Tangled

In this interview, I speak to Zach Weiss, who runs a business called Elemental Ecosystems. I met Zach a few weeks ago when I took his workshop, where he taught some of his methods for understanding and managing water in the landscape.

Zach works under the assumption that the core reason for many environmental problems is a misunderstanding and poor management of water. By building dams, repairing eroded stream banks and many other tactics, Zach helps people improve their land’s ability to catch and hold water. This has flow-on effects for local climate, drought resilience and financial stability.

Show Notes

01:05 Zach describes his work
02:01 Outline of the water cycle
04:31 Sepp Holzer
09:20 Zach's opinion of Holistic Management
10:32 Tom Brown Jr. and Jon Young: wilderness skills, bird language
10:59 Ringing Cedars
11:57 Rajindra Singh, the waterman of India
12:53 Universal principles vs. specific tactics
13:25 The Tao
14:23 Describing a typical re-hydration project
16:26 Why pond liners are not ideal
18:27 Building water bodies that fit in with the existing geology and hydrology, as opposed to digging dams in inappropriate spots. "Tying a water body to the natural veins of the Earth."
20:48 Zach's thoughts on some aspects of permaculture
22:57 Getting your hands dirty. Build models using the soil on your property.
24:35 What to do in the suburbs?… Observe your property, create a rain garden, infiltrate the maximum amount of water.
26:21 Hügelkultur
27:40 Zach's problem with swales
30:14 The process of tapping springs, and why to drink spring water
32:35 French drains
33:42 Evidence of revegetation changing climate and increasing rainfall
34:44 Willie Smits, and his TED Talk
35:14 Convincing people that water is more important than atmospheric CO2 for climate
36:57 Zach's experience in Australia: a perfect example of the watershed death spiral
39:45 Zach's film, Elemental Change
42:00 Vicencia Dehasa, Spain
42:14 Tamera, Portugal
42:36 Peter Marshall and Terra Preta Truffles near Braidwood
42:54 Walter Jehne
43:22 Tarun Bharat Sangh, Indian NGO

On this episode I speak to Darren Doherty. Darren is one of the world’s most well-respected farm planners. He has developed a design system called the Regrarians Platform, which incorporates ideas and from existing frameworks with Darren’s own innovations. The platform was greatly influenced by people such as PA Yeomans, whose scale of permanence forms the basis of Darren’s framework. Darren’s approach also draws on Allan Savory’s work in holistic management and Bill Mollison and David Holmgren’s insights from permaculture.

Darren has worked around the world in many different kinds of climates and also has extensive experience regenerating landscapes in Australia.

Darren and his family have also produced an award-winning film called Polyfaces, which profiles Joel Salatin and his family on their innovative farm in Virginia. You can stream it at polyfaces.com.

I wanted to talk to Darren about his own history, and also get his thoughts on the bushfires in Australia, and how we can try to mitigate them in the future.

We don’t spend a lot of time specifically discussing the Regrarians Platform itself, so I encourage you to look up Darren’s lectures on YouTube, or go to regrarians.org to learn more about it.

At some points, we do get a little bit into the weeds, but even if you’re not familiar with land management or farming, I think you’ll still find Darren’s insights on those topics interesting.

The ongoing bushfires in south-eastern Australia are a horrible reminder that we need to change the way we’re operating. But I don’t think it’s a simple as trying to reduce carbon emissions. So over the next few weeks, I’m going to talk to some people who have ideas about more tangible and effective ways of managing landscapes, including urban areas, farms and bushland. If we don’t re-instate a functioning water cycle, then things are going to get worse, no matter how much CO2 is in the air.

This interview is with Michael Mobbs. Michael is a former environmental lawyer from Sydney who has become known as the “off-grid guy”. Because, in 1996, he began the process of disconnecting his inner-city home in Sydney from mains water, sewage and electricity.

Show Notes

01:59 How cities change the water cycle

02:47 Michael’s house

03:49 Michael’s role in the 1993-4 parliamentary inquiry into Sydney’s water

04:43 what does “you can’t do that” actually mean?

06:16 A model of the house is in the Powerhouse Museum’s EcoLogic exhibition: https://maas.museum/event/ecologic/

06:59 “It’s as though this culture has never landed here”

07:43 the problem with the education system; growing up on a farm

08:29 The Sydney Botanic gardens wastes millions of rainwater every year

09:46 Gutters are the main cause of house fires. Why don’t we use a different design? An example of the gutters Michael describes: https://www.eaveswatersystem.com/

12:15 Bureaucracies never change

12:15  “If you wanted to set up a society, a culture, that’s doomed to fail, this is the one you would set up.”

13:49 People shouldn’t rely on governments. Do what you can, including catching and using as much rainwater as possible.

14:10 Leaky drains: Michael’s street saves 4 million L of water each year from going to the ocean. Here is a great video he made that shows you how to do it: https://www.sustainablehouse.com.au/community-gardens

16:51 A road garden in Bondi

17:57 Food waste and wasted water

18:57 Buy from farmers’ markets

19:25 Michael’s new project to design a pre-fabricated studio house with attached water treatment and solar electricity systems: contact Michael to learn more https://www.sustainablehouse.com.au/contact

21:13 How the house is resistant to bushfires 

21:52 Using recycled timber, eg from “weed” species like camphor laurel

23:01 Michael’s recent travels through many areas in rural Australia

24:30 Do an experiment to catch for one day all the water that you would have normally let drain down the kitchen sink: it will be a lot

25:28 Drinking rainwater: it’s healthy and doesn’t have chlorine, which may be carcinogenic

27:05 In Australia, water utility companies are government-owned, so there is no competition. And the government does not fund research into the effects of chlorine on, for eg, gut health

27:53 Michael’s two books, Sustainable House and Sustainable Food: https://www.sustainablehouse.com.au/products

29:17 Archimedes, Newtown, Einstein: they came upon their insights through their interactions with the world around them

29:40 “The best university, the best reading, is where we walk and talk and see in our own environment, wherever that may be, each day.”

In this episode of Tangled, I talk to Dylan Gower. Dylan is an architect by trade, but in this interview, we discuss a community energy project that he leads. The organisation is based in Cowra, a town in central New South Wales, a few hours drive west from Sydney. The group is called CLEAN, which stands for Cowra Local Energy Action Network.



The longterm aim for CLEAN is to develop a decentralised energy network for their local community, by digesting organic matter from agricultural, industrial and residential sources to produce biogas. This gas can then be used to generate electricity and thermal energy. And then by-products from the biogas production can be used by farms, factories and other businesses.



This project interests me because Dylan and his collaborators are trying to look holistically at the way humans use resources. It’s a commonsense approach that we need if we want to design systems that can work for the long term, without relying on fossil fuels. There are good reasons why we have used fossil fuels for the past couple of hundred years. They’ve been cheap to mine. They’re extremely energy dense. And you can store and transport them easily. But if we want to have any chance of weaning ourselves off these sources of energy, we need to design elegant systems that effectively make use of locally available resources. This is what Dylan is trying to do with CLEAN Cowra.



In theory, once the system is set up in Cowra, it could provide the community not only with renewable energy, but also a way to filter water, increase soil fertility, reduce reliance on government subsidies, innoculate them from geopolitical shifts with regard to trade and energy policies, regenerate local ecosystems, provide ongoing employment and entrepreneurial opportunities, and show other communities how they can implement similar systems. Dylan didn’t pay me to say this, but I honestly struggle to think of any downsides to pursuing the project.



If you find the show interesting, please subscribe to Tangled in whichever app you use, and share it around with anyone you know who might also like it.



Show Notes



02:50 Dylan introduces CLEAN Cowra, describing the group’s aims and how it originated



03:50 Dylan’s background as an architect interested in ecological sustainable development and renewable energy



04:30 Looking at how bio-energy is relevant to regional communities



05:36 NSW Office of Environment and Heritage, Sustainability Advantage program



05:50 Doing a resource audit to map the region’s known available relevant resources: agricultural, industrial, horticultural, animal husbandry, municipal waste



07:20 Some challenges Dylan has faced, eg getting traction with community members and potential stakeholders



08:20 Using principles and language of design thinking: iterating over time



09:04 Starting with a broad, overarching project, and then realising it was necessary to hone in and focus on specific aspects in isolation



09:36 How to distribute energy locally?



10:45 Microgrids allow distribution of electricity, but then how to distribute thermal energy? And CO2. And other by-products from the initial processes.



11:10 Discussing the distribution of thermal energy



12:00 Many greenhouses burn LPG just to produce CO2 for the plants



12:20 CLEAN proposes to co-locate greenhouses near the bio-energy plant, which would be mutually beneficial

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Walter Jehne is an Australian soil microbiologist, with decades of experience teaching and advising governments, farmers, students and communities. Walter is the director of Healthy Soils Australia, and is also part of NGOs including Global Cooling Earth and Regenerate Earth.




I only came across Walter’s work recently, when I saw some of his lectures on YouTube (see here: one, two, three). And within the hour or two that it took me to watch those, he had managed to completely change the way I think about climate change.




Walter’s main message is that we need to regenerate what he calls the soil sponge.



Why is building soil so important?



It’s because so many of the problems we’re facing: extreme weather events from climate change, desertification, loss of biodiversity, water shortages, food shortages, reduced food nutrition and many others, can all be minimised – if not entirely eliminated – if we can re-build the living skin of the earth: the soil.




A particular point that Walter makes that shocked me was that carbon dioxide is only responsible for 4% of global heat dynamics. While the hydrological cycle (meaning, the way water moves between the atmosphere the ocean and the land) controls 95% of the heating or cooling of the planet. So even if we stopped burning fossil fuels completely tomorrow, it would barely make a dent in the overall temperature dynamics on earth. The only way we can really get the planet back to a stable climate is by building soil and letting the natural cooling processes that have been going on for billions of years, keep doing their work.




This episode is timely, because just a few days ago the United Nations announced that the years 2021 to 2030 will be named the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. So clearly, Walter’s message has been reaching a lot of people, and now can hopefully reach even more.




As always, if you enjoy listening, please subscribe in whichever podcast app you use. And share the episode with anyone you know who might also like it.



SHOW NOTES



03:07 Walter’s early career as a microbiologist



04:37 The origins of climate change science and the shift to focus on carbon dioxide at the expense of the water cycle.



07:02 Stockholm 1972, World Environment Summit: All elements that play a role in global heat dynamics were discussed. But scientists in the mid 80s said there were too many variables to model easily. And that it was necessary to simplify the message for politics and the public. This led to the focus on CO2, which governs only 4% of global heat dynamics. A very simplistic analysis of the big picture.



* This was continued on through to the IPCC. So we’ve trapped ourselves in a tunnel of only looking at CO2* We can’t solve the problem with the climate wit...