Biography

Brock Dolman is a founding member and resident of the Sowing Circle LLC, an intentional community where he lives and works in the Sonoma County hamlet of Occidental, California. He is Occidental Arts and Ecology Center's WATER (Watershed Advocacy Training Education & Research) Institute director. He also co-directs OAEC's Permaculture design and wildlands biodiversity programs. He holds a BA in Biology and Environmental Studies from UC Santa Cruz. Living up to his specialized generalist nature and rekindling the dwindling art of the peripatetic natural historian, his experience ranges from study of wildlife biology, native California botany and watershed ecology, to the practice of habitat restoration, community education about regenerative dwelling designs and ecological literacy activism engendering societal transformation. Notably, he has been accused of being a hydro-chondriac and obviously afflicted by Cirrhosis of the River. Whereas with others his punishing abuse of poetic semantics compels the moniker of a Fluid Druid who is Mostly Water.

Brock frequently provides public workshops and works directly with numerous community based watershed literacy education programs and regional watershed groups. He is constantly speaking in public at numerous conferences such as Bioneers, EcoFarm, HOPES conference, GreenPrints, Salmonid Restoration Conference and SolFest. He has been on national radio programs, published nationally distributed articles on permaculture and watersheds, and widely lectures at local universities, colleges, environmental forums, civic clubs, and public political meetings. He is a Sonoma County Fish & Wildlife Commissioner. As a watershed educator and activist he is an active member of the Dutch Bill Creek Watershed Group, West County Watershed Network and Russian River Watershed Council. Over the past seven years his Basins of Relations: Starting and Sustaining Community Watershed Councils training has helped over 27 citizen based watershed groups form on behalf of protecting and restoring their local watershed and thus themselves.

At this Eleventh Hour as the cheap energy Titanic sinks away, Brock advocates a broad awakening that the future lifeboat you are looking for is shaped exactly like your local watershed. Watershed by watershed, each community will be tested on how well they come together to batten down their watershed's resiliency hatches as lifesaving adaptations to the impending uncertainties of global warming. Climate changing opportunities will demand of us to bring forth a Reverential Rehydration Revolution, one that will necessarily engage the spirit of Planet Water towards activating more water literate human settlement patterns. Pragmatically these newly dynamic conditions will demand us to implement solution oriented concepts like

'Conservation Hydrology' land use practices and 'Basins of Relations' social organizing as strategies for restoring communities through participatory regeneration of watersheds.