Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond,
Volume 1, 2nd Edition:
Guiding Principles to Welcome Rain Into Your Life and Landscape

This new revised and expanded second edition is currently at the printer and scheduled for release in June 2013.

Available to PRE-ORDER at a special discounted price of $24.95 per signed book (cover price is $29.95). Note that the scheduled release of the book is in June 2013—pre-ordered books will be available only after release. Pre-order here.

Pre-orders from this website are greatly appreciated, because they help directly fund the production of these books.

Selected Content, Including Appendix 6 Resources

Praise for Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 1, 2nd edition

Additional Testimonials

Book Reviews

Book Awards

Book Specs

Turn water scarcity into water abundance! Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 1, is the core of the complete three-volume guide on how to conceptualize, design, and implement sustainable water-harvesting systems for your home, landscape, and community. This book enables you to access your on-site resources (rainwater, greywater, topsoil, sun, plants, and more), gives you a diverse array of strategies to maximize their potential, and empowers you with guiding principles to create an integrated, multi-functional, and water-sustainable water-harvesting landscape plan specific to your site and needs. Clearly written with more than 40 photos and 230 illustrations, this volume helps 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!

This new 2nd Edition…
• Adds over 120 new images, revisions of over 40 illustrations, for a total of over 280 images within this book
• Updates the real-life case studies to show their ongoing evolution (chapters 1 and 5)
• Adds more tools for integrating the harvest and enhancement of multiple free, on-site resources—such as wind, sun, and shade—in addition to water (chapter 4)
• Completely renovates the approach to seeing, understanding, and responding to flows of water and sediment (appendix 1)
• Dramatically expands a tool for tracking the seasonally changing path of the sun and its shadow, anytime and anywhere on earth (appendix 7).

In addition, this 2nd Edition provides the following new resources:
• One-Page Place Assessments, a tool to deepen your awareness of—and connection with—the place where you live, and to help amplify its regenerative potential (chapter 2)
• A harvest calendar of regional native, wild, and cultivated foods that can be used as a template for your area (appendix 4)
• An appendix to help you see, understand, and respond to the flow of wind and what comes with it, including soil, snow, heat, cold, fire, etc (appendix 8)
• An appendix describing the Water-Energy-Carbon Nexus, the myriad connections between these inputs and outputs, and how you can determine your lowest-energy-consuming, -water-consuming, and -carbon-emitting sources of water, energy, and more (appendix 9).

Harvesting and cycling water and sun.
Illustration by Joe Marshall.

Selected Content

• Table of contents
• Foreword by Gary Paul Nabhan
• Preface to the 2nd Edition
• Sample Gallery of Book’s Illustrations
• Appendix 3 Water-Harvesting Calculations–2nd edition (PDF)
• Appendix 4 Example Plant Lists and Water-Requirement Calculations for Tucson, Arizona, plus a Sonoran-Desert-Foods Harvest Calendar–2nd edition (PDF)
• **VOLUME 1 APPENDIX 6 RESOURCES**

Praise for Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 1, 2nd edition

“This wonderful book overflows with effective ways to beneficially cycle and enhance local water supplies, while maximizing power from the sun. It provides much-needed guidance and ideas on how to meet our resource needs, increase household and community potential, and protect the ecosystems upon which we all depend.”

— Sandra Postel, founding director, Global Water Policy Project; Freshwater Fellow of the National Geographic Society; author of Last Oasis

“In an age of enormous, industrial questions about resources, this book is an antidote. In these pages are solutions on a human scale, taking water not from massive reservoirs or river diversions but straight from the sky.”

—Craig Childs, author of The Secret Knowledge of Water

“Though a bizarre irony, rainwater in the arid west is typically deflected away from water-starved land and shunted off to storm drains at great expense. Not so in Brad Lancaster’s universe. He welcomes rainwater into the landscape with creativity, intelligence, and humor, and puts it to use growing and enhancing all kinds of resources, while reducing flooding and erosion, and enlivening the urban environment. In this new edition of Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, he welcomes us to join him in exercising the radical common sense of harvesting rainwater melded with the harvests of sun, wind, carbon, and more.”

— Ann Audrey, Environmental Consultant for integrating rainwater harvesting, habitat restoration, and edible trees

“This applies twice as much to the second edition: Buy this book now. If you live in a dry place, buy it. If you live somewhere subject to droughts (which is everywhere), buy it. The simple techniques (and the principles behind them) can help you save bundles of money, and make the landscape around you more productive and beautiful, with less work and upkeep than you can imagine. Lend it to your neighbors, and you’ll benefit as well. (Heck—buy them each a copy.) This how-to manual has enough stories, illustrations, and simple ideas to inspire even the most unhandy among us (such as myself). Buy it, try a couple of projects in your backyard, and in a few years be sure to send Brad and me a thank you note!”

— Kevin Dahl, former Executive Director of Native Seeds/SEARCH, and author of Wild Foods of the Sonoran Desert and Native Harvest: Gardening with Authentic Southwestern Crops

Book awards (1st edition)

Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 1, won Best How-To Book in the 2009 DIY Book Festival, which honors independent and self-published books. www.diyreporter.com/news/news2.asp?news2_id=436

Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 1, awarded Best Gardening/Agriculture Book and Best First Book in the 2007 Arizona/Glyph Book Awards. azbookpub.com/onews/2007-arizona-book-award-winners/

Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 1, has been awarded the Silver Medal in the 2007 Independent Publisher Book Awards Home and Garden category. www.independentpublisher.com/article/php?page=1157

Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 1, selected as a pick for the 2006 Southwest Book of the Year by the Pima County Public Library. www.tppl.org/books/swboy/2006/gilbert.php

Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 1, has been selected as a finalist in Foreword Magazine’s 2006 Book of the Year Awards. www.forewordmagazine.com/botya/search2k6.aspx?srchtype=category&srchval=26

Book specifications (2nd edition)

• ISBN 978-0-9772464-3-4
• Published by Rainsource Press
• Distributed in North America by Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 1 (800) 639-4099
• $29.95
• Paperback
• 8.5″ X 11″
• 304 pages
• Over 280 illustrations; index; bibliography; six appendices including patterns of water and sediment flow, water-harvesting traditions, calculations, plant lists, worksheets, sun paths and angles, wind harvesting, water-energy-carbon nexus, and resource lists.
• Foreword by Gary Paul Nabhan
• Printed in the U.S.A. on 100% post consumer recycled paper, processed chlorine free
  
• Categories: water harvesting, landscape design, passive solar design, ecology, sustainable strategies
• Release date: June 2013