Tag: rain

James Barrett – Europe doesn’t have a water problem, it has a retention problem

9th June 2026 julia Regenerative Agriculture, Water Cycles 0 Comments

Europe doesn’t have a water problem — not the one most people picture, anyway. The rain still falls; we’ve just spent a few hundred years engineering it off the land as fast as we can, which James Barrett likens to hauling your garden clippings to the dump only to drive back in spring and buy compost.

James is a regenerative hydrology consultant, founder of Decent Water Company and lead regenerative designer for Ten Lives Festival in Portugal — where 150 people spent their mornings digging rock-lined “smiles” into a semi-arid, 70-hectare site that sees barely 400mm of rain a year. Sitting between two almond trees, he explains why he favours many small, low-risk interventions over one big dam, how those rock linings passively harvest daily fog and condensation much like the fog nets of Chile, and why transpiring trees hand a landscape a longer growing season and a few degrees of cooling. He also shows how LiDAR and AI let him read 70 hectares from a laptop, finding where water wants to pool before he lifts a shovel.

It’s a practical field lesson in keeping water higher in the landscape — and in why where you choose to dig decides whether soil, ecosystems and the economics all start to regenerate together.

Anastassia Makarieva – Healthy forests invest their capital to create their own rain

8th September 2023 koenvanseijen Regenerative Agriculture, Water Cycles 2 Comments

A conversation with Anastassia Makarieva, researcher at the Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute and with a fellowship at the University of Munich, about how healthy ecosystems, and specifically healthy forests, regulate moisture and thus rain. We discuss tipping points and where to look for wet spots even in very dry landscapes.

Alpha Lo – What if water is more important than carbon

21st July 2023 koenvanseijen Landscape Design 2.0, Regenerative Agriculture, Water Cycles 7 Comments

A conversation with Alpha Lo, physicist and writer of the Climate Water Project, about the importance of slowing water down, the connection between drought, fire, and floods, and the massive role water plays in heating and cooling our planet.

Sven Verwiel – How to unlock the potential of syntropic agroforestry in East Africa

17th January 2023 koenvanseijen Farmers First Tech, Nutrient Dense Food, Regenerative Agriculture, Short Food Webs 0 Comments

A conversation with Sven Verwiel of ForestFoods, a Kenyan based premium produce brand, about the potential of syntropic agroforestry in Kenya, and what we can learn from the over 40 years of experience in Brazil and what is needed to apply it at scale in the local East African context as well as why is the African continent the crucial and most interesting place to apply regenerative practises.