Rivers of land and sky: project restoration

Towards a global plan for the restoration of atmospheric circulation of water

Restoring Rivers of the Land

I recently came upon this scene of a river bed scattered with logs like fallen soldiers on a group trip. What was going on in this mess? It turned out to be a restoration site, and those logs were an integral part of the restoration plan, placed to slow the river’s rush and remind it how to meander, how to braid itself into the complex tapestry it once was.

[This is the scene I saw. There are piles of logs laying on this river bed. Some of the river is flowing at top of photo just out of sight]

We’ve grown accustomed to rivers as straight lines, channels carved for our convenience. But rivers, like stories, are meant to wander. In their natural state, they braid and weave across the landscape, creating channel bars in the middle and a complexity of habitat that supports countless lives. Trees fall and some find their way into streams and rivers, where they become gathering places for other logs, creating jams that birth new habitats for aquatic communities. Wild rivers naturally are full of logs.

Here in the Western United States, our rivers have been channelized and straightened, their complexity erased. It’s a familiar story repeated around the world - water forced into submission, wildness tamed into utility. But these simplified channels carry more than just water; they carry debris and pollution downstream at speeds that overwhelm the natural systems meant to filter and cleanse.

A city in Oregon faced this reality and made a choice that speaks to ancient wisdom: instead of spending millions to clean polluted water downstream, they decided to work upstream in the forests, to restore the river itself. That’s the project I was looking at. Here, in the restored meanders and braids, water slows and settles. The multiple channels create a living laboratory of purification: deep pools where sediment drops to the bottom, trapping pollutants in the quiet water. Side channels and backwaters become wetland sanctuaries where cattails, sedges, and other water-loving plants extend their roots into the flow, pulling excess nutrients from the water while providing habitat for countless small lives.

In these calmer braids, wetland plants work in partnership with microbial communities - invisible but essential partners in the cleansing process. The bacteria and other microorganisms transform nitrogen compounds through nitrification and denitrification, literally breathing pollutants out of the water and releasing harmless nitrogen gas to the atmosphere. What appears as simple plant growth is actually a complex biological factory where roots, microbes, and chemistry collaborate to purify each drop.

I was looking at a collaboration between human intention and natural intelligence, played out across multiple scales. When a river is restored, in the hyporheic zone - defined as where surface water mingles with groundwater beneath the streambed - the river’s microbiome helps cleanse sediment grain by grain. Above, the braided channels provide the time and space needed for these cleaning processes to unfold. Water that once rushed past pollutants now lingers in pools and meanders, giving the living systems enough time to transform contamination into clarity.

Walking further upstream to a restoration site that had been growing for a year, I saw a cool sight. A year ago, this place had looked exactly like the messy site I’d first witnessed downstream = raw, scattered with logs. But that log mess had been the necessary first step in healing. The disturbance there broke up compacted soils, created varied topography for different plant communities, and gave the river permission to find new pathways.

[the restored river area - we saw chinook salmon nesting on the other side of those logs. What you see here is one braid of the larger river. The weeds at the top of the picture are growing on a channel bar.]

At the restoration site, I stepped through tall grass into what I thought was solid ground. My foot plunged through into mud, wetting my jeans and shoe - the wetland reclaiming its rightful space. Bare soil had sprouted sedges and rushes, and the harsh edges of construction had softened into the gentle curves of a living system.

We clambered over logs where water from the main river was creating a side stream, a quieter braid with clear, beautiful water. We stared in awe: chinook salmon, their bellies brushing the bottom as they created their redds - rings of stones where they would lay their eggs, continuing a cycle older than memory. The fish had returned not despite the initial disturbance, but because of it.

It has taken time for ecologists and hydrologists to piece together these nature-based solutions. Through the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, hydrologists promoted channelization, treating rivers as mere conveyances divorced from the living systems they nourished. Only near the century’s end did nature-based solutions enter hydrology, informed by conversations hydrologists were having with indigenous peoples and regenerative practioners. They began to research the complex, symbiotic relationship between ecology and hydrology.

Even now, we’re still learning how exactly one goes about restoration - how to midwife a river back to health, how to read the land’s own instructions for healing.

Restoring Rivers of the Sky

This earthbound learning mirrors a greater challenge: if we’re at a twentieth-century level of understanding how to restore the rivers of the land, we’re only now beginning to grasp how to restore the rivers of the sky. Just as river channels had to be roughened with logs to reintroduce meanders, our simplified climate models are beginning to be re-braided with complexity as we rediscover the role of vegetation, soils, and small water cycles.

Think of it this way: if water flows across the land in rivers we can see, then for balance to exist, similar amounts must be flowing overhead from ocean to land - invisible rivers carrying the sky’s cargo of moisture. At times, these aerial flows converge into wide rivers of vapor. There can be Amazon-river-scale volumes flowing through the sky above us. Because this circulation is invisible, we forget it exists. It becomes the forgotten dimension of water management.

On the ground, restoration began when we learned to work upstream instead of just cleaning downstream water. The same principle applies above: to restore dependable rainfall downstream, we must tend the “upstream” forests, wetlands, and soils that feed the sky. In South America, scientists like Eneas Salati first found experimental evidence of forests creating rain and coined the term “flying rivers” to describe the Amazon’s aerial gift to distant lands. The Congo rainforest similarly supplies rain to other African countries - one vast circulation system pulsing moisture across continents.

The circulatory metaphor makes the connections clear: if you need blood flowing to many parts of your body, you wouldn’t want to cut off circulation in any one area. Just as blood circulation can be affected by diet or hormones, with one action rippling through the entire system, the Earth’s water circulation connects distant places in ways we’re only beginning to understand.

The Oregon city that restored upstream meanders offers a miniature of this global lesson: slow water, and you allow ecosystems to do the cleansing work. Slow transpiration decline - by protecting forests - and you allow the atmosphere to do its cycling work. Both depend on time and space for living systems to interact with water, whether in a hyporheic zone or in the canopy boundary layer. Just as to restore the quality of the water in an Oregon city, we have to work to restore the river much further upstream, so to restore rain in one state or one country, we may have to restore the atmospheric river much further upwind in other countries.

We’re used to thinking about restoration as local work benefiting local places. But healing one ecosystem or one watershed can impact other countries, other continents. The restoration of salmon runs can restore forests through the nutrients fish carry upstream. Those forests can then affect moisture flows a thousand miles downwind. Restoring beavers restores wetlands and forests, which can influence rain patterns on distant continents. The restoration of local land-based rivers will aid in the restoration of global atmospheric rivers.

Certain areas emerge as particularly crucial in figuring out how to restore the global atmospheric water cycle: the Amazon, Congo, and Indonesian rainforests, along with the boreal forests in Russia and Canada. These massive forests function like five Gaian hearts pumping life through the planet’s circulatory system. They influence not just their immediate surroundings but the large scale atmospheric moisture flow patterns.

The continuous, massive amount of moisture transpired by forest doesn’t just add humidity; it fundamentally changes the air pressure dynamics above the canopy. This huge release of moisture and the associated release of latent heat creates a persistent low-pressure zone, which actively pulls moist air inland from the coast. It is the aerial equivalent of how fallen logs create eddies and side channels that draw water sideways into new paths. Forests are the “large woody debris” of the atmosphere, roughening the flow and diversifying its pathways.

Atmospheric circulation proves more complex than terrestrial rivers. Aerial rivers change direction quickly and can even vanish. A critical driver of these flows is forest transpiration: as trees release vast amounts of moisture, that vapor condenses higher in the atmosphere, releasing latent heat. This heat release provides buoyancy that strengthens rising air currents, which in turn helps power the great circulation cells - the Hadley and Ferrel cells - that move air from the tropics toward the poles and back. The Hadley Cell, for instance, is a colossal conveyor belt: warm, moist air rises at the equator, creating the tropics, then travels poleward and sinks near 30° latitude, creating the great deserts. The Ferrel Cell operates in the mid-latitudes, acting like a planetary gear that transfers energy poleward. At the boundaries between these circulation cells form the jet streams - fast-moving rivers of air that steer weather across continents.

[Forest transpiration plays a role in determining how fast and wide the Hadley and Ferrel cells flow]

When forests transpire less - whether due to deforestation or drought - the balance of energy and moisture in the atmosphere is disrupted. With weaker latent heat release, the major circulation cells can lose strength, causing jet streams to slow and meander, like tired rivers unable to hold their course. These exaggerated bends, called Rossby waves, can stall in place, locking weather patterns for weeks or months and triggering climate whiplash - such as prolonged droughts in California or unprecedented winter freezes in Texas. Large-scale land-use change - deforestation, industrial agriculture, urbanization - further alters surface energy and roughness, creating planetary “bumps” that can anchor or intensify these wave patterns. In this way, local land management decisions propagate across entire hemispheres. American agriculture, it turns out, depends on South American forests. And as we research the larger weave of causality, we are starting to get a glimpse o how the vegetation on each of the continents is affected agriculture rainfall on all the other continents.

Dr. Abigail Swann’s pioneering work has illuminated these vast, interwoven relationships, which are termed ecoclimate teleconnections. Her research shows that changes to vegetation in one region - such as planting or losing forests in the mid-latitudes can shift the path of large-scale atmospheric waves, altering rainfall patterns continents away. For example, mid-latitude afforestation can subtly shift the Hadley circulation and thereby change tropical precipitation, sometimes making distant regions wetter or drier. These are not merely local climate effects but planetary reverberations, where the health of a forest in Siberia or North America becomes intimately tied to the water security of South America or Africa.

Researchers like Dr. Roni Avissar have demonstrated through advanced modeling that Amazon deforestation can excite atmospheric Rossby waves that ripple across the globe, reducing rainfall and affecting snowpack as far away as the American Midwest and Sierra Nevada. These studies confirm that healing the land is the most powerful upstream work of all. Restoring forests is not merely an act of biodiversity preservation; it is global plumbing maintenance, ensuring the water circulation essential for stable weather patterns across continents.

Its also key we slow the seeping of water off our continents. Recent research by scientists show that we are losing freshwater off our continents. To counter this, we can slow water; more vegetation, more meandering rivers, more floodplains, richer soil will help with slowing the water, and keep it on the continent. With more water on the continent we can then have more water evapotranspire into the atmospheric moisture plumbing in the sky, which in turn will bring more water to the continent. It is a positive feedback loop that we can activate to bring back water.

The restoration of local small water cycle feedback loops is also key to the restoration of the global atmospheric moisture flow. German ecologist Wilhelm Ripl talked about how just as a body relies on countless small capillaries to regulate its flow, the planet relies on innumerable local water cycles - soils, wetlands, streams, and forests - that keep water circulating close to where it falls. When these “capillaries” are drained, straightened, or sealed beneath pavement, water bypasses the short loops and rushes seaward, weakening the land’s ability to recycle moisture and purify itself. The loss of these small cycles forces dependence on fewer, larger, and less stable long-distance flows, creating a kind of circulatory collapse marked by floods, droughts, and declining water quality. Ripl’s insight reframes restoration as the reweaving of local loops: by rebuilding the fine-grained water networks of the land, we also rebuild the resilience of the atmospheric rivers overhead.

A global plan

Therefore, the challenge of restoring the rivers of the sky is a challenge of massive, coordinated terrestrial restoration. We need a Marshall Plan to restore the global water cycle - an unprecedented international effort that recognizes water circulation as the most critical infrastructure on Earth.

This Global Water Restoration Plan would encompass several major points: first, the urgent conservation and restoration of the world’s five great water pumps - the Amazon, Congo, Indonesian, Russian and Canadian forests - through international treaties that recognize these as global climate utilities deserving of massive investment and protection. Second, restoring large ecosystems and watersheds on all continents, targeting the 2 billion hectares of degraded land worldwide that could be returned to carbon-storing, water-cycling forests and grasslands. Third, implementing continental-scale water retention strategies via slowing water. The slowing of the water provides more land-based water to create rain with. Fourth, the restoration of local small water cycles everywhere, from urban watersheds to agricultural landscapes, recognizing that every restored stream, every replanted forest patch, every regenerated pasture contributes to both local resilience and global atmospheric stability. Fifth, this plan would use advanced climate modeling to diagnose which restoration sites offer the greatest leverage for maintaining stable jet stream flow, prioritizing those areas where terrestrial healing can prevent the atmospheric blocking patterns that create climate whiplash.

Such a plan would not only mitigate climate catastrophe but generate enormous economic returns through climate stability, food security, water security, drought lessening, flood mitigation, and the creation of millions of restoration jobs worldwide. Payment for ecosystem services, carbon markets, and international climate funds could finance this work, transforming environmental restoration from a cost into the most profitable investment in human history.

The whole story, from the braided stream to the vast, pulsing heart of the Amazon, to the atmospheric rivers shows us one simple truth: all the water on Earth is connected. The rivers on the ground and the invisible rivers in the sky are part of the same big beautiful system, that’s intricately connected with our ecosystems. Instead of seeing nature as something to be used up, we can treat it like the most important system we have to keep the water infrastructure of the world running.