Brad Lancaster

Who is Brad Lancaster?

Brad Lancaster is someone who looks at a desert street and sees an orchard. For three decades he has shown in Tucson, Arizona, in the middle of the Sonoran Desert, that rain is not a problem to be drained away as quickly as possible, but the most valuable resource a dry place has. His book series Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond has become one of the standard works on rainwater harvesting, and his own house is the best illustration of what it describes.

He is a teacher, designer and consultant, and has run his own practice for permaculture education and design since 1993. What makes his work special is its scale: everything he does can be built by hand, by one household, with a shovel and patience. And it does not stop at the property line.

His path

The turning point came on a journey through Africa in 1995. Lancaster spent a day on the farm of Zephaniah Phiri Maseko in the driest region of Zimbabwe. Phiri, known far beyond his district as the man who farms water, had turned his land into a system of pits, ridges and stone structures in which no drop ran off unused. Lancaster has written that this one day set him on his path. When Phiri died in 2015, he called him a mentor of thousands around the world. He returned to Zimbabwe in 2014 and 2016 to learn from local water harvesters.

Back in Tucson he began on his own small lot in the Dunbar/Spring neighbourhood. In 1998 he took a hand saw and cut six openings into the kerb in front of the house, so that water from the street would flow to the young trees beside it. That was not allowed at the time. According to High Country News it took him three years, with the support of neighbours, environmental groups and a city hydrologist, until the city made the practice legal.

The idea

At its core, Lancaster's idea is simple: harvest water where it falls, before it leaves the property. The best storage is not a tank but the soil itself, planted and covered, a living sponge. Tanks come where they are really needed. Basins, berms and microcatchments slow the water, spread it and let it soak in. Trees planted at the edge of such basins use the water and shade the ground, and their fallen leaves become mulch.

He summarised his approach in eight principles. In our own words, they say: observe for a long time before changing anything; begin at the highest point of the catchment and work downwards; start small and simple, at a scale you can build and repair yourself; slow the water and let it soak in rather than letting it run off; always plan a safe overflow and treat it as a resource too; cover the ground with as much living and organic material as possible; let every element serve several purposes; and keep checking what works, then start again from the beginning.

The street is part of his thinking. According to High Country News he calculated that an average mile of residential street in Tucson sheds enough water to irrigate around 400 drought-tolerant, food-bearing trees. Roads, roofs, paths and even the condensate from air conditioners become sources of water.

The work

The house he shares with his brother's family is his living laboratory. According to his own figures, about 100,000 US gallons of rainwater, around 378,000 litres, are harvested there each year on a lot of one eighth of an acre and the adjoining public strip, with an average annual rainfall of about 280 millimetres. Native trees, fruit and vegetables grow where gravel and bare ground once lay.

The two volumes of Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond pass on this knowledge. The first, on guiding principles, appeared in 2006 and in its third edition in 2019; the second, on water-harvesting earthworks, appeared in 2008 and in its second edition in 2020. Both are written so that a homeowner can work with them.

He also built community. He co-founded the Neighborhood Foresters, who plant rain-fed native trees in the streets of Tucson's inner city, and the non-profit Desert Harvesters, which teaches people to harvest and use native desert foods such as mesquite pods.

What became of it

The example spread. In his neighbourhood, rain gardens along the public rights of way now catch more than a million gallons of stormwater a year, by his account, and shade the streets. In October 2008 Tucson became the first city in the United States to require new commercial developments to cover half of their landscape irrigation with harvested rainwater; the rule took effect in June 2010. Lancaster has taught on several continents and worked with municipalities on rules that allow and encourage water harvesting. His honours include the Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Rainwater Catchment Systems Association in 2015 and the title Citizen Forester of the Year from the Arizona Department of Forestry and Fire Management in 2021.

What we learn from Brad Lancaster

Terra Humana takes from Brad Lancaster, above all, the order of the work. Before any planting, we want to know where the water flows on the slope of Sa Medada, where it comes from and where it leaves. We begin at the top, we start small, and we build so that we can repair everything ourselves. The soil comes first as storage, the tank second.

We also take his view of paths and tracks. Every track on a slope collects water and can cut gullies; led into a planted basin, the same water feeds a tree. And we take his honesty about scale. Tucson's summer monsoon is not Sardinia's winter rain, and the quantities cannot be transferred. The principles can: keep water where it falls, cover the soil, and let the plants, together with drought-tolerant planting, do the rest.