the water
issue

We've been taught to think of the ocean as remote - a destination, a backdrop, the subject of documentaries we watch from dry land. But every drop of water you encounter is part of the same planetary circulation. The rain on your street runs to a storm drain that runs to a river that reaches the sea. What you put in the water near you - and what your city, farm, and factory puts in - travels.

The ocean doesn't start at the coastline. It starts wherever water falls.

Fresh water covers less than 3% of the Earth's surface, and the scale of modern human civilization has been throwing it out of balance. Aquifers are being drained in decades. Rivers choke on nitrogen from farm runoff. Sewer systems overflow raw sewage into the same waterways people drink from. Tires alone account for the vast majority of microplastics entering the ocean, showing up in rain, in soil, and increasingly in human tissue. Water is all connected.

Cultures across the world have always known water as sacred, as a being, not a resource. That relationship never disappeared, and right now, it's coming back. People are filtering greywater before chemicals reach rivers, switching to non-toxic materials, restoring watersheds in their neighborhoods. Growing foods adapted to their local climate, in ways that restore healthy local microclimates. Industry is slowly shifting as well - you'll hear about inspiring examples below.

When we opened this theme to the Bloom community, we discovered that a remarkable number of people listed healthy water systems as one of the things they care most about, and want to give their time and knowledge to. Water, it turns out, is where a lot of us want to meet each other.

The people you'll meet in this issue, the actions you'll find, the art you'll feel - are all part of that. The only question is what you do next.

Researcher Alpha La has been asking the question: how much living land does a watershed need before rain behaves differently? He's been digging deep into the measurable relationship between canopy, soil, evapotranspiration, and the clouds that it turn out, are intimately connected to them.

Restored vegetation does not only sequester carbon. It exhales water vapor. It cools air. It changes the texture of what rises toward condensation. Stack enough small restorations - a riparian buffer behind a school, a food forest on a vacant lot, a neighbor's oak allowed to mature - and you are building rainfall infrastructure the way you'd build any public works project: incrementally, collectively, without waiting for permission from a capital city that may never see your full sky.

Every bioregion has its own math - its own history of clearing, compaction, fire suppression, irrigation. What transfers across them is the method: notice the aggregate plant life and soil health, document what changes over time, and refuse the story that restoration is charity performed on wounded land. It is hydrology. It is the work that sends cleaner, slower water toward coastlines, and repairs the microclimates that sustain life.

The water restoration community uses a phrase from Brock Dolman's hydrology work: slow it, spread it, sink it. Slow water's travel on the surface, sink it into aquifers, lift it up by roots, and it will be evapotranspired back as rain through the small water cycle. You cannot extract more than the land stores, and we're running out of stores in many parts of the world. But, you can replenish your local water cycle by infiltrating rain where you live - in your backyard, your city, your town.

Birger Lundgren is a Swedish tech entrepreneur who used to build apps. Now he builds toilets. He writes from Cape Town with wit sharp enough to cut through the shame we wrap around sanitation - and from inside Day Zero, when the city nearly ran out of water in 2018.

"Pee and poop should go into the soil, not into the sea." - Professor Jan-Olof Drangert, Linköping University

What if one of the biggest climate and health solutions on Earth is something we have all been sitting on for centuries? Every day we flush clean drinking water down the drain and call it progress. We mix it with cleaning chemical waste, send it through expensive pipes, and spend billions trying to clean it again. If it even reaches the waste water treatment plant instead of overflowing sewers with heavier rain events and urban populations larger than the system was built for.

The result is pollution, disease, and lost nutrients that should have gone back to the soil.

Birger's wake-up call came during Day Zero in Cape Town. People queued for hours to collect water while thousands of litres of clean water were still being used to flush toilets. That was when he realised our systems are upside down - and changed careers from software to sh*tware. He founded Scandinavian Water Saving Products to cut water use, then Sanitation Ambassadors, a nonprofit that builds fast, affordable circular sanitation for schools, communities, and clinics.

In many tropical zones, poor sanitation in the absence of infrastructure leads to diseases that infect more than 1.7 billion people every year. Schistosomiasis burrows through skin in contaminated water, a painful condition affecting reproductive health. Ascaris roundworms drain nutrients from more than a billion people annually. Pharma distributes tablets that kill adult worms but not eggs. To get to the root of the problem, clean toilets, safe water, and soap break the cycle completely. Birger calls it the cheapest antibiotic in the world, and it never loses strength.

Container-Based Sanitation keeps waste safely out of the water cycle - no leaks, no broken pipes. Treated with urea, it stops worms and bacteria. With biochar added, PFAS stay in soil instead of rivers and reefs. One guest told Birger, "That was the nicest toilet I have ever used, and I could not even smell my own sh*t."* His Loo-Topia is modular, affordable, circular sanitation that turns waste into value, in use now across shools, clinics, and universities.

Where in your community could you set up a composting toilet to help people reconnect with the cycle of life?

Bloom calls it regenerative culture. Birger calls it smart sh*t. Same idea. What releases from your body is nutrients for other creatures. One connected cycle here on this gorgeous rock in a protective bubble floating in space.

So many cultures worldwide have deities of water! Here we're featuring art from this community and artists we're fans of. Many Bloomers make art about water to protect what they love, with sensation and meaning. Andy Cartier's guest post on mycelium surf and skate boards opens the maker stories below. Definitely don't miss Robin Gunkel's poem, Yew in a Dewdrop. She wrote it especially for this issue!

Andy Cartier grew a surfboard. Not as stunt - as argument. Mycelium networks, fed and shaped over weeks, form a buoyant core that can replace petrochemical foam in boards, packaging, insulation - the mundane objects that become ocean plastic when we're done with them. The process is iterative, messy, joyful. Failure is documented alongside success because the point is not a perfect prototype. The point is a different relationship to material life.

Riding something you grew changes your body chemistry. You know it will return to soil. You know the waves will unmake it faster than a polyurethane deck. That temporariness is not weakness - it's ethics. Ocean culture is tied to disposable foam in ways we've normalized. Andy asks what happens when the object under your feet is as alive as the water holding you.

The future of design might not be built - it might be grown.

New materials are water policy. Every farmers market still wrapping greens in plastic clamshells is making the same choice at a different scale. Circularity starts where people can touch the alternative - a board, a filter, a compostable box - and imagine the supply chain differently.

For decades, pin-up imagery sold war and weapons. Permaculture Pinup - Jivana's project from the Nicoya Peninsula, where the ethos is Bees, Trees, and Seas - turns that on its head: flirty, playful media in service of Earth-regenerative education. Interview role models. Galvanize food and health sovereignty. Drop seeds, not bombs. Jivana is also author of the novel RAVE: Mythophrenia.

Before tail brands and Instagram economies, Hannah Fraser invented the vocation of freelance mermaid in 2003. For two decades she has built spectacular tails, performed underwater for film and music, and stood on highway bridges in full fin to stop wetland destruction - landing on the front page of the local paper in support of the environment. At Permaculture Pinup she embodies the "seas" in the most enchanting way possible.

"I've been mermaiding for over twenty years, back when there was no blueprint for what that even meant," she told Jivana. "What's changed most is visibility and speed. The subculture has exploded, which is both exciting and risky - increasingly commercialized and disconnected from the ocean itself."

"The future of this subculture depends on whether it chooses embodiment and stewardship over spectacle alone." - Hannah Mermaid

The first thing she ever did in a tail was help create an educational film about wetlands; not long after she wore that same tail on a highway bridge to stop wetland destruction. She had already learned the pattern dressing as a fairy in front of bulldozers logging old-growth forest in Australia.

"When you arrive as a living symbol, people pause. Beauty disarms. Fantasy opens the door. And once someone is emotionally engaged, you can speak about the hard truths they might otherwise avoid." - Hannah Mermaid

Burnout is real when the ocean you love keeps changing for the worse. Hannah stays connected to joy, not just outrage - she swims, creates, and lets wonder refill her. "Community is survival." At Envision 2026 her talk Journey into the Deep wove firsthand encounters with ocean animals, including a manta ray campaign that helped sway endangered species protection.

"When emotional connection comes first, protection follows." - Hannah Mermaid

What she is building, she says, is a culture where beauty and responsibility belong together - where devotion to the ocean is expressed through art, courage, skill, and joy, not outrage alone.

Convenience is killing the ocean. The alternatives feel luxurious and sci-fi - seaweed that dissolves, foam grown from mushrooms, packaging you can eat. Welcome to the biomaterials revolution.

If you live in the Southwest US, you know a water crisis is coming. The solutions are many and need to work together, but one of them is simple and empowering. And anyone can do it. Slow the rainwater flow, so the land can drink it before it runs away.

Will M is a Bloom leader working at Wildcat Bluff Discovery Center outside Amarillo. A lawyer and rock-steady community builder, he has documented community-based water restoration on Bloom: leaky weirs, stormwater harvest, and volunteers learning by doing in an outdoor classroom that recharges a lot more than the aquifer. A leaky weir is a small structure made of, for example, discarded Christmas trees and brush - basically a human-made beaver dam. It invites water to linger, sink, and move differently across land where rain has been running off fast instead of soaking in. Together they are a down payment on the Ogallala Aquifer, and one way to recharge the water we're still drawing down to dangerous levels.

None of this is new. Beavers used to do this work, and bison kept the grasslands rooted and dimpled with wallows that caught the rain. Farther west, communities including the Hopi, A:shiwi, Ohkay Owingeh, Kewa, and Walatowa, build check dams and terraces to grow food; they aren't doing "restoration," they are feeding their communities, and life thrives around them. A leaky weir is, in a real sense, a remembering. Will's crew has been featured on Panhandle PBS and local ABC stations; local press telling a different High Plains story: not damned, not naive, but competent.

This solution needs to work in tandem with large-scale agriculture changes, and the scale at which it needs to happen is vast, and that's exactly the point. Millions of people participating in their local watershed, learning it, restoring it, is not a backup plan. It's the plan. Anywhere flood or drought is the problem, this is one of the most direct ways to reconnect with the water around you.