Michael Haupt

The Method

Diamonds became valuable in three moves. Someone controlled what reached the market. Someone persuaded the world it needed the stones. Then an institution made the convention hold, until “as good as gold” needed no explaining. I use the same three moves for the water that living land holds, and I publish every step.

Supply: pool the promises

A buyer wants one counterparty. A catchment offers hundreds of landowners, stewards and small farmers, each able to promise a little. The first move gathers those promises into one pool that belongs to the people in it, so the place can sign as one body and keep the contract. The mechanism is commitment pooling.

Demand: meaning that survives disclosure

De Beers needed a story. Water held in the land needs one too, with a condition attached: it must still work once the whole campaign is published. That is the test applied to everything on this site. If a claim only holds while the buyer is kept in the dark, the work is refused.

Institution: a convention that holds

The third move turns a good idea into an accepted one. Here it is an open protocol: published verification, dated records, and a way to translate the work of a community into terms a funder can sign. Each adoption gives it more authority, the way an internet standard gains it.

What gets priced

The landscape’s work of holding water: the rain that soaks in and stays, and the springs that keep running through the dry months. Drinking water stays out of it. Nobody is asked to buy a glass of water from anyone.

The Catchment Chronicle

The method has one working document. A Catchment Chronicle is a dated, sourced and correctable public account of a catchment and the land in it. A farm is written as a chapter of its catchment’s chronicle, so every piece of land stays inside the story of its water.

Three rules make it a chronicle anyone can check:

  • Every factual claim carries a tag. [IC] means independently corroborated, by two sources or an official record. [MS] means it comes from the people the claim is about. [TBV] means likely and not yet verified.
  • Every party described has a right of reply. Their correction replaces the text, and the page records the date.
  • Proposals are kept apart from decisions. A proposal says who has and has not been asked, and becomes a decision only when the people who would carry it out agree.

A Chronicle is built in five stages: listen to the land and the people who know it; publish the ground rules before anything else; place the land in its catchment, from the farm out to the river basin; check the history, the institutions and the existing obligations before proposing anything; then propose in a fixed format and publish, with open data and plain-language pages that an AI can read as easily as a person.

A water flow report comes with it, built from public elevation data. It is for choosing and comparing, and ends by saying where a detailed survey would change a decision.

Three ways to use it

  1. Run it yourself. The templates and AI prompts are free for any landowner, community, forum or network to use on its own place.
  2. Ask for help. Short consulting is available to anyone running the method.
  3. Commission a Chronicle. I write a small number each year, on the land with travel paid, or remotely after a two-hour interview with someone who lives there.

Fees are modest. The water, eventually, is priceless.

Networks that would like to see the method in action can ask for an open session, at no charge. Ask your accountant whether alchemy is right for you.

Who it is for

  • Catchment partnerships in places where a water company already pays for outcomes, who need landowners ready and pooled to bid.
  • Communities near a water fund, and the funds that would like to reach them. Most communities have no idea these funds exist.
  • Landowners and stewards, including land held in trust by a community, who want an honest account of their land before anyone sells anything.
  • Families who have already had the argument, and now want to know what is possible for land they would like to protect for good. My part comes before the land trust: settling who holds which rights before anything is locked. My earlier engagements of this kind ended at the family’s money conversation, which is why this offer begins after it.
  • Heads of economic development. I teach them how a place turns many small promises into one contract a funder can sign, so the community holds the contract and the money stays in the region.

What it will not do

Not available for exponential growth on a finite planet.

I take no part in greenwashing, and that includes carbon work used to greenwash and any offset sale. Land protected through this work is never sold on as an offset. Where a landowner later sells credits, the Chronicle is the honest account they take with them, and I play no part in the sale. Work that leaves out the people the market has left out is declined, as is anything imposed from the top down, any form of surveillance, and anything that treats people as separate from nature.

Data gathered about a place, from satellites, sensors or interviews, belongs to the people of that place. It is published openly or not collected.

Results

Results vary with rainfall. Here is the rain gauge: every claim this work makes about the future goes into a dated register, saying what should be measurably true, by when, and how to check it. The results are published either way.

Lineage

None of this starts with me. The method draws openly on Sepp Holzer and Zach Weiss on water retention landscapes, on Regenesis and on Commonland’s 4 Returns, on the Doughnut Economics Action Lab, on David Ronfeldt’s TIMN model of how societies organise, and on Will Ruddick’s work on commitment pooling.