HOW DO YOU INCREASE (OR DECREASE) FLOODING? BY DECREASING (OR INCREASING) THE AMOUNT OF WATER THAT SOAKS INTO THE GROUND.
I'm speaking with Ricardo Aguirre, a civil engineer who seeks to prevent flooding by soaking water into healthy soil.
HART HAGAN: What can you do to increase the amount of water that runs off during a rain event?
(Note: In this part of the interview, I meant to ask Ricardo how to DECREASE runoff, and thereby decrease flooding. Instead, I asked how to INCREASE runoff. Ricardo took my question and ran with it.)
RICARDO AGUIRRE: Well, to increase the amount of water to run off during rain events, you can do what we've already been doing, which is to increase desertification, which is something I don't think we really want to do. We probably want to prevent that from happening. Through desertification, we're actually increasing flooding and causing more soil loss, more dust storms and more wildfires.
So what you can do is, you could remove soil organic matter. We’ve done a really good job of that by removing livestock from the land. Let's say not livestock, but megafauna (large animals, mainly wild animals).
We were communicating with an official recently. And I told her that we're looking to mimic the pleistocene era. She responded by saying the pleistocene era was different because it was much wetter during that time.
I didn't really want to respond to her directly, but she's making my point for me. There's a reason the pleistocene was wetter, because we had functioning watersheds.
So yeah, it's changed. We’re not in that era anymore. We have largely man-made deserts that formerly were grasslands. So we have changed that wet condition of the pleistocene era.
So, to increase runoff (flooding) what you do is you remove megafauna or large ungulates or ruminants from the land. You thereby break the mineral cycle. When you break the mineral cycle, you break the water cycle and you get more runoff and more flooding.
So, basically, we're proposing to do the opposite and we're demonstrating practices to get livestock mimicking those former grazing animals to demonstrate that we can get the mineral cycle repaired and then the water cycle repaired concurrently and catch water where it falls.