The wildfires raging in LA, and Alpha Lo’s post below, are a reminder of a mantra a mentor of mine, the late Curt Kerns, would often say with all the conviction of a Pentecostal preacher on the pulpit: “the ground needs water!”.
The grand reveal, the epiphany for me in the making of Our Blue World, was the importance of connecting water with the land and how indigenous wisdom is being rediscovered like a renaissance movement, by people in different locations all over the world independently of each other.
From the Maori Iwi of the Whanganui river in New Zealand, to farmers rewetting bogs in Ireland, descendants of the Wari restoring the Amunas of the Andes mountains, and Mayors uniting to leave room for the river along the banks of the mighty Mississippi.
What Erica Gies, captures in her book Water Always Wins, as The Slow Water Movement. Paul Hawken sums it up incredibly succinctly, with an efficiency of language rivalled only by Ernest Hemmingay, in Regeneration:
“Make Rain, Hydrate the Land, Cool the Planet”.
In many ways, the through-line of Our Blue World: A Water Odyssey can be summed up in these 8 words.
We have interrupted the water cycle, and contributed up to 30% of ocean level rise by abstraction of groundwater.
Something I learned, from the mind-expanding book: The New Water Paradigm, was that there’s 5,000 times more water in the ground, than in all the worlds rivers.
Ideas such as Sponge Cities, restoration of the Amunas in Peru, the Slow Water Movement, visionary projects like Eden Again, led by Mark Nelson and Meridel Rubenstein, are all echoes of this unifying theme.
The land needs the water. The land provides the rain.
When we break this cycle, we have a fundamental impact on climate and when we restore that link, we have agency and the ability to take action.
We are seeing affirmative action being taken by various stakeholders, Apple for example is working with River Partners to restore the natural function of the flood plain on 750 acres of the Sacramento River in Northern California.
Brave Blue World Foundation
Ruán Magan Aoife Kelleher Sophia Donskoi
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