A 2025 review, aqua-ly

groundwater, microbiome regulation, LA wildfires, art of water, multifunctionality, Congo rainforest and Sahel, silvergreen water, water ecology principles, making a global map of moisture recycling

Dec 30, 2025

[Van Gogh painting]

It’s a blessing to have a newsletter that explores the many dimensions of water and its multiple connections to ecology and climate, while engaging with an audience. Thank you for your readership, comments, feedback, and help spreading the word. I am happy that many of you have found it to be an enlightening read. I am gratified that the newsletter seems to be making an impact on many different sectors based on many conversations I have been having.

I began writing in the latter part of 2021, having come from a permaculture and physics background, and while organizing a water networking and education group. I’ve interviewed practitioners and scientists from various areas of the water field, exploring many aspects of the water cycle and how it integrates with ecosystems and climate. One of the key themes throughout has been that we can restore the water cycle, and that this has many positive implications for our planet. I’ve read hundreds of scientific papers in the process of seeking to develop a more comprehensive understanding of water, and I’ve distilled the key findings into the essays featured here. This year, I dove further into academia and have been working to better integrate practitioners and academics.

2025 opened with huge fires in LA, which deeply resonated with me as I had lived there for many years. The recurring fires in California during the 2010s and 2020s were what initially got me into this water field, as I wondered how permaculture solutions might work for the fires. I also wondered why no one seemed to talk about restoring water to the land, instead focusing primarily on fuel reduction by cutting down vegetation. Because Didi Pershouse and Walter Jehne had launched Rehydrate California project a while back, I contacted Didi to do a second podcast together as a dialog - “Lessening LA wildfires: The water solution”. I further explored ideas of restoring the water cycle to lessen wildfires “Taming the hot dry winds that cause wildfires; sponging up freak storms”.

I looked at harmful algae blooms, discussing the work of John Todd, who had pioneered using plants and microbes to clean up lakes and rivers. He facilitated the restoration of the lake’s natural microbiome, which then in turn cleaned up lake toxicity and algae blooms (amazing that these tiny creatures we often forget about are so powerful) : “Bringing our lakes and oceans back to life: how to deal with algae blooms and polluted waters”. This was my first article writing it as a dialog between different people. People seem to enjoy the dialog format.

[Australian aborigine painting of water holes and groundwater]

It was a year of bringing more and more focus to groundwater and exploring various hypothesis of its importance in how it connects with the rest of the water cycle and with the carbon cycle - “The dance of vegetation and groundwater”, “Green water, blue water, silvergreen water, silverblue water”, and “The unsung linchpin : groundwater helps stabilize the climate”. After those articles, I had an interview with John Cherry, a groundwater pioneer, whose groundwater textbook trained a generation of hydrologists. The interview rocked me, and oriented me even more to the importance of groundwater. Here it is in a two part series “The big groundwater crisis - food, water, pollution, and social unrest” and “Groundwater & climate crisis solutions: regenerative ag, rainwater harvesting and interdisciplinary collaborations”. His calculations show 70% of our food depends on groundwater, which makes the widespread depletion of groundwater a major issue we need to be talking about a lot more. It was nice that he was appreciative of all my efforts to build conceptual bridges between groundwater and other aspects of the earth system.

I had a chance to view first hand a river restoration project and and see the salmon in the wild (so cool to see them wiggling thru the water) - “Rivers of land and sky: project restoration”, which also made me ponder analogies to the restoration of atmospheric rivers.

I talked to a lot of interesting people this year. One was Douglas Sheil, who is an ecologist with a hydrological bent : “The forest-water connection”. Our interview became the most downloaded Climate Water Project podcast on this channel.

Stuart Andrews, son of Peter Andrews who had founded Natural Sequence Farming in Australia, a water restoration based approach to farming and land management, came on to discuss the philosophy and techniques of the approach, as well as on carrying on his dad’s legacy - “Natural Sequence Farming”.

I had the honor of interviewing hydrologist Ruud van der Ent. A previous article I had written on his work “Map of the small water cycle”, about precipitation recycling, was one of the most read articles in this newsletter. Our interview : “Making the map of the small water cycle”. Kind of like how after a movie, there is also the making of the movie interview.

I also talked with van der Ent’s scientist colleague, Lan Wang-Erlandsson, who was working on planetary boundaries and the importance of moisture-recycling/small-water-cycle to the planet : “The planetary boundaries of green water”.

The planetary boundaries are a type of negative tipping point. There are also positive tipping points. I had a meeting with eco-oriented folk in October where we discussed building a map of how to ‘nudge’ the global water cycle to positive tipping points.

Hydrologist Sieger Burger and I discussed many aspects of the water cycle in a fun dialog : Plants drink water from the air.

Charlotte Qin paints powerful water paintings and does reciprocal performances where the audience engages in a connection with water. I love performances where the artists gets the audience to participate. As an artist myself I was really happy to chat with her: “The art of water”.

[from Charlotte Qin’s reciprocal performance piece about glaciers melting]

United States Geological Survey’s (USGS) scientist, Laura Norman has been a key person in bridging academia and practitioners. She has worked to quantify how much slowing water impacts the hydrological cycle and ecosystem: “Putting rocks in rivers to lessen drought, fire & flood”

Producer Paul O’Callaghan came on to discuss his movie which looked at many groups from around the world working to restore the water cycle in their country: “Our blue planet”.

The Climate Water Project takes a lot of work to produce. Just like water feedback loops are key to running the global water cycle, the feedback loop of paid subscribers and me writing/interviewing has been an important one in running and growing the Climate Water Project newsletter and podcast. If you have found reading these articles and listening to the podcasts valuable please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Here are some research problems in water to help bridge academia and the world of practitioners : “A research program for hydrology”. Here are some more interesting questions “A more exciting set of unsolved problems of hydrology”

I asked Ali Bin Shahid if he might be able to calculate the biotic pump effect, and that got us engaged with looking at the problem, and seeing if we might be able to contribute further to its understanding. I wrote The Mystery of the Biotic Pump that rotated the wrong way, and he wrote some articles too.

A different paradigm was posited in “Is the earth microbiome regulating the climate?”, an article which a lot of people liked. One of the way science advances is by positing bold hypothesis, and then going about testing them. This was my boldest hypothesis of the year.

I wrote about viewing the earth as a coupled system “The coupled planet: how forests, groundwater, rain, & climate shape each other. A complex systems approach”, and thru a group theory approach “The algebra of the earth that reveals its multifunctional genius”

The Water Ecology Principles , a distillation of the many aspects of the eco-hydro-climatological system, was a hit with quite a few people.

A more philosphical essay “On the nature of water and its stewardship”, that came during a time I was reading about critical philosophers like Foucault.

I peered at rain moving around the world and noticed something curious. I wrote about it in “An intriguing behavior of global rain”.

And the most popular article this year, based on the question a lot of people were asking was “How much land do we have to restore to bring back the rain?”. In it, I distilled the research of a lot of different scientists, and observations of many on this topic. One of the most enlightening research studies (which most people don’t know about) was done by atmospheric scientists Ronny Meier and company, who tracked 7x11km neighboring cells in Europe that differed by more than 20% vegetation, and found that more vegetation meant noticeably more rain, which indicates eco-restoration on the range of 7x11km range of in climates like Europe could impact rain.

.Two years ago Nick Steiner, of Water Stories, and I discussed how we didn’t really see anyone much on social media discussing restoring the water cycle, but felt the world was about to wake up to this soon. Then last year we saw an explosion of interest as a lot of people started talking about these issues. The small water cycle and precipitation recycling became a topic of interest, as well as many other aspects like rain infiltration, slow water, the drought-fire-flood cycle, bioaerosols, and the soil sponge.

This year I saw a lot of leaders in different sectors like insurance, governance, banking, and philantropy began to get curious about topics like how we might restore water cycles to help ensure the future of our planet, and what role they might play to help. There is momentum building. I sense we are going to phase transition to another stage. 2026 is going to be an exciting one!

Climate Water Project

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