Water is Earth's Blood - The Old and New Water Paradigms to Restore Our Planet's Health
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- čas přidán 22. 05. 2024
- Water is the Blood of Earth. If you draw the analogy between water and blood, the Earth and your own body, you can quickly understand a lot about the water cycle. You can see how the springs, creeks, and rivers mirror our own veins. But it’s not just the water in and on the ground but also in the air, the atmospheric rivers of water vapor that function as the arteries, with the forests as the lungs. Water moves through the Earth’s circulatory system, bringing life to land. Much like our own body, when this system is disrupted, damage and loss is inevitable. When the water cycle is fully functioning we have a healthy environment. This is the Full Water Cycle.
If we look at some of these veins of the Earth, we quickly see how catastrophic recent human impact has been. River systems that used to flow year round now only flow in the rainy season. The Fertile Crescent, the birthplace of agriculture, is now a desert. Without the condensation nuclei the rains have been lost, and humid deserts created. This is the Watershed Death Spiral. The most concerning part is that we’re getting better at it, we’re doing it bigger, better, and faster than ever before.
The Old Water Paradigm
As civilization arose, with poor sanitation and high concentrations, disease became a greater concern. Open water often meant disease, so the landscapes were altered to drain all of the water away. Waterways were dredged for transportation and with the then lower levels the banks were levied. The floodplains were developed making most of the world’s arable soils and cities.
These actions have hardened the landscape and disconnected waters from their floodplains. They have forced the flow to happen all at once, leading to massive flooding. Then because the water wasn’t able to infiltrate into the land, the flood is then followed by massive drought and fire. There are tremendous costs and consequences associated with these actions. We are now seeing these results first hand with catastrophic flood, drought, and fire all around the world leading to famine, refugees, and war.
The New Water Paradigm
What we need now is a New Water Paradigm. We need to move from drainage to retention, exploitation to co-creation. This begins by changing our relationship with water and nature to one of love and respect - understanding that water is sacred, and is a common good for all life on this planet. By holding water in the ground, Decentralized Water Retention Landscapes, the vegetation will return and along with it transpiration and cooling. We need to terrace and revegetate the unused or less used lands, in order to infiltrate more water into the earth. We need to find ways wherever and whenever possible to start offsetting all of the hard surfaces and drainage our ancestors have created.
Right now the conversation about environmental footprint is all about reducing our environmental footprint. I want to have the biggest possible environmental footprint, because I understand that our footprint can be negative, or it can be positive. If we are only focused on having a less negative footprint, we will never have a positive one. So we are using the tools and resources available to us today in order to create a better tomorrow. When done well these natural systems last for generations, even till the next ice age.
How do I know this is possible? Because I have seen it first hand from my mentors and in my own projects. I am eternally grateful to Sepp Holzer, who rewired my brain and showed me what is possible when humans partner with nature, instead of fighting her. He has led people to create paradise from desert. His farm, the Krameterhof, (now run by his son Josef) is the most incredible example of human potential in partnership with nature that I have ever witnessed. On a barren mountainside farm he created paradise, not just for himself but for all of his co-living beings as well.
Then Rajendra Singh showed me what is possible through community action. Together we truly can quickly turn things around. The movement of Community Driven Decentralized Water Retention that he started has brought water back to 250,000 wells, impacting more than a 1 million people - reversing migration. Their work Revived 7 Rivers and reduced the local temperature 2 degrees.
To Learn More, Join Us at Water Stories
Visit our homepage --- www.waterstories.com/
Join the community --- community.waterstories.com/ - Krátké a kreslené filmy
Excellent work Zach and team! The narrative and visualizations are exactly what's needed to understand impacts to the water cycle and the overarching drivers. Thank you so much for producing this and taking action! Now let's get it to go viral and change our unnatural dehydrating ways!
Thank you so much God bless you always
It's one of the most important videos that humanity has to understand.
Thank you for visualising it.
Such an important message. I'm sharing it wherever I can.
Hi Jennifer,are you engineer in sciences agronomy ?
Excellent depiction of the importance of water cycle repair. Sharing!
Thank you! We really need help getting these message out to people.
This is a message that can go far to save us from ourselves. Planners need to know this. Citizens need to act upon this. The Great Plains of the US and Canada were once water sponges - collecting and holding water through the interaction of bison and the prairie perennials whose roots are often twice as thick as a man and perhaps 14 feet long. The soil was like cottage cheese, with topsoil going down many feet, welcoming a huge biodiversity of plants above ground and microbes below ground. Yet in our arrogance we mined all that fertility and with our plows and equipment, destroyed the microbial community in the soil that needed plants, water and air to survive. And we turned the rich prairie soil into dust that swirls into storms that plague America to this day. To ignore it is to invite the cycles of drought, fire and flood into daily life for millions. Will we awaken in time?
Thank you for your insightful presentation. Let us hope that more world leaders will listen to your wisdom. Unfortunately, many are short-sighted only looking for gain and destroying nature and the future. You mentioned the Amazon region. I live in Brazil and am aware of the terrible destruction of the rainforest and hope that this can be stopped before it is too late.
Great presentation
I love you so much for making such an aspiring videos. I've been waiting for such a videos because I couldn't create it. Thank you that you created such a great content videos.
Shared! And I'll share your excellent presentation, Sir, again snd again.
So inspiring !!
We also need to replant areas to bring back the biodiversity that creates the rains in these areas, more plants, trees and shrubs, the more waters produced for the soil sponge :)
Very important! Made sure to share with my family
I love your explain,i'm student in sciences agronomy and environement ,i need increase y knwonledge about soi and water ,i love agriculture.someone Can help me how i Can improve
11:00 The New Water Paradigm doesn’t need to make the entire surface of the earth green from space. There are places like the Namib desert which have been desert for millions of years. However, as you are aware, Zach, the amount of land that has been changed into semi-arid and arid landscapes from human intervention is vast and many disbelieve when they first hear that they were created by human practices.
Thank you for sharing another inspiring video and showing us real examples of what’s possible.
incredible presentation
Hadn´t watched this one yet - what a cool piece, Zach! Thank you!
A lovely artful piece of work Zach. Well done 👍🏻
Absolutely - water is life and it belongs to all of us. Great presentation! Thank you. :-)
Love it! Concise and engaging!
Thank you!
Wow! The "civil courage" to cultivate our landscapes rather than gov't/corporate private monetization of inefficient water use... 🤔
Thank you! You and your team's work is very inspiring! It's amazing how a couple of days of precise work with big machinery can create such profound changes. I hope to participate in one of the courses :)
Our pleasure! we look forward to welcoming you into the course!
Is there data on how much grasslands and other plants contribute to the water cycle? How they impact rain clouds?
Thank you!
This might be a naive question or a really good one. Is it possible to offset the rising sea levels by storing water on land - in water harvesting structures, the ground, and trees?
Great work and so important!
Excellent! Thank you!
Sehr gut
Very Interesthing
Who is the presenter? Great work!
Zach Weiss
In Austria water isn't privatized
you still have to consider the insidious effect of geo engineering imo