The nature of water—its ontology—shapes how we ought to relate to it. It’s important we find the right perspective from which to see it. If we view it as an object, like a table or a spoon, something we own, then we impose a form of ownership that distorts its true nature. For water is not an object like those things. It is something that passes through us—through our bodies, through our gardens, through our cities. It is a process, a flow. Water is not just a noun, a quantity. It is a verb, a behavior. A certain amount of water blows in from the ocean, rains, and flows back out. But that same water could, after raining, be recycled up again to fall a second time. In doing so, it can fertilize twice as much vegetation. It's not only the amount, the noun, that matters, but also its flowing, the verb. This reframes scarcity. Circulation is key. The same amount of water, circulated through more vegetation, can support more vegetation. The same water, circulated through more animals, supports more animals. Shifting to a verb-based metaphysics takes us from a zero-sum water management game to a non-zero-sum game. Water can multiply if it’s a verb. We don't just have to divvy up the water on the ground or make it last longer—we can also cause it to rise into the air and cycle around as rain. Especially dry-season rain, when it’s most needed. It's a transport system in the sky, powered by sunlight. Vegetation plays a central role in the water dance. Plants and trees don’t just respond to water—they influence its cycling. This relationship is symbiotic: vegetation affects the water cycle, and the water cycle affects vegetation. But there’s more. Evolution enters the picture. Water does not evolve, but vegetation does. Over billions of years, life on land has adapted not only to survive, but to shape hydrological dynamics. Before life, rain simply ran off into the oceans. But with the arrival of plants, vegetation may have begun to manage rainfall, by how they transpire water, and by what biological matter is released into the air to seed clouds. Water and vegetation come into being through their mutual becoming. Evolution has weaved them tightly together. The seasonal and daily rhythms of stomata opening are conditioned by their iterated ecosystem relationships over millions of years. The transpiration could be timed. Both the atmospheric scientist Rong Fu, and independently physicists Makarieva and Gorshkov, have proposed that the Amazon forest transpires more water a month or two earlier to change atmospheric circulation patterns and bring in more ocean moisture to create rain. Vegetation, according to these researchers, learned to choreograph the flow of water. When we recognize vegetation, soil, and water’s self-organizing dance, we shift our thinking from being masters to participants in a distributed regulatory system. We move from grey infrastructure towards green infrastructure. We begin to understand that nature has its own control system. A system with deeper wisdom, multifunctional and distributed, with far more complexity and the ability to deal with fluctuation, perturbation, and to adjust and adapt itself. By stewarding vegetation, we are stewarding the water cycle and the climate. A tree is a node in the water network, a traffic controller, guiding the emergence of a complex system. It shifts water between three levels: aquifer, land, and atmosphere. By tending the soil, we are tending the water cycle. Restoring the soil improves nutrients, increases sponge capacity, and enhances its ability to hold and filter rain. The soil is a living community, an ecohydrological record—past rains and droughts stored in its constitution. Similarly, the floodplains—by restoring them, as Seattle is doing by buying back homes next to rivers, or as China is doing through sponge city projects—become part of a participatory hydrology. The deconstruction and depaving become both symbolic and needed acts of repairing our relationship with the water cycle. Water scarcity is often the result of broken feedback loops and the loss of landscape memory—the loss of a land’s ability to retain and recycle water. The new water stewardship is repairing the feedback loops. It shifts from being mainly a centralized bureaucratic one, towards bioregional community stewardship and distributed ecological acts. The water cycle emerges from a council of the ecosystem’s parts; each part holding a multiplicity of roles. The way water nourishes life on earth becomes once more significantly mediated by trees and soil, floodplains and beaver dams, wetlands and grass, bacteria and fungal spores, aquifers and tree roots. You're currently a free subscriber to Climate Water Project. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. © 2025 Alpha Lo |