With blatant disregard for one of my favorite permaculture principles — "Start small" — last month the organizers of the Celebrate Sustainable Santa Fe conference started huge. Headlining the opening event, an "intimate breakfast" of 50, were renewable-energy guru Amory Lovins, farmers' market flag-waver Jim Hightower, and gang peacemaker Aqeela Sherrills. Backing them up during the weekend event were the ever-enormous Big Head Todd and the Monsters and the legendary remains of Bob Marley and Peter Tosh's bands.

I was first to saunter up to Hightower and was delighted to hear that he'd just come from my local house of worship, the Santa Fe Farmers' Market. During brief remarks to the group, we heard of Sherrills' terrible losses in the war also zone he calls home (Watts, Calif.) and of his reverence-based movement "to restore the vitality of the human spirit." Later, as unused quiche was being consolidated on a platter and the coffee thermoses were making that nearly empty sputter-gasp, Lovins informed me of a relatively new distinction between "green water" and "blue water."

Blue-water resources are found in aquifers, lakes, and dams, according to a 2006 editorial in the Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management, whereas green-water resources exist in the soil. Green-water flow is further categorized in two ways. There's the productive type, called transpiration, and the nonproductive type, called evaporation. The idea is that any green water that doesn't first get used by some living thing like a bug, tree, or person, is wasted water. For the billions of people facing food shortages due to water scarcity, crop yields could conceivably double if blue-water planners would see their role also as green-water planners, that is, as land planners. Unfortunately, rivers, lakes, and aquifers are likely to shrink, which means even highly successful green-water planning could still leave about one billion people hungry worldwide by 2030.

I'd venture to say that there are at least two more types of water. Call them "light turquoise" and "dark turquoise." The former is the precipitation we should be collecting in cisterns. The latter is the sewage we should be cleaning and reusing.

Fortunately, we live in a great place for developing these technologies, and we live at a perfect time to be carving out new and desperately-needed niches in the marketplace. As Taylor Selby, one of the event's organizers, said during his remarks, we also live at a time of tragic loss in this community.

As it turns out, one of the victims of the recent car crash that left four teens dead had a remarkably enlightened spirit with respect to environmental issues. She'd plant food crops next to bus stops and ask car-drivers in bank lines to shut off their engines while waiting idly. "Rose Simmons did more in her short life than most people do in their lifetimes," Selby said, holding back tears.

Maybe, at least here in Santa Fe, we've already discovered a fifth type of water, provided by our Rose-tinted tears of sadness and inspiration.

Nate Downey is president of Santa Fe Permaculture, Inc., an ecological landscape-design firm. His book Harvest the Rain is in the advance-praise harvesting phase of the publication process. Please contact him via www.sfpermaculture.com or 505-424-4444.