The Return of Lost Water
The water’s still there now
But hidden in the air now
In the clouds it makes a home
Until there’s rain to share now.
—from “Water Cycle” by Meish Goldish, to be sung to the tune of “It’s Raining, It’s Pouring, The Old Man Is Snoring”
THE WEATHER’S BEEN AWFULLY WEIRD. I write this in southern Vermont in early March, 2012, a day after the temperature climbed above sixty degrees and I wore a T-shirt when I walked the dog up the mountain road. Last night we had terrific winds, the limb-clipping kind, which after dark whipped into a rainstorm punctuated by the occasional crackle of ice and hail. This in a winter during which one January afternoon I changed my boots in an eerily empty Prospect Ski Mountain lodge as the owner and cook stared, drop-jawed, at the Weather Channel: nothing but too-warm weather and rain as far out as they could predict. Rain in January? It’s been the worst cross-country ski season anyone at Prospect has ever seen. The high school Nordic team— which my son competes on—has been roaming the county, desperate for skiable snow.
Actually, the weather’s been weird pretty much since I moved here fifteen years ago. Our first spring there was the tornado that rode 67A through North Bennington and across the Bennington College campus (where we then lived). The sky turned pickle green and I curled up on the couch to wait it out. The minute the winds stopped, a hundred chain saws broke into song, the neighbor-helping-neighbor sound of vigilante road clearing. Last summer brought us Hurricane Irene, which left more than a dozen Vermont towns with no roads in or out for days. From our spot on the mountain I thought it was just a regular old storm, until we got our power back and, via Facebook, shared witness to covered bridges collapsing and cars swimming in parking lots.
Everyone’s got similar stories these days. The heat waves are hotter, the hurricanes heavier, the lack of snow more lacking. The extreme and unusual—what weather pros call “hundred-year events,” meaning that they come along but once a century—are now extreme yet usual. Meanwhile, our political candidates are asked if they “believe” in climate change, as if it matters what any of us thinks. Unless we willfully choose not to, and many do, we all know that the weather has meandered far from its familiar patterns, that it’s gone off kilter. And that this likely has something to do with what we’ve been doing to the planet.
In news reports about extreme weather events it’s become de rigueur for the reporter to ask some highly credentialed authority, in that blithe tone of offhand curiosity we tend to favor in our newscasters, “whether this [fill-in-the-blank: heat wave, rash of tornadoes, relentless wildfire season] is a consequence of global warming.” And the expert— no doubt mindful of the job-threatening controversy that could erupt upon connecting too many dots—will say something along the lines of, “Well, of course it is hard to attribute any particular occurrence to global warming but the statistics are showing a clear trend toward intensified storms/warming/instability that is consistent with the model of global climate change.” And then, perhaps, we’ll hear a vague analysis of the jet stream configuration or ocean currents, all in a matter-of-fact voice, a manner that offers some reassurance that nothing too disturbing is going on and that the experts have it all under control.
I feel strongly that the public should not be protected from knowledge of the consequences, climatic and otherwise, of environmental degradation. At the same time, I have to admit that a direct link between rising carbon dioxide and our increasingly chaotic weather isn’t quite satisfying to me. I’m plenty convinced that human activities have altered the ecological conditions that govern climate. And, thanks to that handy Keeling Curve, it’s clear that carbon dioxide levels have been rising. But exactly how these intersect doesn’t seem clear. What’s a reasonable time line for rising carbon dioxide to cause palpable change? Does anyone know? Could excess carbon dioxide, and excess carbon dioxide alone, be making our weather crazy right now? It seems we can have but two choices: to deny that anything is happening at all (“We’ve always had climate cycles” or, “What’s wrong with warmer weather?”), or to attribute all warming and climatic oddities to greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide. Because despite the hugeness of this problem, despite the threat that climate change represents to life as we know it in every corner of the globe, the carbon dioxide narrative remains the only one we have with which to talk about it.
Could there be another way to understand the swings of hot and cold, wet and dry, fluke and flukier, that mark our weather in the here and now? I think there is, and that something important has been missing in the debate (and even our non-debates) about climate change: the role of water in climate regulation.
Now, I didn’t just come up with this by myself. So I think it’s time I introduced the folks who made water’s importance to weather and climate clear enough for me to understand. There is a group of hydrologists and scientists in Slovakia and the Czech Republic who have written a stunning book called Water for the Recovery of the Climate: A New Water Paradigm, which I bumped into on Peter Donovan’s Soil Carbon Coalition website. Interestingly, the vision articulated by the New Water Paradigm has a close parallel to the Soil Carbon Coalition’s project: Just as Donovan seeks to return carbon to the soil, these European thinkers say we need to return water to our soils.
Too much water has drained from our land, they say, as a result of deforestation, intensive agriculture, and an expanded built environment. Every field that’s turned into a parking lot or industrial park means more water siphoned off into gutters and culverts and less water in the ground. Land that’s dried out and lost its soil carbon to oxidation means that rain, unable to soak in, cascades across the surface and into the waste stream. Eventually all that water flows off to the sea. One consequence is that we’re wasting perfectly good water at a time when many places are experiencing water shortages. Another is that in letting land-based water slip away, we’re losing an important means of keeping our climate in balance. Even if by some political or geophysical miracle we slash our atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration down to pre-industrial equivalents, they argue, we would still contend with the climate havoc wrought by our heedless treatment of the land and of the water that rightfully belongs there.
You see, when people make the connection between water and climate change, they tend to go in just one direction: anticipating how climate change will put added stress on water resources as the planet warms. Scientists, for example, predict reduced snowpack mass, which is troubling since many regions, notably the American West, rely on snow as a reservoir for usable water. Experts also expect that increased drought and wildfires coupled with rising energy demand will tax existing water supplies, particularly as warmer weather will speed up evaporation in lakes and rivers. These are significant concerns. However, scant attention has been given to how the water cycle—or more precisely, the small and large, green and blue water cycles—affect the climate. Or the fact that these dynamics hinge on the soil, as soil moisture plays an important role in maintaining the earth’s natural air-conditioning mechanism. This is a crucial topic to explore because, as it turns out, there’s a great deal that we can do to support water’s heat-regulating potential. And in doing so, we can help regain temperature stability, microclimate by microclimate or possibly on a large scale.
The folks behind the New Water Paradigm, Michal Kravcík, Jan Pokorný, Juraj Kohutiar, and a few others, see themselves as a group of friends as opposed to an organization or advocacy group. Given their backgrounds, these guys were primed to be upstarts. Just months before the fall of communism, Kravcˇ ík was forced out of Slovakia’s Institute of Hydrology when his research showed that the government-sanctioned water-management approach was ineffective. Kohutiar was a political dissident during the last years of communism, active in the Movement for Civil Liberty and the Catholic Underground. Their ideas are as likely to develop in the course of an evening of chatting over wine as through funded research or professional conferences.
The lead author, Kravcík, is a hydrologist who from 1993 to 2011 ran a nonprofit called People and Water (L’udia a Voda in Slovakian) that provides education and solutions on water and ecosystem management. He was awarded the 1999 Goldman Environmental Prize for the “Blue Alternative,” a water-use model that substituted for a large, ecologically destructive dam project at Tichý Potok in the Carpathian Mountains, a plan that cost a fraction of the Slovakian government-supported dam and secured the survival of four 700-year-old villages. Born in Ukraine of Slovakian parents who were among tens of thousands of ethnic Ruthenes sent into exile from Czechoslovakia after World War II, Kravcˇ ík loved to paint and was long torn between the technical fields and art. He’s always been drawn to the Impressionists, “the way they paint water on the landscape, and show the dynamic atmosphere of water and air.”
Pokorný is the outlier in that he’s in the Czech Republic—he assures me that the two nationalities don’t have problems like in the former Yugoslavia, apart from perhaps drinking too much when they meet. He received a PhD in plant physiology at Prague’s Charles University and did academic research on oxygen and photosynthesis. He became interested in evapo-transpiration, the process whereby water moves through and out of a plant in the form of water vapor. “I saw that there’s more water circulating through plants than we can see, and that this invisible water cycle is important to the biosphere,” he recalls. “Soon I was looking at the world from the point of view of plants, looking at water quality and how plants affect water quality. Water enters the plant as dirty water and goes into the air as distilled water. Plants not only give us oxygen, they also produce for us clean water and function as the perfect air conditioning system.”
In the mid-1990s Pokorný met Michal Kravcík. “He showed how much was lost when we drain areas instead of keeping vegetation on the land,” he says. Kravcík, meanwhile, learned a great deal from Pokorný: “I hadn’t understood the connection between water and solar energy,” he says. By combining their two perspectives, they were able to see that the wholesale clearing and draining of land is not only a massive waste of water resources but also interrupts the ecological cycles that lend stability to our climate. Considering that the pace of urbanization is such that around twenty thousand square miles of our planet’s surface is encased in concrete or pavement each year, they saw this was not a small matter.
Juraj Kohutiar, who has handled much of the group’s writing, is a civil engineer who got to know Kravcˇ ík when they were colleagues at the Slovak Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Hydrology. They reconnected years later. This was during the chaotic transition period just after the fall of communism, when, Kohutiar says, “the new elite had a need for experienced people. They wanted me to work on security, and when I told them I had no background in this they said, ‘At least you had experience on the other side, being persecuted by the police.’” He subsequently became the head of counterintelligence for the Slovak Information Service.
Within the water group, Kohutiar has assumed the mantle of resident skeptic, reining in others’ (notably Kravcˇ ík’s) more sweeping statements when they get carried away by enthusiasm. For example, Kravcˇ ík said to me, “I am sure that if we have efforts on a massive scale to keep water on the landscape, after ten years we will have no problem with the climate.” Kohutiar’s response, when I mentioned this on Skype: a polite, measured distancing from the statement accompanied by a wry, indulgent smile.
They each keep busy with writing and lecturing as well as their respective on-the-ground community ecology and educational efforts: Kohutiar with engineering consulting in Africa; Kravcˇ ík, building a drought and climate protection program through the Slovakian government as well as his involvement in numerous international projects; Pokorný, running an applied ecological research nonprofit called Enki, named for the Sumerian “god of fresh water and education, the patron of craftsmen and artists,” in addition to research in Africa.
They’ve also tried to get the international climate leadership attuned to water’s role in addressing climate change—to little avail. In 2009, Kravcˇ ík served as the group’s delegate to the climate talks in Copenhagen, COP15, where he presented the Kosice Civic Protocol on Water, Vegetation and Climate Change, a cogent manifesto on the importance of water and plant life in sustaining the biosphere. The document prompted some notice but not enough to make a dent in the conversation. “There was some response from people in the general public, yet no response from the people that we would term decision-makers,” says Pokorný. “To the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], we have the atmosphere and in the atmosphere are greenhouse gases. If greenhouse gases go up, it’s a warmer climate. It’s different when you consider the biosphere and atmosphere and the energy balance between the universe and surface of the earth. There’s been a simplification of climate change, a train which goes along, driven by lawyers and business.” The CO2 mafia, as they’ve begun to regard it.
To understand how water mediates warming and cooling, let’s take a look at what happens when sunshine hits the ground. If the sun’s beams strike bare soil, what you primarily get is “sensible heat,” which means it generates heat you can feel. If, however, solar radiation falls on moist soil covered with vegetation (and saturated soil invariably has plant cover), the scenario changes. Rather than producing palpable heat, the solar energy is transformed into “latent heat” held in water vapor. This heat, then, is stored in the gas and released where it’s cool (in, say, a forest) or when it’s cool (in the early morning, at which time it will condense and form dew.) Evaporation consumes heat, and thus has a cooling effect. Condensation releases energy, thus creating heat where it is needed.
“This is the perfect and only air conditioning system on the planet,” says Pokorný. “Eco-systems use solar energy for self-organization and cool themselves by exporting entropy to the atmosphere as heat. And the medium for all of this is water.” By transpiring, plants act as “valves” that release the heat. Plants have small pores, called stomata, on the undersides of their leaves, which open or close to regulate the release of moisture. A tremendous amount of water flows through plants this way; given sufficient water, some wetland plants can transpire as much as twenty liters of water per square meter. Another way to express it is that the soil “sweats” through the plants, as a means of maintaining a cool temperature on the ground and ensuring that soil doesn’t lose essential moisture to evaporation.
“Hot air rises,” says Pokorný. “Therefore on bare soil heat is rising— even between crops, such as the bare patches between maize plants. In forests, the shrubs and ferns are cooling the air, so the temperature does not go up.”
In terms of temperature fluctuation, “among greenhouse gases, water vapor is the big gorilla,” Peter Donovan told me (in a conversation that led me to explore his website). “While carbon dioxide may be the primary driver of global warming, there’s more water vapor than other greenhouse gases and it traps a lot more heat.” Water vapor makes up between 1 and 4 percent of the atmosphere, whereas carbon dioxide is 0.0383 percent (that’s the parts-per-million figure we hear about). Water has a greater capacity to absorb thermal energy than any other known substance. At the same time, water vapor is in constant flux, moving vertically and horizontally through the atmosphere and between forms, shape-shifting from gas to liquid to solid and back again, depending on conditions. While carbon dioxide traps heat, water vapor acts as conveyer of heat, alternately holding and releasing thermal energy as it circulates.
“Big gorilla” indeed. The authors of Water for the Recovery of the Planet put it this way: “Water evaporation is the most important agent of energy transformation on Earth.” And yet, Pokorný notes, “the cooling process of transpiration is often considered an incidental function of plants, rather than a vehicle to moderate and modulate leaf temperature and surrounding temperatures. It’s even cast as a negative, in that the plants are said to ‘lose’ water this way.”
It seems that by twisting ourselves into political and rhetorical knots to agree on greenhouse gas emission yet ignoring what humanity has done to the land, we’ve been going at this climate thing all wrong—or at least missed some important opportunities. When we rip the vegetation off an expanse of land, we’re losing the temperature modulation that those plants provided. We haven’t been paying heed to the hidden water cycle, nor giving the collective power of plants the chance to manage our climate for us. To avoid excessive heat, what we want is for transpiration to change sensible heat into latent heat. According to Pokorný, each liter of plant-evaporated water converts 0.7 kWh (kilo-watt-hours) of solar energy to latent heat, an amount comparable to the capacity of, say, a large room air conditioner. Bare ground devoid of plant cover retains heat and has little moisture to spare. Radiation from the sun, then, just sits there and the soil proceeds to dry out, oxidize, compact, and lose the capacity to absorb water and sustain microbial life, all of which makes it more likely to remain plantless.
We also want more soil/plant moisture wafting into the atmosphere. This is because water in the troposphere, the air that surrounds us, tames immoderate weather. A dearth of water in the soil means less atmospheric moisture, a situation that sets up the conditions for temperature extremes. In a dry environment, the ground heats up and cools down quickly, and there are significant differences in temperature between day and night, summer and winter, mountain and valley. Think of a desert landscape, where it might hover around 120 degrees F during the day but slip below freezing at night. By contrast, in the damp environment of the equatorial rain forest, the temperature stays a balmy sixty-eight degrees around the clock. “That’s because the trees and other plants air-condition the system,” says Pokorný. On a dry landscape, up to 60 percent of solar radiation becomes sensible heat, while on watered land as much as 80 percent is transformed to latent heat.
A pattern of increased temperature disparity also invites dire weather events like torrential rains, as well as the opposite, severe drought. Here’s why: Dried land and built-over surfaces bombarded with solar radiation become “hot plates,” microclimates dominated by sensible heat. Hot air inhibits the process of condensation, so rain is less likely to fall on such areas. Instead, the moist air drifts toward cooler regions, like mountains or forests or points north. The cooler zones, then, receive more rain. Particularly in the summer, these can be heavy rains that cause flooding in nearby, low-lying areas. So while some places are too dry, and stay that way longer, others are positively waterlogged. This perpetuates the temperature differential, which can itself be a trigger for extreme weather systems like tornadoes and hurricanes. As Kravcˇ ík explains, “The cold zone and hot zone collide, which creates a turbulent atmosphere.”
More frequent flooding also obscures the fact that the land is drying out—and that advancing desertification interferes with its ability to absorb water, so that land can be at once desperately thirsty and inundated. In one of nature’s more confounding paradoxes, soil needs water to protect itself from water. Land that’s well watered uses rain to nourish plants, moderate temperature, and replenish watersheds and groundwater stores. Parched land can only repel it. The result is not only the loss of water but also topsoil erosion and soil sediment settling in lakes, streams, and rivers.
Kohutiar notes that rainfall measurements have reflected the trend of precipitation moving to cooler regions. In Slovakia, over the last century rainfall has decreased 10 percent on the plains yet gone up 3 percent in the mountains. As for Europe in general over the same time period, rainfall has dropped 20 percent in the Mediterranean while rising 20 percent in Scandinavia. Such changes are often attributed to increasing levels of greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide. What’s actually going on, however, seems more nuanced.
Then there’s all the water lost because we’re sluicing it all away. As Water for the Recovery of the Planet describes it, this has been our bargain with civilization. Since people have grown crops, they’ve cleared forests for agricultural land and drained fields for the cultivation of grains. Aside from leading to erosion and declines in soil fertility, this has also created a continual need for irrigation and drainage—which, over time, has depleted groundwater sources and left the soil salty and arid. The mechanization of agriculture sped up this process, which now takes place over huge expanses of land. Research suggests that the pumping of groundwater accounts for 25 percent of sea level rise.
The patterns have played out differently depending on the region. In one geographic/historical note that speaks to their own nations’ experience, the authors observe: “The Red revolution in socialist countries collectivized the small fields of small peasant farmers, plowed over boundaries and united plots of land into scores, even hundreds of hectares. Gigantic fields with no natural barriers . . . or protected bands of vegetation limiting surface runoff from the land, were presented as great leaps forward.”
The move to towns and cities played, and continues to play, a big part in the erasure of water from our landscapes. While farmers and pastoralists depended on rain, people in urban areas came to see rain as a nuisance, wastewater to be dispensed with swiftly, often in conjunction with sewage waste. Over the last several decades we’ve waterproofed our cities, coating the world’s roads, sidewalks, and roofs of buildings with impregnable materials. We’re spared the inconvenience of walking or driving in mud, but we’re also, Kravcˇ ík et al. write, “draining the environment in which we live. We are causing a long-term drop in groundwater supplies beneath our paved and roofed surfaces” and creating “urban hot island” microclimates, which, with the rise of mega-cities, are merging to become urban hot island macroclimates.
“According to our estimates, each year over 700 billion cubic meters of rainwater vanishes from the continents,” Kravcˇ ík says. “This is water that in the past had been soaked and saturated in soil, and evaporated in the atmosphere.” This massive influx of water to the oceans contributes significantly to sea level rise. He says, “Regarding sea level rise, people are still thinking of ice melt and not about the loss of water from the landscape, the water that flows from the continents to the sea.”
The way we use and dispose of water has been drying up our land and created conditions that result in lower total rainfall, but rainfall that arrives in heavy bursts as opposed to showers spread over time in more manageable doses. The combination of the two factors— dried-out land and the draining away of rainwater—means that we’re steering the solar power in the wrong direction. The air-conditioning function is no longer operating at peak form; it’s as if we had a fan that could potentially offer relief but is mostly blowing hot air. Other consequences of lost water, says Pokorný, include the disappearance of humid zones, which are places of groundwater recharge, and the overpumping of groundwater sources in an attempt to boost agricultural yields—which itself leads to the salination, acidification, and an overall ravaging of the soil.
This has got to change, says Kravcík. “We need to keep rainwater on the land. Yet still we’re roofing, asphalting and clearing the landscape—all the while draining rainwater out of the city and bringing spring water in from rural areas.” Now that he’s built the case, he makes a bold proclamation: “The most urgent challenge of present civilization is to understand that the drying out of landscapes has a much more serious impact on climatic change than an increase of CO2 in the atmosphere.”
What we’ve addressed so far is the small or “closed” water cycle. The small water cycle regulates local climate conditions while the large water cycle, the continual back-and-forth drift of moisture between land and sea, governs climate on a broader geographic scale. We’ve seen how the small water cycle mediates solar heat by way of evapotranspiration and condensation. In the large water cycle, we get water on a macro level moving in two directions. For one, water is continually flowing from the land to the ocean. By definition, land sits at a higher elevation than the sea. Therefore, thanks to gravity, continental fresh water stock perpetually streams downward into the ocean. Because water can’t run uphill, the way continental moisture is replenished is that ocean water rises in the form of vapor. Moist winds transport the water over the landmass, where it ultimately condenses and returns to the earth as precipitation.
While it’s accepted that the large water cycle determines global weather patterns, the manifold variants and interplays within the system make it hard to pin down cause and effect. Between forcings and feedbacks, airflows and ice floes, the confounding oscillations of El Niño and La Niña, it’s challenging enough for the meteorological and scientific communities to explain climate phenomena as they manifest in weather, let alone take a stab at drawing conclusions about the impact of human activity. Our limited understanding about what causes weather incidents is one reason behind all the I-don’t-know-ness when it comes to elucidating our weird weather episodes. What does seem clear is that conventional ways of understanding weather don’t quite account for the types of weather anomalies we’ve been experiencing.
Which brings us to the “biotic pump,” a theory that first appeared in the literature in 2007 that pulls some of the pieces together, and in doing so turns many meteorological assumptions upside down.
Let me introduce this concept by posing a question that the biotic pump potentially answers: If precipitation derives from moisture brought to land from the ocean, how does that moisture reach inland areas far away from the ocean? In other words, why doesn’t it only rain on the coast?
Answer: It’s thanks to forests. The high rate of transpiration in wooded areas enriches the atmosphere with water vapor. When moist air ascends, it cools, and water vapor condenses, producing a partial vacuum where condensation has occurred. This creates an air pressure gradient, whereby the forest canopy sucks in moist air from the ocean. This moisture now enters the small water cycle described by the forest and its surrounding region, and brings sustaining rains. The biotic pump is the mechanism by which moisture is transported across land. Forests don’t merely grow in wet areas—they create and perpetuate the conditions in which they grow.
This theory, developed by Russian physicists Anastassia Makarieva and Victor Gorshkov, has received little attention in the United States, and many in the scientific community balk at its radical reframing of climate dynamics. That’s because the biotic pump model posits that it’s the flux of condensation that drives horizontal airflows, not the temperature discrepancy between air masses, as had been assumed. “The same principle allows us to quantitatively explain atmospheric circulation patterns in hurricanes and tornadoes—severe weather patterns accompanied by intense water vapor condensation,” Makarieva and Gorshkov say. “While theory of moist atmospheric processes is indeed a commonly recognized ‘hole’ in climate science, the scientific community does not seem to be well prepared to respond to the challenge by radical paradigm shifts.” As was the case with the New Water Paradigm, it’s been found that evaporation and condensation, processes that both depend on and have implications for the viability of soil, have been overlooked.
Makarieva and Gorshkov note what happens when large forest areas are cleared: The ocean-to-land winds weaken and the rain-making process stalls. They link the unprecedented heat and drought in Russia over the last few years to accelerated deforestation in western Russia. Australia, which has lost 40 percent of its tree cover over the last two hundred years, has in recent decades seen steep declines in rainfall in most regions while certain areas have been pummeled. The lack of tree cover means there’s not a strong enough “pump” to draw moist winds to where it’s needed.
Pokorný notes how common these types of anomalies have become: “The disruption of the large water cycle explains why water falls at the wrong time in the wrong amounts. For example, it rains in the desert and washes everything away. The rains come all at once.” Not that weather chaos following deforestation is a completely modern phenomenon. In presentations, Pokorný quotes a biography of Christopher Columbus written by his son Ferdinand: “On July 22d [1494], he [Columbus] departed for Jamaica . . . Every afternoon there was a rain squall that lasted for about an hour. The admiral attributes this to the great forests of that land; he knew from experience that formerly this also occurred in the Canary, Madeira, and Azore Islands, but since the removal of forests that once covered those islands they do not have so much mist and rain as before.”
One situation that seems to support the biotic pump is the plight of the Mau Forest Complex in Kenya, which has undergone rapid clearing. “Changes of the type that took centuries in Europe—the conversion of virgin soil into agricultural land—happened during one generation in Western Kenya,” says Pokorný, who has done research in the region. “People referred to it as a ‘water tower,’ as it supplies the Rift Valley and Victoria area with water. Over the last 15 years 200,000 hectares [nearly 500,000 acres] were converted to agricultural land. The rivers lost water. In 2009, in the rainy season, August to November, the rain didn’t come. In recent years, the rain has been very weak. The lack of water stopped the hydropower station run by the Japanese. There’s been a total collapse of life under the catchment.” More than half of Kenya’s electricity comes from hydropower. In 2009, several thousand families were evicted from the land in an attempt to restore the forest ecology.
Gorshkov and Makarieva have been frustrated by obstacles like delayed responses from journals and the refusal of scientific peers to publicly evaluate their work. However, the biotic pump theory does seem to be gaining acceptance, in part a result of historical research linking deforestation to droughts, as is now considered the case with Mayans and Aztecs. The concept of the biotic pump, if correct, brings a new urgency to the need to conserve forests. Makarieva and Gorshkov write: “It is well-known from the estimates of the fresh water reservoirs on land that if the ocean-to-land transport of moisture stalls, the fresh water will totally disappear on land in just a few years.” Therefore, soil moisture and the ability of native vegetation to control its amounts are vital to the integrity of the water cycle on land. So as to maintain the needed pressure gradients, condensation must be intense over forests. This requires significant stores of moisture in soil—to allow for the evapo-transpiration that sparks the process.
If there’s no soil moisture, there’s no evaporation and no rain. Climate activists have decried the plunder of forests, particularly tropical forests, emphasizing their capacity to store carbon. But now we can perhaps see an even more direct bearing on climate. “The impact of increasing CO2 concentrations on the greenhouse effect can be completely compensated by a relatively minor change in the hydrological cycle over land,” say Makarieva and Gorshkov.
When we think of continental water in an ecological sense, we generally picture the likes of lakes and rivers, topographic markers that would be depicted in blue on a map. In drawing people’s attention to water on the land, Makarieva and Gorshkov and the New Water Paradigm group are making a plea for what has come to be called “green water”: the water that moves through the small water cycle via the soil and plants. They say this water has been neglected. “Our legislation protects water in rivers, lakes, and underground stores,” says Kohutiar. “As for the water we don’t see, we don’t care about this water at all. Soil is a huge basin for water but we have no laws protecting it. But this water is more important to us than water in rivers, particularly in terms of maintaining local climates.”
In the early 1990s, scientist Malin Falkenmark of the Stockholm International Water Institute articulated the distinction between “blue water” and “green water.” Blue water is precipitation that ends up in lakes, rivers, and aquifers, whereas green water is water on land: soil water. While we think of rainwater replenishing reservoirs, in fact 65 percent of water that falls as rain becomes green water. Falkenmark argues that we need to do a better job of managing green water sources—particularly in dryland regions, where blue water pools capture little rain and therefore people are more dependent on water held in soil for drinking and agriculture. While we can’t predict the effects of climate change, she says, certain anticipated changes, such as reduced river flow and longer dry periods between rains, add urgency to our turning attention to green water.
According to this understanding of water reserves, maintaining green water stores acts as a barricade against “hot plates,” protects against erosion, promotes soil microbial diversity, and helps to build soil carbon. This sets up a positive feedback loop that supports vegetation, as the carbon and water cycles tend to follow each other. Christine Jones writes that for every 1 percent increase in the level of soil carbon, a square meter of soil can store an extra 16.8 liters of water—nearly two buckets’ worth. The flip side, she notes, is that a loss of soil carbon means a corresponding loss of land’s water-storing capacity, and thus green water.
It’s become a truism that future wars will be fought not over oil, but over water. According to the journal Nature, four-fifths of the world’s population lives in areas where water security is threatened. As we enter an era in which additional water crises are anticipated around the world, attention to green water can help us meet this challenge. When we look at water scarcity, we tend to deal with it as if it’s a zero-sum game, as a commodity. Indeed, there are corporations trying to corner the market on it. But when we think of fresh water as a commodity, we’re picturing water as static, a thing that can be bottled and stored. In nature, water is continually in motion: shifting form, floating in air currents, and flowing according to the contours of the land. We need to view water, blue and green, as part of the commons, and keep it on the land, where it supports ecological cycles and moderates temperature, rather than allow it to stream off to the sea. This will benefit everyone.
The New Water Paradigm group wants people not only to understand where we have gone wrong with water, but to turn around and get it right. Part of this involves altering long-held attitudes toward water. Says Pokorný: “We need to change our approach from regarding rainwater as an inconvenience that needs to be removed quickly, to seeing rainwater as an asset to be retained in soil and plants.” People also need to let go of a fatalistic attitude toward rain. “Through much of history, people saw the rain as coming from the gods and could not imagine that humankind could have any impact on rainfall,” Kohutiar says. “This feeling persists today, that rain either comes or it doesn’t regardless of what we do.”
People need to manage land with water circulation in mind, says Pokorný. He notes that in much of the world, population is concentrated in cities and people have lost touch with how land is managed on a daily basis: “Decisions about land use are often made via computers from air-conditioned buildings.” He adds that farmers, who work closely with the land, are under pressure to produce as much as they can per acre so cannot always take care of the land and environment in the way that, were this an ideal world, they would. “I think we should be aware that farmers manage water for us, because it’s not in rivers and lakes where water quality can be enhanced. We can try to store it in rivers but the water we use comes from large surfaces, and large surfaces are managed mostly by farmers.”
Each of us can choose to assume responsibility for the water that traverses our path, says Kravcík. He envisions cities in which local groups organize water cooperatives and every home has a rain garden. On the municipal level, he says infrastructure resources need to shift from gutters and gullies to watersheds and catchments. He touts the potential of terraces, contoured barrages, stone canals, rock terraces, log structures, earthen bunds: Vehicles for water conservation are many and varied, and generally low-cost. “If you live in a house [depending on where you are], in one year 100 cubic meters of rain might fall from your roof,” he says. “Say your house is 100 years old—that would be 10,000 cubic meters of water lost over a century. Then take millions of houses around the globe and you can easily calculate just how much water is lost from the cycle. We need more water in the small water cycle. It doesn’t matter if it’s as water or in clouds, as long as it’s in the system.”
The biggest challenge, he says, seems to be nudging the public away from greenhouse gas myopia. “People keep focusing on the negative, the seemingly impossible task of slowing CO2 emissions from industry. I tell people, fixing the climate is not about lowering CO2 but about raising H2O in the atmosphere,” says Kravcík. “We have to look at the physical behavior of energy on planet earth. When we do, we see the important role played by water. I will continue to share this information with people around the world, and eventually this will have an effect.”
For his part, Pokorný laments that this still feels like an uphill battle. “I’m a scientist by breeding,” he says. “There are scientists out there much smarter than me who say, ‘I believe you are right, but I can’t imagine that everyone else who’s focused on CO2 is wrong.’ I grew up under communism. Communism runs on the assumption that if everybody says so, it must be true. It’s very easy and comfortable to make a mistake with the majority.” He suggests that one reason behind the continual emphasis on greenhouse gases is the ease of measurement. “We look at concentrations of CO2 and methane in part because we are able to model it. It is not easy to measure and describe the physical processes of ice, water and vapor and their dynamic in the atmosphere, or the processes in the soil that serve to equalize temperature.”
The physics and chemistry that underlie water–soil–climate dynamics may be complex, but the prescription that rings through Water for the Recovery of the Planet is simple: We need to saturate the small water cycle through conserving rainwater on land. “Many civilizations have done water harvesting,” says Pokorný. “Everyone who has a yard or garden can do it. Local governments should be doing this too. If we continue to do what we do now—drain land and remove vegetation—we will desiccate our countries.”
Kravcík says, “By retaining the water that we are now sending out to sea, we can change dried-out landscapes to fertile green landscapes again. If land is in good condition, that reserved water will recharge soil and water will infiltrate from underground. The system will produce vegetation, and we’ll start to recover the whole ecosystem.” Now buoyed by his own optimism, Kravcˇ ík’s painterly side comes to the fore: “You can think of the sun as yellow and water as blue. Together the sun and water make green, which is nature. This is how we make a green landscape. We prime the small water cycle: evaporation takes water up and condensation brings it down. Every drop of water is key to our recovery.” He alerts me to a favorite quote, from King Parakramabahu the Great of Sri Lanka in the twelfth century: “Not a single raindrop should be allowed to flow into the sea without first having been used for the benefit of the people.” It is hard not to get swept up in Kravcˇ ík’s enthusiasm. But whatever the relative climate impacts of CO2 versus water cycle disruptions turn out to be, it seems clear that land–water dynamics have not been fairly assessed. And that we could be better using our water—and doing so could only benefit our ecosystems and well-being.
As a result of People and Water’s efforts in conjunction with governmental programs, people in Slovakia are motivated. “In the last eight months, more than 18,000 small water holdings have been built,” says Kravcík. “This creates a lot of jobs for poor people, so there are social and economic benefits too.” In 2011, the building of retention structures in communities throughout Slovakia employed seventy-seven hundred people, most of whom had been unemployed.
In south-central Portugal, the Alentejo, an effort to restore water function has been under way since 2007. The area is desertifying, with long rainless periods broken by heavy, damaging downpours—the classic brittle landscape scenario—and rampant fires. The iconic cork oak trees are failing from disease. Tamera, a research and training center for peace and habitat restoration in the town of Colos, has, with the guidance of Austrian farmer and permaculturist Sepp Holzer, redesigned its landscape around water-retaining systems. According to Bernd Walter Mueller, a German national involved in the project, out of one containment basin has emerged New South Lake (otherwise known as “Lake 1”). Here, some ninety-three species of birds have been recorded, including many seen only in water-filled landscapes, and the terraces at the shore have yielded an edible landscape with herbs and newly planted fruit trees. Mueller writes: “Many people who visit Tamera for the first time cannot believe at first that it is anything other than a natural lake.”
Recently, Kravcík and several colleagues traveled to South Dakota to consult with members of the Cheyenne River Reservation Tribe on a proposal to apply federal compensation funds to implementing the Blue Alternative on tribal lands. The idea would be to build small dams and weirs and assorted catchments along the Cheyenne’s rivulets and meanders to capture rainwater for drinking and allow rain to soak into the soil. Tribal elder Candace Ducheneaux told Indianz.com, an Internet news source from a Native American perspective: “Cheyenne River Reservation’s clean water sources have been destroyed through poor water management. Most significantly, the damming of the Missouri River at the Oahe Dam.” Largely due to limited water sources, the reservation has had a severe housing shortage and the land is desertifying. In the Lakota Country Times, Ducheneaux attributes the high rates of usually rare diseases—“off the charts,” she says—to toxins in the water, in part from mine tailings (gold and uranium) and industrial waste. The Cheyenne River is on the route of the proposed Transcanada Keystone XL Pipeline. In spring 2012, members of the Lakota Nation went on a forty-eight-hour hunger strike to oppose the pipeline and its effect on tribal ancestral lands and water sources. Not only does such a pipeline present the risk of spills—the present Keystone XL had fourteen spills on US land in 2010, its first year of operation—but the oil extraction process uses and potentially contaminates drinking water from Canada’s boreal forest and poses a threat to land and water sources along its path.
Here, as with all Kravcˇ ík’s projects, the flow of water is not just a desired outcome, but a tool for ecological change. “We need to work with the elements and the energy we have on the earth,” he says. “We have sun, carbon and water. We have dynamic processes of using and storing energy. Now, we cannot change the sun and we cannot change the carbon cycle. But we have a tremendous opportunity to alter the water cycle by returning water to the system.”
Old Water Paradigm Versus New Water Paradigm
(Adapted from Water for the Recovery of the Climate: A New Water Paradigm by M. Kravčík, J. Pokorný, J. Kohutiar, M. Kováč, E. Tóth)
OLD: The water on land does not influence global warming, which is caused by the growth in the volume of greenhouse gases produced by human activity.
NEW: An important factor in global warming may be the change in the water cycle caused by the drying and subsequent warming of continents through human activity.
OLD: The object of research is the impact of global warming on the water cycle.
NEW: A topic worth researching is the impact that changes in the water cycle have on global warming.
OLD: Urbanization, industrialization, and economic exploitation of a country have minimal impact on the water cycle.
NEW: Urbanization, industrialization, and economic exploitation of a country— affecting more than 40 percent of the world’s landmass—have a fundamental impact on the water cycle.
OLD: The impact of humanity on the water cycle is negligible and cannot be reversed by human activity.
NEW: The impact of humanity on the water cycle is at present considerable, and its changes can go in both directions.
OLD: The reason for extreme weather events is global warming.
NEW: The reason for extreme weather events is changes in the water cycle.
OLD: Rising ocean levels are a result of melting glaciers.
NEW: Rising ocean levels are a result of melting glaciers on land, but also of a decrease in soil moisture and groundwater levels, as this water flows to the sea.
OLD: The main source and reserve of fresh water is surface water, in lakes and rivers.
NEW: The main source and reserve of fresh water is groundwater: water in the soil.
OLD: Water is used only once and for one purpose and then is sluiced away.
NEW: Water can be used for many purposes, then purified and recycled.