These days you don’t have to look far to find crises. “Natural” disasters that were once rare, are happening more frequently, with increasingly severe results. This is not how things have to be, in fact there is nothing natural about these disasters - they are rather the direct result of water and land miss-management. What management you might ask? Draining the water away from the land, draining and developing the wetlands, disconnecting waterways from their floodplains, destroying the forests, and paving over the earth just to name a few. These actions all disrupt, damage, and degrade the water cycle. The natural consequence to such actions is flood, then followed by drought and fire. Human activity is damaging the Earth’s organs, the ecosystems that regulate our climate.

How widespread have such actions been? Over the last 10,000 years human activity has desertified ⅓ of earth’s land. How did this happen? How could such a relatively small organism create such a tremendous difference? Around 12,000 years ago in the Middle East humans domesticated the ox and invented the plow. With these two inventions extractive agriculture began. For the first time humans had a powerful ability to change the vegetative cover of the earth on a large scale, and keep it changed. This technology spread around the world leaving deserts in its wake - the Middle East, Northern Africa, the Tibetan plateau, the North American West, Australia. But destruction is only part of the human story, we also have a tremendous ability to restore, regenerate, and revitalize. We have a choice to create Desert or Rainforest.

The natural water cycle, the Full Water Cycle, is balanced and productive. For every ecosystem on Earth increasing interconnectedness results in increasing productivity. This results in a balanced and stable climate. The full water cycle is increasingly disrupted, leading to the Watershed Death Spiral. In this cycle flood, drought, and fire all intensify as the climate becomes increasingly extreme and erratic. We can reverse this cycle, and lead ourselves back towards the full water cycle, by Reviving the Water Cycle. This starts a flywheel of productivity, leading to prosperity and peace. Humans have disrupted the water cycle, but we can also catalyze its restoration by partnering with nature and working for water.

We can rebalance the Earth’s water budget through Decentralized Water Retention Landscapes. By creating space for water, establishing diverse vegetation, treating our waters and soils with care and respect, we can restore the health of our planet. This has been done all over the world. Our 10 Heroes of Water show some of our favorite examples, but there are many, many more. Our 9 Ways to Reverse Drought, Revive Rivers, and Reduce Flood and Fire, are just some of the many ways this work can be accomplished.

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My plea to you is this, help rehydrate the earth’s body with blood. Hold water within the landscape, not just for you and your children, but for life. For water is life. Stand up, for yourself, for our co-living beings, the organisms with which we share this planet.

A future of extreme climate, disaster, scarcity, and crisis, or a future of balance, abundance, health and prosperity - it’s not a matter of chance, but rather a choice. So my question to you is simple - which future will you help create?