By Sarah OâLeary
This article was published in the December 2009 edition of Econews (the newsletter of the Northcoast Environmental Center).
Speaking at the 2009 Bioneers Conference in San Rafael in October, Brock Dolman repeatedly reminded his audience of the importance of âhydro-literacy.â He pointed out that 60 percent of Americans canât even name one component of their hydro cycle â where water comes from and how it gets to you.
Dolman advocates a âwatershed approachâ to the looming problems of climate change, sea-level rise and potential drought. While studying owls, salamanders and other endangered vertebrates as an endangered species vertebrate biologist, he reached his own âwatershed momentâ when he realized that if the hydrologic cycle of a place is compromised then the carrying capacity of life in that place would be accordingly compromised.
â[We] have to start thinking like a watershed because thatâs the scale,â he said. âIf you fly up in a plane about a thousand-foot level from your project site, you go âoh I get it, Iâm actually in a container â a cradle â called a watershed with a drainage attachment.ââ
âYou can have your head down in the creek trying to fix it up for the fish for a long dang time,â Dolman continued. âUntil you realize that if you want to save the river, you start at the ridgeline.â
Dolman has devoted much of his adult life to educating and advocating for healthy watersheds and smart uses of water and land. He heads up the Water Institute, a program of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center (OAEC) in Sonoma County, and also directs the Centerâs Permaculture Design Program and co-directs their Wildlands Biodiversity Program. In his spare time, he works with local political entities advocating for water rights and water-quality protection â once even dressing up as a totem salmon for a Board of Supervisors meeting.
The Water Institute, established in 2004, stands for Watershed Advocacy Training Education, Research and Restoration, representing a five-pronged approach to watershed management. âWatersheds are ⊠interesting units upon which community organizing can happen on a geographic scale,â said Dolman.
Much of the work of the Water Institute is participating in public processes around policy and land use decisions, he explained. â[We] are directly involved in actually helping to rewrite policy,â he said. âFor example, Iâve been involved with a large number of people in the process of rewriting the new California grey water code â to try to make parts of that code more accessible and affordable to people.â
Education and Relationships
Another important component of the Water Instituteâs work is education. âIf youâre going to do advocacy, one of the important things is to do training and education around just basic literacy.â
To this end Dolman has coordinated âBasins of Relationsâ trainings for the last decade. âLots of folks up and down the coast in many different watersheds ⊠have done this residential training at OAEC and then gone on to start a citizen-based watershed effort,â he said.
Dolman emphasized that every watershed is unique with its own challenges and work to do. â[Itâs] about the relationships between the people you share that basin with. Each watershed, in my opinion, ends up looking like a lifeboat and youâve got to get your community together to batten down the hatches of your living watershed lifeboat because the future isnât looking so certain.â
Soil Saves Carbon
In the midst of the current buzz about preserving forests in order to sequester carbon, Dolman reminds us that healthy soil is also an important piece of this puzzle. Carbon is fixed through photosynthesis, making plants an important component of carbon storage. Since part of the carbon is stored in the below-ground portions of the plant, Dolman points out that this area may be a safer place to store carbon than above ground where they are susceptible to fire and other natural threats.
âItâs important to honor that each vegetation community has its rightful place,â he said. âWhat would be called âcarbon farmingâ puts the carbon in the form of humus and black fixed carbon into the soils â this is one of the areas that needs a lot more recognition.â
Forestry certainly has its role, Dolman acknowledged, but organic farming that increases the percentage of carbon in the soil over time should also be considered as a form of carbon sequestration. âIf it can be done in an agriculturally productive manner thatâs still fish-friendly and wildlife-friendly, then we may have some integrative solutions here,â he said.
Tying this idea back to the importance of water, Dolman said, âAs we increase the humus content in the soils, we can increase their water-holding capacity, increase the sponge so to speak, so our water storage capacity can go up. We can pattern the land to slow that water down, spread it out and sink it, get into the soil.â
To Dolmanâs mind, most human settlements need a retrofit to be more ecologically literate â and this is the idea behind permaculture, which he defines as a âdesign methodology for regenerative human settlement patterns.â A good retrofit will promote resiliency in the face of an uncertain future, he said.
âThe watershed lifeboat analogy is helpful,â Dolman said, âwhen you think about how we can retrofit every human land use behavior to be integrated in a way that youâre solving a bunch of your perceived problems: food security, air security, fire security, soil water, fish, people, plants.â
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