Video: Mountain with cloud blanket.
Voice-over (approx): "Peaceful.  Quiet.  Nothing happening, just a …" 

Video: Picture speeds up to time-lapse.  The cloud becomes seen as a place where cloud material appears in the upstream uplifting, then speeds over the hump and becomes invisible vapor again as it descends into warmer, less violent flow. 
Voice-over (approx): "But it's our limited human perception that makes it look calm and resting.  That calm scene is a raging hurricane blasting over the peak.  That resting cloud is the point of pinch of flow in a wild wind tunnel.  Where violent processes are…  We see but a tiny fraction of what lies before us." 

Video: Landscape: clouds, mountains, streams, rivers.  Then, camera zooms back into computer-generated shot that pulls back far enough to see mountain ranges, plateaus, and river systems draining into the sea. 
Voice over (approx): "Our limited perception sees this.  …  But let's speed up time so we can see what's really happening." 
 

Video: (computer generated)  a) slower speed: The seas evaporate. Clouds form now and then and dump rain.  Rain falls and erodes the earth.  Erosion produces silt and rock, which streams and rivers carry to the sea.    b) faster speed:  Clouds and rain storms blur into invisibility, but erosion becomes obvious and orogenic lifting begins to be seen.  Lakes form briefly, silt in, and disappear.  Man made reservoirs are flash-gun pops of the same kind of lake formation. 
Voice over(approx): "That quiet landscape is a turbulent cauldron.  The sun drives sculptor's tools in its never-ending whittling and carving. It works like this:…  [fill in details]…    …Lakes are temporary blips in earth's time scale.  Man's reservoirs are puny attempts to tap into a flow he only dimly understands…"  [Take it from here, Maestros.] 

We need a hyperlink:
 

  Show the "flow."  It's radiation from sun (high temperature) to earth to outer space (low temperature).  Exactly as much energy goes from earth to outer space as goes from sun to earth.  If we prevent the flow to outer space (use a big ellipsoidal mirror), the earth would heat up until it has the same temperature as the sun.  No more flow from hi-T to low-T.  Life becomes impossible.  Human understanding of these processes is extremely recent (mid 19th century).  In the last half of the 20th century, most people (including a lot of engineers who learn about it) still don't understand it, even when they know it.  The peculiar "efficiencies" we get from the simplistic theory–like "35% maximum efficiency for a steam engine, and "300% efficiency for a refrigerator (or other heat pump)"–should give everyone a clue that that theory is goofy.  Erwin Schrödinger pointed out the key concepts in his essay "What is Life?", and engineers are beginning to use "second law efficiency." 

This principle from basic science underlies much of the ecology of river systems.  Find the name, Greg Hanscomb, just one click away from this Web site via hyperlink, and you will have found many observations that should be linked in our thinking to this principle.  Entropy, and its many "Eurekas," constituted a major advance in human understanding back in the 19^th century.  Twentieth and 21^st century thinking can benefit, too.  Think about it.