The mississippi book festival, thank thank you for inviting us all here today, thank you very much. [applause] youre watching book tv on cspan2. Television for serious readers. Heres a look at whats on prime time tonight. We kicked off the evening with a report on the worlds water supply. Then Robert Watson remembers one of the worst maritime eras. At 10 00 p. M. On book tv after Words Program and colder presents her case. We wrap up book tv in prime time at 11 00 p. M. With Service EmployeesInternational Movement with david roth. It all happens next on book tv. Now Judith Schwartz on clean water around the world. Good evening everyone, welcome to the north shire bookstore and thank you for coming tonight. My name is tracy and i am the director of events here at north shire. I would like to ask if you have not done so already to please violence your cell phone and also let you know that following our discussion this evening, there will be a book signing downstairs at the signing table. We have plenty of books available at the register. Our special guest and author tonight is Judith Schwartz. She is a journalist whose recent work looks at the economic and social challenges and solutions for water. Her 2013 book how to save the planet was awarded a silver prize for sustainability and is among booklist top ten list of sustainability. She lives here in vermont. Shell be speaking about her new book water in plain sight which is a book about water scarcity and the inspiring, eyeopening reminder that drying our planet is possible and makes understanding what makes Natural Systems dry in order to fix these problems. Please help me welcome Judith Schwartz. Thank you tracy. I will begin by reading the introduction which is fairly brief, then i will give a broader context to the book and then i will tell a few stories because what is the fun of writing a book if youre not telling a story. We begin. Introduction water in plain sight. I knew something was missing. Thanks for bearing with me. Alright, i used i used to have perfect eyesight. Its unseasonably warm for december in paris and the ice is melting, the ice harvested as icebergs from a fjord is an art installation set up. The 12 blocks each way, more than 20000 pounds are arranged in a circle to form a clock. In winter, dusk in paris is a leisurely affair. Sprawling across the hours like lunch in a side street brasserie , its nearly dark when i reach the square but the ice trunks, some taller than the people wandering among them have their own glow with glinting charisma. People posed by the blocks, snapping photos, children holding onto their parents hand, they touch the icing giggle at it smooth coldness. Some Young Children in snow suits and wool hats or strollers , i wonder what their parents are saying when they been down to explain that each drop of dissolving water ticks off another moment toward the potential destruction of earths climate as we know it. The International Conference on Climate Change in which 195 countries agreed to place limits on Greenhouse Gas emissions as an effort to curb global warming. Water was central to the emergence of the High Ambition Coalition as island and other lowlying Nations Press for more stringent emissions limits. Leaders from states such as the Marshall Island in the pacific and st. Lucia in the caribbean said if expected Warming Trends continue, their very existence is under threat. Water is a theme at the International Rights tribunal formally a stair Workers Union hall and now a cultural venue in the 11th. [inaudible] among the cases brought before the judge in the pack tall was the commercialization of nature in which the provisions of nature such as clean water become products to be bought and sold. Other condemn the building of mega dams which would displace indigenous communities and oil and mineral extraction that damages rivers and other water sources. Water was on the agenda at the peoples climate summit, it had a picturesque old world square at pariss edge where more than 100 citizen driven workshops and traditions took place. Along with two friends from spain and mexico respectively, i headed up a steep hill to a vast fortresslike school for a panel on water and climate. We were joined by the orderly stream of students and activists including members of the grand Climate Campaign from norway, some some very tall men and women in redhot hats and pennies in route to various events. The director of the organization in france opened the form by saying water tends to be seen as related to the consequences of climate but not as an inherent part of Climate Change. And yet human activity have been affecting the water cycle in the way that it is affecting Climate Change. This shows we can actually act on Climate Change through our water practices. Water was part of numerous random conversations. I was in paris in december 2015 during prop 21 with a group called Regeneration International, a global a Global Network of activists, scientists and community leaders. I was bunking in an eight bedroom in a backpackers hospital that housed a lively nightclub down stairs one morning i ran into someone who joined our room sometime during the night having just arrived from indonesia. She told me in the village where she works some of the springwater is among the finest in the world. Now that the water is being privately bottled by aqua, a subsidiary of dannon, the local people are struggling to get clean water. They have to walk several kilometers to get water, she said. Its hard work in a mountainous area so they are climbing up and down. Water connects us all. It connects high lands and low lands and communities upstream to cities of the coast. Bodies of water Transcend National boundaries and so create incentives for groups to cooperate and trade. Waterways offer a means of travel long before anyone dreamed of writing on wheels. Of course, water connects us socially, the universal gesture of peace and hospitality is to offer another person something to drink. Water is a point of connection for many of our global challenges as well as for solutions. Protecting Water Resources such as maintaining moisture in soil can help mitigate Climate Change. The water cycle interacts with all basic biophysical cycles, the carbon cycle, the energy cycle and the nutrient cycle. The better we understand this and the better we appreciate how water processes alleviate poverty and hunger, the more of whipped we will be to take on the difficulties of our time. In this book, i hope to put water in context, to explore how water works and highlight water rolls in other timely concerns. To do so, i will share stories of water innovators from around the world who are finding new routes to water security, strategies and insights with important implications for food justice, Economic Resilience and Climate Change. These these stories will take us from mexico to africa to australia, from deserts to mountains to rain forest. We begin in zimbabwe, a country in in Southern Africa that falls at the end of the alphabet and ranks near last on just about every other social and economic indicator. Here among the Wild Elephants in antelope we will find revived rivers and pastures and hope for a thirsty world. We will come back to zimbabwe, but i will put this in context. This book is clearly a book about water, but as you sensed its also a book about Climate Change and about biodiversity and about peace and conflict and food security. What i do in the book is i explore how water connects with all those different facets of our challenges and also explore how literacy, understanding how it works and moves across the landscape and to the atmosphere can help us better address these concerns because its no news to any of you that we do have a lot of really, really difficult challenges before us. We are not going to resolve those challenges with a visual grasp. Were not going to really get at these problems were not going to get there from scientific research, from peerreviewed studies, in part because of the politicization of agricultural science and also because most research is not out in the real world. Its done in labs so that you dont see how a whole system operates. The same way we are really not going to get at our challenges by looking at each one separately, in other words we cant say okay were going to deal with biodiversity loss and be competing with other institutions that are dealing with Climate Change and floods and droughts and all those other things. No, the way that we are really going to address these challenges is by looking at the whole system, asking questions like how does nature work and what might we learn from that and by looking at systems as a whole in the context of our social and economic circumstances. So i have been so lucky in this process because i have been hanging out with the most hopeful, the most interesting, the most porky people who are looking at things sideways, who are saying okay, i know that the agricultural Science Division say that i should do that, but i think, as ive observed in nature, this is what i see and i think working by the diversity of my plan is a better way to go its also really exciting to be part of what is becoming a growing movement, a growing international around regenerative agriculture. Its really interesting, so im admitting it, im having a good time with all this and whats interesting is when i wrote the book on soil that came out three years ago, how to save the planet, when i was writing that, in vermont, in my little office, sitting on my little dust, and felt like i was in this alone, i was putting ideas together, i have my sources but my sources were necessarily talking to each other so i would just sit there and say oh my gosh i really hadnt understood the potential of working with water to address Climate Change. Sometimes i would be there feel like my head was going to explode because i had no one to really talk to about this. In the past few years, so Many Organizations have arisen that deal with soil and regenerative agriculture that it is really quite mind blowing. As we speak in california there is the soil, not Oil Conference going on and ill just rattle off a couple names of the organizations that ive been interacting with. Okay, so there soil for climate and bio diversity and the center for food safety, food and climate initiative, theres Regeneration International in california and los angeles, theres kiss the ground, theres the Soil Carbon Coalition, theres project drawdown and the carbon underground. So youre getting a sense that this is something that people are really starting to make these connections and its been exciting to be a part of that. I learned from observing and sharing the insights of the people that i have a chance to visit with so im going to be been until some of of those stories and then i invite you to ask questions and im happy to share more with you. Okay. I left you dangling there with zimbabwe and i would guess thats probably not first on the travel wish list for many people but it was really quite extraordinary. What brought me to and bob way was, its the Africa Center for ballistic management and that evolved through the work of someone named allen savory. Has anyone heard of him . Okay ill just do a little cameo intro, he is from rhodesia which is now zimbabwe as a child he loved wildlife more than anything in the world by the of course, he wanted to be a park ranger actually its similar to my husband who wanted to be a game ranger. Alan started to work with the park service in the 1950s when they were just establishing the national park. He grew aware that the land in the savanna wasnt as vibrant and there werent as many animals as there were when he was a child and this was of great concern. Among the crew they decided okay, maybe there are just too many animals for the landscape and why dont we can set off give the land a chance to rebound. So they did that and what happened was the land deteriorated further. So this made no sense. If the problem was that there were too many animals and then you remove the animals and the land gets worse, something wasnt adding up. Alan took it upon himself through years of study and getting up in the middle of the night and looking at rain looking to see where the water flowed in all of these different things, looking at animals, he came to understand that grasslands like the african savanna and grasslands coevolved. The land needs the animals in the same way that the animals need the land. He came to understand many of the dynamics and how the actions of animals on the land, the animal impact really good kickstart a number of biological processes that lead to a thriving ecosystem. The animals waste added fertilizer, they would trample down decaying plant matter so that plant matter would be in contact with microorganisms of the organisms could break it down and build into the soil as opposed to just having that plant matter oxidize and release co2 and blocked the sunlight. There were all these different dynamics and what was happening is that the predator population was declining so the animals werent kept on the move in the same way. They developed holistic management which is the ballistic framework and the grazing in which animals are managed in a way that mimics those natural processes and over decades, he refined this and he bought land and gave the land back to the government and started this nonprofit which is the demonstration site. I had been hearing about people who said their land had rebounded and rather than going into debt because their ranch went into decline, they were able to keep going in people all across the world, i hadnt been there so when i embarked on this new book, i realized, ive got to go. I was thrilled that i did because it was really exciting and to see this, right there, just some of the changes that were pointed out to us. The main river in that area, it means where the grass grows high and its a perfect name because it is growing high again. The river now flows through the year that started in 2014 and also it runs further up into the landscape, about 1 kilometer further. There was all the wildlife that comes with water and the landscape was a thriving river. We saw plans that virtually defined wetlands because so this was becoming a wetlands over the period of about 15 years. In the past there had only been one pool for all the elephants came to water and elephants like to water and they like to wallow in a play and spray tether with their trunks and the like. It was good for people because when there was only one pool and you always knew where to find the elephants but now theres many pools and thats good for the elephants. We also began to see healthy herds of stable antelope. We know that in many parks, those numbers are declining and these are beautiful stately creatures with antlers and horns in their very beautiful, but the fact that we were seeing so many of them mens that there was a diversity of grasses and there are healthy classes because thats what these particular antelope need and then in terms of people, we went to some villages where the Africa Center had been working with these people, with these communities and this is poverty like we just cant even imagine and it was so deeply humbling to meet with these people because i might have had an extra bag that i was just carrying around i mean how many bags do we have in our hands from daytoday and people were very anxious, may i have back, because, because that was something they could use. In these villages, the 22 villages that i went to, people have been able to get off food aid because the animal impact, by pooling their cattle and moving them from crop field to crop fields, they were able to enhance the fertility to hold water so that they could have six or seven months of growing their crops instead of just two. These people were really happy because you look at Something Like that and the implications go all the way down the line. Getting off food aid meant they had a sense of pride because theres no joy to be dependent on others. They could bring their children to school because when the children were hungry, they didnt dare send their children to school because it was taxing for the children to walk back and forth. That was really, really something. I want to mention not because i dont think ive made it clear, and i think its so important because one of the things i do talk about in this book a lot is this notion that we cant really talk about our water problems whether droughts or floods without talking about the land. Often when we talked about water problems, its just about how much is coming from the sky, not enough that we have a drop, too much and we have floods but thats the way we are trained to think about it. But, land is crucial. The factor that i want to bring up his carbon. Carbon is a soil and its really, really important. Its the main component of soil so organic matter, thats the good stuff, thats what you want in your soil to have your garden really look great and be great. A 1 increase in soil organic matter means an extra 20000 gallons of water. Acre that the land can hold. What that means is if you have rich soil that you really worked this well and theres a lot of carbon in it, as our lands and prairies used to be they had such rich soil is why everybody couldnt wait to plow it up and put crops in there. What that means is that if you have a really, really strong, heavy rainfall, your land can hold that rain. I know of lots of cases where someone whos been working to restore their soil, their fine after a 13inch rainfall whereas their neighbors are losing, theres a roshan, their tractors are slipping and theyre having all kinds of problems. Thats one thing. Also when you hold water in the soil you can go a lot further between rainfalls so that is implications for irrigation and how much water you need and keeping the plants growing continually. There we are. Im going to open it up to questions because i can go in so many Different Directions and talk about my trips all day but i just put out a few things there, the importance of soil, the trip to zimbabwe which showed that working with animals and managing animals in a particular way, its cows and goats and sheep and at the Africa Center they are working on a project with chicken and pigs. Apparently they work in synergy and the pigs routing behavior creates holes for water to linger and filter and the pigs and the chickens apparently like each other so the piglets get up in the morning and they want to play with the chickens. Anyway, i left you you with a couple of thoughts and im happy to hear your questions. Was zimbabwe getting adequate rainfall prior to this regeneration of the soil and it just wasnt being held in the soil . The rainfall there, it had been kind of lackluster rainfall years but they werent getting no rainfall. That brings up where alan always talks about which is its not how much rain you get, its making that rainfall effective i was the shift. They werent great rainfall years but what they got they were able to make effective. Another example we were able to see as he took us to a parent. Where two rivers meet in one side had been National Parkland on the other was there land. The parkland had flooded and you could see the debris that were stuck in the debris was only up to about here at the Africa Centers land and as alan said, if we had been over there, this vehicle would have been underwater is zimbabwe still in a drought . The whole country. [inaudible] yes. We have been doing it in botswana and it was fascinating but one of the things we learned about was that it comes from north africa and it wasnt necessarily rain. [inaudible] but china was building up rights and building dams. In zimbabwe and south africa, we had been talking about the water that they receive but botswana is a little further north. That is such an important point about the land crabs because thats going on all over the world, hugely in south america and africa and many of these purchases of huge tracts of lands, there land crabs, but there really water crabs and the implications are really, really huge because a project thats being worked on, like a Development Project may stop the water that would normally flow into another area, thats really of huge concern so thank you for mentioning that. Thats what happens here out west in the United States and thats been a major problem where we have three or four rivers and theres dams and electric plants in their using up the water and then can get downriver. So you talk about wyoming and colorado and nevada and utah and so even have the northern states arguing and upset with our northern states. We dont feel that here. We just dont feel that in the northeast. Water has been the primary, forget the drought, it was just water usage for the crops in the dams. Right, there are so many, in that, we could tease out that concern in so many different ways and it makes no sense that we are growing like 50 of our nations produce in this dry area but i will say one thing, its not only, theres other ways to look at it to and that is to rehydrate those areas of the west and theres ways to do that working with nature such as bringing back beaver and perry dogs and rebuilding those landscapes that are healthier and able to hold more water. As a mention, i spent a lot of time living in california and im here in vermont on occasion and im familiar with the water issues in california but im wondering what the problems and opportunities are in this region of the country in southern vermont around water. We have very different challenges that weve had industrial, our local industry has had has meant that there is pollution in many of our water sources, thats a huge topic in and of itself but in terms of what ive been looking at which is how water moves across the landscape, okay, we dont have the problems that we have out west although were not doing so hot in some ways. We had hurricane irene which, it was a big crisis for vermont in so many parts of the state flooded and people lost homes and a few people lost their lives and it left a lot of records. Had our agricultural soil been healthier, maybe we could have reduced the impact. I havent really studied that and of course we have a lot of agricultural waste going into lakes. It is different. Theres a lot we can do but it is different. Out west you have water going toward energy, the Energy System and then a huge use of energy thats going toward moving water all around. It is different but in talking about the west, its interesting you mention nevada, nevada is the driest state in the country. There are a group of people in nevada that have been working with ranchers. Okay so you have a really dry area. You have a woman scientist with one of the national divisions, i forget if its usda or forestry so shes a biologist and her specialty is fish and with the land drying up in the streams drying up, her work wasnt very exciting so she wanted to bring back more fish so what happened was she worked with some ranchers who used holistic plan grazing to build the land and build the banks of streams and stop erosion and all of that and then what happened, as land became restored, beavers returned and as the beavers returned the water really just accelerated that process and so what they are able to do, as they have the melt of snow from the fjords coming down, they are able to hold that water and the fish have returned those really an extraordinary story. So yes, we have a certain set of problems here, but yes, i guess also, another factor is that all of us, because of Climate Change and i will come back to how i look at Climate Change because i can get gives us more agency, because of changes in our climate, everyone. [inaudible] arata. We all need to think more about how we use water and how we keep water in the landscape through agricultural and other practices. Thats important. [inaudible] so farmers all over are talking about different patterns, but again everything is connected so the way i like to think about Climate Change, as i said, because i because i think it gives us, it opens up more opportunities is as a symptom for the manifestation of disrupted carbon water and energy cycles. Once we think of it that way then we can start to roll up our sleeves and say how can we begin to restore those cycles because in working with carbon, youre also also working with the water cycle and the energy cycle because when you have carbon rich soil, youre youre Holding Water in. Plants grow and when plants are growing you have transformation and when you have plant cover, when the suns energy strikes the surface, rather than getting sensible heat which is heat you can feel which is what you get on bears soil and asphalt and driveways and roofs, parking lots, instead of that the sun is coming down on plants which means its helping the plants grow and its bestowing its energy on plants and its changing heat energy to Latent Energy and there are all these dynamics that are so interesting once you look at condensation, you have have heat being transformed, you have water moving in the form of water vapor all the way around and just the people that ive talked to, just the understanding of the role of forest in drying in moisture and in tooling and all of these different fascinating dynamics, theres so much that we can do. Another thing i mentioned, condensation, just one other visit in the book that we went in the middle of high summer, we went to the texas desert in far west texas. The reason we went there is that i had met somebody at a conference and she told me how they were capturing condensation for all their water needs because of the way they designed their roof. There was a point, it was three or four months after the last rain and their water tank overflowed by working with condensation and it was the most important water in the landscape because its the most predictable. They actually grow their crops, theyre not big on props but they have some, theyve determined where to grow their crops on when the sun hit and when the sun hits so that they can keep that moisture in the soil and on the plant available to the plants as long as they can. All of these things, its all opened up and its all possible so thats whats exciting. I alluded to this, but the person from france that i mentioned back in paris, we can work with the water cycle cool, so this fellow named walter from australia, hes a soil microbiologist and hes absolutely brilliant, he works with an Organization Called healthy soil australia and he has what i would call, just from what i have seen, the most comprehensive and hopeful approach to grappling with Climate Change. Its called regenerate australia , using various water processes to cool in order to buy time to draw down atmospheric carbon. Its very, very powerful and anyway, i dont want to try to remember his ten points because im not going to get them correctly, but as he points out, our climate is 90 determined by hydrological processes and that makes sense. Anyone who feels the change in the weather, like the moisture, that water vapor which is the dominant Greenhouse Gas is conveying heat, moving it constantly so i just think we can start to really feed that and understand okay ill leave you with this one thought okay ill take your question and then ill leave you with one thought. Theres a conference in california, with all the fire and drought thats going on, are they they going to be involved with that to help it . I dont know. The conference is just north of san francisco. I think its very despairing about, this is my issue that breaks my heart and causes me to worry about my children and my grandchildren and it feels like it got to that tipping point. I love that youre looking at solutions and regenerative practices and are 70 people doing it. I just wonder about the time factor and i worry about the ice caps melting. I know theres people in greenland and it has changed so much more quickly than they could have ever predicted. I am so committed to doing everything that i can and im so grateful for all of these groups that are getting on it and theres also a number of people that are working on nailing up regenerative camps of ecological restoration, all of this is happening, to be honest, our country is a little bit lagging but this is happening, yes, i do get concerned about that but theres no time to be concerned because we have got to act and also we need to have hope and i guess what does keep me hopeful is that natural processes want to be healthy. So many examples that i have found of places where the environment rebounded and was restored quicker than anyone could have imagined and as one of my sources, someone who has a little operation called the Soil Carbon Coalition and its Peter Donovan and hes been going around north america on a bus, he lived in this bus and he measures soil carbon levels at different farms. What he talks about is whats missing in all of our projections is the power of life, the power of the biosphere so we shouldnt dismiss it but we need to keep that power and support that power and now i can close with that i really like, as i mentioned the friend in texas gets all their water from do, what she says is we can be the beavers on the landscape. We can be the restorers of the water cycle and all that goes with it. So, there we are. The choice we have and i know its really, really hard and sometimes i think that all of the craziness that is going on right now politically and in all kinds of ways that somehow, its like a deep concern, its almost like sparks out of some very profound, not knowing what to do but i do feel very strongly that a couple things that stands in our way his imagination and also how we talk about these challenges and thats why a make a point of reframing change. We talk about these cycles. If its just Climate Change like this big looming, it raises fear and theres nothing we can do about it except protest against the Oil Companies which we certainly need to get our fossil fuels, we know that but we also know that isnt going to be enough and thats the stress that is lurking. If we work on the basis of these cycles, and by working on ecosystems and restoring landscapes yes, i think we can get there. Does your book and with a lot of hope . Yes theres hope in every