Didi Pershouse (Author, and Founder of the Land and Leadership Initiative) and Walter Jehne (Soil Microbiologist and Climate Scientist) give an incredibly hopeful view of how we can work with plants and soil biology to bring abundant water and rain back to California; reduce drought, flooding and wildfires, while also addressing global warming.
There is a community discussion part way through, with an incredible group that has gathered for the evening, and then the lecture resumes.
You can find on-demand webinars with Didi Pershouse, Walter Jehne (and other colleagues) and find out about upcoming conferences, workshops, and online classes at www.landandleadership.org, and at www.didipershouse.com.
Download the free facilitator's manual "Understanding Soil Health and Watershed Function" at https://www.didipershouse.com/understanding-soil-health-and-watershed-function.html
Other helpful links:
www.rehydratecalifornia.org
Didi Pershouse is the author of The Ecology of Care: Medicine, Agriculture, Money, and the Quiet Power of Human and Microbial Communities and Understanding Soil Health and Watershed Function. She is a lead author for the "Future Directions" chapter of the UN-FAO Technical Manual on Soil Organic Carbon Management, and a contributing author for Health in the Anthropocene.
Pershouse is a skilled facilitator, who can bring conservatives and liberals together into effective working groups with common goals: improving soil health, public health, water security, and regional resilience through simple changes in land management. Both online and in-person, her participatory workshops engage farmers and ranchers, policymakers, investors, and scientists in systems thinking and deep listening, to allow for emergent strategies. She was one of five speakers at the United Nations-FAO World Soil Day in 2017.
As the founder of the Center for Sustainable Medicine, she developed a practice and theoretical framework for systems-based ecological medicine—to restore health to people as well as the environmental and social systems around them. After 22 years of clinical work with patients, Pershouse now travels widely in North America and Europe as a speaker, teacher, and consultant.
In 2018, she founded the Land and Leadership Initiative. She is the board chair of the Soil Carbon Coalition, and a co-founder of Regenerate Earth and the "Can we Rehydrate California?" Initiative.
She is currently working on projects with the UN-FAO Farmer Field School program; the Climate Resilient Zero Budget Natural Farming Initiative in Andhra Pradesh, India; the 4p1000 Initiative, and the Northeast (US) Healthy Soils Policy Group. You can learn more about her work at www.didipershouse.com.
Walter Jehne is an internationally known Australian soil microbiologist and climate scientist. He is passionate about educating farmers, policymakers and others about “the soil carbon sponge” and its crucial role in reversing and mitigating flooding, drought, wildfires, and rising global temperatures. His work shows how we can safely cool the climate by repairing our disrupted hydrological cycles. That project requires us to return some of the excess carbon in the atmosphere to the soil, where it can build a sponge that soaks up water.
In 2017, he participated in an invitation-only United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization conference in Paris aimed at bringing soil into the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. Jehne was an early researcher on glomalin, mycorrhizal fungi, and root ecology. He grew up in the bush, surrounded by nature. At university, he chose the field of microbiology because it encompasses all life processes in microcosm. As a young man, he started his career working on forest dieback diseases in relation to soil microbial interactions. Later he realized that the disease fungi were actually our friends because they’re involved with symbiosis, and disease serves to remove and recycle moribund organisms.
As a research scientist at CSIRO (Australia’s scientific research organization), Jehne investigated the potential of mycorrhizal fungi to recolonize toxic, degraded soils and to rebuild productive biosystems. His curiosity took him to China to study why the country’s traditional agriculture was so productive.
Eventually, he worked with his federal government on changing the paradigm of land management to foster strategic innovation. He retired 15 years ago so he could get back to practically applying science and grassroots empowerment. He travels widely to work with farmers and policymakers to share his understanding of biology's role in restoring a healthy climate.