Slow water

The key to healthy regulation of earth's eco and climate systems.

Slow water is a path. Slow water is a clue, a pointer, a key, an injunction to how we can bring earth’s natural systems back to equilibrium. Slow is a directive, an abbreviation of the “slow it, sink it, spread it’ maxim of how we can work with rainfall once it hits land, to help it to infiltrate into the soil. Slowing water helps set off a chain reaction of feedback loops that help regulate the earth system - the small water cycle, the large water cycle, the groundwater-surface water cycle, and the vegetation-evapotranspiration thermostat mechanism. These feedback loops hold solutions to how we lessen droughts, fires, floods, heatwaves, and water scarcity. Slowness is a way to shift away from the fast tracking of water off our continents via the dam-aqueduct-channelization-drainage industrial complex. Slowness is a way that the terrestrial carbon and water cycles can recouple. Slow water is an anthem, a song of eco and climate restoration.

In Al Baydha, Saudia Arabia, where the vegetation had been destroyed by mismanaged grazing and firewood cutting, where rare rains come in flashfloods that problematically rush off the land, villagers have been digging wide shallow swales and building granitoid-rock, traditional Incan check dams to slow the path of the rainfall on the land. The rain can then infiltrate into the land, and help grasses, mycelia, and acacia trees to once again flourish in the region.

In Niger, where the land is arid and sparse, villagers dig demi-lunes, semi-circle swales in the sloped ground, that slow and catch the rainwater. Into these they have been planting sorghum, millet and gao trees which are beginning to revegetate the region.

Each year, in many places in India, after a few months of monsoon rains the droughts come, destroying crops, and leaving villagers without a source of income. So villagers have been digging johads (small ponds) and swales to catch the rain in the monsoon season which is then used to irrigate the crops into the dry season. The ponds also slowly seep the water into aquifers below to replenish them, helping provide more well water. Rivers have been revived as aquifers are able to supply them with water year round. Thousands of villages have been reinvigorated as they learn the art of slowing rainwater.

On the Mississippi, a century of of locals building levees in their area to protect against flood, has led to, unfortunately and counterintuitively, sometimes the river speeding up and bigger floods happening elsewhere on the river. Now some of the levees are getting dismantled, as river engineers realize that a better way to stop floods is by slowing the water, by decelerating it in the floodplains. As one example, in the Louisiana Mississippi basin, 17 miles of levees have been taken down to allow the water to overflow onto the floodplains, and then can slow down, amidst the replanted cypress oak and ash, and the returning waterfowl and wading birds.

Logging along the Yangtze river, and deforestration along the Nenjing and the Songhua rivers, has led to floods in China that have affected 200 million people. With no trees and vegetated landscape upstream to slow or stop the stormwater, the downstream cities are left to absorb the vast liquid influx. To deal with the problem, the government has been reforesting river-side land, and unveiling its sponge city program in 30 pilot cities to soak and slow the stormwaters. Rivers are being recurved and revegetated, so they can slow river water. Rain gardens, road bio-swales and wetlands are being created. People and businesses are being moved off floodplains, and the land depaved, to allow the land to return to its absorbent and water-slowing nature.

Why is slowness so important? Imagine an art museum where a patron walks in every minute. If people walk briskly through the museum the total amount of people in the museum at any one time will be a lot less than if people walk slowly. If people take twenty minutes to walk through, the place will be a lot less packed than if people go slowly, taking two hours to walk through. Now lets make the analogy that the museum is the continent, and people are water. If we slow the rate of the water flow there will then be a lot more water on the continent. A key quantity here is something I call Water Path Time, which is analogous to time spent in a museum. Water Path Time is the average time for water to go into the ocean and then come back out to the ocean. If we can increase this quantity we will have a lot more water on our continents.

Lets look at California through the lens of continental water amount, and water path time. Water flows off the Californian Sierra Nevada mountain ranges, is caught by a plethora of dams, and then funnelled to Central Valley farms and Southern California cities. In Los Angeles and San Diego the water is used and then funnelled through storm drainage and man-made infrastructures. The LA river, channelized with concrete, after the devastating 1938 floods, funnels water quickly out of the area and into the ocean. The water, as it moves from the base of the Sierra Nevadas to the Pacific, is on a fast track. It does not have the lingering time it used to. The patrons are moving too quickly through the museum. California is drying up.

We can take the museum analogy further. People in the museum can walk around twice, doubling their walk path time, resulting in a more packed museum. On a continent water can go around twice or more. It can rain down, evapotranspire back up, and then rain down again, in a process known as the small water cycle. The more the water cycles the more water there is on the continent, just like how the museum will have more people inside the building if more people walk around again. Globally about 65% of our rain comes from the small water cycle, and 35% comes from the large water cycle. The large water cycle is where the ocean vapor blows inland, falls as rain, and then goes back out to the ocean. The amount of water in the small water cycle depends on how we tend to the land. If the land is able to slow the water, and guide it into the vegetation and soil to evapotranspire, then the small water cycle increases, and the amount of water on our continents increases. The small water cycle is nature’s act of recursive genius in terrestrial hydration.

There is also another way for the water to go around in circles. It can sink down into the aquifers, where tree roots bring the water up , where the mycelia then spread the water around the soil, in a process called hydraulic redistribution. In the Amazon tree roots bring the water down low during wet season, then they bring the water back up during the dry season. This is the groundwater-surface water cycle. It is as if there was a basement in the museum, where patrons could go chill for a while, and then come back up to continue looking at the art.

All over the world there are water scarcity crisises, tense water debates, and water-induced political turmoil. Water has been re-allocated, and overallocated; local and national governments are scrambling to make sure their constituents can get water. Increasing the amount of water on the land would help with these issues significantly. To do that we need to slow the movement of the patrons through the museum, and allow them to go around multiple times.

Before the onslaught of dams, aqueducts, pavement, and farm drainage, rainwater would form wetlands all over the Central Valley and Los Angeles, and get absorbed in greater quantities into the Californian wilderness. There was thus more water on the land available to evapotranspire and get blown towards the Sierra Nevadas, where it then came down rain and snow. The amount of water in the small water cycle was larger. Its the equivalent of patrons walking a second time again around the museum.

As a result of all this loss of continental water, there are many more water shortages in California. The wilderness is not as lush and hydrated. Less wetlands means the winds are hotter and drier, creating more wildfire. Less wetlands also means less groundwater, groundwater which supplies forty percent of the states water. Rivers, which depend on aquifers to refill, no longer flow year round. Rain is less as small water cycle decreases.

There are a few signs though that some Californians are beginning to understand the water cycle, and to hear the rhythms of this slow water anthem. A Sustainable Groundwater Management Act has been passed. Los Angeles is starting to regreen its river, unstraighten its length, so the waters flowing down them can help grow the vegetation instead of just rushing out to sea. In Burbank, plans for the Rory Shaw wetlands is unfolding to absorb stormwaters from around the area, cleanse it, and then sink it to aquifers below, where wells can then bring the water up to LA’s residents when needed. LA is working to create a human assisted groundwater-surface water cycle. Half of LA’s residents could get enough water just from rain, if the rain was recycled in this wetland-aquifer systems. If LA can supply its own water, water would not have to be depleted from mountains up north. Other wetlands projects are also in the works. In the Central Valley they are refilling aquifers by creating flooding farms and creating temporary wetlands on them. And there is a small movement to get industrial farms to convert to regenerative agriculture so they better can slow the water.

Slowing water also helps the large water cycle, which is where the oceans vapor blows inland, falls as rain, and then flows back out along rivers to the sea. We need the rivers to be flowing well into the ocean year round, otherwise salt water will intrude onto the continent. If water is guided into the land more, then it flows more slowly underground, and so can come out in dry season to keep the rivers flowing. Many of the USA rivers are channelized and so the water rushes off of them in the wet season, and does not get a chance to stay year round. Allowing rivers to meander again, to form oxbows and curves, helping willows and other trees regrow which slow the waters, reintroducing beavers so they help the rivers overflow laterally into adjacent wetlands, will slow the water so that it can continue moving out all year. It is as if we wanted people coming out of the museum 24 hours a day, and yet patrons only entered during the day.

Another reason it is so important to slow water to increase the amount of water on the continent because plants regulate the heat of the land through water. As it gets hotter the trees and vegetation evapotranspire more water to cool the land, similar to how we sweat to cool. The continent is like a large swamp cooler, which is a simple low tech air conditioner which cools the air by evaporating the water in its container. If the swamp cooler though does not have enough water then it can only cool your room so much. If the continents does not have enough water the ecosystem can cool the continent during heatwaves. We have to allow the natural ecosystem to remain in its natural state to be able to cool the land locally. We have to slow the water to cool the land. Slow water cools.

Forests evapotranspire so much they often create low hanging clouds. These clouds shield the earth from heat. The heat and water equation is complex. Water is also a greenhouse gas, and so can also heat. Research is appearing recently that suggests that the overall effect on the earth from the forest evapotranspiration is a net cooling.

A key actor, perhaps the major actor in the art of slowing water is our soil. As microbes, fungi, and organic multiply they are able to create air pores in the soil, which then allow the soil to absorb a lot more water. For each one percent increase in organic matter in the soil, the soil will be able to absorb 20,000 gallons more water per acre.

Industrial agriculture with its use of pesticides that kill the insects that help make soil by decomposing organic matter, with its use of synthetic fertilizer that destroy the natural food webs in the soil, with its use of tilling that break up the mycelia strands, and with its use of monocropping that destroy the biodiversity, has degraded the soil gradually over decades. With that when the rains come, or when water is piped in from aqueducts it does not stay on the long before its piped to rivers and off the continent. The soil degradation has been increasing the velocity with which water leaves the continent.

A regenerative agriculture movement, with its permaculturists, agroforesters, syntropic agriculturists, silvopasturists, biodynamicists, natural sequence farmers, and indigeous practitioners has been working to restore the soil. To restore the soil carbon sponge, to restore the microbes and fungi to the soil. To understand how ecological succession to more biodiversity which then builds a more complex soil web, as more complex carbon structures are generated, and then also decomposed. Its a cycle, an natural engine that gets more and more efficient at building soil, and slowing water.

There is some subtlety here about the axiom of slowness in regards to large man-made dams. Dams ostensibly slow water at first glance. However there are some caveats to this. On many lands, extreme rainfalls are coming more frequently. When they approach, many dams have to release their water, so they have an appropiate buffer for the large storms. That water then rushes out at high velocity along the river to the ocean. It is as if museum patrons were corralled into one room, and then all of sudden were escorted quickly to the exit. In addition a lot of the water in todays dams is being funnelled to cities who use the water once and then flush it out the ocean, so that water is also fast tracked out. In this case the analogy, is the patrons are kept in one room and then guided to see one painting and then escorted out of the museum. Its easier at this stage of scientific progress to get our water to do one thing, but forget the large picture, that the water is playing many roles all at once, and in trying to engineer our water to do one thing, we throw the whole system out of balance.

Dams are also not in tune with the environment. If the dam water was instead distributed amongst many wetlands, they would be growing vegetation, aiding the microbial, insect and wildlife around the wetlands, and naturally cleansing the water. Dams also change the temperature of the water, and block the flow of fish, like salmon which could otherwise swim upstream, where it then also becomes an important of the ecosystem through being part of the food chain of bears and birds. Mussels which cleanse the water are also inhibited in their growth. And dams block the flow of sediment downstream, where it could have turned into soil which helps the ecosystem flourish.

Complex systems synchorinze through rhythms. If you change it, you can throw off the whole system. If ones heart beats too fast then you start to get lightheaded, shortness of breath, and the organs and tissues may not get enough oxygen. So it is with the geophysiology of the earth. The earth is one interconnected self-regulating system. The water part of its circulatory system. If it has an innate rhythm, an innate velocity, that helps it syncronize with biology, geology, and climatology.

The planet is a self-regulating system with many feedback loops, in a similar way to how the human body regulates itself through its endocrine, neuro, and immuno systems with a multitude of feedback loops. The Gaia hypothesis, first espoused by James Lovelock in the 1970s and subsequently developed by many others, suggested that biology on earth regulated the environment, and created climatological and biochemical conditions that are amenable to life. Organisms created the oxygen in our atmosphere, vegetation evolved in ways that reflected the influence of albedo on climate.

Water forms key feedback loops in the terrestrial regulatory system - the small water cycle, the groundwater-surface water circle, the large water cycle, and vegetation-evapotranspiration thermostat. All these depend on the slowing of the water. The biology, the microbiomes, the fungi, the vegetation, and the fauna can regulate the climate, in a Gaian way, through these feedback loops. If these regulatory systems get weakened, then we get more extreme weather, more drought, more large storms, more floods, and more heatwaves.

Its time for a new and ancient song, the slow water song. The earth’s water has its rhythm, its natural speed. Millions of years of evolution has guided the terrestrial environment and atmosphere to harmonize its water dance. And this water dance happens at a slow tempo, a slower vibration than our out of control modern speed obsessed culture. With the slowing of water, our cities, tense with water scarcity concerns , ever aware of water cleaniless issues, and our ability to lessen droughts, floods, fires, and heat waves increases. Its time for slow water legislation, slow water practitioners, slow water engineers, slow water urban designers to join the indigenous and regenerative agriculturists and permaculturists. Its time for the slow water anthem.