permaculture

[Wesley Roe and Marjorie Lakin Erickson <lakinroe@silcom.com>]

Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands by Brad Lancaster

Guiding Principles to Welcome Rain Into Your Life and Landscape Volume 1

www.harvestingrainwater.com/    

Now Available!

Turn water scarcity into water abundance! Rainwater Harvesting for 
Drylands, 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 115 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!

Learn more about the book and see sample chapters.

Praise for Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands, Volume 1

Water harvesting and water cycling.
© 2005 Brad Lancaster and Joe Marshall

"Through some bizarre irony, rainwater in the arid west is typically 
deflected away from water-starved land and shunted off to storm drains. Not 
so in Brad Lancaster's universe. He welcomes rainwater into the landscape 
with creativity, intelligence and humor and puts it to use growing food, 
shading houses, reducing erosion, improving wildlife habitat, and enriching 
the urban environment. In Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands, he welcomes us 
to join him in exercising the radicial common sense of harvesting rainwater."

- Ann Phillips, Manager of Restoration Projects, Tucson Audubon Society

"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 bunches 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, Executive Director of Native Seeds/SEARCH and author of Wild 
Foods of the Sonoran Desert and Native Harvest: Gardening with Authentic 
Southwestern Crops

REQUEST YOUR COPY TODAY
Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands, Volume 1 is distributed by Chelsea Green 
Publishing Company and is also available from:
Native Seeds/SEARCH, http://www.nativeseeds.org, 866-622-5561
Silverbell Trading 502-797-6852
Permaculture Activist, http://www.permacultureactivist.net,
Natural Building Resources 505-895-3389
And your local bookstore and library when you request it.

About Brad Lancaster
        
Since 1993 I've run a successful permaculture consulting, design, and 
education business focused on integrated and sustainable approaches to 
landscape design, planning, and living. And as I live in the dryland 
environment, rainwater harvesting has long been one my specialties and a 
passion. Through my business I've been able to share this passion and many 
of the fun innovations and daily adventures that come about from striving 
to live more sustainably and comfortably in the Sonoran Desert.

At home my brother and I harvest over 100,000 gallons of rainwater a year 
on a 1/8th acre urban lot and adjoining right-of-way. This harvested water 
is then turned into living air conditioners of food-bearing shade trees, 
abundant gardens, and a thriving landscape incorporating wildlife habitat, 
beauty, edible and medicinal plants, and more. Such sheltering landscapes 
cool buildings by 20°F, reduce water and energy bills, and require little 
more than rainwater to thrive. Outside the home, I have helped others do 
the same and enabled clients to create ephemeral springs, raise the level 
of water wells, and shade and beautify neighborhood streets by harvesting 
their street runoff in adjacent tree wells.

I started writing Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands as a way to further 
empower my clients and my community to make such positive change in their 
own lives and back yards by harvesting rainwater. I wanted to provide an 
accessible resource that explains what water harvesting is, how to do it 
appropriately, and how to modify it to the unique conditions of everyone's 
own site. I believe we all can become beneficial stewards of the land on 
which we live, and I believe that by sustainably harvesting rainwater we 
can all begin to transform our households from consumers of resources to 
producers of resources. Drawing on my years of teaching, consulting, 
designing, on-the-ground implementation, and learning from others, I offer 
readers my clear and simple process to assess and design their own water 
harvesting landscapes.

Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands, Volume 1 - Guiding Principles to Welcome 
Rain Into Your Life and Landscape
        
Now Available!

Sample Content
Table of contents
Foreword by Gary Paul Nabhan
Sample Gallery of Book's Illustrations
Appendix 3 Water-harvesting Calculations (128k PDF)
Appendix 4 Example Plant Lists and Water-Requirement Calculations for 
Tucson, Arizona (128k PDF)

Turn water scarcity into water abundance! Rainwater Harvesting for 
Drylands, 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 115 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!

Book specifications:
ISBN 0-9772464-0-X

LCCN 2005907763

Published by Rainsource Press

Distributed by Chelsea Green Publishing Company 1-800-639-4099
$24.95
Paperback
8.5" X 11"
200 pages
Over 150 illustrations; index; bibliography; six appendices including 
patterns of water flow and erosion, water harvesting traditions, 
calculations, plant lists, worksheets, and resource lists.
Foreward by Gary Paul Nabhan
Categories: water harvesting, landscape design, ecology, sustainable 
strategies
Release date: November 2005
Official month of publication: January 2006

 Testimonials & Reviews For Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands, Volume 1

"Brad Lancaster is one of those rare individuals who combines practical 
ability to design and implement common-sense solutions to rainwater 
management issues with a clear ecological and political vision of the 
importance of doing so. In Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands Brad shows us 
how to use rainwater around our homes and in our communities so that our 
human-created landscapes reflect the abundance of nature. As we move from 
assumptions of scarcity to participation in abundance, our lives and our 
communities can be transformed."
-David Confer, Ph.D., environmental engineer and sustainable design and 
development consultant

"What a wonderful, enthusiastic book. Brad Lancaster lives what he preaches 
-- a water careful lifestyle that is all about more life. Brad is a worthy 
teacher--his love and deep respect for water shines through on every page."
- Ben Haggard, author, sustainable systems designer, and permaculture teacher

"Brad Lancaster's Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands is an important book 
about using rainfall as the primary driver in creating and restoring 
landscapes for agriculture and communities. It is ecological design at its 
best."
- John Todd, Ph.D., Research Professor and Distinguished Lecturer, The 
Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, The University of 
Vermont; President, Ocean Arks International; Senior Partner John Todd 
Ecological Design, Inc.

"This important and timely water-harvesting book reads like a conversation 
with a trusted friend. As such, it is an effective how-to and why-for 
manual for living within our means in our shared watersheds. Heartfelt 
thanks, Brad, for spotlighting the route to abundance in these arid climes!"
- Barbara Clark, project manager, Teran Watershed Project, Cascabel AZ

"Our modern society is afflicted with a severe case of hydrological 
illiteracy. Brad's Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands, in three volumes, is 
the antidote needed to mitigate this epidemic of cerebral imperviousness 
impacting the collective head-waters of our cultural ego-system! Pragmatic 
practitioners of "waterspread" restoration for arid lands and beyond, will 
find a wealth of accessible and practical information in these books. The 
Conservation Hydrology mantra of -Slow It - Spread It - Sink It -- has 
never been better articulated in as clear and concise terms for the 
homeowner, ranch owner, sub-division developer or city stormwater engineer. 
I will require this book for all my Basins of Relations community watershed 
students and feel it should be so as well for all land managers and land 
use planners. This book is sure to become a classic for all people who 
believe in a future based on rehydration instead of dehydration and for 
that I say, Bravo Brad!"
- Brock Dolman, WATER Institute Director, Occidental Arts and Ecology Center

"Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands, Volume 1 is more than a text on how to 
harvest rainwater. It is a way of life that gives back nourishment to our 
earth rather than what has become the standard of continually taking. This 
way of life has become almost a religion for Brad and as he demonstrates, 
it should be the same for all of us."
- Heather Kinkade-Levario, R.L.A., President of the American Rainwater 
Catchment Systems Association (ARCSA) Author of Forgotten Rain - 
Rediscovering Rainwater Harvesting

"The world needs more practical visionaries like Brad Lancaster! Blending 
his own knowledge, experience and wisdom with the collected wisdom and 
practices of water harvesters from around the world, Brad gives us access 
to a wealth of critically needed tools for rethinking our relationship with 
the gift of water from the sky. This man more than walks his talk; he 
lives, breathes, eats and drinks it!"
- David Eisenberg, Director of the Development Center for Appropriate 
Technology, co-author of the Straw Bale House Book, and a two-term member 
of the Board of Directors of the U.S. Green Building Council

"Brad Lancaster presents the first of three volumes of his vision on what 
might be called Eco-hydrology. It is not just a book about harvesting 
rainfall, although there are many practical ideas on how to make use of the 
water that falls on your land. It is a guide designed to help the reader 
see what Brad sees when looking at a city lot or homesite. He has set as 
his goal to train you to see your land and the environment in which it is 
set in a new way, as a natural resource to be managed in harmony with your 
living there. While water harvesting is central to living a new paradigm it 
is only part of a broader vision designed to enrich your quality of life 
while enhancing the surrounding environment."
- James J. Riley, Ph.D., Soil, Water and the Environmental Science 
Department, The University of Arizona

"Like small acorns that grow into mighty oaks, Ben Franklin's succinct and 
wise words are perhaps more valuable today: 'Waste not; want not…A penny 
saved is a penny earned.' The anticipation of rain and its eventual harvest 
and storage for nurturing the native habitat, our source of food, the 
quality of our air and water, and visual delight for our senses is a 
natural model for us to mimic. Brad Lancaster's pioneering series of books, 
Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands, shows us how we can mimic the way nature 
works, as it immediately provides the resources necessary to support a 
world of efficient and effective use of water that helps create abundance 
in all our lives."
- Dr. Wayne Moody, American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP), Planner

"This book and the thinking behind it should be part of the basic education 
of civil engineers, architects, landscape architects and planners 
everywhere. As a civil engineer working for a progressive municipal water 
utility in an arid climate, I can see if a majority of our citizens 
followed these practices, many of our current and future challenges would 
be alleviated. The positive side benefits in terms of erosion-control, 
creation of bird habitat, and natural cooling would be exceptional."
- Patricia Eisenberg, P.E., past president, Arizona Society of Civil Engineers

"On a water-world such as ours, Brad's book should be a required study for 
all human beings. Scholarly, forthright and, above all, practical, this 
work delivers critical knowledge to those thirsty for a positive 
relationship with water. Thank you Brad for your friendly presentation of 
such a complex and important component of global sustainability!"
- Paul A. Branson, Earthwise Technologies Ecological Restoration



© 2005 Brad Lancaster