Water Always Wins

in 1979, Brazilian meteorologist Eneas Salati, using the fact that water from different sources has different chemical signatures, showed that half the rain in the Amazon rainforest came from the trees themselves. Trees can also generate rain far away: the Ama-zon produces precipitation as far away as Texas; the Congo forest waters the US Midwest; forests in Southeast Asia influence rain in the Balkans. The flip side—as Kenyan farmers have witnessed firsthand and which has been borne out in studies—is that deforestation can reduce rainfall magnitude.