Art Ludwig

Who is Art Ludwig?

Art Ludwig is someone who takes water seriously at the moment most people forget about it: when it disappears down the drain. For more than three decades he has shown that the water from showers, washbasins and washing machines, known as greywater, is not waste but a resource that can keep a garden alive through a dry summer. And he has shown that this works best with the simplest means.

He works near Santa Barbara, on the dry coast of California, with his family design practice Oasis Design. By his own account he has worked on integrated ecological design since 1980. His books, especially Create an Oasis with Greywater, are among the most widely read guides on the subject.

His path

Ludwig grew up in Santa Barbara and studied at the University of California at Berkeley, where he put together his own course of study in ecological systems design. There, according to Oasis Design, he developed in 1989 the first laundry detergent compatible with plants and soil, and founded a business to sell it. The idea behind it was practical: if water from the washing machine is to feed fruit trees, then what goes into the machine must not harm the soil.

That same year his home region took a step that would shape his work. During a drought, Santa Barbara allowed household greywater to be used for garden irrigation, by Ludwig's account as the first place in the United States. Ludwig has recounted that his father sent him the newspaper report just after he had developed his detergent. From then on, greywater became his central theme: how to build systems that work, that do no harm, and that ordinary people can install and understand.

The idea

At the heart of Ludwig's thinking is a simple insight: greywater should go into the soil as quickly and directly as possible. Stored for long, it soon begins to go bad; pumped and filtered, it needs maintenance that is often neglected. Led straight into a basin filled with mulch at the foot of a plant, it is cleaned by the soil life and taken up by the roots.

From this came his best-known designs. The branched drain divides the water in a pipe running downhill into ever smaller flows, until each branch ends at a tree or shrub, without pump, filter or tank. Laundry to landscape uses the washing machine's own pump to send the rinse water through a hose to the garden. Both systems are cheap, easy to repair and forgiving of mistakes. Ludwig published his designs without patents, so that anyone could build them.

His approach is a lesson in ecological design. One of his design principles is to choose the most inherently simple solution and then to carry it out as well as possible. For him, a good system is not the one with the most technology, but the one that does the most with the least effort and keeps working for years.

The work

His best-known book, Create an Oasis with Greywater, first appeared in the 1990s and has been revised many times; the sixth edition of 2015 was published as a twentieth-anniversary edition. It explains how to plan, build and maintain greywater systems, and why some popular solutions fail. In 2005 he added Water Storage, a book on tanks, cisterns, ponds and groundwater for domestic supply and fire protection. Through Oasis Design he has also planned water systems for homes and communities and passed on his knowledge in courses and on his website.

His second work is less visible but just as important: the rules. For a long time greywater systems in California could hardly be approved, and so many people built them without a permit. Pacific Standard estimated in 2009 that there were about 1.7 million greywater systems in the state, of which only about 200 had been officially permitted. Ludwig advised authorities on clearer, simpler rules, among others in New Mexico, which adopted its standards in 2003.

What became of it

On 4 August 2009, in the fourth year of statewide drought, the California Building Standards Commission adopted new greywater standards. Simple systems such as laundry to landscape could from then on be installed without a permit. According to Ludwig, more than 20 water authorities have since offered rebates for this system. What began as a practice in the grey zone has become, in large parts of the American West, an accepted part of saving water, thanks in no small part to the patient work of practitioners like him.

What we learn from Art Ludwig

Terra Humana takes three things from Art Ludwig. First, simplicity: on a dry slope, a system without pumps and filters, which can be repaired with a spade, is worth more than any clever technology. Second, the order of things: what goes down the drain determines whether the water helps or harms the soil. Anyone who wants to use greywater has to start with soap, detergent and cleaning products. Third, the place of the water: not in a tank, but quickly into the soil, into mulch basins at the foot of trees, where the soil life does the work.

Greywater does not replace rainwater harvesting, but it supplements it at exactly the time when rain is absent: in summer, when a household uses water every day. The principle we take with us: the water that passes through a house each day can, with care, feed the trees around it.