Read Part One of this series here.

Listen to David reading this piece here:

A new water paradigm

At the 2008 Australian Permaculture Convergence (APC) in Sydney, water was the theme. It was amazing and slightly bizarre to see a bunch of mostly cranky older male ecological pioneers, along with one woman, Sarah West, on the same platform to discuss the subject. In addition to Bill Mollison and perhaps his most prominent student, Geoff Lawton, and peer in age, Vries Gravestein, my mentor Haikai Tane, local colleague Darren Doherty, John Archer, Phil Gall and Peter Andrews all had their two bob;’s worth. While most spoke past each other, Haikai was probably the most diplomatic and engaging, which is saying something because he has a history of being very provocative. Darren as the youngest was deferential to his elders, but is likewise hardly a wilting flower in putting his ideas forward. Stuart Hill had the job of facilitating such a stellar cast of participants

I remember engaging with Peter Andrews after the panel informing him that on Permaculture Design Courses (PDCs), I use a landscape sand model to teach both Yeomans’ Keyline system of water harvesting and distribution, and his own Natural Sequence Farming to redistribute and recharge floodplain flows. He was horrified that I could do such a thing because he regarded Keyline as, at best, a waste of time, and, at worst, a contributor to salinisation of soils. That egos and apparently conflicting strategies are par for the course in the organic / regenerative / permaculture agriculture scene is nothing new, but I think the simple slogan of permaculture and water catchment teacher from California, Brock Dolman, sums up the commonality behind all these alternative strategies: ‘Slow It, Spread It, Sink It!’

These diverse ways to help Mother Nature catch and store water for as long as possible (while it continues to move and circulate through landscape, vegetation, and atmosphere) have themselves slowly begun to infiltrate more mainstream versions of water catchment management, most notably in the urban context with what is called Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD). The dominant motivations behind WSUD have been to reduce the damaging force and pollutants of urban stormwater runoff to downstream natural environments, as well as residents and water users, including the oceans now receiving the accumulating plastic refuse of humanity. 

The publication (and translation into English) of a small book Water for the Recovery of the Climate: A New Water Paradigm (Kravčík et al, 2007) from Slovakia, the same year as the Sydney APC showed that these ideas are not confined to the English speaking world, and beyond being just good for people and nature, were also part of a bioregional-based response to climate change. 

A few years later I had a visit and complimentary copy of the book from one of the authors and I found it a timely reminder that there were other ideas about climate, deep in the lineage of organics and permaculture, which were important in the climate change context.

With the shift of focus to include adaptation rather than just mitigation, changing land management to improve the capacity of our catchments to be resilient to rising extremes of drought, fire and flood made perfect sense, even if many actions by our regional authorities, such as removing willow trees along watercourses, do the exact opposite. While these issues might be controversial, they don’t in any way challenge the fundamentals of climate science. 

With the breaking of the Millennium Drought and the onset of the hyper-wet summer of 2010/11 our practical land management focus was back on Slowing, Spreading and Sinking peak water flows through Melliodora, Spring Creek Community Forest and at Fryers Forest. Apart from building leaky weirs, forest contour debris swales, and of course more tree planting, this was the ideal context for me to revisit the idea that forests, soil, and land management could change the climate in beneficial ways. 

The desertification of the eastern Mediterranean islands in ancient times, caused by the cutting of the needle leaf cloud forests, is well established. In the similar climate of southern California, the growth of needle leaf forest trees on the coastal range can more than double the effective rainfall from fog inception and drip, compared with that achieved by the chaparral fire shrublands on the same landscapes. In the equatorial tropics of Brazil, there is clear evidence of vegetation creating its own climate, something depicted in Mollison’s Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual (p.145). In all these regions there is quite a lot of air humidity for trees to intercept.

Mollison further suggested that belts of trees across semi-arid landscapes can increase rainfall. Over the years in permaculture teaching, I cautioned against too strong an expectation that tree planting and soil management could rehydrate landscapes beyond the limits of climate, and that Australian arid regions were already mostly well-vegetated.

On the other hand, it is now generally accepted that the 10-20% reduction of rainfall across the Western Australian (WA) wheatbelt during my childhood is attributed to clearing of the extensive open eucalypt woodlands and their replacement with winter crops and pastures of annual plants. 

Although the WA climate is Mediterranean, the cold offshore ocean currents generate much drier air than is the case in the Mediterranean or southern California. So could revegetation and rehydration of the WA wheatbelt reverse that loss of moisture? 

My guess is that most regions of the world have become dehydrated, to one extent or another, by a variety of land use changes. Most obviously, the clearing of forests, woodlands and perennial grasslands and their replacement with crops (mostly annuals that leave the land exposed to heat in the dry seasons and bare in frozen winters) must be a major factor reducing the amount of water in the ‘Small Cycle’ between soil, vegetation and bioregional atmosphere and leaving more to run to the sea.

The loss of soil structure and organic matter by agriculture could be an even larger factor. In addition, water and wind erosion can take away (to the sea) critical minerals that help support lush, soil building, rather than fire-enhancing, vegetation. Draining of swamps and wetlands, the extraction of groundwater beyond recharge rates and of course urbanisation, mining and industrialisation all locally degrade the ability of landscapes to catch and store water. 

On the flipside, dam and reservoir construction may be a significant factor holding more water in the landscape, but whether that translates to water in the atmosphere may depend on the uses that water is put to. Because water has unique thermal properties, the solar radiation that reaches a fully vegetated and hydrated landscape is largely absorbed in evaporating water to support the local water cycle, while in unprotected and dry landscapes most radiation turns into what geographers call ‘sensible heat’ that raises the temperature. Water in its vapour, liquid and even ice form is a massive buffer moderating the extremes of heat and cold, droughts and floods and, of course, supporting life. 

In Water for the Recovery of the Climate the authors make the case that rehydration is a hedge against both desertification and more extreme weather events including flooding. Because humanity has done so much to dehydrate landscapes, we can move somewhat in the other direction without any grand claims that we can override larger global and bioregional climatic limits. 

This argument is similar, and closely related, to the argument that because agriculture has radically reduced soil organic matter levels, proven regenerative ag techniques can make a step change in the amount of carbon in farm soils back to the levels that are possible in any particular climate around the world. This would suck vast amounts out of the atmosphere. This is carbon sequestration at its best with myriad no-regrets benefits even if that process cannot continue indefinitely due to natural climatic limits. 

However while this soil carbon sequestration strategy fits nicely within the current scientific consensus about carbon dioxide driven climate change, the landscape rehydration strategy is more challenging, as it suggests that the climate models have only considered the impact of GHG driven climate change on the water cycle but not the other way around. My limited understanding at the time was that all funded global climate models include some common assumptions about water:

• Firstly, that the ‘Large Water Cycle’ from the oceans to the land is not significantly impacted by land management.
• That the ‘Small (bioregional and local) Water Cycles’ on land that we currently experience are, on average, normal for the planet in the current interglacial climates, and the forces of dehydration I just mentioned are at the margin and probably balanced by hydration in other regions.
• That modelling water in soil, vegetation, and atmosphere, including clouds, is too complex to include so is largely ignored.

Could it really be for the sake of manageable climate models, and a perception these factors were marginal, that they are ignored? To this day I have not attempted to answer that question to any degree of certainty, but what was very clear for me was another case of avoiding the tragedy of the commons. Just as reducing dependency on fossil fuels could prove beneficial in the context of depletion and/or sanction of their use, rehydrating our local and bioregional landscapes could potentially give us a better climate or, at least a less harsh one, even if the rest of the world does not follow suit. What’s more, most of what needs to be done in that regard is in the hands of ordinary farmers and other land managers, rather than corporations manufacturing complex tech on the other side of the world. But if making and deploying solar panels, wind turbines and electric cars are accepted as more proven ways to attenuate climate change than rehydration of landscapes, then there is not necessarily any social or legal licence, let alone reward, for doing so. In fact, as Peter Andrews and other pioneers of landscape rehydration have found, there have been both social and legal sanctions for doing so. 

That small book from central European scientists reminded me that Yeomans, Mollison, Tane and Andrews were all influences on my own thinking, which I had tended to downplay for several reasons. These included the difficulty in finding evidence that supported this climate aspect, beyond the obvious practical benefits from any efforts in rehydration of landscape. As with increasing soil organic matter levels, I understood how fickle the nature of larger seasonal patterns was, as well as extremes that could counteract and undermine any efforts. Most obviously, I knew well how permaculture enthusiasts could become ‘biomass junkies’ generating too much fuel, at risk of being incinerated in the next bushfire. So unlike the apparently hard measurable inputs and outputs of the industrial world, I concluded working with nature was a much more subtle dance that didn’t suit the bean counters, reductionists, or powerbrokers. 

Reflection

Have we attenuated climatic extremes at Melliodora? The most problematic extreme when we first came was frost, both severe winter frost that precluded tender subtropical plants including citrus, and late spring frosts that regularly damaged the flowering of stone and other fruit. Those extremes, as well as wind, have certainly been moderated but I tended to assume that this had been due to a gradually warming climate more than our microclimatic modification. In any case, the theory I have just outlined obviously depends on bioregional-scale rehydration to have any impact on weather and climate beyond the microclimate scale.

Nevertheless, our long running campaign to protect riparian willow forests from destruction always included a microclimatic theme. How could it not, when each summer we experienced walking down the gully to the creek where the air conditioning by the fully hydrated willows dropped the temperature by five or more degrees? In February 2018 while sussing out a location at Jubilee Lake for the local pre-launch of RetroSuburbia, I was astonished by the almost ten degree drop in temperature as we left the open green grass to the shaded canopy of the willows. The comfort of everyone at that event was a product of the microclimate created by willow trees at peak transpiration. 

Between the hectic round of RetroSuburbia events that year we found time to support community members trying to save the very same willow stands from destruction by our local council, informed by the experts in willow destruction in the North Central Catchment Management Authority. In a press release during a heatwave the following summer, I used data on evaporative cooling from large fully hydrated trees in Europe to calculate that the 1-hectare willow ‘everglade’ novel ecosystem at Jubilee Lake, which our Shire Council had destroyed at a cost of over $100,000, was equivalent to between 2500 and 3750 air conditioners, more than one for every house in the twin towns of Daylesford and Hepburn.

In a more formal report for the local community group and council I said the following:

With a drying climate and greater risk of severe bushfires and more intense storm events (the default climate change prediction for at least two decades now supported by meteorological data) it is imperative that this willow dominated ecostructure be conserved.

Looking back over five tumultuous years, it is hard for me to say whether those words I used reflected a heartfelt confidence about climate models and meteorological data, and whether that faith was mixed with some degree of referencing the climate orthodoxy. Later that year, Hepburn Shire Council joined more than 1000 local councils around the world in declaring a ‘climate emergency’ while symbolically poisoning the best vegetative hedge we have against climate change. In my savage critique of this type of virtue signalling, I may have been ignoring that in attempting to influence others we often refer to evidence and ideals that the others hold as credible. 

Burrum Biodynamics

An interesting case of rehydration at a larger scale is Burrum Biodynamics on the eastern edge of the Wimmera plains of western Victoria, one of Australia’s most productive winter rainfall grain and legume growing regions. Soil infiltration tests across the farm boundary with the neighbours’ conventionally managed fields showed a soil infiltration rate of 7 compared with 17 in the biodynamically managed field. A similar comparison on another local biodynamic farm also showed a dramatic difference. That second farmer mostly grazes sheep as runoff flooding from the region makes his soils too wet for cropping most years. Both confirmed that runoff from the region, which is overwhelmingly cleared farmland, has increased progressively in recent decades. My own experience in walking over the biodynamically managed fields that grow the grains and legumes we consume was an extraordinary experience in spring 2019. 

Walking on the spongy soil and looking at the beautiful crumb structure achieved on the fertile but notoriously sticky-when-wet grey clays of the Wimmera was almost a spiritual experience. 

It is important to understand how conventional cropping in the Wimmera and other regions has changed over the last few decades from predominantly stubble burning and cultivation to stubble retention and herbicide control of weeds. Although early results showed improvements in soil organic matter levels and presumably substantial improvements in soil water infiltration rates and less wind erosion, those conventionally managed fields are now way worse in these functions than the biodynamic managed fields. 

The government agriculture and Landcare officers continue to studiously ignore these model farms as they promote chemical farming methods which are rapidly depleting the capacity of semi-arid grain growing regions to capture and store water. Most farmers follow the treadmill of getting bigger with larger bank loans to stay viable in the conventional commodity markets dominated by the corporations, while Burrum do the extra work of on-farm processing, packaging and marketing to maintain economic viability with zero support for their huge R&D efforts over decades, which show a better result for climate, soil, animal and human. 

Reflection

None of this work has been motivated by the desire to sequester carbon in organic matter or build resilience in the face of GHG driven climate change. These farmers, like many biodynamic, organic and regenerative farmers, maintain a healthy scepticism about the conventional climate models and the assumptions that underpin them. In some ways, it doesn’t matter whether the increased regional runoff these excellent observers have experienced is due to land degradation under conventional farming and/or the increased intensity of rainfall events, the actions we should be taking are clear. 

Allan Yeomans’ Priority One

In his later years Allan Yeomans, son of PA Yeomans of Keyline fame and manufacturer of the Yeomans plough, devoted his considerable energy and resources to supporting the notion that Keyline and associated regenerative agriculture could save the world from anthropogenic GHG emission-induced climate catastrophe by a once-off multiple increase in soil organic matter levels across the world’s arable and pastoral farming regions, back to, and possibly beyond, their levels prior to agriculture and grazing.

Allan’s back of the envelope calculations and his massive book, Priority One: Together We Can Beat Global Warming are the very opposite of climate sceptic territory. In fact, Yeomans’ plan is one of the few that honestly follows the logic of the climate emergency meme and lays out a plan for a benign, no regrets ‘geoengineering’ solution across the world’s vast farming lands. This would, by necessity, be led by the managers of that land with huge benefits for environmental and human health. That it would contribute to global rehydration and thus directly attenuate climate change is also clear to me. Yeomans’ calculations show how this once-off sequestration could soak up the excess atmospheric CO2 generated by fossil fuel burning and allow the necessarily long transition to low carbon energy systems. He was, like me, a sceptic about the energy density, reliability and other limitations of modern renewables, but saw nuclear power as the logical solution to maintain high energy modern systems in ways not in conflict with the global atmospheric limits.

Charles Massy Call of the Reed Warbler

Another older agricultural pioneer whose writing has gained more attention is Charles Massy. The research and documentation in his bestselling book Call of the Reed Warbler, of the diversity of regenerative farmers and their stories is enlightening and uplifting. It shows that these farmers are demonstrating the best way to address the climate emergency, all as a by-product of a huge diversity of other benefits, including psychological ones. Amongst other benefits, Massy’s writing and talks throughout rural Australia have contributed to mutual acknowledgement of the diversity of frameworks, systems, labels and ideologies that underpin this work, thus helping to heal the history of competition and mutual suspicion that has characterised the alternative agricultural networks in this and other countries over the decades. 

The conventional scientific response to these successes is, at best, a cautious acknowledgement of the need for more research in properly controlled trials, along with the understandable caveat that bad management and/or challenging seasons, especially in semi-arid grain growing and pastoral regions, can easily lose the gains in soil organic matter.

In rural climate and Landcare networks, there has been somewhat more preparedness to fund and support workshops on holistic grazing management, mineral rebalancing and some other regenerative responses, but rarely Keyline, riparian rehydration, or organic, biodynamic or permaculture holistic methods. Just as the urban sustainability facilitators had to respond to householder interest, the rural programs are necessarily dependent on the response of farmers. In some regions, that interest is coming from new small farmers, other times from socially conservative multigenerational farmers concerned about future options for the family farm. While the question of how to simultaneously mitigate and adapt to climate change often figures as a motive, just as important is the urgency of how to bypass the ongoing hard sell of the agribusiness corporations and the threats from debt servicing and rural community collapse. There are also the threats (and opportunities) presented by the renewable energy rollout including wind and solar farms, powerlines and mining; the very materials needed for the rollout.  

Paul Hawken Drawdown

Back in the 1980s, before the internet, when the ‘Whole Earth Review’ magazine out of California was one of my few sources of information about solutions, the writings of alternative entrepreneur Paul Hawken was an influence on my own strategies with permaculture. Decades on, his book Drawdown, documenting the top 100 solutions to take carbon out of the atmosphere either directly or by substitution of carbon and other GHG emission processes, was backed by strong peer reviewed and expert evidence. 

In his words from the website:

In 2013, I created Drawdown, a collaborative effort involving 200 researchers and advisors who came together to model the one hundred most substantive solutions to reversing global warming. The goal was to see if we could achieve drawdown by 2050, that point in time when greenhouse gases peak and start to decline.

There was nothing like it at the time and that remains largely true to this day. In order to qualify, solutions required extensive peer-reviewed science and in-depth economic analysis from respected institutions. The models were deliberately conservative and because of that the data was never challenged as to its feasibility. 

When shown the book by colleagues I found many of the usual strategies but noticed that many land-based solutions associated with regenerative agriculture and permaculture were included and validated by peer reviewed science, unlike much of the territory at the fringe of funding and acknowledgement where I, and some of the examples I have given, are located. 

For example, ‘Silvopasture’ involving grazing animals in unirrigated fodder tree systems, which were some of the origin models and ongoing applications of permaculture both locally and around the world, was rated ninth in the list just above rooftop solar at tenth, while what was classified as regenerative agriculture was eleventh, well ahead of the more conventional ‘Conservation agriculture’ at 16 which was just ahead of ‘Tree intercropping’, another common permaculture strategy. Other regenerative land use related strategies, including ‘Managed grazing’, ‘Multistrata agroforestry’, ‘Bamboo’, and ‘Biomass’ are in the top 50 solutions. Other favourites like ‘Composting’ and ‘Biochar production’ were on the list at 60 and 72. Simple appropriate technology promoted through permaculture such as ‘Clean Cooking’ (eg rocket stoves) at 21 are just behind ‘Nuclear power’ at 20 and ahead of ‘Electric cars’ at 26, while behavioural strategies around food such as ‘Reduced food waste’ and ‘Plant-rich diets’ are near the top at three and four, just below ‘Onshore wind turbines’ and, perhaps surprisingly, ‘Refrigerant management’ at number one because it involves the capture of massively GHG intensive refrigerants in older equipment and the substitution with climate neutral refrigerants. It is the rapidly growing use of refrigeration and air conditioning equipment worldwide that makes this strategy so critical. In reading Drawdown, I speculated that the most powerful solutions to the climate crisis that we model and promote at Melliodora might be our cool cupboard storage, fermented and other traditional ways of storage and breaking the refrigerated food addiction and fear of food poisoning. 

I never accepted the carbon reductionism framework to articulate personal, local or even global permaculture priorities. Further, I find the labelling and division of solutions used in Drawdown frustrating and reductionist, but understandable as it enables many different stakeholders to see how their field of work or interest can be a climate solution. This includes ones such as ‘Educating girls’ and ‘Family planning’ listed at number six and seven, even if I have grave concerns about how both of these solutions are being funded and driven from the top (but that is another story).  

To summarise, land use-based strategies reflecting permaculture principles are listed as reducing 134 Gigatonnes of CO2 while the much-trumpeted core of the high-tech renewable energy rollout, wind and solar farms, rooftop solar and electric vehicles, are collectively still ahead at 155 Gigatonnes. But when you account for the externalities of resource extraction, depletion and pollution involved in the renewable energy rollout vs the myriad biological yields and the life-enhancing and distributive democracy benefits of the land use-based strategies, it amazed me that environmentalists and climate warriors had been convinced to rally behind the high-tech solutions while remaining largely ignorant of the power that lay dormant in the biological solutions of soil, water, plants and livestock. 

‘Food waste reduction’ and ‘Plant-rich diet’ at slightly more than 136 Gigatonnes is an equally powerful set of simple behavioural solutions that may seem in conflict with animals as a solution, but this is not the case. Livestock solutions all involve animals as an integral part of land management at lower levels of meat production than industrialised intensive systems. Consequently, the total amount of meat produced globally and thus dietary consumption would reduce.

Of course mention of animals as part of the solution only emphasises how our consumer greed economy, organised by debt funding and corporate logistics, can easily turn any of these biological solutions into a new abomination. I felt that implementing any of these tech, land use or behavioural strategies at scale, speed and from the top down would be bound to produce lots of collateral damage, unintended consequences, encourage criminal-level gaming of the incentives, and support the biggest, most powerful players while hurting the disadvantaged or even the majority of folks trying to adjust to changing signals, and carrots and sticks from above.

Drawdown also includes what Hawken calls ‘Coming attractions’; technologies that are being developed but as yet without sufficient peer reviewed scientific proof, such as ‘Repopulating the mammoth steppe’, featured in the film Pleistocene Park, ‘Pasture cropping’ demonstrated by pioneer regenerative farmer Colin Sies, and ‘Marine permaculture’ promoted and piloted by Brian von Herzen of the Climate Foundation that all reflect permaculture principles. In the case of Marine Permaculture, I later collaborated with von Herzen and Scott Spillias (CSIRO) in the first peer reviewed articulation of permaculture ethics and design principles to guide and govern the rapidly expanding Blue Economy in the oceans: ‘Marine permaculture: Design principles for productive seascapes’.

The main point is that the best of what people trust in ‘The Science’ validates and reinforces so much of what permaculture has done as enlightened self-interest, rather than grand schemes to save the planet.  

Reflection

However, the forces that for so long struggled to turn (appropriate) renewable technology into something complex and profitable for global corporations, still find many of the bottom up, distributed biological and behavioural solutions as threats to be ignored, if not actively suppressed. 

It is equally clear that this hard reductionist climate logic is not being used to guide public policy. Instead, the solutions that fit, maintaining power from the top and consumer culture from below, are prioritised for funding, promotion and a relatively free ride from regulation.   

At the Sustainable Living Festival in 2018 Paul Hawken and I shared a meal, reminisced about both being old hippies and exchanged copies of Drawdown and RetroSuburbia in our mutual respect of each other’s work. Paul’s work is far from acknowledging an energy descent future for humanity due to hard limits. At times, I have felt that it is the human collective tendency to shoot ourselves in our feet, and failure to use our hands, hearts and heads to focus on what is truly good for us individually and collectively, that makes the energy descent future likely, even more that the hard limits of physics and ecology.

Urban density

Urban densification (more people in the same area) is a planning strategy for getting greater efficiencies in transport, sewerage and other infrastructure while protecting both nature and agriculture from suburban sprawl. This orthodoxy long predates the climate story, but became supercharged by it. While high-density development continues to be the prevailing response worldwide in countries like Australia, with extensive low-density suburbs, many planners saw infill development to raise the population density of existing suburbs as the best solution. They reasoned that this might avoid the social damage created by the high-rise housing segregating the poor from the rich in their respective towers around city cores that had resulted from previous urban renewal policies. Meanwhile, developers continued to use the suburban sprawl template as a licence to make money by converting more farmland into suburbia, building larger houses, filling more of the progressively shrinking lots of subdivisions. 

Living in a terrace house in North Carlton in the early 80s, I distinctly remember arguing the case in favour of suburban-density housing with a permaculture colleague. I argued that buildings oriented for passive solar gain and surrounded by intensive permaculture-designed garden farming, as well as agriculturally productive public open space, would be best adapted to surviving and thriving through frugal energy futures. Fresh back from doing his PhD in Copenhagen, my colleague had become convinced that compact, energy efficient row housing supporting medium population density following the European model was what we needed in Australia. That friendly discussion and difference of strategy was a seed for my later work articulating the RetroSuburbia strategy.