Zachary Weiss

March 17, 2022 Global Earth Repair

Elemental Ecosystems – USA

Protégé of revolutionary Austrian farmer Sepp Holzer, Zach Weiss is the first-ever person to earn the coveted “Holzer Practitioner Certification” directly from Sepp – through a rigorous two-year apprenticeship working on projects in North America and Europe. Zach created Elemental Ecosystems as a for-benefit social enterprise focused on solving societies growing environmental problems by considering the elemental relationship between biology and hydrology. Zach has worked in more than 25 different countries on 6 continents, spanning a wide range of climates, contexts, land-forms and ecosystems. After a decade of experience in the field, Zach created an online educational platform called Water Stories while focusing on designing water retention landscapes that harvest rain to create naturally productive ecosystems.

Zach educates about climate change being a symptom of the severe water cycle disturbance and that there is something we can do about it. When the landscape isn’t being recharged with water, it leads to flooding and drought, and often wildfires with no natural recourse. We are carbon based life but the living part is mostly water. There is much more a land owner or manager can do to influence the water cycle.

“Water is the ultimate capital of any farmer.”

Often when water is talked about, it’s regarding big centralized water systems or the weather. Zach, however, is focused on decentralized water retention landscapes with flood fire and drought mitigation Zach tries to use most of the time with customers on the implementation not on the consultation

“So if you think water is really moving through the landscape, it’s moving through the air. It’s moving through the ground. And it’s constantly in motion. And so the full healthy water cycle is forests that are seeding the moisture in the air, causing clouds and then precipitation. That phase change draws in more precipitation. And so you have this pump. It’s called the biotic pump, where the living ecosystems of the continents actually draw moisture from the oceans, from the evaporation inland to the different continents. And so that’s what we call the full or the natural water cycle.“