 One thing I discovered in my research is that many of the things that are blamed on global warming or blamed on greenhouse gases are actually, at least to a large extent, caused by disruptions in the hydrological cycle, disruptions to water, especially floods and droughts, but also even rising temperatures. So for one thing, water vapor is the dominant greenhouse gas on earth, but its effects are a lot harder to model because for one thing it's not globally distributed in a relatively uniform way as carbon is. Some areas there's a lot of it, some of the areas there's not very much, and also the effect on temperature that water has depends on the form that it's in. If it's haze, then it has a warming effect because it's a greenhouse gas, but when it forms clouds, it has a cooling effect, especially during the day. At night, it actually has a little bit of a warming effect. It also depends on how high the clouds are. So this is really hard to model, therefore it is not very effectively modeled. Even making it even harder is that the formation of clouds is influenced by life. Cloud formation is ceded by aromatic chemicals that are given off by plants and ceded by bacteria that have isonucleating proteins on them that allow clouds to form at a lower altitude, which means that they have a stronger cooling effect if they're at a lower altitude. So when you look at the world through the lens of water, it gives birth to a different set of priorities than looking at the world through the lens of carbon, although there is actually a large area of intersection because the best way to heal water is through soil and forest. And wetlands and some other ecosystems too, but mostly I'll concentrate on soil and forests. In a healthy system, the water cycle is as follows. The rain falls on the earth, and it is soaked up completely with almost no runoff because healthy soil is like a sponge. It's penetrated, it's very thick or is covered with layers of leaf litter and plants. It's penetrated by mycelia, by roots and mycorrhizae and earthworms and animals. And so the rain comes and it soaks down, down, down, down. Some of it stays in the soil and some of it sinks all the way down to the water table and into the deeper aquifers. And once it's in the soil, then over time the trees can pull it up and they transpire it through the leaves. This water then so it evaporates from the leaves. It forms new clouds that are in part seeded by the trees themselves. And then it comes back down as rain. So what happens when you cut down the trees or you plow up the grasses? The grasses do some of the same thing. What happens then and you have bare soil? Well, the rain comes and because there's no roots holding it in place and because, especially if you've been spraying chemicals on it because the soil is depleted of life, then it's no longer such a sponge. And some of it maybe soaks in, but a lot of it runs off, carrying the soil with it, or it evaporates. It stands in puddles and you've seen like these pictures of the parched, cracked earth that happens after the rain has fallen and evaporates. So now you don't have the trees feeding the rains for days and weeks and months after the rainy season is over. Instead you have a drought and the parched earth, the exposed soil, not to mention parking lots and asphalt and things like that, that creates a lot of sensible heat that creates high pressure zones that prevent new moist air from even coming in. So cities and cultivated agricultural land can push away the rains into uninhabited areas, into the mountains, for example, intensifying the rains there and causing flooding, which is exacerbated by the fact that the soil can't soak up so much water anymore and the wetlands have been drained. These are sponges for rainwater. So now you're getting, whereas before you had reliable rains, now you have a flood-drought cycle and then it gets blamed on climate change, which excuses you from doing anything about your agricultural practices or your forestry practices. One of the principles that I like to work with or use as a conceptual lens is the principle that life creates the conditions for life. So healthy forests, not only do they recycle water that originally comes in from the oceans, they actually bring water in from the oceans because they transpire so much water, when this is called the biotic pump, this theory. The water rises, condenses, the condensation creates a low pressure zone that then pulls air in from far away, ultimately from over the oceans. So you're bringing new moisture in, in Brazil they call it the flying rivers. And when you cut down the forests, everybody knows this is vernacular knowledge that the rains stop coming, that forests and water have an intimate relationship. So there's way, way more I could talk about with water. I could talk about the, the damage caused by exterminating beavers that, and by straightening waterways and by building dams because the beavers used to slow down the water. A lot of what are streams today were not streams 200 years ago and, and, and we're not wearing these deep channels, but they were more of like a series of water terraces because there were five or 10 beaver dams per mile on, on the old maps, places that are, are where there's a stream now that was once just the middle of a marsh or a bog or something like that. So beavers and, and other animals and, and plants, they maintain a healthy water cycle. And when you disrupt that, then all kinds of chaos arises, floods and droughts and higher temperatures too. I looked at these, there's a whole bunch of research coming from this group of Slovakian hydrologists. And one of the maps, I remember they have an area of land with different land uses, different topographical features. There's a forest, there's a parking lot, there's a cultivated field, there's a lake, and the, they, the map has the temperature over each of these different micro regions. And, and, you know, it's like 20 degrees Celsius higher over the parking lot than it is over the forest. This, you can call this a heat island. And, you know, some of the climate skeptics, they, they, they say, well, we're not really having global warming, it's just the urban heat island effect. Well, that is of scant consolation, if we're turning more and more of the earth into a heat island. So this is, so yeah, so disrupting soil and cutting down forests, that independent of carbon dioxide is already heating up the planet and disrupting climate. And you can look at it from the carbon lens as well. When you expose all that soil, it blows away, it washes away, it's not held there. So that carbon in the soil, it oxidizes. And it goes into the atmosphere, massive amounts of carbon dioxide. It's the largest source actually of carbon, of atmosphere carbon dioxide, it's from, from damaged land. And of course, then forests, when they're cut down, they can no longer store carbon, and, and the grasses can no longer sequester it. So this leads to a different set of priorities, a different set of policies that says that, and again, this is true for me, whether or not global warming is happening, that our top priority has to be to protect and regenerate, to protect and restore and heal the systems that maintain life, the living systems that maintain the conditions for life. And key to those is water. Water and carbon too, carbon in the form of soil, carbon in the form of biomass, carbon in the form of life. These are sacred substances. So this can happen on every scale. Every person can take care of a little bit of life. But really what we need is a radical change in our agricultural system and, and a moratorium on any more deforesting of especially pristine first, old growth forests. Those have a more powerful effect on maintaining climate equilibrium. And, and also to regenerate not just soil through better agricultural practices, but also to regenerate to restore wetlands and to regenerate marine ecosystems by having no fishing zones that should probably cover at least half the ocean so that the ocean can recover. You know, maybe take it just one more, add one more thing to the water paradigm, just that that's as the Standing Rock people said, water is life. If we do not respect the water, then life will not thrive. And I really, you know, can't say that the main focus should be water, because everything's interconnected. To heal the water, you have to heal the soil. To heal the soil, you have to respect the plants. You have to allow biodiversity to thrive. You can't do model crops anymore. You can't just extract anymore. You have to look at land as a being and say what do you want? You have to listen and observe. You can't stamp a formula. You can't make a template that works in one place and applied everywhere else. The industrial mindset does not work for earth healing. You can't send drones out with tree seeds and plant them willy-nilly everywhere. How do you know that that's the right tree for that spot? How do you know that? Even if it's the right tree for the next valley over, how do you know it's right for that valley? And how do you know it's right for that spot on that valley? I can answer that question. How do you know it? You know it if you've been intimately familiar with that spot. If you've observed the land for decades or generations and you know those trees like family, then you can be a caretaker of the land. Some people are kind of savants in this and they don't need decades or generations, but that's the mindset. They at least start with that question. What wants to be here from that mindset? Miracles of healing can happen. And that mindset, I'm going to say, that is contrary to the scientific reductionistic worldview that says that there's no wanting outside of humans and maybe at a rudimentary level, you know, animals at a more primal level wanting. There's nothing that wants to be here. That's a projection. Land doesn't want. Land doesn't dream. But I think that we have to begin to see land as a wanting being to ask that question. What does the land want? What does the water want? What does the forest want? How can I participate in that? How can I serve that? How can I be part of a transition to a state of being that includes all of us that's beautiful in which all life benefits, not some life at the expense of the rest, knowing that we're in this together?