Building resilience to drought in the West with Dr. Caroline Nash

On Land

On today's episode, Western Landowners Alliance Programs Director Hallie Mahowald was joined by Dr. Caroline Nash, a hydrologist and geomorphologist with the consulting group CK Blueshift LLC.

Dr. Nash got her PhD at Oregon State University and has done field work throughout the American West. She has extensive experience in rangeland conservation and stream restoration. She brought knowledge about the science and regulatory systems relevant to watershed scale conservation efforts to the conversation. At CK Blueshift, Dr. Nash leads the company's current projects and consulting work related to hydrologic analysis, restoration design, and monitoring strategy.

Find links and references from this episode, as well as a full episode transcript, at onland.westernlandowners.org/podcast

Topics discussed

[00:01:09] What is CK Blueshift?

[00:03:02] The new abnormal?

[00:06:13] Long Term Solutions

[00:10:24] About the Blue Commons Fund

[00:13:38] Matching finance and funding to right levels of risk

[00:15:50] The once-in-a-lifetime influx of federal investment in water

[00:17:10] About the ReBeaver program

[00:20:31] What is Process-Based Restoration, actually?

[00:24:30] Why we can't just move beavers and be done?

[00:26:38] Zuni water management in the Southwest

[00:28:13] Beaver persistence as inspiration and information

00:32:02] How do landowners get involved? Highlighting the existing innovation on the land.

[00:35:31] Making sure landowners have the risk management tools needed to participate in experimentation

[00:36:12] Why you should communicate with your neighbors about your experiments

[00:38:20] What keeps you up at night, and what gives you hope?

[00:40:05] Aging rural population, waning land-based expertise

[00:42:02] Young people getting excited about land stewardship

[00:43:20] Seven generation perspective