​The History of BioIntegrity Partnerships ... by Chris Searles (3/5/25)

Hi, I'm Chris. I started BioIntegrity in late 2014, before I really had a name for it. My previous life story: I was a musician who enjoyed early success in Austin, TX, in the early 1990s, most famously with Twang Twang Shockaboom, and then nationally during the later half of that decade most famously with Shawn Colvin. But then I quit music and by about 2005 I found myself running an online retail store called, GoodCommonSense. That store's purpose was to "make consumerism good for the planet." After about 10 years of that work, which I loved, plus leading on a bunch of local environmental initiatives and partnerships, plus playing drums with Alejandro Escovedo for a couple of years... I found myself wanting to know, "What's the #1 solution to climate change and the biodiversity extinction crisis?" I had a friend who kept asking that. "Is it paper or plastic?" he used to say, "Solar, Wind, Composting -- tell me what one thing to do!" Challenge accepted.

By 2015 I built BioIntegrity's first website, and in so doing lucked-into finding the domain "biointegrity.net". I was searching for a domain related to biodiversity and ecological integrity and up that popped. I didn't fully the meaning at the time, but I knew I could earn that understanding with more study and work and it 100% expressed this initiative's primary focus: protecting and restoring ecosystem integrity where biodiversity is most concentrated and/or in ways that help biodiversity richness restore and self-sustain. But that was a lot of words. biointegrity says it all for me, in the abstract and in the absolute, we are talking about nurturing and following living systems based on information, science, and care-practicioning, relating to our own bio-physical bodies as intelligent miracles, or understanding Earth's composition as a life-support system and how to work with it to create an optimal future on Earth for all extant life: biointegrity, 'means all those things. 
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Hi, I'm Chris Searles, creator/founder/staff at BioIntegrity.

By 2016 we were really cooking in Austin and so I decided to move to Silicon Valley with my "globally-strategic conservation" pitch and paper The Systemic Climate Solution. This paper and much of the media I created helped the global tropical forest conservation movement energize and make more relatable its communications and movement during that time. I ended-up in San Jose until 2019, hanging with some great researchers and learning how difficult it was to breakthrough quickly with Tech people, but also working with my Austin community to help fund protection of more than 300,000 acres of old growth tropical forests during that time. We kicked butt back home. Our BioIntegrity community enjoyed a rich partnership with RainforestTrust.org, 2015-2025, ultimately protecting at least 375,000 acres together that I am aware of, perhaps well over 500,000 acres by now. I enjoyed giving numerous presentations and producing some really events all over Austin, for Tropical Forests, during this time, and I am eternally grateful to all in our community. This accomplishment matters. 

My Covid life was in Texas, 2020-2021. In 2020 I began seriously studying both Biosphere Earth, the other life and living systems on our planet, and how Earth's living systems circulate moisture, particularly forests. It was abundantly clear tropical forests could make their own rain and control rain around the world to some extent. Also that boreal and temperate forests worked together to send rain from the ice caps over the lands to the subtropics, and that temperate circulation over our lands is far more dependent on forests than even Forestry, much less the Media had to yet realize. I was delighted as an advocate, but I wanted to know more. The research implied we could learn how to make it rain and reverse some of today's downward spirals from drought. During this time I published The Value of Biosphere Earth, the first scientifically-based collection of paper I'm aware of identifying Earth's other species (biodiversity) and life systems (ecosystems) as humanity's only life-support system, irreplaceable in every regard and powerfully beneficial, integrated and self-balancing in ways we do not yet fully understand. I also started practicing "Rainmaking with Trees" and was instantly successful.  

In 2022 BioIntegrity began advocating for locally-strategic environmental solutions -- starting with reorienting our identities towards biospheric reality. We produced the first G.I.F.T. Fest, continued producing issues of AllCreation.org, and created new content around the value of bio-rich soil, ie. The Sponge. All along I was practicing rainmaking with trees in my spare moments at home in Austin, every single day, May-August and on most weekends at one or two additional sites, all year. What I saw after dozens of small experiments and twenty five documented projects was that a person can quickly spin-up clouds in forested landscape via wetting canopies and trunks or trickle-watering trunks. Getting super-localized rainfall and precipitation (fog and transpiration rain) to a forest system is pretty reliable if the forest is still wild and the watering is done gently over several days on 12 or more superlative canopy trees (24 is better). Getting significant cloud cover is pretty reliable if watering is done gently over an hour or more on one or more superlative tree canopies. I was never able to summon rainfall to my urban forest site, but it did receive create cloudbursts (unpredicted), above average rainfall, reliably-impressive winds (unpredicted), and appear to suddenly temperatize the weather and forecast across all of Austin twice in July that year immediately my waterings. By mid-september of that year I took Rainmaking with Trees and Strategic Watering to Northern California. I was determined to help prevent another rash of Fall fire outbreak.
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I drove around in a Ryder truck, running from Ukia (my fill up station) to Ft. Bragg to Ukiah (to refill) and then Willits for several days in a row, having the time of my life and watching as the forecast went from 0% chance of rain to 100% over these critical areas. My timing was lucky, there was front headed down from Alaska that I scheduled for, but could not have predicted exact timing with. In a nutshell, the rains that came had roughly a 4% chance of falling for that time year (you'll see these odds in future reports). And fall they did. Right on cue, as I was wrapping-up my waterings in Colusa, from West to East over Northern California for hours and hours. Mission Accomplished. I went back to Austin and cried. "I'm a rainmaker, the first one." Those rains lingered for only a few days but also had an uncanny effect: even though essentially ALL of California's forests were under red flag warnings and still in "Extreme" or "Exceptional" drought, there weren't zero additional fires in my FMC zone, from Willits to to San Francisco to Santa Barbara to Los Angeles to San Diego: zero forest fires rest of that year, even during an additional month of drought. When the rains did finally come, they gently re-watered the landscape system 'rest of that year. This patterning has since repeated in South Texas, Central Texas, SW New Mexico, Central Arizona, and SW Oregon -- systems that were unable to manage drought get low-probability rains, after my stimulations, and then go on the circulate and attract more moisture for as long as they can, it appears to me. We need to research this self-watering phenomenon. It is not identified as such in any research I'm aware of but: a) it's one of the biophysical world's most logical paradigms: that in fact all organisms seek water balance (filling, emptying, refilling with fresh water) once they have the resource to do. The only time organisms and living systems, such as ecosystems, don't try and self-water is when they are too dry or unwell to function or too saturated to need water. Science makes it clear, forests prefer to have water on hand and in reserve. And, b): Permaculture identifies the ability to self-water as "autogenesis", when the organisms, micro to macro, have enough infrastructure, hydration and other resources to reproduce without human help. That is the natural way of living things: to thrive whenever possible. In my case, I'm just rehydrating forests. They were already successful as living systems. 

In 2023 we focused on assisting a grassroots project in Africa, learning more about how to help internationally, maintaining our education and advocacy programs, and testing out "Rainmaking with Trees" copiously in Central-southern and -central Texas. I had enormous success I told nearly no one about. I wanted to be certain before I went public with this breakthrough. 

In 2024 we released An Introduction to Rainmaking with Trees, my sincere and folksy video telling the story, sharing the science and laying out the basics of how it works. We also produced G.I.F.T. Fest II, January-April, which was a world-class blast; another great beginning. I also started doing Rainmaking with Trees live on Facebook, not realizing those videos would be lost forever at the time, and in the process I noticed the air was dangerously dry coming up from Mexico, in early March. Having just come out of our worst drought since the catastrophic Bastrop fires of 2011, I was freaking out. We were still in a tinder box, surrounded by desperately dry trees. I immediately decided to personally-finance the pilot of "200 Trees: BCNA" as a response. The ideal outcome would be for the greater forest system in our neighborhood to gain net positive functionality and durability, via my literal soil sponges and strategic waterings and what those strategies delivered. All I really knew was,

1. Moisture - we needed this landscape to contain and self-circulate more moisture. 

Thanks to our semi-rural neighbors, I was able to install roughly 450 tree sponges in our forested neighborhood area on large conifer and deciduous trees, April 1 to May 15. Right at about sponge #400 I saw the minor changes I had been noticing as a patchwork across the neighborhood exponentially multiply. We suddenly had something like 12 days of fog and received roughly 3.5" of rain after the sponge installations were complete. Additionally, I rainmaker-triggered rains monthly from February through May, including a nearly 2" rain on May 28, which was unforecast at the time. 

I was also concerned about Canada's forests. They'd had their worst-ever losses to wildfire, high heat, and drought summer of 2023. I was afraid of a repeat. But as we got closer to the end of May, I realized I needed to stay focused on the Southwest USA because the intensity of droughted air from Mexico was still palpable. I came up with an audacious plan to work multiple sites in New Mexico and Arizona, which would hopefully also send rain to Texas along the Rio Grande up its central region forests (from Uvalde to Dallas), and to central Mexico's vegetated regions. That effort -- The SouthWest Projects: six weeks on the road, June 15 to July 28, appears to have worked perfectly. 

During the second half of The SouthWest Projects I became aware that my worst forest-nightmare was exploding in Oregon and across the NorthWest. I knew I wanted to go back to California and work on the Northwest's forests as soon as possible. By late July, I decided to just keep going. August 9 I was watering outside of Eugene, Oregon. We got rain there nine days later, that had 0% chance in the forecast when I began and about a 4% probability falling that time of year. This time there was no Alaskan front, just rain rolling in off the ocean. That rain made bringing in two more large rains and several tiny one pretty easy. More about this in the report -- Ending Forest Fire Forever, part 1: Strategic Watering and The Northwest Projects. 

Now it's 2025 and everything is new again. I spent half of January in Los Angeles advocating for Strategic Watering as a response to the fires and drought there. I'm now focused on sharing this information, doing more projects, and finding BioIntegrity's unicorns. BioIntegrity is ready to rise. I hear the call. I've done everything I can to answer it honestly as leader/doer/visionary and staff of this organizational journey so far. We have literally accomplished more -- as a community of generous donors, and as me, acting as an organization -- We have literally accomplished and uncovered more palpable good in the modern world than I can yet process. At the same time, I see a much greater future for everyone, with the adoption of biophysical truth and biospheric integrity as our social and economic realities. The world is what we make it. Let's end forest fire, let's water trees and forests, and let's protect, regrow, and innovate a bio-rich, optimal future together.

Thanks for reading-
I am EXCITED about our future. 
Chris Searles (3/5/25)

Learn more: 

• BioIntegrity 5.0