Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 2 – 2nd Edition: Water-Harvesting Earthworks
by Brad Lancaster
Published by Rainsource Press - August 2019 - Paperback - 448 pp – 28cm x 22cm
Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 2 is a how-to guide enabling you to “plant the rain” by creating water-harvesting “earthworks” or “rain gardens.” Earthworks are simple, inexpensive strategies and landforms that passively harvest multiple sources of free on-site water including rainfall, stormwater runoff, air conditioning condensate, and greywater within “living tanks” of soil and vegetation. The plants then pump the water back out in the form of beauty, food, shelter, wildlife habitat, timber and forage, while controlling erosion, reducing down-stream flooding, dropping utility costs, increasing soil fertility, and improving water and air quality.
This revised and expanded full-colour second edition builds on the information in Volume 1 by showing you how to turn your yard, school, business, park, and neighbourhood into lively, regenerative producers of resources. Conditions at home will improve as you simultaneously enrich the ecosystem and inspire the surrounding community.
Learn to select, place, size, construct, and plant your chosen earthworks. All is made easier and more effective by the illustrations of natural patterns of water and sediment flow with which you can collaborate or mimic. Detailed step-by-step instructions with over 550 images show you how to do it, and plentiful stories of success motivate you so you will do it!
‘Harvesting rainwater was once a worldwide technology, but was replaced by pipes, canals, and sprinklers: an inefficient and wasteful strategy that results in running dry. In Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 2 Brad uses the concept of ‘planting water’ as a guiding principle in designing landscapes that passively harvest resources to grow more resources. Such brilliant, low-tech, regenerative systems are vital to hydrating the land and maximizing the benefit that water brings to plants, animals, and people. Thus, this book is an excellent and comprehensive tool for all bucket and shovel ‘engineers’ to maximize the hydrological resource, reduce energy use and transform their once erosive landscapes into ones of stability, botanical diversity, and abundance.’ — Arty Mangan, Bioneers Food and Farming Program Director
Brad Lancaster is a dynamic teacher, consultant, and designer of regenerative systems. He’s taught throughout North America, Middle East, Asia, Europe, Africa, and Australia; worked with the City of Tucson and other municipalities to legalize, incentivize, and provide guidance on water-harvesting systems, demonstration sites, and policy; and designed edible rain-irrigated landscapes doubling as flood control and community-building strategies for housing developments, parks, schools, businesses, ranches, and neighbourhoods. Brad’s aim is always to boost communities’ true health and wealth by using simple overlapping strategies to augment the region’s hydrology, ecosystems, and economies — living systems upon which we depend. Brad lives his talk on an oasis-like demonstration site he created with his brother’s family in downtown Tucson, Arizona. On this eighth of an acre and surrounding public right-of-way, they harvest 100,000 gallons of rainwater a year where just 11 inches per year fall from the sky. Brad is motivated in his work by the tens of thousands of people he has helped inspire to do likewise, go further, and continue our collective evolution.
