Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond by Brad Lancaster
Thought Seeds
The Best-Selling, Award-Winning Books on Rainwater Harvesting
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Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 1: Guiding Principles to Welcome Rain into Your Life and Landscape
and
Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 2: Water-Harvesting Earthworks
are both Now Available!
Click here to order.
Turn water scarcity into water abundance! These books show you how to conceptualize, design, and implement sustainable water-harvesting systems for your home, landscape, and community. They enable you to access your on-site resources (rainwater, greywater, topsoil, sun, plants, and more), give you a diverse array of strategies to maximize their potential, and empower you with guiding principles to create an integrated, multi-functional, and water-sustainable water-harvesting landscape plan specific to your site and needs. These books will help bring your site to life, reduce your cost of living, endow yourself and your community with skills of self-reliance and cooperation, and create living air conditioners of vegetation growing beauty, food, and wildlife habitat. Stories of people who are successfully welcoming rain into their life and landscape will invite you to do the same!
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| The wasteful path to scarcity. The site rapidly dehydrates itself by erosively draining rainwater and runoff away to flood downslope areas and contaminate surface water with sediment. Greywater is lost to the sewer. Costly municipal or well water is pumped in to replace the free water that was drained away. Leaf drop/mulch is also drained away further depleting fertility and water-holding capacity. This leads to a depletion of resources and feeling scared in the city due to the resulting scarcity. | The stewardship path to abundance. This site passively hydrates itself by harvesting and infiltrating rainwater, runoff, and greywater on site, reducing downslope flooding and overall water consumption and contamination. The need to pump in water is greatly reduced or eliminated. Leaf drop/mulch is also harvested and cycled back into the soil and plants further increasing fertility and water-holding capacity. This leads to an enhancement of resources and a bun dance of celebration due to the resulting abundance. |
Check out Brad Lancaster’s interviews on NPR’s Morning Edition:
Click here to listen to September 17, 2008 interview.
Click here to listen to January 10, 2008 interview.
Check out the following bounty of free water-harvesting resources
Rainwater-harvesting and greywater-harvesting tax credits now in effect in Arizona
Arizona taxpayers who install a “water conservation system” (defined as a system to harvest rainwater and/or residential greywater) after January 1, 2007, and before January 1, 2012, may take a one-time tax credit of 25% of the cost of the system (up to a maximum of $1,000).
Builders are eligible for an income tax credit of up to $200 per residence unit constructed with a water conservation system installed.
Apply here.
For more info go here.
For more water-harvesting financial incentives around the U.S. and the world go here.
For water-harvesting ordinances promoting water harvesting in Tucson (such as mandating greywater-harvesting stubouts in all new home construction, and commerical developments providing at least 50% of their irrigation needs with harvested rainwater) go here.
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