Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

Today was a unique experience. We heard Tucson native Brad Lancaster
present his Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands, a two-hour slide lecture at
our favorite nursery, Plants of the Southwest in Albuquerque. This guy is
the real deal, innovative, well informed, very entertaining, young and on a
mission.

Following is from the January 2006 newsletter of
The International Rainwater Harvesting Alliance
Maison Internationale de l’Environnement II, Chemin de Balexert 7-9
CH-1219 Châtelaine, Geneva, Switzerland
http://www.irha-h2o.org/news/news/Newsletter014.pdf

“Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands
Volume 1: Guiding Principles to Welcome Rain Into Your Life & Landscape”

Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands, Volume 1, is the core of a complete
three-volume
guide on how to conceptualize, design & implement sustainable
water-harvesting systems for
your home, landscape & community. This book enables you to assess your
on-site resources
(rainwater, topsoil, sun, plants & more), gives you a diverse array of
strategies to maximize
their potential & empowers you with guiding principles to create an
integrated, multi-
functional water-harvesting plan specific to your site & needs.

Clearly written with more than 150 illustrations, this volume helps bring
your site to life,
reduce your cost of living, endow yourself & your community with skills of
self-reliance &
cooperation, & create living air conditioners of vegetation growing beauty,
food, & wildlife
habitat. Stories of people who are successfully welcoming rain into their
life & landscape will
invite you to do the same!

IRHA member Brad Lancaster has been active teaching, designing, &
consulting on the
sustainable design system of permaculture & integrated RWH systems since
1993. He lives
what he teaches on a thriving, award-winning 1/8th-acre urban permaculture
site he created
with his brother in downtown Tucson, Arizona.

Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands, Volume 1 ($24.95; 200 pages; paperback;
8.5 x 11 in.;
November 2005; ISBN: 0-9772464-0-X) can be ordered from Chelsea Green
Publishing
Company 800-639-4099. Visit www.HarvestingRainwater.com for more
information or e-
mail Brad on: brad@harvestingrainwater.com .
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Also see Arid Lands Newsletter,
http://ag.arizona.edu/OALS/ALN/aln46/aln46toc.html
The man who farms water, by Brad Lancaster

Back to http://harvestingrainwater.com/ . In the book's foreward by Gary
Paul Nabhan, director of the Center for Sustainable Environments at
Northern Arizona University, he writes:

"... Brad has continued and extended our earlier, haphazard efforts of
rescuing such knowledge from Native American elders. But Brad has also gone
two steps further than many of us. He has essentially accomplished a
worldwide survey of water-harvesting practices, humbling his predecessors
by compiling a dizzyingly diverse portfolio of strategies, techniques, and
technologies."  The foreward ends: "Although he has a Ph.D., in arid land
resources, he has learned more from Brother Brad than all his professors
combined."
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paul, tradingpost@riseup.net
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The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all
our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to
foster its renewal is our only hope.
   - Wendell Berry