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  • From: Wesley Roe and Marjorie Lakin Erickson <lakinroe@silcom.com>
  • To: scpg@arashi.com, sdpg@arashi.com, ccpg@arashi.com, lapg@arashi.com, hd-l@slonet.org, permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org, eastbaypermaculture@yahoogroups.com, ppg@lists.riseup.net
  • Subject: [permaculture] NEW BOOK Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands by Brad Lancaster
  • Date: Sat, 12 Nov 2005 08:04:51 -0800

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




  • [permaculture] NEW BOOK Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands by Brad Lancaster, Wesley Roe and Marjorie Lakin Erickson, 11/12/2005

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