Episode 116: Restoring Water Cycles and Ecosystems with Alpha Lo

Hi, friends. Welcome to the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast. This is Jon Kempf, and I have been looking forward to this conversation that we're about to have today for a long time. One of the challenges that I have, there are so many great conversations that I want to have and so many people that I want to talk to that sometimes things get delayed much further than I expect they will. Those of you who've been listening for a while, you'll remember that somewhere in the first 20 episodes or so of the show, I interviewed Gerald Pollack and Walter Teryenni, and we had some very interesting conversations about how water behaves and how water moves in ecosystems at an ecosystem level and the impact that that can have. And this is a topic I've been wanting to get back to for some time. And because we often have this conversation around how we can improve our farms and our soil's resilience to climactic extremes, to water extremes. But I think collectively, we don't appreciate the fact that we can actually have an impact on the climate and we can change the climate in a significant way is when we begin working together collectively. And one of the innovators and researchers whose work I have greatly admired in this space is Alpha Lowe. Alpha has, perhaps more than anyone else that I know of, brought together in a coherent and cohesive way the science and the information available in the space around how water influences climate and how we can manage water and the small water cycle and the overall ecosystem. So, Alpha, thank you for joining us here on the show. I've been looking forward to this discussion. If you can tell us a little bit about your story, your background, the context, and what is the scope of the work that you're doing today and what you learned along the way.

Cool. Well, I'm very happy and honored to be here on this podcast. My background, I went to graduate school in physics. And then years later, I kind of got involved with permaculture. And when Covid hit, I got really. I was like, wow, this is like a reset chance to really deal with the ecosystem issues because we're suddenly producing a lot less and, you know, destroying the environment a lot less. And I started investigating, and I was also in California at the time where we'd been having wildfires for the past few years and really wondering if there was a permaculture solution to the wildfires. And as I investigated, I ran across a Zach Weiss video about the small water cycle that, you know, as you increase the evapotranspiration on the land, you can actually increase the rain and that there was a, there's a way that the landscape can get more hydrated and I investigated more and then soon I was kind of connected to a worldwide network of people that I was also helping facilitate with some gatherings. And I just, you know, have dove really deep, you know, more than full time since then. Just kind of examining this whole water topic and how it relates to the ecology and the climate.

There's this Native American saying that I've heard described that the prairie dogs bring the rain. And there's another quote that I forget where it is attributed to. That's something to the effect of rain doesn't come from the sky, but rain is planted. And I've been in groups amongst groups of farmers when that comment was made where it really raised some eyebrows and lots of question marks. So when you think about the hydrological cycle and the small water cycle, how is it possible that rain can be planted?

Yeah, I think that's a Fukukoa quote or at least I heard it attributed to him. And yeah, and I haven't heard the prairie dog, but yes, prairie dogs can influence the rain and animals, especially beavers and prairie dogs and also various animals that affect the soil can affect the rain. So that's the quote is referring to the whole feedback loop. We sometimes just think about the climate affecting the land through the rain and the heat because the rain helps the vegetation grow. But actually there's also the other side of the feedback loop where there's evapotranspiration and also when it vapor transpires you're affecting the heat patterns off the land. And so if a prairie dog is digging holes in the soil that actually allows the rain to infiltrate more into the soil, then the soil can hold the water longer. Like there's probably going to be a lot of rain in the wet season, but it can hold more of the rain into the dry season and so then you can have more evapotranspiration that then it's called a small water cycle where the water goes from the land to the air to the land and back. And it's also called by the climate scientists precipitation recycling. Which I think it would be good to know because the climate scientists and the eco people don't necessarily know about each other because they're using different languages. And that cycle is a cycle, it's not just a one way street. And so we can plant the rain because the more the soil absorbs the rain, the more you then have available to evaporate, transport or less will go run off to the ocean so quickly. It's like a time delay mechanism where you're not having like purely wet season and then not enough that rain waters hailed into the dry season. So it kind of, it spreads it out over the whole year. So then you have more of a consistent rain.

So what you're describing is that we don't have desertification because of a lack of rainfall. We have desertification because of a lack of holding water in our soils and then having plants capable of releasing that back into the environment to generate rainfall at later times during the growing season.

Yeah, I mean it's still. I mean it's both. I mean it is because we having lack of rain. There are, you know, like certain latitudes on earth where there's less rain. And so there's that reason. But there's also. Yes, what we're doing to the land is also affecting the rain. So it's like both of those. Both of those factors factor into the lack of rain or too much rain in the case of floods or big hurricanes.

For our listeners who aren't familiar with the small water cycle, can you give us an overview of what is the small water cycle and how does it function when it is functioning well and what causes it to not function well?

So the small water cycle depends on the evapotranspiration and how much of the soil is holding that water in. And so you could argue that it's functioning well when it's able to circulate more. And there's some studies by I think Clausen and Kleiden that looked at what happened when there was no vegetation on the continents and then when there is, you know, all green. And they found significantly, I forget exactly how much, maybe like 50% more rain, I think when it's all green as opposed to when it's all desert. So that extra rain is a result of the small water cycle or the precipitation recycling.

And how can we, on the farms that we are managing and are responsible for stewarding, how can we most effectively improve water cycling on our soils and on our farms? What are the mechanisms and the tools that we need to be aware of?

Well, if you increase the carbon content of your soil by 1%, there's a rough estimate that's about 20,000 more gallons per acre feet that the soil can hold. So that's super significant. That means that the water is being held for longer into the season. It also means that if there are, you know, flooding issues in some areas, then that soil can also be slowing that water down so it doesn't flood some of the urban areas so quickly. And also it helps improve the aquifers. And so there's various things depending on where you are, different ways of cultivating the water, because a lot of farmlands sometimes also naturally have wetlands, but then it's drained out, but you can still leave some of your farm maybe to have some more natural wetlands. And so you're also wanting to allow the water to seep into the aquifers because the way we're doing a lot of farming these days, like a lot of the aquifers are getting drained. And so in some areas where it's appropriate, you can also do, manage, recharge. There's a professor at UC Davis, Helen Dalkey, who kind of helping a program in California where certain farms during the wet season when there's excess rain and then the dams can't hold the rain, they, they funnel some of that water onto the farm and let it just soak the whole farm for seven days and then it will slowly kind of infiltrate into the aquifers. I mean there's some correlates. You don't want too much pesticides or synthetic fertilizer in those areas where you're trying to recharge the aquifers that way. And then also trees can be helpful. So the way we do farming nowadays, we tend to not use trees, but trees are in permaculture is quite a food forest. Like there's a, there's layers. So you, or agroforestry, you integrate the whole trees into the farming system and trees can actually help slow down the air. So, and this is research done by Francina Dominguez, a climatologist like she found that the air from the ocean, when it's carrying that has a lot of high speeds, but the trees can slow it down. So when the air molecules slow down, the water vapor molecules slow down, they more likely to find each other nucleate to form the clouds and then it rains. So yeah, so those are some of the practices that can be helpful.

Where do you see the big areas of opportunity for agriculture as a whole? There are many of the listeners of the podcast who many are farming hundreds, but also many are farming thousands, in some cases even tens of thousands of acres or I shouldn't say farming, but responsible for managing and stewarding in the case of, of ranging and rangeland management, grass management and so forth. Where are the significant areas of opportunity for us as land stewards to in addition to the obvious organic matter improvements, are there other management Practices that we can utilize to improve water cycling in the local ecosystem.

So farms are part of a whole watershed area. And well, usually when you want to impact the atmospheric flows on a scale that sees more significant impact, you want to get all the land in the area in the watershed, or at least multiple pieces of land working to infiltrate more rainwater into the land. And so that's a practice that you can kind of build a community of a network of farmers and other people who own land in your watershed area. Because the more you can kind of get onto that, this collective phenomena, and then rivers are also very key. And so having riparian vegetation next to the river and having good soil next to the river, so that when the rains next to the river or a bit away from it, all that water is not just rushing into the river immediately, it takes some time to go through that land and then into the river. And in the watershed, you can collectively monitor the groundwater, because the groundwater basins are over a much wider area. Where you infiltrate from one farm, it might, you know, it's going to affect that basins everywhere. And so you can kind of do a groundwater monitoring program and also make sure that not too much has been taken out. And there is a key thing that tree roots that at Berkeley, the one of the water groups there, they've been studying how the groundwater affects, you know, how much the land gets hydrated. And they found that during the dry out season and dry seasons, the trees are bringing much more rain up from the groundwater than previously thought. And so that's a key factor in hydration that we've kind of forgotten and has led to, you know, a lot of groundwater depletion around the world. And so it's important that, you know, the groundwater is reachable by the tree roots. So if you drop the groundwater beneath that level, then you're not going to be able to bring up that water during the dry season. So that's another key factor to look at. And certain tree roots go much deeper than others, too.

When we think about regenerating the hydrological cycle in an ecosystem, having grasses with deep roots and having trees with deep roots to be able to access water and bring it up and cycle it through the local atmosphere is a very important piece. But when we look at the agricultural landscape across the Midwest, it used to be true 30 to 40 years ago during peak growing season. If you're talking about peak corn production season after the tasseling stage in the Midwest, I've had many agronomists with decades of experience tell me that a Healthy corn crop could go three to four weeks between rain, between rainfalls, because the soil would be able to hold that much moisture. And today if we don't have rain for a week, then the crop is experiencing a drought. And this is an expression of declining root biomass. It's an expression of a soil having a reduced water holding capacity, reduced carbon. There are a lot of pieces that factor into this. And my sense, from the reading that I've done in your work and others work, is something else that is happening is because as the small water cycle is no longer functioning as well, we also no longer have rain coming in or we no longer have the wind generation. We no longer have air movement and water movement across landscapes from one region to another nearly as efficiently and as effectively as we might have had previously. Is that a correct understanding and how does the water cycle facilitate water movement across landscapes?

Yeah, that's actually a very complex issue because wind itself is very complex because it depends on where the land is heating up. And so if there's more heat on a certain air, then that air will convect upwards and then it can suck in air. And then there's, you know, there's the jet streams, which are these fast moving streams and they can get blocked in certain areas. And then the temperature of the ocean, which varies because of different patterns of the ocean, when it gets colder or warmer, it affects how much moisture comes in. And then there's a Hadley cell. So there's actually so many factors involved in the wind, it makes it very complex. In the US There is a general tendency for the winds to blow from the west coast of the US inland so into the Midwest. And so like when there was the drought in 2012 in the Great Plains that affected a lot of farms, both Rong Fu Amus at UCLA and Francina Dominguez at University, in separate studies they showed how that drought actually originated in California and certain areas of the Southwest because it would take several weeks or several months to kind of move slowly. It's called moisture hopping or moisture hopping is a small water cycle where the water goes up into the air and then blows a little bit inland and then keeps moving. And so that's kind of the wind pattern that's moving that water vapor slowly through moisture hopping inland. And so that's really key. And so what we're doing here in the Southwest is affecting the rainfall you're going to get in Ohio, for instance. And what the farmers are doing in the Southwest is affecting the farmers in the Midwest too, because they're influencing the wind patterns and the amount of vapor transpiration that goes up into the air. And so there's a. Diego Morales is a matter of scientists. They're trying to build something called the precipitation recycling watershed networks. So they want different countries to realize that they're affecting the rainfall in their countries by how they're affecting the wind movement and the evapotranspiration. So we have agreements between different countries that are downstream from the upstream countries, because we know that when they take water from the river, it affects them. But what we don't realize is that we're affecting the water vapor and the wind patterns downwind of us. And so they're proposing that the different countries start needing to start making these agreements that you need to restore the land in your area because you're affecting our farms in. In our country.

This is the. The concept of. Of water hopping and this biotic pump, if you will, of moving water inland is one of the ideas that I was first really intrigued with and, and wanted to better understand what I'm learning about the small water cycle. Because we have this phenomena of the rain shadow west of the Rockies, or, excuse me, east of the Rockies. And we have this phenomena of desertification, of what happens in the Southwest spreading up into the Midwest in a single season. But then also, I guess I'll frame this as a question. What impact does what happens in the Southwest have over multiple seasons?

A lot of this is still being worked out by climate scientists because it's so complex to model. But if you're looking at effects over multiple seasons, you're looking at things like El Nino and La Nina, and there are effects that are over multiple seasons. There's one way that the atmospheric scientists track. They track the memory. There's something called the Hearst exponent. So how the rainfall correlates to previous years or to previous months. And there does seem to be some correlation to previous years. But I think exactly why it correlates. There's so many factors that it's not always so clear.

When you described this forest clearing that had an impact on the El Nino cycle, One of the questions that is often asked is what is the scale of local land impact that is required to influence the water cycle either positively or negatively? How many acres of impact are necessary or how do we measure that?

I think that's also a complex issue because atmospheric science models right now, like the global models, you know, you have about 100 miles, the grid size, so. So some of the small effects you have to do, the more micro meteorological models but then they're not necessarily integrating all the larger variables. Milan, Milan, he's a meteorologist that was asked by the European Union to look at why Spain was losing its rain. And he figured out that it was because they were chopping down the forest and paving over land so there's less evapotranspiration to add to the moisture. He gave a rough estimate that he thinks it's about a 6 by 6 mile area. So once you reforest that much or regreen that much area then you should potentially maybe see impact on the rainfall within that area. But it also depends on how much the winds are because if the winds are carrying that rain a lot more further downwind then you're going to see that impact a lot more further downwind in valleys. It's actually much less when you don't need to regreen as much to actually have an impact in your area because the mountains can stop that air moving downwind and so that water vapor stays in your area and so it can be significantly less than 6 by 6 miles. In India, Andrew Millison, he's a permaculturist, he went and recorded a lot of what's happening in Maharashtra, India. In India like rain is like a lot more of a religious, I mean it's a lot more like it's prayed for and it's like people celebrate the rain in, in the U.S. i think we sometimes look negatively when it rains. Monsoons are really important. But the problem is in the dry season they didn't have as much rain and they had does this project called the Water cup where they regreened, I think 8,000 villages like in a kind of competition, cooperation, game. And they found the people, the villagers would track in their village when they regreened and reforested and also caught the rain in the ponds that the rainfall increased. And so in these kind of village sized areas they were able to in some cases see increases in the rain. And I think there's also been studies in similar areas where there's certain areas where there's forested or not forested and they saw it affected the rain in that area when they did these studies.

I'm trying to think of what direction to take this conversation because there are, there are so many nuances of climatology that we could get into. But instead I'll ask the question what are the things that you wish all land stewards knew and were informed about?

One of the key things is slowing water down is super important because basically, I mean the water naturally slowed down in the past, through the various mechanisms, through the richer soil, more forests, the beavers were slowing down the rivers and damming them up. And actually, beavers have a super important impact on American history. But as we've kind of paved over and dried up and deteriorated the soil like that, slowing down has not happened. And so the waters have sped up in the way to the ocean, so it's not staying there into the dry season. So that, that would be one of the key aspects. And then I think an understanding of the small water cycle is key. So there's this phrase Brock Dohlman coined called slow it, sink it, spread it. So you want to slow the water, sink the water in the aquifers and then spread it laterally. And then I added hop it and lift it. Because I think you also want to think about how the waters, you know, go into the air and hopping, moisture hopping. And also the tree roots, they can lift up the water from the groundwater. So those are some key concepts.

Alpha, as you've looked at and been able to interact with people who are studying climate and water cycles from all over the globe, one of the pieces that you've done remarkably well is organizing that information on your blog on Substack. And for all of our listeners, we'll include the link in our show notes because this is a very valuable resource that I would definitely encourage everyone to spend some time with reading. Please subscribe. And also please consider supporting Alpha in his work because it's my understanding this is one of the. This is an important mechanism for funding his work and his continued research. In addition to those pieces that you've organized so well, Alpha, what other resources would you really recommend and encourage people to go take a look at to learn more?

Yeah, Erica Giese has a cool book, Water Always Wins. I think the Eco Restoration alliance is now starting a kind of a blog where they. A cooperative collective blog where they're bringing a lot of pieces written by different people. On Substack, there's a guy, Rob Lewis, I forget exactly. Climate according to Life or something. Yeah, there are a lot of references in my substack, which is climatewaterproject.substack.com so you can kind of go down many rabbit holes. There's one earlier piece where I have list of a lot of references of different, you know, maybe 400 scientific articles that you can kind of go through. And then, yeah, there's always links to the different people I've interviewed on my podcasts that you can then click on their link. So like, I just recently Interviewed Lelo Phillips, who wrote the book Beaverland, and the guy over the sea who wrote over the Sea, Stephen Miller. So anyway, that like different people have different collective references. My podcast is on my substack, but you can also see it on Apple podcast and Spotify too.

Wonderful, thank you for sharing that Alpha. Thank you for all the great work that you're doing. When we think about being good stewards of the land and the landscapes, then sharing what we're learning with other people and having a collective impact, when we realize that working together collectively we can really stabilize and improve our climate in a significant way, is very empowering. And it's knowledge that is only effective when it's shared. We need to share it. We need to have many more people be aware of this information in order to really have the scale and the impact that is necessary.

So yeah, so, so one of the the ideas is a kind of perhaps there's a climate calming effect that can happen from all this vegetation. And you know, there's a variety of natural disasters with quote unquote around the natural. We're having this more floods these days, more droughts and more fires. And this is especially prevalent in Australia and California where there's this been huge cycle and they actually impact each other. So it's not purely a climactic effect, it's actually partly the land too that's affecting it. Because let's say you have more droughts that's going to dry out the land, so then you have more fire. And that's a natural thing that people understand. But the connection of why fires lead to more floods is not fully understood by everyone, by the mainstream because there's one effect is that the fires, when they're really intense heat, it actually creates this hydrophobic which means water repellent surface, a waxy surface on the soil. So in Australia when there were these huge fires over the last decade, you see these huge floods that a million people had to get it were asked to evacuate a year later because in the hills where there were the huge fires, the water, when it rained, it flowed down the mountains and the hills and collected in the urban areas lower down. And so I mean fires when they're smaller, which is more of a natural effect, they're not going to create as much of the hydrophobic effect. So it's more because we have various things we've done to the environment that we have these really huge fires now that that's leading this issue. But then that leads to more floods and the floods wash away huge amounts of soil. And that soil is critical to hold the rain when it comes down next in the drought season. And so when you do have the drought season, it's a lot worse because you don't have all this soil. And also you have less of a small water cycle. You have less aquifers and less groundwater and aquifers. And so you're also affecting the rains. And so there's this feedback loop from the floods to more drought, which leads to more fires. And so that's been happening particularly at the California and Australia level, because they're at those latitude levels where. Where they're most vulnerable to this. But now it's starting to spread up to Oregon and Washington and even slowly into Canada that they're getting more wildfires. And so we're at a very dangerous stage of this rapid desertification of the whole landscape. And yeah, I mean, it still needs to be a lot of this atmospheric science needs to be worked out. But there were some studies around the forests when the ones that weren't cut down, the ones that were, that there was more extreme weather, there was bigger rains and also longer droughts where the forests were cut down. And so there may be some kind of calming effect of all the forests. And there's various reasons possibly this could be. And that's still being figured out. But when the land is vastly heated up, that actually does draw in more ocean winds because of the convection upwards, which can then actually lead to larger rains. And then because you're also having less of the small water cycle, then there's less of that, a small irregular rain that's happening anyway. This soil still needs to be worked out. But there's all this extreme weather that can be affected by the land and also ties into this whole fire, flood, drought cycle.

Given your understanding of, as you frequently keep referring to, there are lots of details that still need to be better understood. But given what we presently understand, if we were to collectively implement what we already know, how might the landscape change? How might the weather patterns stabilize? What does perhaps an idealistic vision of the future look like? In other words, what are the possibilities really, if we were able to collectively implement what it is we already know?

Yeah, I think the landscape, well, we want to integrate a lot of the different multiple organisms into it, integrate the biodiversity into the landscape. So it's not just the plants, but the beavers, the prairie dogs, the microorganisms. These are all really important and they form this really complex system that's kind of like with checks and balances. And so like the whole biodiversity issue is related to the climate issue. But they often treated as separate things, but they're very well interlinked. The guy, James Lovelock, who came up with the idea of Gaia, the Earth is a living organism, he did some simulations, it's called Daisy World where the, you know, they had white, very simple toy model with white daisies and black daisies. And he found that the whole system would actually self regulate like the black daisy and the white daisies would grow or die in a ratio that would then create a constant temperature. And then they introduced animals into it like rabbits that would eat the daisies and then foxes that would eat the rabbits. And interestingly enough those things also help to kind of regulate the whole environment because they would regulate the mound daisies. And so there's this huge feedback loop like all the trophic levels that's kind of regulating the interaction between the land and the ecosystem. And beavers in North America and Europe are especially important because they, there was like you know, 50 to 300 million beavers in, in the North America that were changing the waterways, they were damming it all up, creating wetlands after wetlands, these network of wetlands. And when we killed them, the beavers from the 1600 to the 1900s, that's called the, I think Ellen Wall, geomorphologist, coined the term the great drying. And we kind of dried out a lot of the North America and now we're kind of doing it man made drying out from since the 1900s. So it's this huge effect and that if you think about it, there's, there's all that water on the land has to you know, feedback loop up into the atmosphere and then come back down. And so that is the precipitation recycling, the small water cycle that has been lost over the last 400, 500 years that to a massive scale. And so I think rewilding like reintegrating the beaver, which would mean shifting our cultural understanding. But like the beavers could be one major thing we could do for the landscape hydration and also for the climate and also you know, dealing with the water scarcity issues because, because they can help us slow the water down and, and they can do it at much cheaper rates. Like in I think Chesapeake Bay. They found that the beavers could do for free what the human water engineers would require a million to $2 million to you know, cleanse the water, because the wetlands cleanse the water. And then you know, in California they're now the governor Newsom has a beaver department. So they're recognizing the importance. And all over, you know, the Southwest farmers that used to be hate beavers are now actually praising them because they've saved some of the hydration in their land. So I think looking at the keystone species in the water cycle to restore it and, and it could be prairie dogs and then also certain microorganisms and certain insects that really help build up our soil. Like we want to create that richness. And then, you know, with the whole planting, it's because it's a complex system. Like it requires some kind of tapping into that understanding of the ecosystem. And you know, indigenous plants are often good. It's this complex ecosystem. We're trying to regrow grain and as we regrow it, and if there's more trees and vegetation to evaporate, transpire that rain will also increase. And so it's this kind of natural loop. It's a self reinforcing loop so that rain can then, can then help everything grow. But if we don't do that, we're getting this what Zach Weiss calls the watershed death spiral, the fire, flood, drought cycle that's going to make everything worse. And you know, it's possible people have speculated that because the Fertile Crescent in the Middle east was once fertile 8,000 years ago and there was some climate wobbling of the earth, but there's also possibly what the people there did, they might have set off this watershed death spiral by clear cutting forests. And so we're kind of at a very dangerous stage in Earth's history that we could be setting off this desertification which then leads to more climactic extremes.

One of the questions that comes to mind when you talk about the intense wildfires that created hydrophobic soil, we see this phenomena on agricultural soils where the soils are left bare and exposed to the sun.