Welcome to Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

The city of Tucson currently relies on the Colorado River for 90% of the water that it uses.

But that supply may be threatened in the coming years.

Flows are diminishing because of a prolonged mega-drought here in the Southwest.

Now, Tucson and Brad Lancaster has been working on a solution to this problem for years.

He has turned the Tucson neighborhood of Dunbar Spring into a living laboratory of sorts.

He believes we could live much more sustainably by changing the way we think about water.

The trees you see here are intentionally planted and fed from harvested rainwater.

And they're not just surviving.

They're thriving without the use of city water.

Once seen as fringe, these ideas are gaining traction and being implemented by the city of Tucson and other municipalities across the country.

The following is a special half hour documentary produced by David Fenster that looks at Brad's philosophy, practice and teachings.

This is Water Harvester An Invitation to Abundance.

(Brad Lancaster) I'd like to help create a system so I can abandon it and it'll thrive without me.

The systems in our built environment are completely dependent on people and continuous inputs.

And I find it draining because I don't see the energy needs decreasing.

I just see them ever increase.

Whereas I can go out into the natural world and it's like, Wow, I mean, look at what manifests, look at what happens and and grows from this.

Without all these outside inputs, it's thriving just with what's freely at hand.

And that's what really excites me.

[running water] [chicken clucking] [rooster crowing] When I learned that more rain falls on the city of Tucson than the entire population, consumes of municipal water in a year, I thought, Wow, it seems like we should be able to live off rainwater.

So I decided to start by seeing could I set up my landscape, my garden, so that it could rely primarily or even better, entirely on rainwater.

Got the rain gauge.

And in that ten minute downpour, we got almost three quarters of an inch, .70.

Sweet!

[laughs] After I got the plants established, I had to cut them off of City Water.

I had a fair number of plant deaths.

What I was learning was what plants are hardier and can make it and thrive.

[nature sounds] Similarly, I would go out on walks and hikes and regularly check in on plants I'd see out in the wild and say.

Well, what enables them to make it?

[nature sounds] [man walking on a path with a cane] Mr. Zephania Phiri Maseko the water farmer who was one of my main mentors.

He since passed he was in a situation where he was politically active against the all-white Rhodesian government, and he was under house arrest.

He couldn't leave his property.

(Mr. Zephania Phiri Maseko) I was allocated to a land the very poor soil a land that couldn't even produce anything because soil erosion had taken quite a lot of fertility from it.

(Brad Lancaster) So he had to figure out on this degraded, eroding plot of land, how is he going to support his family of eight with no job, no income.

How could he grow food so they would at least eat?

So he had to figure out, well, I do have rain sometimes.

How can I make that available longer.

(Mr. Zephania Phiri Maseko) During the rainy season.

There was plenty of water flowing down.

Then this water had no any one using it then made a structure over this way.

So that I could harness that water, With this pipe, the water that is utilized in this pit is taken down below then into some other in filtration pits, it helps the soil down below.

(Brad Lancaster) He taught himself how to make these, and he's digging them when he's literally in chains.

[farm sounds] the majority of peoples and cultures on this planet are called the developing world or the Third World.

And then we always put us as the first world, like we got it down.

I think it's the opposite.

A good majority of the time we have this temporary luxury of being able to purchase ourself out of a dilemma for a little while longer.

[goat milking] You go to a place where people have fewer resources seemingly available to them.

They have to get much more creative.

When we buy something, we are not evolving ourselves.

We are sidestepping the issue and we're becoming weaker.

[milk pouring into a glass] Just before he uh... [clears throat] Just before he passed away.

I got to go back and visit him again.

20 years after I had first visited him.

And I was worried when I was going to go down there that, oh, yeah, it's not as good as I remember.

And I go back and it is far better than I remember because in those 20 years since I last seen him, he's been evolving the system even further.

I mean, there's fruit everywhere It was insane.

And he he had abandoned his wells because the water level had risen to such an extent.

It came to the surface he no longer needed his wells to irrigate his fields is incredible.

That's the kind of person that I want to be around.

That's the kind of person that I want to inspire me.

[atmospheric music] [car drives by] [hose pours water] This hose water, this is from the cistern.

So I've got two 1300 gallon ferro-cement rainwater tanks to collect water off the house roof and the ramada roof.

[birds chirping] I am trying to change me, change my understanding, change my perceptions.

Here at home I get my drinking water, my cooking water, my bathing water from the roof.

[rustling clothes] Every time we do a load of wash, we take the drain hose from the washing machine and we move it to a different pipe.

And we mark every pipe with the tree or trees that it irrigates.

[washing machine whirs] [water pours on ground] [running water] Sometimes people, they think I'm designing my life to make things harder, whereas in actuality, for me, I'm actually making things easier.

I'm making it easier to do what I want to do.

I'm making it easier to make the change I want to see manifest in the world.

And I haven't owned a car since 1996.

So people say, well, that's got to be difficult for you.

But what it's made really easy.

It's made it much easier for me to have a walkable bikeable lifestyle, and as a result I'm a lot healthier.

And when I want to go to a distant trailhead, I call up a friend and we carpool, or if I need I can rent a car or borrow a car.

So it actually forces more social interaction, which is key for me because I'm an introvert and really shy.

So my inclination is just to cave up I've known this about myself since I was a child.

I think my first big step to address it was I took a theater class in high school and got into drama.

Well, I learned in drama, if you take on a role, if you put on a mask, it's a lot easier to step into that.

So as a as an educator, you know, a promoter of these things, I'm in a role.

So it's easier for me to step in front of a camera, microphone or a crowd.

Hey, I'm Brad Lancaster.

It's raining and I want to show you some water harvesting and action.

Okay.

Boom.

Neighborhood street.

It's raised or crowned in the middle.

Water drains to the curb, flows along the curb, and we have cut the curb to allow the street runoff to go into a sunken mulched basin which is lower than the street to passively and freely irrigate this native food producing velvet mesquite tree.

The great thing here is these trees then grow to shade and cool the street from which the water comes while controlling neighborhood flooding.

Downstream.

Love it.

Okay.

Tucson used to get its water both from the Santa Cruz River, which was surface water and groundwater with shallow, hand-dug wells.

You didn't have to dig far to reach the water because the water table was so much higher in the soil profile.

But when we diverted water out of the river and depleted its flows and got mechanical pumps and started pumping groundwater out at a rate that exceeded natural recharge, then the groundwater table started to drop.

It dropped to such an extent that the city began to drop, which is called subsidence.

Without addressing the real core of the problem in Tucson, which is we were over consuming water.

We decided to ignore the problem and just bring more water in from others, take water from others.

So we started pumping water from the Colorado River to Tucson, which is an elevation rise if we count all the pumps over 3000 feet and a distance or 300 miles.

Water is very heavy.

So it costs over $80 million a year.

To pump water uphill from the Colorado River to Tucson.

The crazy thing is more rain falls on Tucson in an average year of rainfall than the entire population consumes of municipal water in a year.

[water spalashes] (David Fenster) Do you always come out when it rains and kind of.

(Brad Lancaster) Yeah, definitely.

Yeah.

So I'm always out in the bathing suit often times with the shovel, you know, moving soil and what not.

We've been putting in a lot of before and after photos.

One of my mentors, Clifford Pablo, he had been taught by his grandfather how to do the traditional Ak-Chin They would direct the runoff from a desert arroyo up on to the adjoining floodplain.

Walking the land with him.

It gave me a whole new way of seeing.

So when I came back to my neighborhood.

I realized, wow, the streets are our arroyos.

They have a concrete curb that is keeping the water in the channel forever, segregated from its floodplain.

The floodplain being the plantable space alongside the road.

So that's when I realized, oh, we we got to reunite these two.

And that's when on a Sunday morning, when no one from the city was watching decided to cut the street curb and the results were fantastic.

Curb cuts are how we started.

It's a it's a bigger opening, but it's considerably more expensive than the curb core.

Which is just a typically a four inch diameter hole drilled through the curb.

[metal hammering] You can go out into the natural world.

And anywhere that you see water accumulating or lingering longer, there is more life.

It's not just water, it's everything the water carries.

It's sediment It's fertile matter, it's seed.

You know, this living gene bank and all these water corridors so often become wildlife corridors.

All this other life and potential is going to emerge from that.

(Katie Bolger) His message and what he's doing is so important to addressing and mitigating and adapting to the climate change that's going to hit Tucson.

I mean, we're the third fastest warming city in the nation.

And if you live here, you know that anyways that growing up here.

100 degrees.

Yeah, no problem.

In the summer.

103, big deal.

117 for a week is mind boggling.

So I don't know how I felt about them at the beginning.

I mean, I felt that like, yeah, what he's doing is right and look at this and this is the way we need to go.

And now it's imperative.

(Mayor Regina Romero) Item six time has been set aside for a review of the commercial rainwater harvesting ordinance.

(Kevin Dahl) I'd like to introduce Brad Lancaster to present some aspects of this report.

It gets a lot of details, but we're going to hit the highlights.

Brad, are you on?

(Brad Lancaster) Yeah, I'm here.

Candace was going to...

When we wanted to legalize the reuniting of street water and street side plantable space.

We needed examples.

We knew we'd be hit with all kinds of questions.

Well, how do you know this or work?

There's no data.

There's no studies.

You're not a hydrologist.

So it was three years before we interacted with the city cause we wanted the vegetation to get established and to see how everything performed.

We didn't tell them we had done this at first.

[rocks falling] [drill whirring] (Anne Audrey) We've worked together on the city's water harvesting guidance manual, and he was involved with the commercial water harvesting standards.

When I worked at the city at the time that was being developed.

(Brad Lancaster) As things went on, a friend of mine Anne Audrey got a job with the city's sustainability office.

She was, you know, learning the system from the inside, and then she set up the meetings with the various city officials, and she facilitated those meetings.

(Mayor Regina Romero) Thank you, Council member Dahl.

Thank you so much for bringing this item to us, Mr. Lancaster, for doing so much work for us and really being a leader in the country on rainwater harvesting and everything related to rainwater harvesting.

You... really started me on this path.

(Anne Audrey) One of my favorite things about Brad is his framework is abundance, not scarcity.

A lot of people, you know, myself included sometimes run around and it just seems like there's not enough and we're all running for the same thing.

But he's just got the opposite mindset.

If you organize things right and you design them right, you will create abundance.

It'll become self-perpetuating.

(Brad Lancaster) So we're sequestering carbon.

We're filtering contaminants off the street, we're recharging the aquifer after filtering that water through the living lens of soil life And we're growing food, medicine, wildlife, habitat, beauty.

And as the trees grow up, we'll get a canopy shading the street.

[Exclaimed] For free!

(Anne Audrey) As he integrates so much information soil health and rainwater and stormwater and food and community.

And he rolls it all into an integrated framework that works and we know it works because he has done it in his own neighborhood and taught it in many other places around the world.

And it's he speaks truth.

I mean, he speaks the truth.

Also, he walks his talk.

And if you go visit Brad you will be invited to visit the composting toilet, you know, and hang out with the chickens and check out the laundry machines.

[laundry machine chimes] [page flips] (Brad Lancaster) I was just talking to a colleague who said he was speaking with some high ups in the Saudi Arabian Agricultural Ministry.

And he saw my book on on their desk during the meeting.

And then another friend through a friend who is doing some wood work for Al Gore, said my book was on his kitchen table And uh.

So it's interesting seeing how it gets around there.

But what I'm most excited about, it's the people that are using the book and it's it's all dog-eared and dirty.

And, you know, they're out there putting this into effect.

[opens book] The book's that's my main source of income.

And then what can come with that is opportunities to teach, consult, present.

The first edition came out in 2006, and that took about five years to write.

So that's the, the overview book of hey, what's possible?

How do you figure out what the potential is on your site and how do you start to make an integrated plan?

It basically works in any climate.

As long as they have a dry season or drought, the only thing it changes is the plant pallet that's used.

I feel a big strength of these books is that they are highly influenced by Mr. Zephania Phiri Maseko They're the water farmer.

So much of what I was trying to say would be refuted by the modern world around me.

Seeing the incredible things he and his family did just with what was freely at hand that resonated so deeply with me.

I'm like, yeah, this is the way to go.

(Dr. Thomas Meixner) We've taken a natural desert landscape where 10 to 15% of the rain would run off, versus now with paving of streets and roofs and parking lots and sidewalks, all the rain that essentially falls on those.

Almost all of it runs off.

So we get these floods that flood our streets can cause flooding damage in houses.

If I let it run into the street, more of that water goes to raw evaporation, right?

The puddles in my street serve no ecological purpose other than, well, some mosquitoes, which I don't think that's a service.

Whereas trapping that water more locally using it to provide shade that provides cooling that makes, you know, the human habitat of our city more comfortable for people.

Sounds like a better option.

To me the key vision is long term outdoor water use for landscape irrigation essentially going to zero.

We're going to have to learn over time.

How do you manage these landscapes with just the rainwater you get?

So I think the first time I saw Brad, he actually came to the U of A bookstore to talk about his book.

He's not the only person in town who advocates for water, rainwater harvesting.

He's not the first either.

But Brad really didn't stop to ask permission.

Right?

The famous story of him just cutting a curb despite it being against code and being against the law.

He just went and did it, you now, benefit from the 20, 25 years of effort, like, oh, this is what it looks like.

I sort of call him the prophet of rainwater harvesting.

(Brad Lancaster) If we were all harvesting rainwater as I advocated.

Everybody was doing this, we would be recharging our aquifer with our free, higher quality local waters.

At the same time, we would be dramatically reducing our need to pump water from the aquifer in the first place.

And instead of sending our lightly used gray water, the water that goes down our shower drain or whatnot to a sewer, we instead send that to the landscape.

So we're using water multiple times instead of just once and then throwing it away.

We don't throw anything away.

All waste becomes resources and we learn to mimic the planet's hydrologic cycle.

Water tables would be rising.

We would start to bring back longer, ephemeral and then eventually perennial flows of some of our waterways.

If everyone was doing this water harvesting as I advocate, every street would be shaded and canopied.

We'd have a much cooler beautiful, livable community that shade irrigated with nothing more than the runoff from the hard scape surfaces.

Our- our water quality, our air quality.

All this would improve.

Wed have much more vegetation and we'd have a lot more people that are healthy because a lot more people would walk and bike because it would be comfortable and enjoyable to do so.

We would have a much more local place based cuisine because we'd be growing so much more food.

Here in the Sonoran Desert, there's over 400 native food bearing plants.

The Tohono O'odham They were some of the healthiest people around because they were tapped into that diet.

We can learn from the people of here as well as the plants of here.

We would also create whole new industries.

We would, I think, be a leader in the country.

People would come here for education professional tourism, to learn how to live in a way, work in a way that enhances the health, which is the true wealth of any community.

So enhances the ecological health and also the economical health.

We had one of the largest mesquite forests in the world that's all been obliterated since we depleted the flow of the river and dropped the groundwater level.

That that forest is gone so we can bring that forest back.

But now instead of just along the Santa Cruz River, this can be along every street, every walkway, inside every yard.

We are on a major migratory route of birds.

We can create this incredible food way for all of this migrating bird life.

And we can help increase their numbers.

So if we rehydrate rather than dehydrate our community and watershed, we bring back that life too.

Everything I do is really easy.

Okay, it and it takes no high tech equipment, nothing higher tech than a shovel, a hand shovel.

So anyone with just basic physical ability can do this and make these transformations, that's not a problem.

The difficult part is this requires a 180 degree shift in the way we see the world and think.

That's the challenge.

[rushing water] my spiritual practice is just seeing how life is is making it is flourishing without us.

But yet with all these incredible collaborations amongst the various species and the geology and the microclimates.

How do we collaborate with the natural systems that enable life in this place and on this planet in the first place?

Instead of fighting them?

If we can learn to see and act in a different way, yeah, then we can make huge positive changes.

[rushing water] [yells] Woo hoo!

[rushing water] [yells] Oh yeah!

[rushing water] [birds chirping]