Water, Water, Everywhere...

Most of us are concerned with flooding, and fire, so we forget the need for rain. Rain is a hidden need that is directly connected to flooding, but that connection is not obvious. There are two statistics I’d like to share that, for me, are quite frightening: the first is we have lost 2, 620 Gigatons of fresh water from the land, world-wind, in the past 17 years. A gigaton is a billion tons of water. Why is that important?
Water is in basically three places, the ocean, air (clouds, mist), and the soil. Of those three, only water in the soil is useful to humans, and to most of the life we see and value. It is life on land that made humanity possible, and to live on land we need water in the soil. Water in the soil makes plants possible and plants make rain possible, as well as provide food for us, AND the movement of water from the soil, through plants in one big way the temperature of the Earth is managed.
Anastassia Makarieva makes this point in her Substack: “The buffering effect of ecosystems on temperature is tied to how they handle water — both locally through transpiration and at larger scales through the regulation of atmospheric moisture transport (the biotic pump). Yet, water seems to be a prohibited word when discussing the reciprocal links between climate and biodiversity.”
The second is our use of aquifers. A recent article in Popular Mechanics stated, “The study included data from 1993 through 2010, and showed that the pumping of as much as 2,150 gigatons of groundwater has caused a change in the Earth’s tilt of roughly 31.5 inches. The pumping is largely for irrigation and human use, with the groundwater eventually relocating to the oceans.”
Aquifers have taken millions of years to form and in just a very few years, 17 to be exact, we’ve begun to deplete them, and there’s no quick way to restore them. They are restored by water in the soil. Water that needs time to percolate down, being filtered and cleaned as it goes. If we continue as we are, soon all the water will be in the ocean, and life on land will be non-existent, or certainly not as we now know it.
Our casual disregard for water will be our undoing. The good news is that we can shift our impact by ensuring that water stays in the soil. This is something that anyone can do and that all of us need to do. At Soil Smart – Soil Wise, we work with residents to make the soil they have responsibility for water rich. Given the number of people in a city, that can have a significant impact. But this is a huge issue, so making changes at scale is necessary. It is for this reason that we work with cities to rethink what they can do to keep the water they get as rain. Through wise policies and clever incentives, cities can have a quick and deep impact on their local climate, creating cooler environments, throughout the city, because the soil holds water. Cities have another part to play, as well.
Who knew that developers could become climate heroes? In our work, here at Soil Smart-Soil Wise, we have created a team that knows how to heal the Earth by keeping the water we get as rain and working with the sun and wind using solar design, from initial design to finished build, cooling the community it creates. By building Resilient Housing, developers can become a big part of the army fighting climate change while shifting our cities from the hot deathtraps they now are to vibrant, lush communities able to withstand and even help manage the heating temperatures with which we are now dealing.
Nature works with non-linear change, so what happens in cities will impact their region and the rainfall they support will happen up wind. By keeping rain in their soil, cities will create a cooler environment, calling the rain. This is how forest do it, so by replacing forests, using the Miyawaki mini-forest method, they can also replace the missing plant part of this system (the biotic pump) in ways that will benefit the entire region. This is something developers can do, as well, with good resilient design.

Keeping the rain we get though healthy soils ability to hold water, planting, so roots help manage the soil and leaves put water back into the air, designing the land to help water slow, spread and sink, thus replenishing the aquifers, and building to ensure a reduced need for energy we have a recipe for resilience. Heat evaporates water! We need a strategy to keep water in the soil, where it is available for all life on land, where it cools the climate and manages our temperature, and where it has an opportunity to settle down into the aquifers, once again.
These problems seem intractable: drought, fires, flooding, but they are so tightly tied to how water moves on our planet, that WE have an opportunity to make a real difference in practical, measurable terms by simply following nature. If we act as she does and allow her millions of years old design of the biotic pump to rebuild, then we will flourish.