Welcome to Planet Water, where 70% of its surface area is water and where all the white vapor, crystalline liquid and the greenery of the plants are significantly made up of water. Planet Water is the only place in the known universe where life is endemic. 

I love this quote by the late Luna Leopold, emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley and son of Aldo Leopold: “The health of the waters is the principle measure of how we live on the land.”

Basically, the water cycle and the life cycle are the same cycle. People are carbon based life forms; it’s our central atom, but by volume we’re mostly water. The carbon cycle and the water cycle are the fundamental cycles needed to sustain life. The inputs to the photosynthetic cycle are CO2 and H2O. Sunlight enters into chlorophyll and produces oxygen and sugar. The photosynthetic cycle creates the energy that the planet runs on.

There is a global water cycle, but in the permaculture community, we talk a lot about restoring small water cycles. By thinking like a watershed, we’re trying to understand the relationship from the headwaters to the middle reaches down to the delta. How are we living within our basins of relations?  Where are tillage and rangeland agriculture happening? Where is forestry happening? Where are urbanization and human settlement happening in the watershed? And how is all of that in right relationship with the process of the small water cycle?