About the Book
The award-winning Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 1, 2nd Edition: Guiding Principles to Welcome Rain into Your Life and Landscape, is the first book in a three-volume guide that teaches you how to conceptualize, design, and implement sustainable water-harvesting systems for your home, landscape, and community. The lessons in this volume will enable you to assess your on-site resources, give you a diverse array of strategies to maximize their potential, and empower you with guiding principles to create an integrated, multi-functional water-harvesting plan specific to your site and needs.
This revised and expanded second edition increases potential for on-site harvests with more integrated tools and strategies for solar design, a primer on your water/energy/carbon connections, descriptions of water/erosion flow patterns and their water-harvesting response, and updated illustrations to show you how to do it all.
Volume 1 helps bring your site to life, reduce your cost of living, endow you with skills of self-reliance, 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 encourage you to do the same!
About the Author :
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 neighborhoods. 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.
Review :
"Brad Lancaster offers simple, time-tested solutions to making better use of the water falling on properties. The tools and strategies presented have the potential to help homeowners replace nearly all their landscape water use with water derived from onsite sources: rainwater, stormwater runoff, and greywater."--Water Engineering Australia
"Brad Lancaster's Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond is an important book. Its teachings should not just be applied to drylands. It's about using hydrological cycles to create and support sustainable landscapes, and the lessons are universal and useful wherever you live. This book is where to start with environmental restoration. His story of 'The Man Who Farms Water' in Africa is a microcosm and metaphor for the brilliant use of Nature's operating instructions. Most highly recommended!"--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
"I've been looking for a book like this for a long time. That is, one that will tell me, armed with a shovel and not a great deal of mechanical fussing or back-straining, to begin saving rainwater immediately. And in the process, save money, salve my conscience, and, best of all, come out ahead with a greener life."--Peter Wild, U.S. Water News
"In time of escalating resource scarcity and global conflict, this essential book helps us regain control of our water by showing us how to enhance our water supply with simple, fun, and effective strategies at home and beyond."--Maude Barlow, author of Blue Covenant and Senior Advisor on Water to the President of the United Nations General Assembly
"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
"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
