Dear Friends,
Almost exactly a year ago, I was asked to speak at the incredible 2023 Napa Rise event in California, sponsored by Napa Green. If you don’t know Napa Green, it is one of the most thoughtful certification programs I have seen, providing concierge-level service to growers, wherever they are on their journey, while holding itself and its members to the commitment of soil to glass accountability that would seem dizzying if they weren’t so capable and helpful. Anna Brittan and her team of incredible people have pulled together some of the most worthy programming and content out there on everything from regenerative farming and grazing in vineyards, to winery electricity and water management, and the big one – packaging.
Anna delivered the most thrilling kind of invitation to me, ‘We really want to get people thinking, just speak about anything that is interesting and we will be thrilled!’ So I chose to go right to the matter that keeps me up at night, and I assume keeps up many, if not all, land stewards in the west. It is the undeniable force that farming and all of its challenges orbit around: Water.
Without any expectation other than that I would endeavor to say something worthy of the invitation, I stood in front an audience full of some of the most iconic figures in American winemaking. What I feared might have alienated or offended instead struck a common chord with our colleagues to the south. Now, a year later, the conversations that came from that day have grown into a real, on the ground, landscape level project that I can’t wait to bring you along on.
We are working on a hopeful, healthy version of the future that stands in stark contrast to the models of destruction that assume our current path is unchangeable. Come along. If you stay tuned, I promise there will be more.
For your light reading, I offer my transcript of my 2023 presentation here. If you would like to hear / view the speech as it was delivered, you can find it here, on the Napa Green website.
View a video of the presentation or read the transcript below…
~ Mimi
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Welcome to the Imaginarium.
I hope you’ve all had your psychedelic primers, because I want good, pliable minds here. The greatest promise of gatherings like these is to expand the fertility of our mindscapes, and hopefully leave with an expanding shoreline of commitment and willful determination. But before we begin I want to contextualize the privilege we enjoy being here, and make a respectful request that we acknowledge that this beautiful land, this unparalleled paradise, whose name means ‘plenty’, was a cultural landscape tended by the Onasatis-Wappo people, and this land still sings for them, and cries out to us all to hear their wisdom.
Jim Big Bear King, Suscol Indian Council co-founder Veteran and Native American activist 1931-2007
Photo Credit: Suscol Intertribal Council
Why are we here today? I truly believe we all yearn to put our backs to the work we know is ours to do. That readiness to take responsibility is why this is a moment unlike any other in our troubled history. But while we meet our responsibility with courage and bravery, we mustn’t be hard or rigid. Our hearts and minds are going to have to expand like never before or we will lose our greatest opportunity. It is natural to imagine the future through the lens of our lived experience, but that is an awful limitation. At this point we can choose reluctantly to move forward towards a future that is slightly less terrible than the worst imaginable, or we can refuse to accept anything less than the best we can do for this land and our children, and work to restore plenty and live within systems that support and sustain all, rather than some.
You see, we have lost the memory of ecological truths lived just two generations past. Those truths seem like fairy tales to us now, because we are conditioned to believe that the past is dead, and yet….since that moment when the first lipid membrane enclosed a simple ionic gradient that became a rudimentary metabolism, the great phylogenetic tree has regenerated itself through unfathomable collapses of life on earth – several times. So, to sit here with ALL THE POWER, ALL THE RESOURCES, and think that regeneration isn’t possible, well, that’s just pathetic.
Welcome to the imaginarium. My name is Mimi and I’ll be your guide today.
Let us orient: you all know the history of ecological decline here in Napa better than I, but I would like to frame it in perhaps a different way so that we can begin to imagine how we would approach our problems differently if we came to them from a different perspective. How we see our problems and the questions we ask determine our approach and therefore our efficacy.
Although climate change is a global issue, it can and it MUST be addressed regionally because local climates have specific opportunities and roles to play in the greater picture. What has been accomplished at farm or field scale is impressive, but to have any durability in the face of climate change we now have to organize our efforts spatially at the regional scale for true resilience to persist.
First, we need to ORIENT OUR PERSPECTIVE TO SYSTEMS-LEVEL, and go back to first principles if we want to truly solve problems.
Let’s peel our minds away from our typical discourse around climate change for a moment and consider this question: even at current concentrations of CO2 and methane, even at current rates of burning fossil fuels which empirically cannot persist beyond their finite availability, would we be facing the current emergency of climate change impacts if the conversion of productive ecosystems to monocropped agricultural production had never happened? The answer is NO. Local climates, regional climates, change with the significant alteration of the regional environment, because the evolved mechanisms and infrastructure are removed, as in massive soil loss and the loss of structural integrity components.
Image: Napa River Watershed Profile, San Francisco Estuary Institute
Landscapes evolve to accommodate high diversity even in the most extreme environments, and they persist in relative homeostasis through time, changing only at the pace of succession. The organisms that persist have answered the challenges posed by climate and topography through adaptation and cooperation with other organisms, forming architectural flow systems that maximize the energetic currents that move through the system.
To put that principle in a specific context here, homeostasis in a Mediterranean ecosystem that is trending towards semi-arid, like that of Napa Valley, is inextricably tied to the flow of water. You’ve heard of ‘the water cycle’, but there are in fact many linked cycles of water. Long water cycles draw moisture primarily from the ocean, whereas small water cycles are how that moisture gets recirculated on land, as dictated by – PLANTS. Small water cycles release water into the atmosphere through plant water vapor via evapotranspiration. Once that water is in the atmosphere, it forms clouds and that water is returned to land via rain. This maintains local water AND local climate. More on this soon.
The plant communities in Napa include a multitude of remarkable tree species, notably oaks, which have a disproportionately large effect on local environment relative to their abundance, making them keystones of these systems. Acorns germinate soon after they fall and before the first frost, they send a taproot deep into even the most shallow, poor soil, and that is all they do before the winter comes. In their first year, oaks will produce only one set of true leaves, remaining a few mere inches above ground, though below ground they are anything but small. All the energy from those first few leaves is poured into building a foundation, ten times the biomass below ground, a silent statement of their commitment to time and place. At any given age, the body below will be three times the width of the canopy, anchoring fragile hillsides, expanding the capacity of the watershed exponentially, each tree filling the heavens with upwards of 700,000 solar panels alchemizing starshine to feed legions.
Now Consider what happens with vineyard siting and development in this environment. Once we’ve identified the ideal situation, which is often on shallow, highly erodible, rocky hillsides where the preexisting vegetation had scrapped out a living over millennia of painstaking soil creation. The first thing we do is clear the land, removing many trees; maybe we leave a few for aesthetic reasons but often we don’t.
Photo Credit: San Francisco Chronicle
Now let’s be generous and say you have a VERY good field soil, and that holds about 2 inches of water per foot. But how many feet you get is largely determined by the deepest rooting perennials, whose branching roots are the flow systems for water to penetrate into the soil column. Soil animals and microorganisms follow root architecture. In nature, 90% of plant communities are perennials because they create stable ecosystems. So let’s say the oaks and their associated perennial community gave you 10 feet of penetration vertically through roots, with 2 inches of water per foot, that gives you 20 inches of water you can absorb without runoff. When you remove those plants, their roots die back, and even if we put in a perennial plantation (on rootstock), we’ve reduced that rooting depth and architecture and now you might be lucky to have 2-4 inches of water infiltration before runoff, and that is without tillage. Once tillage is introduced, and soil aggregate structure is compromised, we may be able to infiltrate only 1-2 inches in a heavy rain, and now water is pooling and the drain tiles go in.
Why am I spending so much time setting this up? Because now we’ve created the perfect situation for local climate change. Vegetation is how soil is created, and how water tables are defined. Deep and diverse roots create the flow systems, the branching architecture of landscape stability that we cannot see, but which we have now severely disrupted. In this hypothetical scenario, where key regional locations undergo land conversion, 90% of the water that would have been held locally and percolated slowly becomes a devastating force of erosion. In this region, bare and disturbed soils can lose 15 tons of soil per acre per year. Our ‘typical’ rainfall event now is going to be as extreme as the drought that follows the flood, which it will, because there is no sponge to absorb that water, water that would carry the system through the dry spell and cool the local environment. This is energy lost. This is entropy. This is loss of function. This is dehydration. This is aridification.
Image: NASA
I’m going to pull some snippets directly from NASA, and NOAA, where presumably we have our best minds thinking about climate change, as a means of explaining how we need to brush up on our critical thinking. Summarizing the experts, there are five greenhouse gases: CO2, methane, ozone, Nitrous oxide and chlorofluorocarbons. These are gases that do not condense to liquid in the troposphere. Water gets left out of the greenhouse gas conversation because it is condensable at low temperatures and therefore, according to NASA and NOAA, water is only relevant because as humans add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, small changes in climate are amplified by changes in water vapor. To quote, ‘water vapor is a different animal. It’s condensable – it can be changed from a gas into a liquid. Its concentration depends on the temperature of the atmosphere. This makes water vapor the only greenhouse gas whose concentration increases because the atmosphere is warming and causes it to warm even more. If non-condensable gases weren’t increasing, the amount of atmospheric water vapor would be unchanged from its pre-industrial revolution levels.’
Does anyone else see how certain flawed assumptions are driving these statements? Doesn’t it seem a little too simple to think that increased CO2 and methane are the chief reasons why there is more water vapor in our atmosphere, and that CO2 drawdown is our only agency for remediating climate change?
I hate to break it to you, but even if we stopped emissions TODAY, even if we draw down through technology or other methods vast quantities of CO2, the oceans will begin to release the CO2 they’ve been absorbing for more than a century, which has led to acidification and its repercussions. If we place all our hopes and efforts just on drawing down CO2, at best it will be hundreds of years before we can expect to see any improvement in the climate.
Meanwhile we are failing to recognize the elephant in the room.
Water, as a gas OR a liquid, stores vastly more energy than other greenhouse gases. Water, and its distribution and state, drives 95% of the heat dynamic of our planet. Therefore, when we speak about solutions, about our agency here, we must resist the temptation to get hyper-focused on Carbon. While CO2 and methane are truly powerful and persistent greenhouse gases, the truth is that water vapor represents 60-70% of the greenhouse effect, and therefore, where and how water shows up is not solely the inevitable consequence of CO2 and methane concentrations in the atmosphere. Nay, where and how water shows up via the terrestrial small water cycles is where we have our greatest agency and responsibility in the face of climate change.
Should we care about CO2? Hell yes, we need to, with great urgency, end the burning of ancient carbon. That is paramount. But to make our regenerative efforts, even in farming, focus only on sequestering Carbon, well, any good mechanic will tell you that if you want a machine to run properly, you need to put it back together correctly, with all the components. Miss one part, even if you do everything else right, and the thing might run for a while, but inefficiently, and with a shorter lifespan.
Vegetation, green plants, the miracle of photosynthesis wedded the carbon cycle to the water cycle at the beginning of life on earth. Understand that the reason to even talk about putting Carbon into the soils is not solely for the drawdown potential, which is great, and ancillary, but to rebuild the buffering system that has the only real ability to mitigate the warming potential of those uncondensable gases. Our soils could store more carbon if we use cover crops, and maybe some biochar, or get some animals out there to help with nutrient turnover. But what if we looked at the schematic of the fully realized machine that we disassembled? We’d see that we are leaving out a lot of energetic potential.
This is how the machine was broken by agriculture in the first place:
Photo Credit: Mimi, who was not driving while taking these photos
Agriculture puts three billion tons of dust into the atmosphere every year where soil is uncovered. Those bare soils evaporate water as microdroplets, which gather together with dust from agriculture, burning and other pollutants, creating persistent humid hazes. As microdroplets these hazes absorb reradiated heat from bare soil, which is essentially a black body with exponential reradiation capacity, driving extreme local heat events and causing more aridification.
Water in the atmosphere heats if it’s a haze, but cools if it’s a cloud.
That same landscape, revegetated, is also putting water into the atmosphere, but without the dust, through evapotranspiration. In evapotranspiration, each gram of water that is taken into a plant and released as a gas takes nearly 590 calories of heat out of the local environment in that phase change. How much water can be stored in the soil to use for this process is a direct function of the lowest depths that roots have explored. How many calories of heat get removed from the local environment is a direct function of how many different photosynthetic organisms are working at any given time, added to the amount of added shading by multilayered systems.
When we take the dust out of the equation and return the vegetation, especially trees where they have been lost, water vapor that escapes through the stomata of the leaves comes with a condensation agent. Phenols and bacteria that are released with vapor through evapotranspiration allow for the formation of clouds instead of hazes, and that difference makes all the difference. Clouds, with their albedo effect, their reflective power, can lower temperatures immediately by 10-18 degrees.
The way to optimize the most effective cooling system we have on earth is through revegetation and diversification of the system, at multiple levels, thereby increasing water storage for evapotranspiration.
In a well revegetated landscape, the net effect of water flips from a devastating greenhouse gas to a safe and effective mechanism for cooling and maintaining health and productivity even in higher temperatures.
From: Schulz, J.-P.; Vogel, G. Improving the Processes in the Land Surface Scheme TERRA: Bare Soil Evaporation and Skin Temperature. Atmosphere 2020, 11, 513. https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos11050513
When vegetation is restored, water is held in soil. Water in the soil is in itself a very powerful thermal modulator.
In the west coast heat dome of 2021, our covered soils were 40-60 degrees F cooler than neighboring tilled soils. In the middle of the property we were 60 degrees cooler, and the temperatures were 40 degrees cooler at the borders of the property that were adjacent to tilled and bare soil. Conversely, in the spring, we would have bud break later, as our soils took longer to warm, and I’m not complaining with seasons starting and ending earlier. Hydrated, covered soils heat up slower, and they can resist freeze longer.
Our greatest agency for regeneration is in restoring the geometry of resilience on degraded lands. Our most elegant solutions will address multiple challenges at once if we can manage to address root causes rather than symptoms. Recipes will not serve here, only careful listening and learning will light the way forward, but that path, should we take it, could sustain future generations with health, beauty, and persistence.
Images of Napa County, tree and lung vasculature again, shamelessly taken from the internet.
Geometry deals in forms, ratios and proportions. From leaves to lungs to ecosystems, all have spatial forms that evolved to optimize the flows into the system, like air, water, sunlight and other energy. The geometry of resilience refers to structural components of function that maintain the flows of energy that provide everything necessary to sustain life in perpetuity. How an ecosystem receives flows depend on how those flows come into the system, and therefore the structure will be different from one place to the next. In this crinkled landscape of the Napa Valley, formed by tectonic plate collision, carved by water, the uplands need to serve as a percolation substrate, holding water in the soil column to allow lowlands and floodplains to receive and store that water through the arid summers.
I want to value and show gratitude for what many of you are doing and have done on your farms and land. You’ve shown you can build organic matter, improve nutrient cycles, and more. This is an investment in both your brand, and the land that you own. It’s not easy to come to this turf and say ‘more, please,’ but I was given a microphone and too much coffee. Respectfully, what is possible here is nothing short of astonishing. It barely fits in the imaginarium. So I ask, if you look at replanting budgets on a 20 year rotation or less, if you’re replacing half your barrels every year, if you’re looking at carbon capture technology, or CRISPR vines to move the needle on how you meet climate change, what if INSTEAD, as regions, we invest in the land that owns us? How much more likely is that investment to lead to a better future outcome on any level you care to name?
Ecohydrology and agroecology offer solutions to vast areas of the planet where aridification is taking place. Those disciplines are not only scientific ones, but are informed by the respectful study of the indigenous cultural management that sustained healthy and productive ecosystems for millennia in the most challenging environments. In the Napa Valley, dryland streams, ephemeral and intermittent waterways offer many direct and indirect landscape hydrology connections.
American Viticultural Areas are excellent delineations to organize region-wide, watershed-scale projects that target critical areas for successional recovery of function. Improving the biophysical processes in degraded upland areas through the installation of infrastructure like rock check dams, beaver dam analogs, rock gabbions and weirs is a tremendous opportunity to restore lost biogeomorphological and biogeochemical processes in watersheds. Holding back the pulsatile, heavy rains through these infrastructure additions creates opportunities for soil genesis, recolonization of native riparian species, positive biofeedback loops, and have been shown over time to perennialize ephemeral streams and have myriad positive effects at the watershed scale.
Installation of targeted water infrastructure can restore productivity to the surrounding landscape, sustaining the benefits by creating biofeedback loops for increased soil genesis, plant and tree recruitment, and soil water durability. Water is held back during wet times, creating niche habitats and critical nesting grounds. These efforts also restore lost corridors for wildlife passage and shelter. Water is then gradually released during drier times through soil percolation.
Photo taken by Mimi, in Montana at The Diamond Cross Ranch where they are installing Beaver Dam analogs.
Various studies have shown that test restoration sites have better vegetative productivity during periods of extended drought, better rainwater retention leading to permanent recovery of native species, and significant cooling effects over time.
From USGS NIDS Paired watershed study, Dr. Laura Norman
Microclimate cooling is documented where rock dam infrastructure has been installed in Phoenix, Arizona. This was done as a paired watershed study, with an adjacent watershed where infrastructure was not installed. Even before the accumulation of sediment that would otherwise wash away, before the vegetation impacts could be appreciated, temperatures were reduced by 2-3 degrees Celsius, or about 5 degrees F. The impacts were even more pronounced with increased density of installed rock check dams after short rainfall events.
From same paired watershed study, showing flash-flood, erosive movement of water compared to slowed movement, spreading and detention of water. USGS
There are several studies showing that restoration of vegetation in dryland systems show better rainwater retention leading to permanent recovery of native species. The way carbon and water work together to form sinks for plants to establish and from which to gradually expand their territory increases the heat they can use in active transpiration leading to greater cooling effects over time, those cloud microdroplets too small to fall out as rain forming clouds that provide cooling shade.
Where water retention is recovered, surface water and groundwater can interact to form storage banks. Increasing water availability triggers more efficient photosynthesis, and stimulates Carbon and Nitrogen biosequestration, increasing fertility and productivity, allowing perennial plant root exploration and macropore creation, leading to further and further restoration of positive earth / climate feedback loops via the water cycle.
As these projects mature, it has been shown that increases in productivity were durable for longer and longer periods of time, suggesting a successional pattern to this recovery. In this paired watershed study the results speak for themselves. The installation of thousands of rock dams in the treated watershed led to 3-4 additional weeks of base flow, 28% more water retained in the watershed, a soil retention of more than 200 tons per year, and the conservative extrapolated models of carbon capture showed sequestration of more than 200 metric tons per hectare.
This is the closing of the loop. This is the restoration of flow and the optimization of our agency. This is defying entropy.
Before and after water detention installation, “Natural Succession Farming” Australia, Peter Andrews
But exactly what would that look like? At the farm scale, we want to study and evaluate our practices according to a set of ecological principles, acknowledging that Carbon sequestration will be a natural benefit of many practices that align, but should not distract us from the prime goal which is restoration of ecosystem function. At the farm scale we can see better water management, better nutrient cycling, soil genesis, healthier plants and more, but we know we need to stretch beyond the boundaries of our farms to see the benefits that will provide tangible, safe, and beautiful solutions for our communities and our farms. We need to organize ourselves, beyond viticulture, and leverage all the resources we can to work at the regional scale.
Regenerative agriculture is the de rigueur trend in sustainable discourse, and for good reason, but it will suffer the same simplification and we will lose our chance if we don’t recognize the philosophical and scientific underpinnings, the framework for informing our decisions is what matters.
It is a great poverty that in this, the wealthiest nation in the world, most farmers, having answered the call of ‘The Green Revolution,’ now find that revolution has tied their hands behind their backs, unable to see the path forward that will allow their children to continue. American agriculture is commodity agriculture, tied to a global system of trade liberalization that maximizes linear extraction.
I do NOT believe that the global industrial agriculture system that our brothers and sisters in agriculture are bound to has any future, and I do believe they need our help. I do NOT believe that our vision for the future need be constrained IN ANY WAY by what our present looks like, and I DO BELIEVE we can make the future we want to see. Because what it looks like now is a line with an end point.
It is time that we, who represent the highest reaches of value-added agriculture, actively seek to connect with those sectors most shackled to, most bound by, and yes, most incentivized by the negative feedbacks of the industrial system. We cannot just ‘be an example’. Biosystems are not compartmentalized by landownership type, and the implications of our ownership and management do not have borders.
Some of the most degraded land and therefore most significant opportunity is locked in the vast landscapes around us, under grazing, under annual fieldcrops, and we cannot expect that those neighbors are going to make the most crucial changes without security, education, support, and encouragement.
This is Napa Valley, by land use type. You are the leaders of this community. You are California’s calling card.
AVAs could sponsor and help fund restoration crews, farmer education programs partnering with California Universities, and host brain trusts with other farmers, local agencies and non-profits to actualize private landowner buy-in to targeted and staged regional restoration plans that connect private and public lands to accelerate change.
We could leverage and repurpose existing programs like CRP to reach out to our agricultural neighbors and directly incentivize the projects that need to happen first. Imagine if the wine community built a regional restoration program and filled it with young and aspiring farmers and land managers, where they can learn and practice ecological design, ecohydrology, study successional restoration, and gathered the data from this effort?
Restoration of Loess Plateau in China, 1994 – 2018, Credit: John Liu
This slide is to show what can be done on a very large scale when the people of the land come together. We can look at degraded landscapes and think they are lost, or we can see how much there is to gain?
Because of wine’s unique visibility and status among agricultural products, we have a unique opportunity to lead in moving our communities, urban and rural, towards decentralized, farm-based food and fiber production.
What you’ve done to capture the imagination of billions of people around the world, how you’ve built brand Napa, if a fraction of that energy, cunning and elegance of execution were used in a campaign to recruit our less progressive agricultural brethren to an action potential that would lift the entire landscape to new levels of resilience – well, I’d bet good money you’ve got the resourcefulness, imagination and style to meet that challenge.
Imagine if we took our eyes, for a moment, off the brands and choose to collaborate, to reach out.
If we come with open arms and hearts, humbly and without judgement, asking for our regional partners to join us to rally for this land, what we can accomplish will COST SO MUCH LESS than our individual efforts towards sustainability and GO SO MUCH FURTHER for the land.
What if the realization of beauty and permanence, where people can belong to the land again, made our wine community stronger because it stands together, not apart from? And imagine, just imagine, how the recovery of layered and elegant design in nature might expand the proportions of place that can be captured in your work, in your wines. We don’t know what our wines could be. We don’t know what the return of complexity to a simplified landscape could do to expand our concept of terroir.
We are a community bonded by love of wine, compelled to worship the alchemy of human and nature. Let’s grow that community. Let’s make true what we want to believe, that we make wines so true that one taste haunts and illustrates our memories with the bounty and generosity of our tables. Haunting and true wines whisper knowledge of a place with beautiful secrets that would otherwise be tethered to the ground, cloistered in the plants, animals and sky. You are the authors of the stories of this place. These stories, your stories, the character development, the nuance of the plot, the nostalgic richness of the language, are a direct reflection of the health, diversity and resilience of this system. Our wines will reveal what motivates our actions, so let us align and direct our actions as though our wines depend on it.
I’ll say it again: American Viticultural Areas are excellent delineations to organize region-wide, watershed-scale projects that target critical areas for successional recovery of ecological function. What better place to begin the work than the Napa Valley?
Thank you.