Episode 27: Drawing on two decades of field experience studying resilient societies in Africa, Asia and the Americas, James Workman is a pioneering writer and entrepreneur in the design of equitable conservation markets for freshwater and marine resources. As a founder of the online water savings trading platform, AquaShares (http://aquashares.com), he has helped establish water markets in California and Morocco involving hundreds of users, and is now calling on this experience to aid California GSAs and their basin stakeholders in designing and operating cap-and-trade markets to better comply with SGMA.

Prior to establishing these markets, Workman was the Deputy Director of the Environmental Defense Fund’s Solutions Center for fisheries markets, launched the International Water Association’s magazine The Source, was senior advisor to the World Commission on Dams under Nelson Mandela, and served as a White House appointed speechwriter to U.S. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt.

Workman is author of the award-winning Heart of Dryness: How the last Bushmen can help us endure the coming age of permanent drought (https://www.amazon.com/Heart-Dryness-Bushmen-Permanent-Drought/dp/0802715583), and co-author of the forthcoming Sea Change: The fishermen’s revolution that is replenishing life offshore – and on. He studied at Yale & Oxford, and taught at Wesleyan, Whitman and Bates colleges, but his real education came from blowing up dams, releasing wolves, restoring wildland fires, guiding safaris, smuggling water to dissidents, breaking down in Africa's Kalahari Desert, getting married, and becoming a dad – although not ranked in that order.

This episode's motto: "Subsidies help bad farmers continue to make bad decisions."

Links:

All in auctions: http://www.aguanomics.com/2012/12/all-in-auctions-is-published.html

Priests and Programmers: http://www.aguanomics.com/2009/01/priests-and-programmers-review.html