2023 in watery review

water web, biodiversity & climate, swales, water principles, floods, wildfires, scaling, animals & rain, soil sponge, thermodynamics, slow water

One of my favorite essays I wrote this year was “The web of water” which described the feedback loops between vegetation, animals, fungi, and the water cycle. “A food web is the set of paths of nutrients in an ecosystem, a map of what is eating what. A water web would include the food web and also the ways the different organisms are interacting with the water cycle.” Animals, especially keystone species, can have an outsize effect on vegetation. Because that vegetation then affects precipitation recycling (aka small water cycle), animals can affect the rain. That rain then affects vegetation and animals, creating a feedback loop.

(Figure note: Moisture hopping is water traversing the continent through the small water cycle/precipitation recycling loop)

It would be interesting to do some hydroclimate modelling that quantifies the impact animals have on the rain.

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A theme for me this year was bridging the eco-restoration world with the academic research world. In the eco-restoration/permaculture/regen-agriculture world there is talk about the small water cycle, and the role vegetation and soil plays in helping create rain. When I delved into the academic literature, I found that there was, and is, also much scientific research being done on this topic under the name precipitation recycling. A lot of this research hasn’t made its way into the eco-restoration world. After poring over more than a hundred precipitation recycling papers, I wrote the two essays “The quest to figure out the origin. Part I” and “The quest to figure out the origin of rain: weather in digital worlds. Part II”, which are an exploration of the historical development of the idea of precipitation recycling, and its key ideas.

I was very surprised to discover that Sykuro Manabe, who won the Nobel Prize for his carbon greenhouse model that kick-started the modern climate movement, also did key work on precipitation recycling in the 1970s and 80s. When he added soil to climate models, he found that simulations with more absorbent soils led to more rain, because the landscape then had more water to evapotranspire. Rain would moisture hop across continents over a period of weeks to months.

The Dutch hydrologists Ruud Van Der Ent and Hubert Savenije made maps of the small water cycle/preciptiation recycling which show where and how much on a continent, vegetation and soils are evapotranspiring, and where the water then comes back down as precipitation. This work deserves to be more widely known. (see the latter section of part II for a discussion of their work)

The climate scientists Jessica Keune and Diego Miralles describe how countries can form watershed precipitation recycling networks to help govern and make accords, based on the understanding that land use in one country affects rain in another. (see the latter section of part II for more info their work). These networks are an acupoint, a Buckminter Fuller trim-tab, that if we focus on, could have an outsize impact; its something the environmental and climate movement can help foster the growth of. Maybe there are people reading this newsletter who could help take this water precipitation recycling network project to the next level.

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The essay “Possible states the earth can evolve to” explores the work of climate scientist Martin Claussen who coupled climate models with biome evolution models. He found that there are different states the ecosystem can evolve to. In a bio-region, more vegetation leads to more rain, which then leads to more vegetation. There is also the alternative scenario where less vegetation, leads to less rain, which then leads to less vegetation. These are distinct attractor states.

The essay explores how different bio-regions are coupled together. “We can think of a bioregion as being in certain metastable states. Each bioregion is also correlated with other bioregions through the hydrological cycle, energy fluxes, and atmospheric circulations. For a group of bioregions to flip to another more stable metastable state takes much longer…….In this multiscale view of our ecosystem, we have tipping points on many size scales. There are bioregional, continental, and global tipping points. A tipping point is what takes a system from one metastable state to another.”

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In 2021 I was inspired by what the Natural Step project had done to accelerate the sustainability movement. In the 1980s they brought together many scientists and environmentalists to come up with a set of four sustainability principles that everyone could agree with, with which then then built an education program around, that impacted a wide diaspora of businesses, organizations and governments. I wanted to do the same for the field of water. At the end of 2021 I organized a group to try and figure out a foundational set of water principles. We met about ten times, and came up with some possible axioms. But I felt that we were not quite ready to fully tackle this project. This year, I revisited the project, and came up with a possible set of water principles. There’s still a bit of work to have the principles evolve to a collectively agreed upon form, and I still have more to learn about the hydrological cycle.

This upcoming year is a good time for the next stage of this project. Anyone out there, interested in taking the lead on this project, and facilitating a collective of hydrologists, atmospheric scientists, ecologists, environmentalists, and eco-restoration-ists to come up with a set of water principles that is collectively agreed upon?

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“Biodiversity regulates climate - Part I: Adventures in Daisyworld” explores the work of James Lovelock who originated the Gaia hypothesis. He created a simplifed planet simulation called Daisyworld with black and white daisies that helped regulate the planet’s temperature. He then added herbivores and apex predators into the model, and found that they also helped the regulation of the planet’s temperature.

Part II and Part III of the essay series looks at the ideas of nonequilibrium thermodynamics applied to ecology and climate. It explores how the the earth can evolve to a state that is more self-organizing and self-regulating.

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California had floods earlier this year. Heres a look at nature-based solutions to lessening flooding. “California flooding : a water principles perspective”. I had also previously interviewed professor Helen Dahlke from University of California, Davis who had discussed how we could store excess flood waters in the aquifers.

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In the book “So simple a beginning: How four principles shape our living world” by Raghuveer Parthasarathy he describes four principles of living systems : 1. self-assembly, 2. regulatory circuits, 3. predictable randomness, and 4. scaling.

The earth embodies a number of these principles, which I touch on in various essays. 1. Self-assembly. “Mystery of converging clouds that cool” discusses how clouds self-organize to form formations over the equatorial ocean area that lead to the area cooling down in a process called convective aggregation.

2. Regulatory circuits are discussed in “The web of water” and “Adventures in Daisyworld”.

3. Predictable randomness is explored in “Possible states the earth can evolve to.” and “How does rain turn into floods? A chaos theory perspective.” .

4. Scaling ideas appear in ‘How does rain turn into floods”, and in “Earth's fractal water distribution system”. Why do the many parts of the water cycle -rain, flooding, droughts, evapotranspiration, cloud cover, exhibit the scaling exponents that they do? How does vegetation affect these scaling laws? High energy physics and condensed matter physics have been revolutionized by renormalization theory, which is a theory about how things scale in physics. Maybe a similar mini-revolution in understanding ecohydroclimatology might happen as we clarify why the water cycle scales the way it does, and why the scaling exponents take the values they do.

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I started drawing a lot of diagrams to explain water this year “Portraits of Water” . I made a rap song with my friend about water called “The Water Tale”

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I got to spend some time in the field this year. At the beginning of th year, I was overseas, and got to see how swales that we had dug on my last trip, had since rehydrated the previously overgrazed and degraded land so that vegetation could flourish once more. In a second town I visited, I surveyed how huge rains had caused the erosion of soil and the unwanted emergence of ravines. I counselled land-owners how to slow the floodwaters to lessen damage. I also witnessed how a community was working to come together, so that once they saw that the problem with one part of the water cycle, like agricultural synthetic fertilizer runoff, could be seen to connect to a problem in another part of the water cycle, like that of coral degradation, they could then work as a connected entity to find systematic solutions - like helping farmers switch to organic farming, and building a marketplace for organic food.

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I had the honor of interviewing some amazing people this year. Here are the podcasts:

“Bread and Museums - Didi Pershouse”. Bread and museums are analogies we came up with to illuminate aspects of water and ecology.

“Halting our drought-fire-flood path to desertification - Zach Weiss. Sculpting and tending the landscape to restore the water cycle.” Zach Weiss discusses the idea that the draining of our continents is a big cause we are having so many wildfires. He also discusses how land degradation intensifies the feedback loop of drought-fire-flood cycle that creates desertification. [These are important ideas, and I think there should be more modelling of this phenomena in the academic community to test these hypotheses, given how important they are if they are correct.]

“India's regenerative water movement - Andrew Millison. The world's largest permaculture project.” He discusses how locals have documented how rain has returned through eco-restoration efforts.

“Cows, chickens, microbes,& fungi: How to turn deserts into grasslands - Rodger Savory. The biological carpet ingredients”

“Beavers, biology,& slow water - Brock Dolman.” Interview with the originator of the "Slow it, sink it, spread it, store it, share it" phrase

“Biotic Pump - Anastasia Makarieva.” How condensation of water vapor can generate winds that bring rain

“Charles Eisenstein: Water and the Living Earth.” An interview about water as life, and water's many roles in creating a healthy ecosystem and climate

“Regreening the Sinai: Ties Van der Hoeven”. A vast lake, land, and climate regeneration project

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One of my themes for this year, and for the next, is to help bridge the eco-world with academia. I think there is much to be gained as these connections deepen. There are a lot of important papers in atmospheric science and ecology that deserve more attention outside the ivory tower, and which can be used to guide on-the-ground actions. For instance there is much important research on how vegetation and precipitation recycling affects various weather phenomena like El-Nino, droughts, heat waves and floods that the eco-world should know about, that has consequences for how we use our land. At the same time, there are insights and hypotheses from the eco-world that deserve more academic exploration to see how true they are, like Sepp Holzer’s and Zach Weiss’s thesis that the draining of our continents are a major cause of wildfires. Or the thesis that land degradation intensifies the drought-fire-flood cycle, and can lead to desertification. Eco-climate modelling could help quantify animals impact on vegetation, and how that vegetation change then impacts rain. One of the ways we can bridge the eco-world and academia is with organizations that have people from both demographics.

Another way to bridge the divide is for the layperson to be more savvy and knowledgable about academic research. One way to do this is to use AI - for instance you can ask elicit.com questions like “How does groundwater affect wildfires?”, and it will search the scientific literature for answers for you . You can also go on Google Scholar and type in key words or look for review articles. To find papers you can type the doi number into sci-hub.ru . The abstract and conclusion of papers give you a summary. The introduction gives you a brief history and explanations of key concepts. You can then look up references to earlier papers which often explain basic concepts in more detail, and give motivations for how a field of knowledge developed. You can still build your understanding even if you skip over math you can’t do. You can also use Youtube, Wikipedia, ChatGPT, and online textbooks to teach yourself basic concepts.

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I am curious to know what people think are some of the big questions that are out there to answer about water, ecology and climate. Maybe some essays can tackle this next year.

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