What Does Water Want? | Restoring Earth by Realigning with Water’s Rhythms

Human SupremacyEcocentrismReproductive RightsEcological Overshoot

Aug. 19

In this episode, we chat with Erica Gies, award-winning journalist and author of Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge. We explore the complex relationships between water, nature, and human societies, emphasizing the need to embrace 'slow water'—respecting the natural rhythms of water’s cycles for the benefit of both human and nonhuman life. Highlights include:

Erica’s personal decision not to have biological children as both a personal choice and a contribution to reducing human pressure on the planet;
The concept of 'slow water' and allowing for water’s natural cycles on the land contrasted with modern, infrastructure-heavy approaches that focus on controlling water;
The broader implications of population growth on water and the need to address this issue within environmental and degrowth movements;
The hidden complexity of natural systems in water ecology and the need to both appreciate our ignorance of these natural systems’ complexity while also working to understand them better in order to live more in harmony with the natural world;
The significance of traditional knowledge and ecological wisdom in living more in harmony with natural water cycles.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Erica Gies 0:00
Slow water basically means restoring water's natural slow phases on the land, or conserving them where they haven't yet been destroyed. And when I started looking globally at the extent to which humans have interfered with the natural water cycle, I was really shocked. Since 1992, the paved area in cities has doubled. We've dammed and diverted two thirds of the world's large rivers and drained or felled as much as 87% of the world's wetlands. Deforestation is decreasing rain locally, regionally and globally, and we've made the land a much drier place. So the slow water practitioners are restoring space to water. Instead of approaching water with an idea of control, they approach water with curiosity and collaboration, respecting water’s agency and relationships with soil and rock and microbes, beavers and people.
Alan Ware 0:59
In this episode of the Overpopulation Podcast, we'll be speaking with Erica Gies, an award-winning journalist and author of Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge. We'll delve into Erica's groundbreaking work on slow water and the movement to realign human action with water's natural cycles, to address both ecological destruction and social inequity on our overpopulated planet.
Nandita Bajaj 1:33
Welcome to the Overpopulation Podcast, where we tirelessly make ecological overshoot and overpopulation common knowledge. That's the first step in right-sizing the scale of our human footprint, so that it is in balance with life on Earth, enabling all species to thrive. I'm Nandita Bajaj, co-host of the podcast and executive director of Population Balance.
Alan Ware 1:57
I'm Alan Ware, co-host of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance. We are proud to be the first and only nonprofit organization globally that draws the connections between pronatalism, human supremacy, social inequalities, and ecological overshoot. Our mission at Population Balance is to inspire narrative, behavioral, and system change that shrinks our human impact and elevates the rights and wellbeing of people, animals, and the planet. And now on to today's interview. Erica Gies is the author of Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge, a National Geographic Explorer, the Harvey Southam Lecturer at the University of Victoria, and an independent journalist who writes about water, climate change, plants, and animals for publications including the New York Times, Nature, Scientific American, the Atlantic, and Biographic. Published in the US, UK, and China, Water Always Wins won the Rachel Carson Award for Excellence in environmental journalism, the California River Award, an honorable mention from the Society of Environmental Journalists, and was a finalist for the Falling Walls Science Breakthrough of the Year.
Nandita Bajaj 3:10
Hi Erica. Welcome to our podcast. We are so thrilled to have you here.
Erica Gies 3:15
Oh thank you. I'm really happy to be here.
Nandita Bajaj 3:18
And we're really excited to dive into your new book, Water Always Wins, in which you capture the intricate relationships between water, nature, and human societies. And it's fascinating, you know, water is essential for all life on the planet, and yet most of us take it so much for granted in our everyday life. And we just appreciate how you've highlighted the dominant culture's relationship to water as a commodity to control, in contrast to relating to water more as a partnership - to allow it to move and do as it will, which is how, as you've captured, for millennia, indigenous cultures have related to water. So thank you for exploring this essential issue.
Erica Gies 4:05
Well, thanks. I'm happy to talk about it with you and your audience.
Nandita Bajaj 4:08
We'll begin the interview actually with something else that first brought you to our attention about 10 years ago, which is a fantastic article that you wrote for The Washington Post titled, Having Kids is Terrible for the Environment, So I'm Not Having Any. For a short opinion essay, the article covered a surprising breadth of arguments, all of which resonated so deeply with us, such as; why overpopulation is a taboo subject, why being childfree is considered selfish, and why reproductive responsibility needs to enter the sustainability discourse. Could you walk us through how you arrived at the decision to not have biological children, highlighting some of the points you've raised in that article and other interviews you've done.
Erica Gies 4:59
Sure, I knew from a young age. I think I remember at seven thinking that I didn't want to have kids, and, you know, I wasn't set in stone about that. When I was in my 30s, I thought very seriously about it again. I didn't want to just follow through with that, because that's what I'd always thought. But when I really examined my feelings about it, I felt even more committed to that decision. And humans are animals. We like to separate ourselves from nature in the dominant culture, which creates a lot of problems, but fundamentally, animals' role on Earth is to exist and to replicate themselves. And so when you talk about population, you're going against that biological imperative. And people feel that in different ways. And I think that can be why people get really emotional about it. Also the love that they have for their children. I think they can feel like it's an attack, but it's interesting to me as a woman how threatened people seem to be by my decision. There is definitely a sense that, just by virtue of my own decision for my own life, some people feel like I'm attacking them, even when I'm not. And I think, there's a lot of sexism in our culture that says things like, you know, you're not a real woman if you don't become a mother, that you're selfish. And the selfish line just blows me away, like I'm leaving more resources for your children. That's a generous thing. And it's not that I hate children. It's not that I'm a monster. I have a lot of nieces and nephews. So there are all these tropes about what a woman should be, and I find that, you know, men who choose not to have children don't get the same kind of pushback, which is a little sad. But yeah, there's no denying that the Earth is a finite place with finite resources. And the myth that our economy can grow infinitely, that our population can grow infinitely is just untrue. And I find in liberal circles, I often get pushback that if I make this argument, I'm being racist. And I think that has to do with some of the very ugly history of people in power trying to prevent people that they didn't like from reproducing. And then people will say it's really all about consumption, and consumption is important, and rich countries do consume way more than poor countries. But that's not the only factor. Like population is absolutely a factor. Eight billion plus people on the planet is using more resources than we have on the planet. And I think we see that. Quality of life is eroding for everyone, even in wealthier countries., it's harder to find housing. Housing is so expensive. We have more and more homeless people. We are having more and more water scarcity issues, and that's not just because of climate change. That's also because of overuse and the way that we develop, our choices for engineering and urban development, et cetera. The key factor in limiting population growth is access to education and birth control for women. And the places that still have a rapidly growing population are places where women do not have education and access to birth control. And one of the countries that I reported from for my book was Kenya. And in Kenya, there has been a really, really rapid population growth. It has quadrupled since 1980, and every single person I met in government who was trying to provide education, food, health care, water to people was concerned about this rapid growth in population. But there has been a downtick in the birth rate as education for girls has increased. So the number of girls reaching secondary education increased from 12% to 59% from the mid 1970s to the mid 2010s and contraceptive prevalence grew from five to 51% and births dropped from 7.6 to four. So again and again, you see that when women have the choice to choose how many children they want to have, they tend to choose fewer. It's a lot easier to provide for fewer children and to have a higher quality of life when it's not stretched thinner, trying to provide clothes, healthcare, school fees, etc,. And that's really kind of a microcosm of the bigger problem as well, of too many humans on Earth.
Nandita Bajaj 9:59
Yeah, thank you for sharing those great insights and your own experience of choosing not to have biological children. And in fact, your own experience of being stigmatized or questioned for not having children, just as my own experience, is telling. Why, in patriarchal societies, including ours, in western societies, does a woman choosing to not have a child present itself as a threat? Because for millennia, our roles have been tied to our reproductive capacities, and we've been doing what we've been expected to do, and suddenly we have more power and more choices that align with ourselves, and there's all of this backlash and fear of economic decline and population decline. So, we've kind of just flipped the argument on its head and said population control actually has been going on for thousands of years through patriarchal pronatalism, and nobody wants to talk about that. Well, thank you for your courage, because that's what it takes to speak about population in this day and age.
Alan Ware 11:07
Yeah, and I like the way that your essays in Forbes and Washington Post kind of mentioned you growing up in the Bay Area and seeing the disappearance of those natural areas. So you're attaching your procreation decision to caring about that, feeling that in your life, is something I really appreciated. And in your book, Water Always Wins, you discuss how modern societies often rush water away, not allowing the water to have its more natural slow phases on the land. And you interviewed many experts who advocate for slow water, allowing the water to move more slowly through the landscape. In general terms can you explain the goals of slow water advocates and how their approach differs from current water management practices?
Erica Gies 11:55
So slow water basically means restoring water's natural slow phases on the land, or conserving them where they haven't yet been destroyed, or mimicking them in some ways. So this is wetlands, flood plains, mountain meadows, forests. And when I started looking globally at the extent to which humans have interfered with the natural water cycle, I was really shocked. The paved area in cities has doubled just since 1992. Also, since 1992 a floodplain encroachment has covered an area the size of Ukraine. We've dammed and diverted two-thirds of the world's large rivers and drained or felled as much as 87% of the world's wetlands. Deforestation is decreasing rain locally, regionally, and globally, and in many, many ways, we've made the land a much drier place. In fact, draining water off the land rapidly is even a factor in sea level rise. So it's really shocking the extent of the impact that we've had and this kind of control-oriented approach to water has worked to the extent that it has, because we've had buffer. We have had fewer people, and so we've had less development. And we've had more natural areas that provide the many services that they supply us, of absorbing floods and providing water in the dry season and cleaning water and providing food at the base of the food chain. But now, you know, we've degraded as much as 75% of the land on Earth, and so we just don't have that buffer anymore. So the slow water practitioners are restoring space to water. And these projects differ from the kind of conventional approach, the heavily engineered concrete approach, in several ways. Instead of approaching water with an idea of control, they approach water with curiosity and collaboration - respecting waters agency and relationships with soil and rock and microbes, beavers and people. Like the slow food movement, which I was thinking of when I created the term slow water, each of these approaches are unique to each place. So every place has unique ecology, hydrology, geology and human culture. And so these approaches work within those systems. They use systems thinking rather than single focus problem solving. So, in the dominant culture, if you're worried about flooding, you build a wall, a levee. If you're worried about scarcity, you build an aqueduct, and you bring in water from somewhere else. But that ignores these complex systems that water is interacting with, and therefore disturbs them, destroys them, and causes a lot of unintended consequences. Our standard approach is centralized, with experts managing it. Slow water approach is decentralized. It's lots of small projects distributed across the landscape, which is more accessible, because you can start small with the area that you have, and then it's also cumulative, the way that solar panels on everyone's roof can add up to a lot of electricity. It's ideally local, working within the local water cycle, and it's socially just. So we don't often think about this, but the standard way of managing water is environmentally injust. So if you build the levee to protect one community, you're cutting off water's access to its floodplain, and so the water within the channel is going to be higher and faster. So you're actually increasing flood risk on other communities who can't afford a levee. And similarly, dams, which hold water that's brought from other places, dams have brought water to 20% of the world's population, but decreased water availability to 24% of the world's population. So it's really creating haves and have nots. And the last kind of characteristic of slow water projects is that they are community facing in some way. And so in some cases, there's an educational component, where there's signage explaining to the public what water is doing on land and other places the community is actively managing those projects and working together in a hands-on way.
Alan Ware 16:19
Right. Yeah. And you mentioned at the outset, I think, of the book of the desire to seek control of water, as humans have sought control over nature, and that the antonym of control is chaos, disorganization - all these words that have bad connotations to us. And definitely as western cultures, and other cultures, colonized places, they quickly tried to establish control over nature. And it seems like control has its own sort of slippery slope. Once you get into that mindset, you can just expand it. So I'm sure the engineers, you know, this dam can hold so many gallons, this pipe can divert so many gallons, we can control it with this floodgate, and that floodgate number two, and so all of that looks pretty good on paper, and you can apply math equations to it, until things like climate change either send the those numbers out of whack. And all the ecological complexity that you've really taken a sort of dumb approach through control, maximizing certain variables and just ignoring all of the rest, right?
Erica Gies 17:23
Yeah. I mean, really, that control instinct is rooted in an idea of human supremacy, right? People are the most important, and we need to give people whatever they want at the expense of nature, of other beings. And the problem with that, even if you believe that, which I don't, I believe that we have a moral obligation to other species to ensure their right to exist. But even if you do believe that humans are most important, this approach is not helping humans, ultimately, because it doesn't take into account these complex systems, and therefore it destroys them. And therefore, to a significant degree, it's not just climate change that is causing these increases in flood and drought. It is the infrastructure that we've built to control water. It is urban sprawl. It's industrial agriculture and forestry and dams, levees, the whole water works infrastructure. And that's because it interferes with these complex systems that evolved to deliver many of the things that humans need for life as well, right, which are a flexible system that absorbs excess water and releases water when it's needed, that cleans pollution from water that provides the base of the food chain, that stores carbon dioxide, that releases the oxygen we need, etc, etc. And all of these things haven't been counted in the economic system, right? They are externalities, and so they are taken by corporations for free or nearly so. And then, if there is waste, pollution byproducts, those are often dumped without requiring the corporations to pay for cleaning that up. And so who pays is the environment, is poor people, and ultimately, all of us, as these systems are breaking down. And, we're seeing that more and more often, right? There's been finally an acknowledgement that climate change is an existential threat, but biodiversity loss is as well. And I think a lot of people think of biodiversity loss of, oh, it's sad that all of these animals and plants are going extinct, but I think a lot of them don't realize that those beings all evolved together to maintain the systems that make the planet livable for us. And so there is a selfish motivation as well in the importance of biodiversity. And then I would add, the water cycle is also really important. And so if you go back in climate science, 50 years ago, there was a widespread acknowledgement that carbon dioxide was an issue, but also water vapor. You know, water vapor is also greenhouse gas, and it's the primary way that the planet cools itself, and the ways in which we have altered land use have dramatically disrupted the water cycle, and natural ecosystems stabilize the climate that we have. And so we could get off fossil fuels tomorrow, and it wouldn't solve climate change, because the water cycle is so out of whack because of all of this land use disruption. And so that's a piece that is really missing from the mainstream conversation, even among people who really care about climate change. And you'll see things like, we're all going to have to sacrifice something to switch to solar power, or we're going to have to build solar farms in natural ecosystems. And that completely misses the point that that natural ecosystem is playing a key role in keeping the climate as stable as it is, and destroying it is going to amplify that.
Alan Ware 21:16
Yeah, and you have written some about how forests pull in their own moisture from other places, so they're bringing moisture to themselves through the water vapor rising, right?
Erica Gies 21:29
Yeah. So this is an idea that was created by a Russian atmospheric physicist named Anastassia Makarieva and her mentor. And basically the idea is not just that trees grow where it rains, but that trees and their ecosystems actively pull in the water that they need, and so they are evapotranspiring. They're releasing water into the air as part of their photosynthetic process, and they're also releasing little particles of microbes and fungi that also help the rain to form. And so there's a physics process where that coalescing into rain creates a vacuum that then pulls in more wind, that pulls in more water vapor from the ocean, and it kind of passes it along into the continental interiors. And so when you disrupt these processes, when you take water off the land, you actually create a lot of the drought that we're seeing. There's a biologist in California named Brock Dolman who calls it - the last 500 years of colonization in North America - the age of drainage. And that is cutting the trees, leveeing the rivers, cutting them off from their floodplains, draining the wetlands, killing the beavers who create wetlands and, in all these ways, like rushing water off the land. When you don't have that land-water relationship, the plants have less access to water. They're more likely to burn. You're increasing the intensity of fires and you're decreasing rain. And because rain has to hit this tipping point, when you have a healthy ecosystem that is able to release that water, it creates something called moisture hopping. So you're passing the rain to the next area and to the next area. But also atmospheric vapor taps into jet streams, and so cutting a forest in one place can cause a drought on the other side of the world. There's a researcher in Seattle who calls this ecoclimate teleconnections. And in Europe, they are actually considering transboundary landscape protection issues. You know, there are transboundary river sharing that acknowledges if a river runs through multiple countries, and this is an acknowledgement that what you do on the land is actually impacting the rain that you might be experiencing.
Alan Ware 23:56
Right, the rivers of water vapor coming off of the plants, right? Yeah, and I like how the slow water people, you mention them as water detectives, oftentimes that they have to look at the history of water on the land. I know in a lot of urban areas, we buried streams. They're in these concrete storm sewers. I've often wondered, how does that lake connect to that lake? I see no stream. Where is the connection? We've controlled all of it, put it underground, prevented a lot of animals from moving from lake to lake. So I appreciate that history that gets so rapidly just erased from our memory of anything that was on the land and what water was doing on the land before that. And it does make me think for the future. So you have this historical approach, and then you need a more future approach that looks at the return on capital, that's kind of slow capital needs to sort of accompany slow water, right where you have patient capital, not the, as you call it, the gray infrastructure of concrete and steel. We just put this up fast. We know what our return will be. The dam will last X number of years, which has its own very expensive upfront costs.
Erica Gies 25:11
And maintenance. Yeah. So I mean, these natural systems, if they are given enough space to do their thing, can actually maintain themselves to a much greater degree. There was a project I looked at in Seattle where an urban stream was causing a lot of flooding, and it was because people had built on its historic floodplains right up to the edge, and so the water really didn't have anywhere to go. And it's a complex system, right? I looked into something called the hyporheic zone, which is sort of the stream's gut microbiome. Water is flowing actually under the river and to the sides of the river to an extent that people don't really realize when they just look at that little straightened channel that's maybe left on the surface in a city. And taking into account what the stream is actually doing, if you can make space for it, can really help. So like you said, most urban streams are buried, or filled in. But ones that do remain on the surface tend to have a lot of really fine sediment. And this is basically dust that runs off the pavement during a storm, and you have these really fast peak flashes because all of that water, none of it's soaking into the ground, right? It's all running off the pavement and dumping into the stream channel at once. And the silt becomes a really big problem, and cities have to dredge it all the time, and it's very expensive. And so what Seattle found by looking at the historical ecology, water has a memory; it tends to go where it wants to go, which is where it used to go. So by restoring these two small floodplains, they had a really outsized impact of the area not flooding anymore, because the flood plain could absorb the flood, but also absorbing some of the sediment and redistributing it naturally. And so they used to have to dredge this area every year, and it cost a million dollars, and now they only have to dredge every three to five years. Now, if they were able to restore more of the stream, which actually they are working on doing, maybe they would decrease that even more, because these projects have a cumulative effect. When you give the system more space to perform its natural functions, it's better able to, to maintain itself. And then your point about a dam or a levee having certain parameters, you know, it's built to absorb X amount of water. The thing is, like natural wetlands and floodplains are built to flex. Floodplains exist to absorb floods. That's something we seem to have forgotten. And so, yeah, they can be much more flexible when big water events happen. And a lot of the big water event that we're experiencing is not just because of climate change. It's because the water doesn't have space to go. And so if you give it that space, you have smaller impacts on human settlements.
Nandita Bajaj 28:09
Speaking of water not having enough space to go, you've talked about how population growth, urban sprawl, industrial agriculture, have all really deteriorated the agency of the water to do its thing. And we know from the recent World Bank estimates that the world's urban population will increase by 50% in the next 20 years. And you discuss in your book how growing cities are adding more and more hard surfaces, like concrete, which leads to, as you've just spoken about, faster water runoff, which can increase the frequency of both flooding and drought. Can you share some of what you found in your research as the best and worst examples of how cities are managing water?
Erica Gies 28:59
Yeah, I think there has been a big increase in urban flooding, and a lot of that is due to this impermeable pavement. So you may have heard of China's sponge cities movement, and that has a great name. Sponge is very evocative. It absorbs excess water. It releases water. But there are similar approaches all around the world that go by different names. The US calls it low-impact design. Australia calls it urban sensitive water management or something like that. In Europe, it's sometimes called green infrastructure or natural infrastructure, but the idea is to make surfaces more permeable, and so that could be removing industrial facilities from right along the river on the flood plain and returning that area to flood plain. A lot of cities have had kind of renaissances along the river, where they turn that into an urban park, but that's something that can flood when necessary without damaging buildings, because it's a park. So that's a great example. There can be green roofs that slow water from running off those hard surfaces, permeable pavement incentives for green medians and sidewalk bump outs and things like that. But also urban planning longer term, if you use that historical ecology and you say, oh, this is where the wetlands were. This is where the river went. Then maybe when that building floods, because it's built on a wetland and it's going to cost a lot to rebuild it, maybe the city chooses not to rebuild it. Maybe they return that space to water and allow that apartment or whatever to be rebuilt somewhere else. And we tend to think of our cities as really fixed, but in fact, buildings turn over pretty frequently. In places like China, where development is happening so quickly, it can be in 15 years. In the US and Canada, it might be more like 50 years. But in doing that kind of longer term planning based on historical ecology, a city can make smarter decisions about where giving a small amount of space to water will have a really outsized impact, like Seattle did with the Thornton Creek example. I think the ways in which we have pursued urban development, again, are very single focused and not examining the consequences of how things work. But, we're starting to see changes. So Philadelphia, for example, had a problem with combined sewer overflow. So this is an issue that's prevalent in the northeast of the US and in other places around the world where people thought, hey, storm runoff contains pollution, oil, whatever, from the urban surfaces. Why not put that through sewage treatment so what we're releasing into the water is cleaner? Sounds good. But when you have a lot of water coming into that system at once during a storm, it overflows, and what happens is untreated sewage ends up going out into the rivers, and this has been a big problem. And so Philadelphia was really a leader in saying to the EPA, who was like, you have to deal with your sewage treatment. Instead of us building a giant new facility, we're going to have incentives to make the city more permeable, so more of that rain will soak into the ground and will reduce the amount of storm water that's rushing into our system, and therefore reduce the overflows that are happening. And they've had a good deal of success with that, and other cities are replicating that. In Detroit, they have a policy which is also being replicated elsewhere, that charges property owners for the amount of impermeable surface they have on their property. So your house is probably going to be impermeable unless you have a green roof, but maybe you've paved the yard because you don't want to deal with weeds. Well, then you'd have to pay for stormwater runoff for that whole area, because you're increasing the runoff; whereas, you know, if you replace that with plants that are going to allow that water to infiltrate, then you'd reduce your stormwater runoff bill. So these are some ways that cities are trying to adapt, and I think there really is a pretty widespread recognition that pavement is a problem and that we need to make our cities more permeable, and also the value of capturing that storm water. Los Angeles is infamous for stealing Owens Valley's water and bringing in water from Northern California, and they now have a program that is trying to increase permeability within the city to capture more of the rain that comes to reduce the amount of water that they need to import from elsewhere. Beijing and Mexico City both have a lot of subsidence, which is like when you pump out too much groundwater and the land sinks. And so there's a recognition that, again, you prevent that sinking if you allow the water to infiltrate, and you're not overpumping. So I would just add that it's kind of early days, like there's a widespread recognition that it is important, but the scale at which it needs to happen is really vast. So China has one of the most ambitious programs, and people will look at a city that is a sponge city, and they'll say, oh, look, there's still flooding. There's still death and disaster happening. But the sponge city element might be five square miles in a city that covers a thousand square miles, and so it's not hard to understand why that's not yet enough. And that's often why you'll hear engineers say things like, well, these are nice, but they can't be a significant part of the solution. It's really a question of scale. The scale of the capacity of the dams and reservoirs and things like that that we have are really, really massive, and the scale at which we've taken away wetlands and floodplains is really massive. So we need a comparable scale to allow that water to infiltrate where it falls.
Nandita Bajaj 35:04
Right. And you were speaking just briefly about the permeability of houses, and people paving over lawns, for example. But you also had this really interesting data point about lawns, how they're the most irrigated crop in North America. So I know you're not kind of in favor of having lawns when you're talking about permeability, but you spoke about the importance of using that space to plant more native species that would help with a more natural flow of the water. I wonder if you can just say a few words about that.
Erica Gies 35:42
Yeah, lawns are the largest irrigated crop in North America. They use more than 9 billion gallons of water every day. That's just in the US, not counting Canada or Mexico, which is also part of North America. And you know, lawns have a lot of other problems as well. They tend to require a lot of pesticides and fertilizers, which run off into our waterways and pollute them. They are ecological deserts. They tend to be monoculture crops, a single species, so they're not helping biodiversity at all. They don't have very long roots, especially compared to native grasses, so they require that water to not die. And they are not helping infiltrate that water as much, because when you have the long roots, that gives the water a pathway to go deeper underground. So yeah, native plants. I converted my yard in San Francisco to native plants starting 20 years ago, and my primary motivation was water, because I didn't want to have to water my yard at all. I thought, if these plants evolved for this place, they're going to get the water that they need, just as the rain or the fog that comes. So that was my motivation. But along the way, I started learning all of the native plants in my area and working with them and planting them. And it was such a joy to get to know your own bioregion and also like the animals that that attracts because you're providing a little square of habitat in an area where it was missing. And, when I go hiking now, I know the plants. I am not plant blind. I recognize friends from my garden. And there's something really beautiful about that. And if you think about why do we have lawns? They are basically from English aristocracy, and they disconnect us from the place where we are. And lawns are great for playing soccer, for kids to run around in. I'm not saying that there's no role for lawns at all, but so many of the ones we have are not performing those functions. They're just filling space, and they are a dramatic ecological liability. And in a lot of Western states where water is scarce, there are new laws that are requiring, like a business park, to remove the lawns that surround them and replace them with drought tolerant plants, ideally native plants. And even in people's front yards, the idea is like, well, the kids will run around in the backyard, but in the front yard, you could have native plants. And some people might think that this is a hardship or government control or something like that, but sometimes they're done with incentives rather than penalties. And I watched a really dramatic change happen in Phoenix, Arizona, which was kind of infamous for water waste, as all of these people moved from the Midwest and then wanted to have lawns. And as water became more and more scarce, there's been a real movement towards starting with incentives, toward people removing their lawns and welcoming palo verde trees and saguaros and now they see road runners and bobcats on their land. And people are realizing we moved to the desert because we love the desert. So why don't we have desert plants instead of a lawn, for example? So I think reconnecting with that pride of place can be a really powerful thing for communities.
Alan Ware 39:24
Right. Now we've been talking about mainly water on on land. The other major form of water is the oceans; two-fifths of humanity lives within 60 miles of the ocean, which always surprises me being in the middle of the continent, how many people are that close to oceans. So you know, sea levels will keep rising. Billions could be affected in the coming decades. And what do you see as some of the better and worse ways that humanity's adapting to rising seas, or that we might adapt in the future?
Erica Gies 39:56
Well, a lot of people are going to have to move. That's just the truth of it. And you cannot build a wall to hold out the entire ocean. And England is a place where I looked at this issue, because they have such a long coastline, and they have explicitly recognized that in a lot of places, there are - they call them shingle banks. It's basically like a bunch of rocks that are kind of pushed up with bulldozers to keep the ocean out from a community that's behind it. And the Environment Agency has notified communities that within 10 years, within 20 years, we're going to stop doing this. And so you need a plan. And in a lot of places, the local community is partly financially responsible for this as well. And so, you know, they have a real sense of what that entails. Ideally, you might have incentives where the government buys you out and helps you relocate somewhere else. That's not going to be possible in every place, but in a wealthy country like the United States, it probably is possible. The Union of Concerned Scientists did a study a few years ago that looked at how much would it cost to buy out homeowners from every area that is expected to be underwater by 2050. And it was a little bit over a trillion dollars, which is a lot of money. But during the pandemic, we rolled out a trillion dollars. So in a rich country like the United States, it is possible, if the political will is there, there are serious questions about haves and have nots, and who has access to that kind of help. There's a researcher at the University of Delaware named A.R. Siders who has done a lot of work on managed retreat policies and how communities can come together to do that equitably and to move towards something better. And I think there is a growing recognition that if you can remove some communities that are already experiencing significant flooding and return that to a natural ecosystem, like a mangrove forest, like a seagrass meadow, sand dunes, tidal marsh. There's a lot of work being done on that in the San Francisco Bay Area to restore tidal marshes. You are giving the water more space, and so you're decreasing the pressure, the rate of flooding risk on nearby areas. And so that's an approach that some people are taking. And yet people continue to make poor choices to build more and more in areas that are at significant risk. I think of Boston's Seaport neighborhood. I was just down there last year, and it's incredible. It's right on the water. It is absolutely going to be underwater in the near future. And they've built these giant high rises within the last like five years. It's just massive. And they've built this very small little, oh, look, we've restored our tidal marsh here. And, but then they've also done this huge development. And so, cities often do that because there is a tax base motivation. You know, if you build more homes, businesses, etc, you have more property tax coming in. But it's very short sighted, because the cities are also on the hook to provide sewage treatment, to provide road access, to provide electricity, to provide recovery if there is damage, and some of these tolls are going to be coming due really, really quickly. There was an interesting economic study done by a researcher named Hannah Druckenmiller from Resources for the Future that looked at wetlands conservation. And if a community chose to conserve a wetlands rather than allow it to be developed, the return on investment in terms of not suffering property losses from flooding was less than five years. And the benefits of conserving that wetland extended more than 40 miles from the protected wetland. And so, we have these property arguments right, like the recent Supreme Court decision last year of the couple in Wyoming who wanted to develop their wetlands. And so it's like, oh, well, we have to protect their property right to develop that wetland, but in fact, you're taking away other people's property rights by increasing the flood risk to them. And so that's something that we're not really thinking about when we're making those kinds of decisions. And with this Supreme Court decision, a lot more wetlands and ephemeral streams that aren't running year round are now no longer subject to protection, and so that has the potential to increase flood risk for everybody.
Alan Ware 44:49
Yeah, I think you make it clear in the book, there's so much that if we would just stop doing it in that way, conserving the wetland. And then some of the statistics you mentioned. Over the past half century, we've lost 50% of salt marshes, 35% of mangroves, 30% coral reefs, 85% shellfish reefs. So there's so much that if we could just not do things, we would have such a great return. And the return on investment you just talked about was massive.
Erica Gies 45:17
That's really by far the cheapest solution is to not destroy what's left. And that's what I tried to show in the Seattle chapter as well about the hyporheic creek restoration. These systems are so complex, and to restore them once we've damaged them is challenging. We don't understand everything about how they work. And the best projects are making space for the natural systems to repair themselves.
Alan Ware 45:46
And yeah, to the extent that the cost shifting. If the local government collects the great taxes now, because there's a 20 story condo on the beach, and the future cost to the streets and the sewers will be borne by future generations, and when they can't pay that locally, then the federal government eventually is the ultimate bailout. And we've seen the Flood Insurance Program in the US is nowhere near enough, and we are seeing private insurance bailing out of state after state based on all kinds of climate change risks. So it's such a short term outlook that encourages these cities to build mountain homes in fire risk areas or beach homes and condos on the oceans and then to have the Supreme Court doubling down on private property rights is very short sighted.
Nandita Bajaj 46:37
And, you know, in terms of examples of letting water do what it wants, Kenya's water management system is encouraging slower water. Can you talk a bit about how it works and how it can serve as an example?
Erica Gies 46:53
Sure, yeah. So Kenya, like California, has heavier rain years and longer drought years. And in California, water rights are first in time, first in rights. So that means, if I was a settler who came there in 1860 then maybe I have a very senior water right, and if there's a drought, I'm going to get all of my water allocation. And somebody who made a water right in 1950 maybe they're going to get nothing during a drought year. And so in Kenya, they do have people who have much bigger water rights than other people, but the difference is that they share the pain. So if there's a drought year, everybody has their water curtailed. So it might be a percentage, where the person who has a big water right is still going to get a significantly larger amount of water than the person with the smaller right, but it's proportional. And another thing that they do is they have these community water user associations. And so the idea behind that is that the local community has their eyes on the ground, and they have a better sense of the water situation in the area - how much water is available, how to allocate it, etc. In practice, these community organizations often are not well funded, and so the execution leaves something to be desired, but I think it's an important idea, and it's something that they're working toward. And then, in general, the project that I looked at in-depth in Kenya is a water fund by which people downstream are investing money in land use upstream. And one of the water government officials there called the upstream people water producers and the downstream people water users. And I really like that, because the watershed is connected, and we all share it, and that language recognizes that. And so in practice, what this means is like a beer bottling company, Coca Cola, the electricity utility who's concerned about sediment in their dams or in their turbines, all of these are investing money that then goes to small holder farmers who have had a big impact on the landscape over the last couple of decades. And so they've moved into high forest areas. They've cut the forests and now they're growing crops, and these are very steep hills. So, a lot of sediment is running off and running into the river, and the water is also running off really quickly. And so with this funding, an agricultural officer goes around and teaches them different techniques, like cutting terraces so that the water sinks into the ground locally and is able to hydrate the soil so they don't need to irrigate. That encourages them to have planting strips right along the river to collect that sediment and to make sure it doesn't run into the river, to plant native grasses that are going to help to hold the soil and can also serve as fodder for their cows and sheep. It's really interesting, because the money that the downstream companies are giving is not going directly to the farmers. It might give a little bit for like avocado seedlings, which is a crop that is in the soil year round, so it helps to hold the soil. But the farmers are motivated to do this because it makes their life easier. Their crops are better irrigated, so they're more productive naturally irrigated, so they are having a better quality of life. They're having more food for their families and a little bit extra to sell. And so that's the payoff for them, and I think that's the really important point. The agricultural officer that I went around with made this to me is like, you know, if it's not benefiting them, they're not going to keep doing it. Like you can show it to them, but when you leave, they're only going to keep doing it if they see the benefit. And so I think keeping that community benefit focus in mind is important in the success of these projects.
Alan Ware 51:04
I thought it was interesting that it seems like the 2010 Kenyan Constitution had something to do with this greater local governance and decentralization of power that allowed them to address those inequities and establish more local control. So it did happen partly through power changes, right?
Erica Gies 51:24
Right, yeah. So, you know, a lot of African countries moved away from colonialism in the mid 20th century, as did Kenya, but a lot of them sort of adopted colonial structures for government, and that was true in Kenya as well. And then, yeah, about 15 years ago, people there thought, Well, wait a minute. Maybe we want to do this our own way, more in keeping with our local values. And so yeah, they overhauled their constitution, which included an overhaul of their water rights or their water management approaches.
Alan Ware 52:02
And that kind of reminds me of, well, you talk about indigenous knowledge in different cultures around the world, which is very bioregional, local, decentralized, working with the rich context knowledge of the locality. And you talk about Iraq and Peru, different indigenous groups living more symbiotically with water. Can you describe some of what you saw there in Iraq and Peru?
Erica Gies 52:26
Both of these places were so fascinating, and I really feel lucky to have been able to go there. In Iraq, I went to the Mesopotamian marshes, which are the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that are really storied places. Some biblical scholars think that this was the Garden of Eden. And there are people there called the marsh dwellers, who have been living on top of wetlands for 9000 years. Their culture has continued. And so there's a very tall reed there called Phragmites australis, which has become invasive in other places, including the US Midwest, but is native there and is a renewable resource, and they use it to build their homes, to build paddocks for their animals, to build the very islands that they live on in these wetlands. They can eat the root of it when it's young. They make mats to lie on and to rest against, these sort of bolsters. And they fish. They raise water buffalo for milk and cheese, and then they trade with people on land for fruits and vegetables. And their way of life has continued largely unchanged, and around them many, many storied civilizations have come and gone, many agricultural civilizations. And as these civilizations have fallen, the marshes have just retaken their area again. So I think there's a really deep understanding that these wetlands provide the marsh dwellers with the resources that they need for life, and I think that the longevity of their culture, which really pales in comparison to our own, I think there's something to be learned there. Not necessarily that we're all going to rebuild our wetlands and move on top of them, but certainly to acknowledge their importance in providing so many of the things that we need. And, they have ongoing threats. There are upstream dams, particularly in Turkey and Iran, that are holding back water that should be going to these wetlands, and they're having problems like salt water intrusion coming up from the Gulf, because you don't have the fresh water pushing it out. So these are things that they continue to have to deal with. And then in Peru, I went to the Andes mountains because this is another situation which is common around the world, where people on the lowlands rely on the mountains for their water. And in Peru, two-thirds of the population live on this coastal plain that is a desert and gets very little water, but the Andes at their back produce a lot of water, and that's what they rely on. But, with climate change, glaciers are melting. And so glaciers used to be a way to have a reliable source of water throughout the dry season, but as they melt, they are looking for a different way to slow water on the land, and it's an extremely water insecure country. Already, people in the capital of Lima only have water 21 hours a day, and have to store water in cisterns at their apartment buildings, which is also the case in many Indian cities that get water for far fewer hours a day. But the leaders recognize this problem, so they have passed a series of laws that require water utilities to invest upstream in the watershed. So Peru is a country that's had problems with corruption, and so before investing outside of the city would be considered corruption. But now it's required, because there is this recognition that the mountains are the source of the water that people use. And so the projects that that has resulted in have been really interesting. One is protection of a natural high altitude ecosystem called bofedales, or cushion bog, and being a wetland, it holds the water throughout the year and releases water throughout the year. It's also very critical for people and animals that live at this high altitude, and these wetlands are under threat from the nursery trade, the plant nursery trade, because people use peat, and so they cut out these squares of peat, and this is something that has accumulated over hundreds of years, if not thousands. It has massive water retention capacity as well as carbon storage. So if you are into plants, please do not use peat, because it's so important on the landscape where it is, and when you cut it out, it dries out the area, and the whole area dies. And I saw that when I was there. So some of this money is going to protect the peat that remains from peat thievery to get local communities involved in making sure that those aren't damaged. And then another really, really cool element was an earlier people who lived in the Andes, called the Wari people, invented a system called amunas, which means 'to retain' in the Quechua language. And basically, when they would have higher flows in the wet season, at the very high altitudes, they would route some of this water into these natural infiltration basins and move the water underground. And when water is underground, when it's moving through soil and rock, it's moving much, much more slowly than it does on the surface. And so what that does is it allows them to keep the water up in the mountains throughout more of the year, and they would then harvest this water from springs lower down the mountain and use them to water their crops. And then the water again goes into the soil and underground, and then ultimately moves down into the rivers in the valley, which ultimately supply cities like Lima downstream. And so this is a way in which they managed water communally in their area and shared the water. And these systems still exist today in at least three villages. I went to visit one of them. But the amuna system throughout the Andes has largely fallen into disrepair, and so some of the money from these utilities is going to invest in helping these communities reestablish their amunas. And it's also a method that helps to keep people on the land, because a lot of people have been moving to cities and leaving the land, but having longer water availability throughout the growing season and maintaining these traditional approaches makes staying on the land and being able to produce food much more feasible.
Alan Ware 59:12
Right. And the area that Nandita and I are in, the Great Lakes region, so the Ojibwe moved out of the east, and their prophecy had this plant that grows on the water, wild rice. So a lot of wild ricing land is around here, and wild rice requires very clean water, not a lot of pollutants, not a lot of sediment. And we've had water protectors protesting oil pipelines that are going through a lot of these, over 200 water bodies and 800 wetlands in Minnesota threatening those wild rice areas. So it's a lot of cultural significance and subsistence significance to water and clean water historically. And these large dams have been one of the primary means we've used for holding water on the land and controlling it very precisely. But across much of North America, Europe and Asia, beavers were historically hugely pervasive and powerful force for achieving slower water at small scale, very local scale. So what are some of the negative effects you've found? We've talked about some of them, about traditional, large structure, dam building, versus the benefits of small-scale beaver, the natural form of damming?
Erica Gies 1:00:27
Yeah, dams have been really, really destructive, particularly for fish, migratory fish, and you know, we've seen fish populations plummet, and there's a large recognition of that, like, for example, in the Mekong River in Southeast Asia. Sixty million people rely on it as their primary source of protein. And yet, a lot of dams have been built on it already, and a lot more dams are planned. And at one point, Cambodia actually looked at, okay, well, if we build these dams and we destroy these fish runs, how are we going to provide that protein for our people? You know, are we going to have fish farms? Are we going to,, grow it industrially? And they actually passed a moratorium on dams for a while because they recognized how challenging this would be to do. Dams provide water on a pace that is according to human desires, whether it's to generate electricity or to deliver irrigation water, as opposed to natural cycles. So there are many, many species in freshwater ecosystems that are unable to complete their life cycles because they are not having the water availability that they evolved to need. A lot of times, dams flood human settlements and people have to move and lose their cultural history in a place. The Klamath dams that are coming out in Northern California and Southern Oregon recently revealed land that had been occupied by the Shasta tribe, and California gave that land back in sort of a very long, delayed justice move. So yeah, that's another impact. And beaver dams are very different. They're much smaller scale, and they're permeable. I mean, dams release water, but according to human timelines. Beaver dams release water according to nature's timelines. The plants and animals that evolved to use beaver dams. They evolved with the beavers, and so they respond well to those cycles. And sometimes you see in the western US, where people are concerned about salmon, they'll say, oh, you know, we have to get a beaver dam because salmon can't get past it, which is crazy, you know, like they evolved together. Salmon run when it rains, when the waters are higher, and they may be having trouble now, because there's that pinch point. But the pinch point exists because of all the human development that has only allowed that one tiny, little place for them. So again, it's important to think big picture.
Alan Ware 1:03:15
Yeah, I recently read the Ben Goldfarb book, Eager Beaver, so that had a lot of great information about beavers and just how it's a smaller, localized retention of water that allows it to soak into the water table. So it's helping you during drought, and then it's letting a fair amount of water go through. Like you said, salmon can get through. Other creatures can get through the dams, oftentimes, and then if it's very high water, the dam blows apart and it's done. And it's not there for 75 years and has to be destroyed, and you know, through some elaborate process of creating trash of a giant dam.
Erica Gies 1:03:55
I mean, beavers often do come back and rebuild their dams, but, you know, it's an important water storage mechanism. One researcher found that a beaver dam stored 75 times more water above and below ground than a stream without. And particularly in the West, you know, we've relied on snow pack that is projected to disappear with climate change. So this is another important way that we can slow water on the land and have it available through the dry season. And beaver complexes also create fire refugia. It's not just that water doesn't burn, but that they raise the water table across a wider area, which makes that water accessible to the plants, and so the plants are less desiccated.
Alan Ware 1:04:39
Right. And the amount of life that comes into those ponds is enormous - birds, frogs, insects, all of it creates much greater biodiversity.
Nandita Bajaj 1:04:49
And in the book, you quote a professor and Shinnecock citizen, Kelsey Leonard, who gives a Kennedy-like call to action with the question, Ask not what water can do for you, but rather, what are you going to do for water? And you've given a lot of incredible insights of how the slow water movement can really guide how we relate to water ourselves. How has your own relationship to water changed? And how do you think we all might begin changing our relationship to water?
Erica Gies 1:05:21
I think it really starts with curiosity, which is implied in Dr. Leonard's question there. And for me, it's given me kind of eyes for water, if that makes sense, or ears for water. And as I go about my day in the city or in the forest, I'm really more aware. Like sometimes you'll notice, if you're walking down the street, you can hear the water under the manhole cover. So often you hear those sounds, and you think, what is water doing under there, and how did it get there? And what does water want? What would water be doing otherwise? And as I've learned about the ways in which we've tried to control water, I understand better what I'm seeing. So a lot of times, if you do have a stream that remains on the surface in a city, the water itself is maybe 20 feet below you when you're standing on the edge of it, and that's because of the way that we've created that kind of straightened fire hose and fast water. It's cut down through the Earth. It's eroded. And so that is not a healthy stream. That's a sign of a sick system. And so that kind of knowledge and awareness has just made me a lot more aware of what a particular place's relationship is with water, and sort of where they are in their journey of living more in harmony with water and in collaboration with water. And I think, my purpose in writing this book was because I felt like these solutions have so much to offer, and people around the world are having a lot of success with them. Yet many decision makers and local people don't know that this is an option, and so, you know, I was really trying to give, every place is unique. Water is local, but there are some commonalities. And so by telling so many different stories about drought and flood and urban and rural et cetera, I hope to give people some ideas of what's possible and a place to start thinking and to start that conversation and research, and also sort of this message of empowerment. I think oftentimes we feel really overwhelmed by climate change and by the water extremes that we're seeing, and we're waiting for international governments to agree and do something. But the people I met in my book are coming together with other people in their own communities to make their own places much more resilient. And I think that's a really empowering and optimistic message.
Nandita Bajaj 1:07:52
Yeah, totally agree. We need to, as you have done so beautifully, reclaim the many ways in which traditional cultures for millennia have had a relationship with water - you know, a collaboration of kinship, water as a who, not as a what that needs to be controlled. And you say in your book that asking what water wants may have sounded mystical at the beginning of the book, but it's actually very practical. And, I feel like both reasons are good enough reasons, you know, the mysteriousness of the planet that we know so little about, and to really hold that in reverence, but also the practicality of what water wants to do is actually in favor of life, in support of all life on Earth. So, yeah, it's been really, really incredible.
Alan Ware 1:08:45
Yeah, thank you for your writing and your speaking, being the curious generalist that you are as a journalist, and you're so observant and you're, in this book, you're talking to a lot of other people who are making the interconnections - the interdisciplinary, connected thinking that so often we're lacking when we stay siloed in our areas of expertise. So it's great to have you working on something so important with your curiosity and your care and intelligence. So thank you for this.
Erica Gies 1:09:15
Well, thank you. It was such a pleasure talking with both of you, and I really appreciate the invitation.
Alan Ware 1:09:21
That's all for this edition of the Overpopulation Podcast. Visit populationbalance.org to learn more. To share feedback or guest recommendations, write to us using the contact form on our site or by emailing us at podcast@populationbalance.org. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate us on your favorite podcast platform and share it widely. And we couldn't do this work without the support of listeners like you, and we hope you'll consider a one-time or recurring donation.
Nandita Bajaj 1:09:50
Until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj, thanking you for your interest in our work and for your efforts in helping us all shrink toward abundance.