On the nature of water and its stewardship

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 doesn’t vanish; it recycles endlessly, going round and round. Tables, spoons, laptops—they have lifespans. They’re made, they serve a function, then they become waste. Water doesn’t follow that trajectory. It doesn’t go away.

So the narrative matters. If we’re to get our legal, economic, and social relationships with water right, we need to tell the right story. Water’s budget doesn’t conform neatly to the idea of scarcity. That framing obscures the real question—because water still moves through the system. It's more like a dance. We don’t control it entirely, but we can nudge it. Guide it into the ground, shift its path.

Maybe it would have become runoff—now it sinks into soil, or finds its way into an aquifer. What matters is how we shape its journey. When we slow water’s flow through the landscape, new dynamics emerge. It has its own calculus, often counterintuitive. Slower flow can mean more water on land—because it takes longer to run off to the ocean. There can be more water or less water on our continent, depending on how we keep it in the landscape.

If it takes more time to blow in as rain, and more time to flow out, then we keep more water on the continent. It wants to be used. Similarly, when it rains and then evaporates, a slower “hopping” speed across the continent increases precipitation recycling. Rain that once rushed from California to the Midwest now lingers, monsoon seasons in India can lengthen by weeks. It spreads the wet season out.

This is about shifting water from wet season to dry season. Water can do this by moving more slowly through the landscape—by sitting in aquifers. Or we can choose to store it in large, centralized reservoirs. That’s the difference: decentralization versus centralization. Complexity theory suggests that decentralized systems—like aquifers—allow water to redistribute more adaptively, responding to where it’s needed. Where its kept can be the difference between vegetation having access to it or not. In reservoirs they do not. Stored underground, if its level is high enough, tree roots can bring it up and hydrate surrounding soil, keeping ecosystems green, protecting landscapes from fire.

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. One hammer as a noun is one hammer. As a verb it can hammer many times. 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.

What we begin to glimpse, then, is water’s ontology. And from that, a subtle practice of stewardship. Do we slow it down, or push it forward? Do we channel it into big surface reservoirs, or nudge it underground? It’s a kind of game. But to play well, we need to understand its momentum, its feedback loops, its nature.

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 UCLA 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.

Likewise, by restoring wetlands, we are restoring the Earth’s capacity to hold memory and manage flow. Wetlands are living buffers—rhizomatic systems that blur the line between land and water, surface and subsurface. They slow, spread, and store rainfall, allowing it to seep into aquifers and rise again when needed. Acting as valves in the hydrological circuit, wetlands modulate extremes, turning stormwater surges into groundwater reserves. Their power lies not in control, but in their capacity for diffusion, connection, and timekeeping—holding water in trust, as a commons for future seasons.

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. The floodplains and wetlands help guide the wet season storms, via their overflow into the aquifers, and tree root upward transport, to turn into dry season rain. Floodplains thus help to dampen flood and drought, softening climate whiplash.

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.