Speaker 1: All right, welcome to the crime pace of botany dozen podcasts.
I'm excited for today's guests because I've been told by
numerous listeners that I should have this guy on probably
for a few months now. So with me today is
Brad Lancaster, who specializes in rainwater harvest thing. I I
just seen a Ted talk he did. He's get a
Ted talk out there, which was fucking dope. I should
mention too. It was very inspiring, I think for anyone
that lives in a climate that's generally hot as balls,
which certainly where I live and where you live both are.
You're in Tucson, I'm in South Texas. And so what's
the name of your book again, by the way, because
I know you got a book on this.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So it's rainwater Harvesting for dry Lands and beyond.
And then I've got two out. I've got the volume one,
the starter book, and then the volume two for people
that want to go in really deep. And I just
came out with the new Spanish edition Cossetcha the augur
yuvia Arizona Adi Porta.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Man, that's okay, that's that's what I'll need for
my region. What so so, let's just I just want
to get right into it.
Speaker 2: Man.
Speaker 1: So how did you get into this? And because I'm
coming at this from you know, my whole thing I've
been talking about for a while is plants are infrastructure.
Let's get away from this this you know, horticultural atrocity
mindset where plants are Oh, that's just pretty landscaping. We
just need something pretty to put in the back to
It looks pretty that, you know, that wedding backdrop idea
of plants, where it's like, no, they're actual, actually essential infrastructure.
They mitigate flooding, they mitigate the urban heat island effect,
and that's like, that seems to be all of what
you're about, as well as actually, you know, intelligently building
infrastructure in dry areas so that we're not just pumping groundwater,
which is not a renewable resource. You know. So how
did you get in all this?
Speaker 2: Yes, I'd say, uh, you know, it's kind of with
some childhood stuff we can come back to. But when
my brother and I we bought this about to be
condemned house together just on the north side of downtown
Tucson because that's the only thing we could afford, and
there was almost nothing growing on it. And the neighborhood
was amazing, just a real diverse neighborhood with an interesting history.
But the streetscapes were just barren and you didn't want
to be out and about, or you might see a
neighbor and talk to a neighbor because it was just
so hot and exposed. So in talk with neighbors, everyone
wanted they want more trees, they wanted more life in
the neighborhood. And being much younger at the time, I
had a ton of energy. I thought, well, all right,
I'll help organize a tree planting project. But then I
heard more of the history from the neighbors. So like
one of my elder neighbors, she said that she used
to be able to walk downtown and back barefoot in
the middle of the day in the summer. How did
you do that without scalding your feet? And she said, well,
it used to be lined with trees. The streets were
lined with trees. I said, well, what happened to the trees.
They're not any now, and she explained, well, she couldn't
remember what happened. She said, I guess they kind of
died out over time. So I looked at the Historic
Society at old photos and they are mostly exotic China
berry trees. They weren't native trees. They're all exotics.
Speaker 1: Oh god, yeah it is.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And so when people stopped watering, stopped caring for it,
they just died out. So I thought, okay, well, how
can we do better? And we looked to the We
only had to walk out into the desert outside of
Tucson and see there's all these amazing native trees that
are doing just fine without anybody's care. So that, well,
let's do that. But there was no program at the
time in the city that planted native trees. In fact,
there was a program that's still going today called Trees
for Tucson, but they only offered exotic plants, so they
probably really should have been called Trees for some other place.
But thankfully and working with them, Doug Coppinger, the guy
who was working with him at the time, he said, hey,
if you want to add a couple native trees to
the list, we'll get those for you. So I kind
of went overboard and I erased all the non native
trees from the list and I added nine native trees.
And he was cool about it. He said Okay, we'll
just consider this little pilot project. And we planted two
hundred trees that first year, and we've since planted over
eighteen hundred trees in the neighborhood. And the amazing thing
is we've found the native bird LIFs come back. One
of my elder neighbors, Maria, she said that this used
to be a really quiet neighborhood, meaning there was no
bird song. And she said, now she loves it because
every morning the birds are out there singing and all
because we've brought back their native habitat. So that that's
kind of how we got going. But then and we
started planting the rain when we planted the trees, but
we i was still learning, so we didn't do it
big enough, we didn't do it good enough, but it
was better enough and it was a start. So we
just plant these little three foot diameter six inch deep
basins in which we'd put the trees, and so then
when it rained, you'd have a good puddle of free
rain water that would infiltrate for the tree. But we
quickly realized that when we'd get a good storm, the
streets would flow like rivers and the water would just
flow right by our little basins and which were perched
higher than the street. We realized, oh man, we're missing
the boat. So we started expanding, deepening our basins, and
then we started to divert the water from the street
into the street side basins.
Speaker 1: Wait wait, hold on, So these you're talking about what
people call colloquially the hell strip between the sidewalk and
the street, correct, right, yeah, full on.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And so you were digging basin so that the water
wouldn't just run off, so that it would actually collect
and then infiltrate the ground. But the water would also
I mean, all that surface area of the road would
just collect the water, turn into a gutter essentially, and
the rain would just go right by it into the sewers.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, So with our little three foot diameter six
inch basin, you know, we were capturing I don't know,
maybe how many gallons, maybe fifty to one hundred gallons
of water, but what we saw flowing down the street
was just thousands upon thousands of gallons.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, all that surface man just collecting water.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So we're like, ah, man, well let's use the
street to water the street trees for free, just by
redirecting that street. Runoff off the street where it's not
doing any good. Unlet's direct it into the street side
hellscape and turn it into a heaven escape. And so
we started by doing this where there were these dips
in the curb where there were or had been driveways,
and so we just brought the basins to that dip
in the curb and that worked fantastic. Oh the trees growth,
it tripled, the growth rate tripled. They were way more
vibrant productive. So then we got on we got to
do more this, but there's not enough dips in the curb,
there's not enough driveways. So we realized we had to
cut the curbs to make stormwater inlets to pull it
off the street into the hellscape becoming heavenscape.
Speaker 1: Yes, I think I seen a video of this and
it looks awesome. It was like rain water running down
the curb side gutter basically and then being channeled into
a tree basin. Yep.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so we we we said, okay, well we got
to start cutting curbs. But that was illegal at the time,
but I think a better term is it was just
pre legal. It hadn't been legalized.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there you go. That's a good way to look
at it right. They just you were just showing them
how to do it right. They didn't know yah, so
you were just helping them.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So we considered our little project to be an
experimental pilot project. And that's the amazing thing about pilot
projects I encourage people to do that is they have
they are going to be illegal when they start, because
you're typically doing something differently than is the norm, and
that's why it's an experiment. And if you're doing something
like cutting the curbs for storm water harvesting, and if
it's at the time illegal, well you have to break
the law to show that the law is messed up
and it needs to be changed. So so that's what
we were trying to do. So on a Sunday morning,
when no one from the city was watching, we rented
a fourteen inch circular saw, gas powered and we cut
the curb and that worked great. And then the neighbors
they saw how our trees were just thriving and they said, look,
we don't even see you guys watering. Why are your
trees doing so much better than ours? And we showed him.
We said, well, this is what we did. We cut
the curve and they said, well, we want to do that,
but it was since it was still pre legal. We
it took me a while. I was actually scared to
approach the city. I thought we might get fined and whatnot,
and I couldn't I couldn't afford that to pay any fine.
So it took me three years, no more than that.
It took me almost eight years before I approach the city.
And when I finally did, it took three years of
meetings and we finally legalized it. And so now not
only is it legal, and we kept working with the
city and we got it to be incentivized so you
can get a two thousand dollars rebate for doing this,
and then we got a mandated so a new road
construction and major road renovation. They have to do this.
And not that they're always doing it right. Everyone's still learning,
but it's at least starting to move in the right direction.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's that's incredible that I'm so envious that you
live in a place where that was possible. I mean,
I guess it's possible where I live too, but there's
just so much I mean, I'm only saying this half jokingly.
People hate trees where I live. It's the hottest climate too.
It's the hottest climate. And I think, you know, because
people are so disconnected that they just they look at
the quote and they just I mean, this is all
in doctrination. It's the result of complete societal indoctrination and
disconnection from nature. But they see the mess and they
don't realize like, oh wow, the shade or the fact
that I mean, let alone the urban heat island, man,
I mean that that is insanity like it. You know,
it takes a six inch slab of asphalt fifteen hours
to cool off from one hundred and fifty degrees fahrenheit
to ambient air temperature. And so it starts cooling off
at night, and then the whole time it's just radiating heat,
becoming a space heater, making ever the whole rest surrounding
area hotter than what otherwise would be and preventing the
area from cooling off. And then you know, by six am,
the sun's already coming up again and recharging it up
with heat. And so that's I mean, that's how the
heat island works. I don't need to explain this to you,
of course, this is just for anybody listening. Yeah, yeah,
you know. But the way you prevent that is you
prevent the ground from getting heated up in the first
place with shade, by shading it, whether it's a pergola
or better yet, native tree. So did you encounter was
I mean, was there resistance at first or did you.
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, there's a lot of resistance. So in fact,
so we're we're right on the northern edge of downtown Tucson,
and there's a number of organizations in our neighborhood that
house and feed the homeless population, and so there was
a lot of fear among some neighbors that if they
planted a tree, it would just become a camp site
for homeless. And I said, well, why do you I
asked them, I said, why do you think that would
be the case? And they said, well, because it would
be nice and cool under the tree, and that's where
they'd want to hang out. So then I asked them, well,
well where do you want to hang out? And they said, well,
I'd like to hang out in a nice, comfortable place.
They go, yeah, so this is about you, this is
about your neighbors. How do we make this more comfortable
and more inviting for those of us that are here
right now and wouldn't you rather live in that than
a prison yard?
Speaker 1: You know, it's just barren Jesus Christ. It's just it's
so the lack of logic, I mean, the whole whatever.
I mean. And we don't need to get into this,
of course, because we just want to. We just want
to get other people thinking like this. But that logic
is so deranged and just fucked up.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: It's like we can't, we can't have nice things because
then we'll get a homeless person hanging out on earth.
Tell them to leave, it's your yard whatever for whatever?
Just are you that inept at navigating through life? Are
you not a fucking adult? Like, tell them to leave?
You get a tweaker hanging out in your You think
a tweaker is just gonna go hang out, you know,
on the hellscape, you know, and if they do, chase
them off whatever. I mean, it's just you know, because
this is it's the same reasoning like, oh, I don't
I don't want the trees because they make a mess. Well,
sweep the fucking sidewalk. You sweep the sidewalk? What what
are you? Your paraplegic? You don't have you know, like
the benefit is that now you have a nice place
to live and look out your front window on whatever. Anyway, Yeah, sorry, man,
it drives me nuts. It's so unthinking. And then you know,
never mind acting like you know, we could just live
in air conditioning for the rest of our lives and
be totally disconnected from the world around us. The water
is always going to be there, of course, you can
have a say in Augustine Lawn when it's one hundred
degrees for eleven months out of the year, all you
got to do is water it just turn on the irrigation, right, Well,
what happens when the water runs out? Okay? Sorry, So
moving forward when you I'm curious what happened when you
brought this up to the city, because, as you would imagine,
I think, especially when it comes to city employees or
city leaders, it's hard to think a few people that
are more disconnected, unfortunately, from biological and ecological reality. Right
they went in, Yeah, they probably graduated with a business degree.
Maybe they're a small business owner, maybe they maybe they're
a lawyer or so. They have no idea about any thing. No,
it's very possible they have no education about anything biological
or ecological around him. So what what did you How
did you go about this man?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I started by seeking out the friendly moles
in the system. So I tried to find people that
would be receptive to these ideas or at least open
to hearing them. And so thankfully a friend of mine,
Anne Audrey, worked for what was at the time the
city's Department of Sustainability, and so she was great, she
was all in on this. So I talked with her,
and then she knew more people on the inside she
was working with the city, so she found others that
could be potential allies. So then when she set up
the first meeting we were we knew we had some
allies there along with folks that definitely were not allies.
They were very doubtful of it. So my first approach
was actually kind of addressing the issues. You say, some
people they think trees are a mess. So I wanted
to address that kind of stuff by asking I mean,
I didn't start by asking, hey, can we get curb cuts?
Instead started to meet by asking the city officials what
are your biggest issues along neighborhood streets? And they said, well,
we've got the so called mess when we've got leaf
drop and stuff. We've got potholes, we've got crime, it's
excessive heat, we've got heat related illness, we've got speeding
traffic and the resulting accidents and so forth. So I said, okay, well,
that's that's good to hear. I experience all those in
my neighborhood, and we're trying to address those that in
a way that won't cost the city any money, but
in a way that the citizens, the neighbors. We're doing
the actions, we're doing the stewarding, so it doesn't cost
a city any money, but it benefits everybody. So, first off,
in terms of that's so called mess of leaf drop,
by planting within these water harvesting basins, we create low
spots and everything moves with gravity water leaf drop, So
we create the spots where we want the leaves to gather.
Leaves are called leaves because we're supposed to leave them
so they can help build the soil and fertility. So
they're not collecting on the path or the street. They're
instead collecting within the basin. That creates that sponge like malt.
It more rapidly absorbs the storm water and thereby we
don't have puddles and since we don't have puddles, we
don't have mosquitoes because the water infiltrates in twelve hours
or less, and mosquitoes need three days of standing water
to go from egg to adult, so we're addressing that issue.
So then by shading the streets, we're reducing the vaporization
of the asphalt, so we're reducing cracking and potholing of
the asphalt. And then by pulling the storm water off
the street, we're further reducing potholes because you don't have
that water pouring through the cracks and whatnot. So we're
getting it off the street where it's a liability, on
the street side where it's an asset. And then we're
getting neighbors out there doing this together, so then they
get to know one another and they're not strangers anymore.
So more people get to know one another, they become
friends or at least acquaintances, and they look out for
one another. So that helps to curb crime. And then
when they're out there, you know, tending the trees or whatnot,
they're also picking up litter, so and getting shade as
they grow. That's helping cool things off. And we don't
have as much heat island or sorry, heat island or
heat related illnesses. So people started to open up.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but we.
Speaker 2: Still had a number of the traffic engineers that were
very resistant because all their books that they had studied
say you don't want water in the streets. So thankfully
Frank Susa, who was at the time the head of
the city stormwater Control department, before the meeting, he had
gone around the city and taken all these photos of unconscious,
unplanned stormwater harvesting curb cuts where maybe a road had
been built and they stopped building the curb for some reason,
or maybe it had been busted out in a car
accident at some point, but water was coming off the
street into these street side swales and it was growing vegetation,
and these things had been in place for decades. And
he said, look, there's no damage to the roads here.
Everything's fine.
Speaker 1: Wait wait, wait, I'm in fuse though, So what what
is the thinking that Why does traffic engineers, why do
they not want water on the road. That doesn't make
any sense. Why are they worried about that?
Speaker 2: So they're worried that if you if you're infiltrating storm
water within the road or next to the road. That
moisture is then going to migrate, migrate under the asphalt,
and then you might get the compacted subsoil to subside
or sink somewhat. You might get roots growing under the
asphalt and then eventually heaving the asphalt. It's they're just
worried about the integrity of the road base.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, how is the water going to get under there?
I don't understand that by going through the side or what.
Speaker 2: Well if so, when we when we make a hole
in the street curb and pull water into a street
side basin, it's lower than the street. All that soil
within the basin fills, you know, get saturated with water
storm So they're worried it's going to continue to migrate
and saturate under the road base. And this is why
we said, well, we're not just doing stormwater basins. We're
creating a living system, and you have to have the
plants as part of the system as the living pumps, so.
Speaker 1: They use the water that's under there exactly.
Speaker 2: So we're saying that's why this is hand in hand
with our native tree planting program, so the tree will
be pumping up the water. Bappo transpiring the water and
also the bulk of the root growth is going to
be where the bulk of the moisture is, which is
not under the road, it's road side within these basins.
So some started to consider that, and then with Frank
Seussa's examples that were decades old, we got further along.
So eventually it took three years. Not that it has
to take this long, but they eventually legalized it after
a whole series of meetings.
Speaker 1: God, where I live, it would take a fucking decade. Man,
I just feel like there's just so much resistance here.
Its it's I mean, explain, that's a good angle too, explaining,
like explaining how heating up asphalt leads to further degradation,
Like when it's just out there and there's no shade
covering the road, that means you have to repair the
road more often than you would otherwise because you're essentially
cooking all of that, leading to cracks and fractures and potholes.
That's a new angle. I'm gonna try that. Thank you
for helping me add that to my arsenal. But for me,
it's just the heat. I mean, I will see these
strips where I live, and I think, you know, you
guys get individually hotter days. But where we live, where
I live, I live on the border in South Texas.
When Renosa has a garbage fire, which is every night,
I can smell the burning plastic, Like that's how close
I am, right, So, but where I live, it's I
think it's hotter. Where I live. We have more cumuls
of heat throughout the year. It was like eighty five
on Christmas. It's ninety five today. You know, you guys
actually get chili winters. It's for eleven months out of
the year. It's one hundred degrees fahrenheit here, ninety five
to one hundred. And we've got humidity because we're kind
of close to the Gulf. I'm like two hours from
the Gulf, and so try I will see these strips
of road like God, the McKellen shopping district, it's when
I get the Hell. That's gonna be one version. It's
the most bleak, treeless. It's just asphalt and mode turf
grass on the Hell strip. And it just you see
this there and you see the bright sun, and you
look at the thermometer and it's ninety eight degrees fahrenheit,
and you realize, and you look at all these cars
sitting in traffic because there's just too many cars here too,
and all the windows are rolled up. And then those
cars are space heaters too, essentially because they're generating heat
from the AC and the engine. And you realize, wow,
this is just a giant I'm just living on a
space heater. This is insane, Like this is at a
single bird in the sky. It's bleak as hell. It's
just plastic science, commercialism, billboards and cars. And I realized, like,
not only like the mental and psychological effects that living
in a landscape like that has on a person, but
just the physical effects too. Like we didn't evolve to
spend our lives sitting trapped inside cars, right, We evolved
to be running and chasing things and walking around, you know,
And your body starts literally degrading when you're not using it.
It does. You hit a certain age, your body starts degrading,
and you know what, going to the gym for an
hour is not going to do anything. Like it'll do
a little bit, but that's not going to save you
from heart disease. It's not going to save you from depression,
you know. And a lot of people, especially men, when
they go to the gym here, they don't do cardio.
They just lift weights because they want to look tough,
you know. So it's it's a very bleak. It's a
very very bleak. But you know, what you're showing me
is that it doesn't have to be like this. There's hope,
like and it really does come down to just planting
some fucking trees and using intelligent infrastructure. And it's crazy
because where I live, you guys, what do you say
eleven inches of rainy year?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, we get twenty two. Man, Like, we're not even
a desert like the the you know, Peyote and starkeack.
It's in all these cool cacti. I grow half an
hour from where I live. But we're not even a desert.
Speaker 2: Man.
Speaker 1: We get enough rain. There's no excuse. And we you know,
the thing, the way we've been doing things is just insane.
It's insane. It's unthinking and it's insane, and it's just
it's like this because it's just the way we've done
It's just the way you do it. It's just the
way it's always been. It's just the way you do it.
There's no there's no like intellect, but apply a little
bit of intellect and it'll go a long way. So yeah,
this is really great to talk about. To see the
thing that I'm I'm like, how do you work on
people who who don't understand this yet? Because I was
trying to plant street trees where I live and they
told me I couldn't do it. I had to pull
I had a nine person meeting with city hall just
to plant the street tree across the street from my house.
It took nine people. They even had a cop there.
I don't know if they were intimidated by me or
something or what, but it was like and I just
I explained the heat island to them, and I explained
why we need street trees, and I explained why we
use natives because they they evolved here over millions of years.
They were literally built and naturally selected for via evolution
by the by the circumstances here, by the climate circumstance here.
And uh and I got them, I think, just to
you know, throw me a bone and get me out
of there. They said, you can plant one tree and
that's it. And I was like, I don't want to stop.
I want to keep doing this. We need trees here,
like we've this is the ugliest place I've ever lived.
We need to do this. It doesn't need to be
like this, you know.
Speaker 2: So I would say that bleakness is your your hidden asset,
so because you can't make it any worse. So anything
you do, you going to make it better.
Speaker 1: Don't underestimate South Texas. They can always I'm sure they
could figure out a way like led the billboards, more
billboards could make it where they could do that, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but you're not going to make it any worse, right,
And so the where that was kind of our hidden
asset as well. So the neighborhood that I live in.
When my brother and I moved here in nineteen ninety four,
it was a long forgotten neighborhood because this is one
of the few neighborhoods in the Tucson area that was
never redlined. So in the years of segregation, you could
not own or rent property in the majority of Tucson
if you were of color or weren't of the Christian faith.
But in this neighborhood anyone could live, work, play, own, rent, pray.
It didn't matter. So but as a result, though with
those freedoms came the city not investing in this neighborhood,
so we didn't have sidewalks for the most part, whereas
the adjoining neighborhoods did, and we turned that into an asset.
So when I cut the curbs, no one from the
city noticed, even you know, I did it on Sunday morning.
But then for years after, nobody noticed because nobody was
watching this neighborhood like yeah, whatever, They didn't see value
in it. So as a result, like going into what
maybe some in the city considered an armpit of Tucson,
but I considered a gem, we I think had more
leeway to start. I think it might be harder to
start in a place that's looking, I don't know, more,
it's perceived to have more value.
Speaker 1: There's more members of a square community, you mean, yeah, yeah, right, yeah, yeah, yeah,
more to phrases and shit, yeah no, I get it,
I get you. Yeah, And I think you know, where
I live, it's kind of weird because it's it's an
older neighborhood and there's you know, it's actually like middle
class to lower income. It's not super fancy, but still,
you know, I think there's we get busy bodies, and
there's old people that just don't have to do and
they're you know, they're grumpy and miserable, you know. I've
just it's just the thing I've noticed in this neighborhood,
like a lot of the older people are just not
that happy and and so they just you know, they're
out there peeking with the blinds and complaining to the
city about stuff that doesn't matter. I don't know, but
I'm definitely going to work this more. And you know,
obviously requires code switching and working, you know, especially if
you look like me, and uh, you know, but I
think I think it can be done. But I'm the
other thing I'm curious though, too, is so when you
guys were doing this, the you were digging out basins,
so you've got like a hell strip was you're saying
there was a sidewalk there or wasn't, but the area
was the whole area was below grade or at street light. Well,
because a typical neighborhood the curb is what like eight
to ten inches above street level, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's how it was here, So we did not
have sidewalks, but everything was above the street by eight inches.
Speaker 1: So you guys would dig the basins out or what.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so we dug the basins deeper than the street.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because that's that I mean, when I'm planting trees here,
that's the thing I do is I'll dig out. It's
like the opposite of what they teach you in like
a you know, if you go to like a you know,
a community college horticulture class and like a more northerly latitude,
they're going to tell you, oh, you'll mound up the
tree and make sure the root flare is above the
Like no, no, no, where I live, you need to
make sure that there's like a pit around there. You know,
it's like kind of planted in a bowl so that
the water actually infiltrates, because it might not be another
month before you get a rain, two or three months
before you get another rain. So so that you're talking
about that's what you were doing as well, you were
because you know, yeah, planting out basically.
Speaker 2: We've since orfined it. So the key thing is to
put the right plant in the right place and the
right microclimate. So there are some species that you find
growing in the arroyos and natural ephemeral waterways. Those can
be in the bottom of the basin. But then there's
other species you find might be on the banks but
not in the arroyo, so those we put on the terrace.
So we create three planting zones in our rain gardens.
So we've got the bottom zone that's the most water
tolerant and cold tolerant plants because cold air in the
winter nights pools in the low spots. And then we
plant the less water needy tolerant species on the terrace,
so basically on the bank of the basin. And then
the least water tolerant needy species we plant on the
top so that's not in the basin but right next
to it, and that way everything thrives. And when I've
had the same thing that you've heard from the folks
back east, saying you got everything mounded and don't cover
the root flare, so to which I've just responded, I go, well, look,
here's photographs of this tree species growing in in Arrolio
where it's space, the tree is inundated with storm water.
It's doing fine. It's been there for decades. Yeah, so
you can refute those arguments with real life proof.
Speaker 1: Yeah it's not Pennsylvania, buddy, Okay, it's a little different.
You know. I could pour you know, forty gallons of
water on this thing, and the top inch of soil
will be dry in six hours, like the bone dry
in six hours.
Speaker 2: Like you know.
Speaker 1: I've been doing this a while. Yeah. I was crazy
when I posted a video of myself plant in a
street tree and people were like, oh, you planted that
way to wait too low, And I was like, okay, man, whatever,
you know, just you know, we're not an Iwy anymore.
This is this is like the border Lands. It's a
totally different thing down here. But yeah, I mean that's
the thing. I you know, because I would plant stuff
and we have like a number of public gardens nearby
where we planted stuff, and one is on a mild
slope and you water it and you can see the
water just run right off. I mean it's barren. So
you go to the thorn forest here and it's barren soil,
you know. I mean I think where you you know,
because I spend a lot of time in Tucson, it's
mostly like gravelly igneous soil there. Right Yeah, here it's
all it's like clay and silt and you just see
like fine particled clay and silt, calcareous silt, and there's
no igneous like anywhere around here. And you'll see the water.
I mean, you go out to the thorn scrub and
you will see just literal barren patches of dirt where
there's nothing growing there, maybe like a soil crust like
this black bacteria forms the soil crust film, not nostock,
it's another one. And then you'll see like likings. But
it's it's crazy. I mean, it's so bizarre here. When
I first came to the Rio Grande Valley in twenty fourteen,
you know, I came here to check out some of
the native cactus species, because you've got all these rare
plants that don't grow anywhere else in the United States.
How they don't grow anywhere else in the world except
northern Mexico and South Texas. And I was so blown
away at the habitat here, just it looked insane. All
the cacti were growing under this canopy of legumes, mostly
misquit or blackbrush Vichelia rigid doula, and it was just
like clumps of mammalaria, clumps of paote, clumps of like
all these cool but I had just never seen it
cacti grow like that because I'd spent you know, the
twenty years of my life in California and Arizona getting
used to the deserts out there. It's so bizarre. But
so the native trees you guys are planting, are they
mostly legumes or what.
Speaker 2: A number of them are, But they're not all legumes.
Who've got a hackberry, you know, celtis, and we've got
desert willow. It's not a true willow. So there's other
varieties as well, but the majority are our legumes. And
I want to just gonna build on what you were
just saying too. I want the key thing too. With
these bare soils, even if they're like barely draining water,
sloping water away, we are cutting our available water rainfall
in half or more. So we get eleven inches of
rain a year. But most people and most landscapes in Tucson,
they're lucky if they get five inches of rain a year,
and where you are, we get twenty two inches of rain.
Most people they're lucky if they're getting ten. Because the
bulk of the rain, you know, in our good summer
storms is running off, so you're not even getting the
full eleven inches here in Tucson, or twenty two inches
where you are of rain, because the bulk of it,
at least half is running away. And then on top
of that, if it's bare, you're losing whatever you did get,
you're losing most of that to evaporation. So when you
notice all that thriving life like the mammalarians and whatnot,
under the canopy of other vegetation, it's the same thing
here in the snor and desert. There's been some great
studies which have shown that there's a much greater diversity
and density of vegetation under the canopy of plants. And
that canopy could be provided by tree, It could be
by a choya cactus, but you'll see much more because
that little bit of shade is dramatically reducing the evaporative loss,
so more moisture is available, and you're also getting the
nutrient fall from the leaf drop if it's a tree,
that's the overstory. And then in a number of our
tree species and number of the legims like the mesquite
the desert ironwood, they have the ability to do hydrologic redistribution.
So when there's time of wetness in the rains, the
shallow roots absorb the water, transfer it to their deep
tap roots, which send the water much deeper in the
soil profile where it can't be lost to evaporation, and
they bank the moisture there until the dry times. When
the surface soils dry out, they pull the moisture back
up through the two tap roots redistribute it to the
surface roots, and that then creates a more humid, moist
microclimate under the canopy before the tree itself, but it
also benefits all its understory associates or understory.
Speaker 1: Well, this is not I didn't know that le humanous
trees can translocate water. They can basically store it and
then pump it back up. Yes, God damn can you
send me a paper on that later. That's that's pretty well.
Speaker 2: So there they're living rain water tanks and they're living
water pumps.
Speaker 1: I feel like I've heard that before. But yeah, that's nuts, man.
Speaker 2: I mean.
Speaker 1: And also, you know the there is there's a mild
microclimate of humidity under the canopy of a shrub or tree, right,
because I mean, anyone who's harvested zilosabe mushrooms in California
knows that you find them under the landscaping, under the
landscaping of the shrubs. You don't find them out in
the open. You find them on the mulch beds, under
the landscaping or you know, you it's a covering over
the ground. Basically, it's all about it's all about keeping
that ground from getting beaten up by the sun, from
getting heated up by the sun and then evaporating moisture.
I just it's yeah, it's it's crazy, and it's I
think what was interesting that you had mentioned. I'm not
sure if it was in this conversation in the ted
talk you gave, but you know, we were we basically
you were saying that we went to nature to look
at what was growing out there. The China berriers weren't
doing well. We went to nature, we looked at what
was out there. These things are doing fine and they're
growing without any human assistance. Why don't we use those,
you know, which is another thing I always explain to people, like,
then you use the natives, not because it's like a
feel good, pat your back, pat yourself on the back
kind of thing, because that's what makes sense. The natives
are adapted, they've got strategies, and they have morphological traits
like leaf hairs to enable them to deal with the
extreme heat. Because yeah, where we live, man, it's it's
I don't think people understand the sun is something to
be feared, both in Tucson and where I live. I mean,
it's it's already and it's gonna get worse. You know
it's gonna get worse. There's climate change, and then there's
also just the heat island effect too. I mean, I
look at these satellite maps of where I live sometimes
and it gives me anxiety. I'm like, God, damn, it's
just a giant black heat mat. It's just a giant
heat mat. That's only the whole area. It's just a
it's just a carpet of space heaters. These things become
all that parking lot and asphalt just becomes space heaters.
Once the sun goes down, they're reradiating heat at night.
You can feel it when you walk on it, and
we need shade. But so on your TED talk, you
talked about going to Zimbabwe and that I guess could
you talk about that a little bit because that was
that seemed pretty instrumental, and you went there after you
had already got into rainwater harvesting and plants, infrastructure and
all this or what how'd you end up there?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I didn't. I didn't learn any of this
stuff in my formal education. I started to become aware
of this stuff after I took a permaculture class, which
is a methodology of sustainable design that tries to mimic
natural systems. But that class left me with way more
questions than answers. And so after the class, I just
happened to have the opportunity to travel to Southern Africa.
My mom was originally from South Africa, so and where's
my dad? He was from Kentucky and they met n India. Yeah,
that's another story. So I was in Southern Africa because
we're going to have a family reunion there. And I
took the opportunity to backpack into Zimbabwe and I connected
with the folks at the Permaculture Trust about Tswana. And
while there, they told me stories about the water farmer,
this indigenous farmer in the driest region of Zimbabwe, mister
f and Iah Piri Maseco, who had taught himself how
to plant the rain. And uh so I was like,
all right, I got to check this out, you know,
I in the class, I learned theory, I need to
go meet the people that are doing this in practice.
So I took a number of just rural buses, riding
with the chickens and the goats, and I ended up
in Zischabine where mister Pierry lived, found him and I
spent a day with him checking out what he and
his family had done. And they had converted a very eroded,
non productive landholding into this lush oasis that became a
demonstration site for the region. And when he started doing this,
he was literally an ankle chains. So he had been
politically active, striving for democratic reform in what was at
the time called Rhodija. Rhodija used to be is what
Zimbabwe used to be called, and it was led by
an all white minority government.
Speaker 1: Spook Spooky ah.
Speaker 2: Go on sorry, So so he was. Since he was
striving for democratic reform so that black Africans could have
equal rights along with the whites. He he was blacklisted
and jailed under house arrest, and he told he'd never
work again in any capacity. So he had to figure
out how he was going to support his family of
eight with no job and no income. So he had
to figure out how to make this eroded landholding productive,
and he learned by observing what was happening in the
natural world. He saw that when it rained in the areas,
that water pooled or slowed down and had a chance
to infiltrate. Maybe because there were some rocks perpendicular to
the slope that acted like a speed hump and slowed
down that flow of water and allowed more to infiltrate.
That's where life grew. But where the water was too
quickly flowing off the land, it would take the soil
with it and nothing grew. So he decided, well, he
started to transform things by trying to mimic that which
he saw working, the slowing of the water, the infiltrating
water through repair, that which wasn't working, the water flowing
too fast and causing erosion. So over over decades he
turned this eroded landholding into an oasis. And he by banking,
by harvesting, by planting more rain in a year than
he consumed of water in a year, he raised the
groundwater level. So that's amazing, yeah, and this is something
we can all do. So they had hand dug wells
and the water levels came up. They Eventually the water
came up to the roots, so he no longer needed
to use the hand dug well and when so I
was able to go back and visit him twenty years
after my first visit, and I was afraid things were
not going to be as good as I remembered, because
he's a great storyteller, and I thought, you know, maybe
I had just been mesprized by the magic of storytelling,
and maybe it wasn't as good as I remember.
Speaker 1: There you gone and find it. He was just like
a master bullshit artist and like everything.
Speaker 2: Read, yeah, that was my gear. But I got there
and it was so much better than I remembered, in
part because in the twenty years since I had last
been there, he had continued to refine and evolve the system,
and not just him, but all the other life forms there.
They were working in concert to evolve it. So I
got there and it smelled of rotting fruit. I was like,
what the hell? And it was so productive. They're producing
so many mangoes and other fruit they couldn't keep up,
and so it was self mulching. And he had the
zebra that was constantly doing laps around the property. So
the area had become so there were so many subsistence
farmers that the big wildlife they were gone because their
habitat I had been eradicated by the agriculture, but the
wildlife that knew at his place there was still life.
And so that's how the zebra would still circle his
land trying to get in. He's like, that's where the
food is, that's where the good stuff is. So he
So after spending that day with him, I was kind
of depressed about the situation back home, and I said,
you know, look, I don't I don't want to go
back and because it's it's dismal back home, and I'm
thinking of believing.
Speaker 1: I've felt that so many times.
Speaker 2: So I said, so, can you give me some advice,
like where? How should I figure out where I should go?
And he slapped me on the shoulder. He said, you
need to go back home, and you need to set
your roots deeper than you ever thought possible, because if
you leave and you run away from your problems, problems
are going to run with you. They're going to follow
you wherever you go, and you're just going to plant
problems and grow more problems everywhere you go. And that's
going to keep happening until you're able to face your problems,
solve those problems, and then you can go anywhere you want,
because then you'll have the ability to plant and grow solutions.
Speaker 1: Damn.
Speaker 2: So with him saying that, I was like, Okay.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, he was basically like, fucking get to work. Yeah,
and get to work. Stop whining and get to work.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And that's that's exactly what I did. I didn't
know how I was going to do it, but I
knew it was possible because he and his family had
done it and they have fewer seemingly had fewer resources
available to them than I did to myself, and they
didn't have hardware, store whatnot we could go. So I then,
inspired by what I saw he and his family had
done and others so I had had the chance to
visit and learn from, I started to try and modify
things to what to my unique conditions here in the
urban environment. And along with that, it wasn't just him
that inspired me, was also the indigenous farmers of the
Snoring Desert. So after meeting mister Pierre and I had
the opportunity to meet Clifford Pablo, who is Autumn and
he was taught how to do the traditional runoff farming
by his grandfather. So they would just grow abundant crops
just using storm water that they would divert some of
that out of the arroyo, the ephemeral waterway, and they
plant right next to the arroyo out in the open desert.
And so I realized, in talking with him and walking
around his family's old farm, that I too lived on
an arroyo or an ephemeral waterway, except mine was paved
with asphalt and the banks were lined with concrete the
street curb. So I realized I could apply the traditional
aucchin runoff farming to my street side if I considered
it an arroyo side or an ephemeral waterway side. I
just had to reconnect the floodplain of the bank of
the arroyo the street side bank of the Hell Strip,
with the water flowing down the arroyo or the street
and the street curb cuts and curb cores. That was
the means of reconnecting the once segregated water and soil.
Speaker 1: How would you go about doing that in an area
where the street was below gray.
Speaker 2: Uh you mean lower than Hellstrip?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah, well you the Hell Strip is like eight
to ten inches, and so cut the curve and then
you would just end up into the soil. Would you
have to dig that out then? Or what?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, because that's our situation and that's what we do.
Speaker 1: Uh huh. So you dig it out a little bit
and the water runs in there, and doesn't it it's
and then at some point once the water runs in,
I mean, don't you get erosion of the soil on
the above you know, above the street then or what?
Speaker 2: No? So well, if we have a gradual slope, you know,
we have enough room for gradual slopes of the banks
of the basins. You don't need any stabilization. You just
get that angle of repose, the natural slope that doesn't erode.
And then when we've got tighter areas we don't have
as much room. We can't go as gradual with our slopes.
We have to go more vertical. Then we stabilize those
with any number of materials. It can be rock, it
can be prunings from storm storm downed tree branches. It
can be urbanite, you know, broken up sidewalk chunks that
we just carefully put in place so it actually looks good.
It does look like broken up sidewalks.
Speaker 1: What'd you call it? That's pretty that's pretty cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a very abundant urban geologic formation. Uh. And
so yeah, you only have to stabilize the steep bank.
You never put any rock on the bottom of the base.
And if you do that, you're going to impede the infiltration, right,
you want to maximize the infiltration. So and just doing
that it works great.
Speaker 1: Is there a is there a you got a YouTube channel?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: Is there a place where people could see this, like
what it looks like, like how the process is done,
because the curb cutting. Forget where I saw it, but it, man,
it was amazing, and it was you know, it was
during it was a video. I think it must have been.
It was in Tucson where someone had done it and
they had like this little channel cut basically into their yard.
It looked like a mini arroyo and it just kind
of emptied into the yard and then and the water
was just going right in. I mean, I think of
you know, because the same thing happens to my street
when we get a hard rain and all that water
just goes right into the fucking storm drain and it
just wasted. It's just wasted it. It's crazy. We live
in an area with water shortages and we're just pouring
water into storm drains to you know, instead of onto
the land. So yeah, so.
Speaker 2: Folks can they can get all the info on how
to do this. The majority of the information is in
my books Rainwater Harvesting for dry Lands and Beyond, especially
the full color edition of volume two. I've got a
whole chapter dedicated to this. And then if they just
search Brad Lancaster at YouTube, they'll find my channel and
they'll see the videos of all this stuff. And I
just want to point out that here in our desert community,
and it'll be the same in your community. More rain
falls on the surface area of Tucson, Arizona, and an
average year of rain than the entire population of over
a half million people consume of municipal water. So if
we recognize rain as a water source, not something to
get rid of, we can provide all the water we
need just with the rain. We don't have to import
water from elsewhere, we don't have to pump it from
the ground water. But that requires us to manage the
water differently. And so we're trying to show folks how
to do that.
Speaker 1: And using I mean using plants. I mean, people just
need more plants in general. I mean the fact that
so many of the hell strips and street side landscapes
are just mode turf grass. I mean, that's fucking insane.
That shit has to stop. Yeah, that doesn't make it.
If you live in England or something, maybe that makes
sense in a cool, mild climate where it doesn't get
too high e ample rain. Maybe it doesn't work done here.
That's that's insanity. That is complete. I mean, it's either
stupidity or insanity. I don't know, maybe a blend of both.
If you just for anybody listening, if you just google
curb cut rainwater harvesting, you get a plethora of images.
But basically you do have to dig out the yard
side of the street a little bit. You have to
dig it out a little bit, and then you just
create like a little bowl or a basin, and and
then I guess if it you know, and you prevent
the slopes from eroding. I mean you're saying they don't
erode that much anyway, but you can also prevent them
from eroding with rocks or especially I mean, if you
have native vegetation growing on the slopes. Boom, there you go.
That's what a bioswale is. It's not it's not going
to erode. But yeah, I can see how if you
were like a genteel or something, you had no idea
about plants, you'd see this and you would go, oh
my god, you know, like it just it doesn't it
doesn't make immediate sense until you actually see it. But
all the pictures I'm seeing, I mean, these look like humane,
livable landscapes full of plants, you know, And it's this
is the kind of cultural change that we need to
happen all across the US, where plants aren't seen as messy,
but they're seen as essential pieces of infrastructure. And I
talk about this in presentations too, because I think, you know,
part of the I hate most of modern horticulture. I'm
not going to lie. I think it's disgusting. It's just
as bad as the lawn. You know, you go to
like the bank or the post office and the stuff
you see is just garbage, and it reinforces this idea.
It's non native garbage. First off, it's most often dead
because it's not adapted to this climate. They still plant
crape myrtles where I live, which evolved in a place
where you get forty to sixty inches of rainy year,
not twenty. And also in a forest where it's you know,
where it's like eighty degrees, not one hundred and five.
And so of course they always die and so but
modern horticulture kind of reinforces the idea that plants are
just supposed to be pretty. That's all they're supposed to do, right,
They're either they give you fruit or they're pretty. They're not.
It's never seen as oh wow, they actually help mitigate flooding,
which I want to talk about here in a minute,
because a lot of people that flies right over their head.
They don't understand how having roots break up the soil
actually helps the water infiltrate and mitigates flooding, you know,
or the plants prevent the heat from baking the shit
out of the whole landscape and creating a heat out
in the first place. So this is kind of like
what we have to change. So that's why I've just
been saying, you know, plants are infrastructure. Their plants, trees
are infrastructure. They're not like a feel good things. It
does feel good, but their infrastructure. Without them, you have
a shitty place to live, right, Having them creates a
better quality of life and has a number of practical
and pragmatic services that they provide. And so yeah, and
what's go ahead.
Speaker 2: I'll also say what's awesome about well, using the right plants,
using native plants, plants that are the best adapted to
your local climate, soils and wildlife. That's it's not just infrastructure,
living infrastructure. And because it's living infrastructure, it has the
ability to naturally repair itself. It's not you don't require
maintenance crew to come in and repair. It can do
that itself. It can reproduce itself. So it's it's so
much more regenerative and vibrant in the fact that it's alive,
not dead concrete infrastructure. So it's green infrastructure. It's living.
It's not gray, dead concrete infrastructure, which has so many
other backits.
Speaker 1: Have you seen that guy. There's some dude that's like
planting natives in the La River.
Speaker 2: Yeah, wood and stuff.
Speaker 1: I can't think of a more fucking bleak landscape than
the La River. Like, what were they thinking? When was
the La River concrete?
Speaker 2: It?
Speaker 1: I don't know, like sixties or something.
Speaker 2: C seven before that, I think before that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's I mean it seems like such a shit
for brained. I mean, that's insane. Why would you do that, Like,
why would you just create a giant concrete ditch? And
we've got a number of those in San Antonio two.
And they there was actually a plan down here, some
fucking goofball you know, one of these suited pencil neck
goofball politicians down here, had this idea that he was
gonna they were going to concrete all the irrigation canals here, right,
that they were just gonna drain the water out, temporarily
redirect it, and then lay concrete, which is just insanity
to me. So, I mean, he's obviously working for you know,
his nephew runs a concrete company or something that's going
to get the contract. That's the way it normally goes.
But but that's just it's crazy, man, It's just insane.
Because they were worried about water seeping into the ground. Well, okay,
but when water seeps into the ground, then it eventually
recharges the aquafer. Yeah, and it's thick clay here anyway,
not that much water is receeping into the ground. You're
just this giant infrastructure project and waste of eighty plus
million dollars or however much. But the La River thing,
I mean, that is like there's a reason they've filmed
so many, like, you know, so many post apocalypse movies there,
you know, because it looks terrible. But now there's these
areas where there's they weren't they either weren't able to
cement it or the cement has you know, broken up,
and there's native plants growing there. There's like a native
baccarat species. What is that solicifolia I think is the
one you get down there, you know, a native coyote bush.
All these plants and and it's slowing the flow down,
and it's creating bird habitat, and it's creating an actual
nice place to look at and be. It's it's crazy
to think about. Man, did they do that? They did
that in Tucson A bunch too, did because I lived
there a lot. Yeah, they had concreted the concrete irrigation
ditch or drainage ditch.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, there's still a bunch of that. And there's
a cool little project. This was actually done in La
where some activists they did a bunch of native plant
plantings on the banks of the La River next to
the concreted channel. But what they did is they went
up stream of the plantings and they put in a
pipe that pulled the nuisance flow in the La River,
or the urban drool flow. So the La River is
always flowing because of all the car washing in the
streets and broken pipes and stuff, so it's always flowing
a little bit, and then in the big storms it flows.
It floods, you know, it flows bank to bank. So
this pipe it grabbed that urban drool flow and way upstream,
and then it had that pipe going at a very
gradual drop, so it moved the water via gravity, but
it was a more gradual slope in the pipe than
it was in the La concreted channel. And so then
they outleted it where they had planted these native plants
on the bank up above the channel, and they just
created a little natural neandering waterway through which the urban
drool flowed. And that became the three negation source of
all those plantings on the upper bank, and they then
became the seed source, the living gene bank, the living
seed bank that would then scatter its seed via gravity, animals,
water flow and wind into the cracks of the concreted
channel below. And so this way that gene bank, that
seed bank that they had planted on the banks, it
never got scoured out in the flood flows. It was
always there.
Speaker 1: And where what where did you? Where can people read
about this more? I want to go? I want to
go learn about this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so just go to my website Harvesting Rainwater dot
com and then just click the blog page. And this
is one of my early blogs. So go scroll down
to one of the earlier posts and you'll find that.
Speaker 1: And who was doing this? Who did this? On the
on the who did this?
Speaker 2: In l a man, it's been so long since I
wrote that blog, I got to look it up myself.
Speaker 1: You can look at it, I can.
Speaker 2: I also wanted to mention too that, you know, the
way we got this stuff started and when people were
not open to this is just with one simple little
gorilla installation pilot project. And then we kept working it
and I manicured it, you know. I continue to get
out there and care for it, steward prune it to
make sure the plants aren't growing into the pathway. Because
I wanted it to look good enough that people wouldn't
be repelled but would rather be lured in. And I
wanted it wild enough so it suited my aesthetic and
also that of the wildlife, so it would work for all.
But we were so successful working alongside the street that
now we're actually working in the street. So now we're
creating in streets, not street side, but in street stormwater harvesting,
traffic calming like roundabouts or traffic circles and chicanes that
narrow the street. So we're now literally planting the native
rein irrigated food forests in the streets themselves. And that's
now shifting that our neighborhood was the first to do that,
so now that's shifting city policy. The city now has
development standards allow other neighborhoods to do this. And if
folks go to the Neighborhood Foresters dot org website that's
my sister website, that'll show a lot of the stuff
we've been doing in the neighborhood. And if they go
to the gallery page at Neighborhood Foresters dot org, they'll
see the before and after side by side photos of
before we had the n street waterhoves, scene and then
after and now we've got literal food forests, native food
forests growing in the street, and it's you know, so
often people don't know what's possible, and they don't know
that change is possible. So we also make a point
of putting before and after signs at these installations. So
we take a photograph before we do the work, and
then we put a bilingual sign that shows people, hey,
this is what it looked like before we did the work,
and then people coming through today are like, what this
used to look like? That used to be barren. My
place looks barren. I could change my place, man.
Speaker 1: It's I mean everybody, because I've been doing the killer
long thing for for a long time now, Like I
don't know five or six, you're not a long time.
I'm going to be doing it till I croak. But
but you know the thing I always hear from people
because I'm on a fucking mission, this is the you know,
I realized the change this has on people's lives. I
have not met a single person where I've done this too,
or I show them how to do it, who's ridden
me and been like, Y know what this sucks. I
don't like it like, everyone's like, man, you wouldn't believe
what I saw in my yard. Oh my god, it's
such a nice place. I spend time in my front yard.
Now I saw these cool birds come by. It feels
really good. Thank you so much. I've never had anything
but that. I mean, I've never even had just like,
that's all right, Like I've never had. Everyone's excited about
it because plants make people feel good, no shit, because
we involved with them, we evolved, nurtured in this nest
of living, of the living world, and so you know,
I think a lot of people, especially a lot of kids, Man,
they don't realize, you know, Like when I was a teenager,
I was everything where I grew up. It was just
concrete and shit and plastic signs and commercialism and it.
You know, it made me feel terrible and I didn't
I didn't realize it until a couple of years in
when I started thinking about it, and I was like, god,
I just I hate going to that area, you know,
Like my mom would take me to go run errands
with her and I'd be like, God, you know, I
hate going there. It's so ugly and it makes me
feel terrible, and it's hot and there's no trees. And
it was because of that. I mean, imagine going out
into a neighborhood that felt good to be in, that
looked nice, that was shady, that had people out, that
had birds chirping. You know, all this shit that people
take for granted or worse, they never had to begin with,
and they don't know how nice it is to, you know,
have a shady street filled with birds and cool shit
and cool plants and butterflies everywhere and cool insects, and
you know, it's the whole idea that going outside into
the world doesn't have to suck is new to people.
It's like, it doesn't have to make you feel like dying,
right because of where I live. I mean, I'll be
astray with you. Man, where I live, I've got a
native My whole yard is now. You can't see the
street from my front door or from my house, and
I like it that way because I don't want to
have to see the world around me because it's hideous.
It's hideous. I mean, it's treeless, it's concrete, it smells
like auto fumes. It's just shitty, and no one going
out unless they're like, no one's you never see people
walking unless they're forced to and because they're poor or something, right,
I mean, it's some dude from Turkey just came here
and did a video on where I live on McCallan,
Texas and the title of the video was the fattest
city in North America and he mentions and it is
it's I mean, it's obesity is a huge problem here.
And it's a huge industry too, Like the healthcare is
a big industry down here. It's like one of the
few jobs you can get besides border patrol that pays
really well. And it's you know, it's a sickness industry.
It's not a health industry. It's profiting off of people
being sick and metabolically ill. But but you know, it's
in the video was interesting because he shows, you know,
he's like, why are there so many fat people here?
As well? The food's garbage. It's like what a burger
and you know, really greasy tacos and taco bell But
most importantly, like everything is just auto dependent and the
few places where their ice are sidewalks. And then he
shows a strip of the McCallen shopping district, which makes
me feel like dying every time I think about it.
And he shows a sort of McCallen shopping district and
it's just a sidewalk just roasting in the sun with
no tree cover for you know, no trees in sight.
Like it's looking down the street. You know, it's like,
why why go outside when there's no shade? Right, there's
why go for a walk and when there's no shade,
you know. So it's this. This gives me a lot
of hope, and I just hope people start listening to it.
Speaker 2: God, I just wanted to add one thing about that, hope. So, man,
I certainly, uh have my fair share of depression when
I see it could be one of the neighborhood apartment
complexes cutting down trees because they turned off the irrigation
system and stuff starts dying, you know, and stuff like that.
We've got our fair bleak too. But rather than wallow
in that depression, which would be too easy to do,
that's when I start doing more planting. So I've been
doing a lot of gorilla planting with neighbors too. So
in one of these apartment complexes, after they cut down
the trees and turned off the irrigation, we went back
in we replanted. So during the summer monsoon season, we
transplanted some little seedlings. After we first changed the topography
of their like landscape medium strips in the parking lot
which used to just be mounded and drained all the
water to the parking lot, we flipped it so then
we created basins so the water would collect where our
seedling went.
Speaker 1: How did you did you do that with Did you
have like a back home or you just doing it
by hand or what?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I just doing it by hand. So I just
go in summer, there's not many people in the apartment
and a complex, and I go on super early on
Sunday mornings, so I start work at four am, so
nobody's out and about, and we just go out with picks,
shovels and digging bars and a wheelbarrow and started going
at it. So I don't need a gym membership. That
is my gym membership.
Speaker 1: Nay Man, I need to come over there and do
a video. I'm going to come over there and do
a video in the next couple.
Speaker 2: Yeah, by all needs christ I love this.
Speaker 1: This is just fascinating stuff and what you guys are
doing can really lead the way for other people to
hopefully pick up on man, because it's I mean even
in Austin, which is Austin's still kind of chilly right now,
you know, whereas where I am, it's already ninety two.
Like even in Austin, I mean, it's so fucking hot
there in the summer, it's crazy. And they could I'm
sure they could learn a lot there from what you
guys are doing.
Speaker 2: Well. Yeah, And and it gives when I then see
those seedlings grow over time, that's giving me hope because
they're just they're growing on their own at that point.
Now I do have to bring in a bucket of
water for the for a little while to get that
root system grown and established before it can just take
off on rain alone. But one of these trees, the
desert ironwood, the alienia to soda, it's got edible flowers
and seed it's amazing keystone species under which you know,
all kinds of life grows. I planted one on the
street side, and we occasionally get tree killers in the neighborhood.
So he had this one older neighbor who was he
was having some mental challenges, and he took it upon
himself to cut that tree down, and so he just
cut it down on the ground and he buried the stump,
and I was so angry, and I I had a
conversation with him, tried my heart, isting to be real
diplomatic and trying to understand where he was coming from.
But he just threw a kitchen sink at me of
that had of just things that had nothing to do
with the tree. So I just realized, Okay, we're we're
different universes in our perspective in the world, so I'm
just gonna let this sit. And I just left by saying, hey, Don,
next time, you know, I'd really like to collaborate with
you somehow. I don't know how we'll go about it,
but next time, can you talk to me first so
we can maybe come to something that works for everyone.
And he didn't respond, So I thought I was depressed
for a good while for nine months, just seeing no
life there. And then I don't know if it's karma, Don,
he kind of got ill and he was having a
hard time getting around. About the time that happened, I
noticed these a few little stems, a little new growth
coming up from the base of this iron lid trunk,
and so it had been nine months of nothing, and
then all of a sudden a little bit of emerging growth.
I'm like, oh, man, is don going to see this?
And it kept growing, it kept growing, and then in
a matter of two years it was almost back to
the original size it was before he before he had cut.
Speaker 1: It down and then died. And now, yeah, what happened?
What happened?
Speaker 2: Actually he did eventually pass away. Well you know, you.
Speaker 1: Guys like he ever saw the light anyway, So it's
okay to joke about it. No one knows he is
hopefully sorry.
Speaker 2: But the it was amazing resilience of that native tree,
and so they are known as good compassing trees. Where uh,
there's many parts on the north side of Tucson where
there's massive ironwood stumps where people had cut the trees
down to fuel the kilns and whatnot for early construction materials.
And now there's big trees again that have regrown from
those massive stumps. And so we were just experiencing an
example of that right here in our nameihborhood. And so
what that was The other big hope that that gave
me and made me realize, is well two things. So one,
if we plant these native species and they're vandalized by
city hired maintenance crews or neighborhood tree killers, there's a
really good chance that they are going to come back,
and especially if we plant them within or beside these
water harvesting earthworks. So also at this apartment complex parking
lot area, where the parking lot was draining all its water,
I did some plantings and so called maintenance crew came
in clear cut it, but didn't matter. It's all since
regrown from the rootstock because there's ample moisture there to
fuel that regenerative regrowth. So we can put a lot
of it's more energy to put in this planting of
the rain the water oversing earthworks initially, but once you've
got that beneficial water harvesting topography, then everything's easier after
that and the plants regrow themselves.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, so read the rain. So what you're doing
changing the topography is basically just site prep. It's like
setting it up so that it actually gets water. And
when I cause I've been I started, I was doing
a lot of gorilla tree planting, you know, fifteen years
ago in Oakland when I lived out there, and I
would just say, you know, all right, yeah, shit dies
or someone vandalized it. When whatever, I'll just go harder.
I'll do five more next time and I'll plant it's
super dense. I don't give a shit. I got you know,
this is I get off on this. This is joy
to me. This isn't work, you know.
Speaker 2: And the cac die are great for that because when
I notice people will vandalize the prickly pair and stuff
that we plant, and there's just pieces all over. It's
like the broomsticks of Fantasia. I then plant every piece
and then we've got a dozens more prickly pair than
we did pre vandalism, because every little piece has been
planted and is rooted as growing more pads.
Speaker 1: What was Don's reasoning? I mean, I know you said
he was nuts, but like everyone's fucking nuts. Look at
look at the society we live in. How could you
not be?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 1: What was his issue when he was complaining about the tree?
Was it messy or was it like literally schizo.
Speaker 2: Uh iran, Yeah, unfortunately it was really schitzo. I couldn't
I couldn't make any sense of it.
Speaker 1: Damn that sucks, poor bastard. Well, all right, p Don
and uh the tree can be dedicated to him now.
But imagine having only a test Sooda, the fucking iron wood.
That's one of my favorite trees because it's a like him,
but it's not a mimosoid like you know, uh, like
mesquites or or lukena or any of those. It's an
actual like pea subfamily. You know. It's got those papollionaceous
flowers with the banner petal. They're fucking beautiful flowers. Imagine
having that and planting china berries Like that's that's crazy, man,
Like you live in a spot where that thing comes
with the land. One of the most gorgeous trees in
the desert comes with the land, and you're planting china
berry trees right like this thing that needs way more
rain and is from nine thousand miles away. It's crazy.
Speaker 2: And those china berries are relative dead zones because the
I don't know, if you've seen the book by Douglas Talamay,
you should get him on your show.
Speaker 1: Oh I had him on, yeah, yeah, yeah, oh Cole
years ago. I was surprised he came on because he's
kind of, you know, high and tight. He's like a
he's very wholesome, but he was down to come on here,
and yeah, he didn't approve of the of the term
killer lawn though. He's like, I don't like that. We
just say it's like, hey man, we're different people, Doug.
We're different people, different audiences.
Speaker 2: He opened my eyes too. He just said, you like
you like native songbirds, like yeah, I love native songbirds, Like, well,
then you got to have caterpillars because that's what they
feed their young. And he's like, we've got all these
non native mesquites, which unfortunately is now the dominant tree
and the Tucson area in the landscape trade. What is
South American it's the South American hybrids. Oh, you're on
the species name on it. Well it's changed Prosopis. But
the Argentinia and the Chileanensis are two of them. But
there's others. And so our native butterflies and moths they
can't eat it, and so whereas our native mesquite they can.
So you get great caterpillars with the natives, but it's
just a dead zone with the non natives.
Speaker 1: I just why why do people do that? And they
do that everywhere. It's all over the world. Like you
have amazing you have an amazing palette of native trees,
and then you plant something that's essentially the same genus
or family, but it's from It's from like three thousand
miles away. It's like intentionally intentional stupidity. Like when I
lived in Oakland, they would do that. We have ass
kel Fornica native California buckeye. Don't fucking plant it's drout.
It's drout dormant, right, it goes dormant, the leaves fall
off in August, and then it's got these incredible sprays
of flowers and these the fucking morons like that, you know,
behind whatever city agency would plant European buckeyes from a
climate that gets summer rain. It just doesn't make any sense.
It's like, yo, you've got which is the same genus
you have? You already have one that works while you're
doing this, you know, Yeah, it's crazy.
Speaker 2: Well, I find that, in my opinion, the unethical nursery
growers that are planting that are selling the non natives.
They like the South American hybrid mesquites because they grow
faster so they can sell more plants, and that they
grow into bigger size. But then people who plant them
they find that those non native mesquites are susceptible to
storm blowover, so you lose your tree.
Speaker 1: So yeah, it doesn't pay off in the long term.
And also it's just not tied into the ecology there.
I see. This is all stuff that like I love
ridiculing it because it's fun, but also I think it's
it can change because it's just a practicality issue. It's like,
you know, it's like intentionally doing things that are stupid boy,
because no one has shown you that there's a better way.
And then once someone shows you a better way, you
would have to intentionally be going against what makes sense
to not take that better way. So I most people
take the better way. They realize, oh yeah, the native
stuff is if I plant this, I'm gonna get all
the cool birds, and it's it's evolved here and there's
actually practicality to it, so yeah, I'm gonna do this instead.
And so I think that change. I mean, Tucson's light
years ahead of where I live culturally speaking as well,
so I think it's gonna it's especially there it can change,
but but here it can change as well. I think
it's you know, again, it's just showing people like, hey, man,
this is what makes sense, and this is what's what's
the best, uh the best thing to do. But then
the miscuits you have, I mean, it's what is it?
It's volutna, it's persopus or nowavolutna, and then you guys
get pussens to screwbeanscups, and then parkinsonia it's florida, And
then do you get prey coox there too.
Speaker 2: Uh that's more to the south, other side of the
border that that's gone, but it's in the landscape trade.
But yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: But those things are amazing.
Speaker 2: What about the microphyllum and the floridum, those ones are
native Calabernese. What about go ahead. I was just saying,
they have edible flowers and seed. So the other way
that we're trying to get people to recognize the value
of the native plants isn't just through the wildlife habitat
and how you you don't have to water it so
it's lower maintenance and all that. But were we also
draw our plant lists from the local ethnopotana records to
see what did the indigenous and the early immigrant cultures,
how did they utilize these plants? So then it becomes
this great connection to the history of the various peoples
rooted to this place. So it's it's like a whole
history lesson and tie to the various cultures of place.
And we're just looking for excuses or invitations for people
to have additional, deeper layers of relationship with the plants.
So it's the hope that you know, they won't just
extract from them, won't just harvest from them, but they'll
want to actually give back and collaborate with those plants in.
Speaker 1: Respect them and have reverence for them. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and we and going further in that direction. We
started are you know, I started my tree planting and
water harvesting with our street side plantings, but we now
don't just plant trees. Initially that's all we did, but
now we try and plant forests with every planting many forests.
So we've created the water harvesting basin. We make it
bigger than we used to when it was just trees,
and then we're planting just five gallon sized tree that's
the biggest school plant. We don't plant any bigger than
that because we find that the smaller nursery stock it
grows much faster than the bigger plants, and you save money,
so and you don't have to dig holes as deep,
so it's easier work.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it hasn't been tortured in a pot for
however many years. I tell people that all the time,
it's way better to plant one gallons or tubes and
then just yeah, because they get established so much faster,
especially with all the legumes. Man, because all the legumes
are free out of fhytes, they all send down really
deep roots, which is another great thing why they're such
great street trees, because the roots don't go out, you know,
like say like a sycamore or something, would they actually
go down.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So we're planting those deep rooted legumes and other
native trees, and then we plant the understory plants, all
the various layers at the same time. They're all going
to look the same size when we plant them. They're
all one gallon pots. But we're planting the larger shrubs,
which I also call bush trees because they don't grow
so tall that they grow into the overhead power lines.
So we'll plant those under the overhead power lines. Then
we have our smaller shrubs, and then the even smaller groundcovers.
We got the vines, we've got the tuberous rooted plants,
the cacti, so we plant all that at once, because
the people have to water these native plantings the first
one to three years to get them established, to get
those small root balls from the potted plants from the
nursery to grow wider, and it's one to three years
depending on the weather. So if we're in a real
droughty dry time, might have to water three years, but
if we're getting average rains, one year can suffice and
then it'll just be the passively harvested rain water and
stormwater doing all the irrigation. You don't have to water.
But since the people are already water in the tree,
it's like, well, let's get them to do all the
understory at the same time. And it's not going to
take any more time from the people. They're already out there,
and let's get way more diversity and vegetation and density.
Vegetation will have much better habitat, and we'll have all
these other food bearing and medicinal bearing plants that it's
really a living farmer's market and pharmacy. It's not just
a single outlet. And so that's been really successful and
I wish we had started that way, but at least
we figured that out and are now doing it that way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the density, the density thing is really important. That's
you know, it's like a keeping with the whole Milwaukee
tiny forest meth Yeah, which is what I mean. That's
something cool that people did here. You know, a friend,
a friend of mine, John Brush, and a couple other
people that work at this place called Keita, Mazatlan and
McCallen have been doing that, planting tiny forests, and you know,
just unlike areas that would otherwise just be barren barren dirt.
You know, they still mow it, like they still there's
still some guy out there every week driving around with
a mower just kicking up clouds of dust. But because
there's little patches of dead burm mudigrass that they feel
they have to most still, you know, it gives them
a sense of purpose. It's important for their psychology. But
they but they did one near the park here in McAllen,
and like you know, it's just it's just dense planting.
And I'm sure again to the uninitiated, to anybody who's
spent their life living and air conditioning and doesn't go
hiking or spend time in nature. They maybe they think
it's weedy at first, but eventually it grows in and
it makes the whole area again filled with birds, mitigates
flooding and keeps the heat off the ground. The flooding
thing is really really important because that's something I think
a lot of people don't think about and don't realize.
You know, because I made these stickers it said lawns
cause flooding. Because they do. They literally do. That's why
sod is a thing. Because roots don't go deep. SOD
works because lawn roots don't go deep. They don't need
to because there's only a couple inches of leaves. If
you've only got a couple of inches of leaves, you
don't need deep roots. You only have a couple inches
of of or you don't produce deep roots unless you're
like a desert plant that's adapted to it. So you know,
these these lawns, but if you keep it perpetually mode
and then you've got to water it all the time
because it's stressed out and in the I mean where
you live, it's I don't think many people even still
have lawns, do they. I mean it's it's completely idiotic.
I mean, most people, even if they don't like native plants,
realize having a lawn out there doesn't make sense. And
you still do. You see a lot of lawns where
you are.
Speaker 2: There's nowhere near as many as there used to be,
but there's still some out there.
Speaker 1: That's That's a nice thing about southern Arizona is you're
kind of like it or not. You're kind of forced
to use native or at least droll tolerant plants right
the land the climate is not going to let you
do anything else. But anyway, you know, since the lawn
routes don't go very deep, the soil beneath it is
essentially dead because you need roots for microbes to live on.
They are the scaffolding that holds the life. And then
it's compacted as well, and so the water just hits
it and runs right off. And so explaining this to people,
it's like, well, it's a lawn is really just like
a parking lot for when it comes to runoff and water, right,
Whereas if you have perennial shrubs or trees breaking up
that soil, making it more like a sponge as opposed
to a brick. Now the water can infiltrate and it
actually absorbs. I mean when you guys were explaining that
to people, because I meant, you're a desert, but still
when you get high monsoon rains, you still get flooding
out there. Right, Oh yeah. And so when you were
explaining this to like city hall or people that were
in positions of authority, did they were they able to
grasp this when you broke when you broke it down
to them or what so.
Speaker 2: I don't know if they were first grasping it when
we had the meetings, but they definitely grasped it when
a number of the folks that we were having the
meetings with from the city, they started showing up when
the summer monsoons came in all of a sudden. I
saw them in their vehicles. Sometimes they'd be out of
their vehicles on our block checking out our installations, and
they were seeing all the storm water that we were
pulling off the street into these street side basins, and
they were also seeing how quickly that water was infiltrating,
so unlike a rain water tank that fills up in
a storm and then you can't get any more water.
The Great thing about harvesting water in the soil or
planting the rain is it's continually absorbing water, so it's
continually increasing its capacity throughout the storm. And that's when
the light bulb went off. That's when they saw it like, oh,
this works. And then and we too, our light bulbs
have been continually going off. So I mentioned that when
we started, our basins were too small, and then we
made them bigger, and then we connected them to collect
the water off the street. Well, that was working, but
then we realized, wow, we still need to make them bigger.
So we've continually been growing the size of our basins.
And when we first started, everything we did was done
by volunteer labor, just hand shovels, picks. Now we've got
an annual program where we hire and helped train up
local contractors and then they'll dig out the stuff with
a baco and they'll set the rock so they'll do
the hard work, and then we come in with the
neighborhood volunteers to do the planting. So everyone gets that
experience of literally planting their roots with the roots of
the plants in this community. And it's a great chance.
I want to talk and get to know one another
and learn about this program and spread the word on this.
So it's a lot of this is really community building
work too. For the long run, it all, it's all.
It's culture change, that's ultimately what we're trying to do.
It's changed the from the dominant, dead, concreted culture to
a more life embracing life, collaborating culture in a way
that doesn't extract from our aquifer and kill our rivers,
but actually replenishes our aquifer and the flow of our
rivers just by using what's freely at hand, as opposed
to becoming ever more dependent on imported things you buy.
We're just working with the free. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Man, it's so uh, it's really inspiring to hear about.
I mean it's because again it's we get more accumulative
heat throughout the year, but you guys have hotter days.
I don't think we've ever had one hundred and fifteen
one hundred and twenty degree fahrenheit day here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're getting hotter every year.
Speaker 1: A believe it. And you've created this, I mean you've
created a yeah, I mean a fucking desert oasis. You've
created an oasis, and it's got to feel good to
be around and also just get getting to be out
there and get other people into it, you know, having
those like community work days. It's obesome, man, God, I
wish we could do something like that here, you know, Yeah,
you can, just takes time. When did you start doing this?
Like when? When when did everything start? Like when was
your first curveb what year?
Speaker 2: Well, we started the tree planting in nineteen ninety six.
I think I was twenty seven years old or something
like that at the time. And then and I want
to point out that all it takes to do this
is two people, one shovel in one tree. That's all
you need to start, and that's a community planting project.
And then if you got the energy, keep going. So
the key for me, the hardest thing is just starting.
So don't go crazy, big and way. That's going to
intimidate you to the point you never get off the couch.
So just just start. And so we started with just
the tree planting, planting in those small three foot diameter
six inch deep basins, and then the curb cutting curb coreing.
I think we did our first one in two thousand
and three. So it took a while before we got
brave enough to do the pre legal action.
Speaker 1: Okay, and you were just the curb cutting. I mean,
was there a certain way you were cutting it or
was it just two vertical cuts and literally removing a
section of.
Speaker 2: Curb. Yeah, so you can if you just go to
my website Harvesting Rainwater dot com and then you put
in curb cuts, you'll see the section I show how
to do DIY curb cuts. So we cut forty five
degree angle sides and then we did a horizontal cut
on the dirt side of the street curb because we
could make a basin and make room for the saw,
and then we sledge hammered out the last bit. Uh.
And then you just you grind it out, you smooth
it out with the grinder, like.
Speaker 1: A horizontal cut on the on the soil side of
the curb. Yeah.
Speaker 2: And we've since changed that. We don't. We rarely do
curb cuts anymore because we again we're always learning, evolving
because you know, evolve or die, so we're trying to evolve,
so we keep going. We realized we could do it
a lot cheaper and with less work, So now we're
doing curb cores. So with a hammer, drill and a
minimum four inch diameter diamond carbide drill bit. We make
four inch diameter holes that we angle down from the
street to the basin and somewhat in the direction of flow.
Speaker 1: Oh shit, this is so you're just like drilling holes
in the curbs so water can get That's amazing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's already being done by the municipality, but
they typically are doing those holes to drain storm water
from rus for joining buildings to the street. We're just
reversing it.
Speaker 1: What's the diameter of the drill bit? I mean, does
it look like one of those circular saws that you
used to cut a doorknob hole in a door or
is it just literally a drill bit?
Speaker 2: Uh No. If it's it's a whole saw. So if
you just go to my website, Harvesting Rainwater dot com,
and then in the search bar on my website put
in curb core.
Speaker 1: Search bar, I'm okay, the little magnifying glass at the bottom, okay, yeah.
Speaker 2: And then it'll pop up pages where I've got photos
showing showing us doing the curb coring. You can see
the drill and everything, and you can either rent it
do it yourself, or you can hire a local contractor.
There's many they specialize in curb corn. In curb cutting,
we typically use a father son team. They're fantastic, the
Sun's He's built like a linebacker, so you can really
hold that drill. But if you don't want to hold
that drill. A great colleague of mine, Van Clothier, He's
got a company called Stream Dynamics in Silver City, New Mexico.
And if you go to my YouTube page, just search
Brad Lancaster on YouTube you'll find the latest video I
just posted is of his work in Silver City, New Mexico,
that shows him doing early curb cuts. And then if
you watch the video to the end, you see his
latest evolution where now he's not doing four inch diameter
curb course, he's doing six inch diameter curb course. And
he worked with a local metal worker to custom build
this little jig that clamps onto the street curb so
he doesn't have to muscle that drill through the and
the to drill through the curb. Instead, he just sits
casually on this little stool and just with a single
finger he is able to move this little wheel to
move the drill forward through the curb. So you know,
he's in his early sixties and this work is no
problem for him thanks to that jig. And then since
he's doing the six inch diameter curb cores as opposed
to the four he's able to grab more water in
the real short duration but intense monsoon summer.
Speaker 1: So does but it's still a basin on the other side.
Or does it just go into the soil.
Speaker 2: No, it's a basin you got. If you just have soil,
the thing's going to clog up real quick with roots.
So you've got to have an open basin. You have
to have that surface topography that creates a temporary puddle
that then rapidly infiltrates.
Speaker 1: I think I'm gonna go I'm gonna try to do
the curb core because you know, it's too hot where
I live. The city would see what the cut curve
and then complain about it, So yeah, maybe I'll.
Speaker 2: I think they'd go for the core. It looks a
lot more municipal. And so this year, inspired by Van's work,
we're gonna increase the diameter of the cores that we're doing.
Speaker 1: So where do you get the diamond holesaw?
Speaker 2: So a typical rent center will rent that out to you.
Speaker 1: And they're mostly used for what again, just cutting holes
in concrete.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's exactly what they're for.
Speaker 1: Damn. Yeah, that's what I need. Man, that's amazing. Do
you guys get really this is unrelated, but I'm looking
at one of the photos. Do you guys get guyacon out?
Speaker 2: There?
Speaker 1: Is there a native Sonoran desert guyacon species? I should
know this. I think there is, but it may not
grow there and.
Speaker 2: I don't know if we've got one native to the basin,
but certainly in Sonora.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's we get guya come in gust the folium here.
I don't know if there's a I think there's a
Sonoran desert species, but anyway, it's neither here nor there.
But uh yeah, man, this is this is changing everything
for me. God, next time, I cause I will see
I will look out on my street and I will
just see a river gushing during high rainfall events, all
just wasting, you know, all just going out to the
going out to the source. It's like such a waste man.
It's uh, it's so much water. Now I want to
capture it. I just got to dig out a little
basin first. That's the only thing I need to fail
to like do a little bit. How for like a
front yard, how how far in towards the house do
you normally have the basins go?
Speaker 2: Uh, it all depends, you know, everything site specific, but
I typically don't come closer than ten feet from the
house just to avoid any uh water conflicts with the building.
Right right, But I mean, now there are how much
is that?
Speaker 1: How much do you how much do you how much
space do you need to bring it in so that
the water can actually infiltrate and doesn't just back up
and out and start like taking out parts of the bank.
You know.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, Well, here's the way we set up our
typical basins street side basins is I call them Eddie basins.
So again on my website Harvesting Rainwater dot com, search
Eddie basin, eddy basin and you'll see some of the schematics.
So we have the inlet doubles as the quote unquote outlet.
You always have to have an overflow. So I have
a number of universal water harvesting guidelines in my books,
and one of those is you always have to have
an overflow and utilize it as a resource, because if
you don't plan that overflow you're going to have a
flood you don't want. So the water's flown down the street.
It comes in via the curb cut or the curb core.
That's the inlet fills the basin once it's filled, and
you got to put that on the high side, not
the low side of the basin, so you maximize your capacity.
And then once the basin's filled up, then the surplus
water that's coming in, it won't come in anymore because
it's going to meet pooled water. So the surplus continues
down the gutter to the next street side basin. And
I will make the basin as big as I can,
based on how much room I have. Sometimes the hell
strip is so narrow, I don't have much space, but
I just make it fit the space.
Speaker 1: You were saying, you put what on the high side,
not the low side.
Speaker 2: The inlet, the curb cut, or the right right.
Speaker 1: Right, so it's kind of like kidney shaped or paisley shaped,
whereas the bigger end is on the low side. So
like the water will pull up on the low side.
Speaker 2: Well, actually the water will pull up through the entire
section if you do it right.
Speaker 1: Right, But I mean, but the main area where most
of the like a curved like a curved beam where
the head of the bean is on the high side
and the actual like bottom of the curve is on
the low side. I'm describing this terribly, but hopefully, I mean, yeah,
I'm not sure I have the same picture in my head.
People really need to just I'm looking at your website.
People need to just go to your website and type
in any base and they'll see what They'll see what
you got lined up.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And so let's say if I'm lucky and I've got
a twenty foot wide public right of way, I'll main
I always maintain a five foot wide walking path because
I want to encourage people walking wheeling through the forest,
and I want people to appreciate it, not to be
pissed off about it walking way.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So and I push the path to the property line,
so I maximize my planting space between path and street
where I got the bulk of the water available from
the street, and then that the vegetation then grows both
street and street side pathway, so we're getting maximum benefit.
And it creates a physical barrier between the pedestrians and
the cars, so that's a benefit too. And then we
did not start pulling street runoff into private property. We
didn't start that because we're afraid the city would freak
out that we're taking public waters and putting them on
private property. So we tried to do what we thought
would be easier to get approved, and so we kept
all storm water in the public right of way. But
now the law has been changed so we can pull
water from the street onto private property as well, as
long as it cannot overflow to adjoining properties and flood them.
So if I've got the space, I will make the
basins as big as I can so that I don't
lose any water in a big flow event. And you
don't have to do one massive basin. You can have
a bunch of smaller ones into which I'll say, think
like a tree. So a lot of times people think
they need to plant a tree and then have one
massive water i'veseen basin around it. You don't. So I've
got some great diagrams in my volume two book that
show how our dry land trees they uptake the majority
of their water through their root zone that's beyond the
drip edge of the canopy. So they'll go, you know,
many times past the canopy with their root systems. So
we can have multiple small basins where we've got space
to make a basin, and then we just let the
roots go and find those basins. It doesn't have to
be one big, massive one. And so all those small
ones tend to be the way you have to go
in the built environment where you've got all these obstructions
of driveway, streets, walkways, buildings and so forth.
Speaker 1: Got the Yeah, the man, the photos on your site
are super helpful. It's got It looks so cool, it
looks so nice. It's like such a it's such a
pleasant idea. I want to do this all over my neighborhood. Now.
It's so basically the basin fills up and then it does.
You know, it's just the worst case scenario, just whatever
access water there is just ends up continuing on down
the street.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So what's great is you're just using the existing
infrastructure as you're stabilized overflow. So this whole eddy basin concept,
it really minimizes maintenance, it minimizes the chance of erosion
or whatnot. It's a super easy way to go, and
again you're working with what exists. You're not having to
recreate everything.
Speaker 1: And most of them basically just relying on morel and
rocks to hold the to hold the side of the
little banks of this basin, which are only what like
ten inches in most cases ten inches.
Speaker 2: Deep ten to twelve inches. We try to go for
twelve inches so we get more capacity. The mault actually
does not help stabilize the banks, that's justortaining moisture.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: But the rock or we can use urbanite or logs,
that all works great. The logs are better than the
rock and urbanite because they're superior wildlife habitat, So we
get more of the wood burying, burrowing beetles and so forth. Yeah,
and the lizards love that.
Speaker 1: So yeah. So basically, if you dig out a basin,
you just have to support the sides with like rocks
or logs or some sort of material. Yeah, so that
the banks don't eroad. But you haven't had have you
had issues where the banks of these basins eroad at all,
or where one turns into a blowout or what.
Speaker 2: No, not when we do it right. And that's why
you know, I'm real careful on giving they're all simple
that I make sure I give all the specifications in
my books, just so people don't have to recreate the wheel.
I've already made the mistakes, so you don't have to yourself.
Speaker 1: When you were making those mistakes, Like what were before
you learn the correct way to do it? What were
some examples of what went wrong?
Speaker 2: Okay, So one example would be I would make a
basin on a somewhat steep sloped road too long, paralleling
the street. So I'd pull the water in at the
upstream side of the basin and with the intention that
it would overflow at the inlet, you know, once the
basin filled up, But since I made it too long
and this was a more steep street, the water just
spilled out on the downstream side of the basin and
went down the dirt. And so then I figured out, like, oh,
it's just super simple to either get a laser level
or you can make a simple water level bunyip level.
Show how to do that in my books and stuff,
and then you never make that mistake again.
Speaker 1: And so you would if you'd use the level to
what just know that the grade wasn't too steep.
Speaker 2: So would I would take an elevation reading at the
inlet where I'm going to do the curb core or
the curb cut, and then I'd take another elevation reading
at the downstream end of the basin to make sure
I've got at least a four inch difference, so the
water will back up to the street not spill out
over the lower side of the basin, if that makes sense.
Speaker 1: Yeah, ok, so you want you want to make sure
that the lower side of the basin is high enough basically, yeah, exactly, Yeah,
and also higher than the street, and also probably come
in more horizontally, like perpendicular to the road than long
then parallel to the road.
Speaker 2: It depends. If you don't have a steeply slope street,
you can have a very long basin.
Speaker 1: It's no problem, but one must one must take into account.
Slope is what you're saying.
Speaker 2: And yes, so the steeper the street, the shorter your basins.
Speaker 1: Uh huh. Yeah, I see. I've never operated a level before,
like a laser one, at least like a surveyor's level,
you know, Like, so that would be something to consider.
Speaker 2: But pretty fun once you get to hang out it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm looking at the I see you guys with
the pictures on the website. You know you could do
this with you know, if the guy was wearing a
hard hat or something that, you.
Speaker 2: Know, you don't need that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I'm just saying you could get away with anything.
You know, it's pretty put on a hard head and
the vest he belongs out there that he's supposed to be.
Don't worry about it. Go eat your lunch.
Speaker 2: But well, and that's the thing. When I do the
gorilla planting, I wear the uniform, so I got all
my my Dicky's shirts and pants. I've got my boots,
so I dress like the landscape crewise And.
Speaker 1: Do you guys, You guys maultch when you plant street
trees out there, you maultch generally right or do not
need to?
Speaker 2: Yeah? So we want to malt because the impacted urban
soil is so lacking in organic matter. So will you
use compost. We've got Nigerian dwarf goats, so we compost
their bedding. So we'll use that typically as the free
malts compost for our community planting projects. And then that's
like our first application. Then anytime we're pruning the trees
and other vegetation on that block, we cut up the
prunings into four inch or shorter sections and just drop
them into the basin, so it's chop and drop. Now
I don't I make sure I do never longer than
six inch lengths because if it's longer than that, I'm
not getting the soil puning contact and I need I
want to maximize that contact with the organic matter to
speed up its decomposition and also to maximize its effectiveness
at being a soil cover, to increase soil stormwater infiltration
and minimize stormwater and ground moisture loss. And if people do,
I find when people get lazy, they just kind of
throw in branches. Then that becomes a fuel load for wildfires,
and it becomes a pack rat nest and it's just
a problem. So you've got to maintain a certain aesthetic
and function.
Speaker 1: Well, you guys, probably where you live, where I you know,
chip drop dot com is super useful, and where you live,
I mean Tucson probably has enough of a you know,
they've got a network there, like there's enough people using it.
But where I live, you know, chip drop doesn't do anything.
No one uses chip drop down here because it's just
worth two in the boonies down here in South Texas.
But I've also just if I see a tree company.
Like I saw a tree company that got a contract
to work on the power lines. I hit those guys
up and I was like immediately, I was like walking
to the coffee place and I was like, hey man,
you guys need to spot the dump afterwards. I could
really use the mulch. Come dump in this you know
spot near my house. And uh, and so that's because
mulch I've just found. I wasn't sure when I first
moved here whether mulch would help because of uh, you know,
just just the different plants and whatever. But mulch is
like so essential and mainly in keeping the sun from
baking the shit out of the ground, you know, yeah,
preventing that it means you have to water less. And
also roots don't really like being hot, at least when
you've done newly planted stuff. You know.
Speaker 2: Well, I see that mulch as being the the early
step preceding you know, getting that overstory. We've just done
these new plantings. All the plants are really small. We
don't have an overstory plant that's giving us that natural microclimate.
So the mulch gives it to us, you know, right
off the bang. While we're waiting for that vegetation grow
bigger and create its own canopy and mulch.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly right. Yeah, that's it's it is.
It's like I always talk about like ecological secession, like
you have a landslide of fire or a bulldozing event,
human bulldozing event. Right now, you're starting from square one.
You get the pioneer species and they end up creating
the micro climate for other you know, slower growing things
that can't take full sun when they're young to grow.
And so that's if you want to skip that step, Yeah,
you can partially do it by using things like mulch
or you know, some way to just prevent that ground
from just getting baked to shit. If if somebody wants
to go, if they're in two cent, I want to
see some of the what's a good street or intersection
to check out some of the work you've done.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So again, I'd send them to the Harvesting Rainwater
dot com website and then in the menu bar they'll
see resources and if they click on resources, one of
the sub pages is self guided water Tours of Tucson.
So I give a little description of the site, the address,
how to get there by bicycle, foots, bus or car,
and so depending on what kind of water harvesting they
want to check out, they can, you know, go to
what they're desiring. And then on my neighborhood block, which
is at University Boulevard and Ninth Avenue just on the
north side of downtown Tucson, we've got a bunch of educational, bilingual,
multi lingual signage within a one block radius of that intersection,
and people will see, you know, a lot of the
examples of all this stuff and including we've got other
signage there that shows additional sites that they can walk
a little further out to that have public art as
well that tell some of the water harvesting story and
how we've expanded our neighborhood rain irrigated food forest planting
to upstream neighborhoods which are in our there are water
hood you know, so the larger watershed is our water hood,
the larger neighborhood, and so trying to show everyone how
we need to work together as a community within the
same watershed to help each other out. So they can
check that out, and of course they can check tons
of virtual stuff out on my YouTube channel to search
Brad Lancaster on YouTube, and my books Rainwater Harvesting for
dry Lands Beyond have tons of examples.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was going to ask you, if you want
to do a trade later, I'll send you the I'll
send you my book that just came out, and send
me yours a mechanic because I yeah, yeah, I love
that and.
Speaker 2: I'm curious too. So I created these books in part
because I used to have just like stacks of books
and journals that filled my room when I was trying
to write this book. And I wrote the book because
I'd look at all these piles, I go, nobody's going
to be this insane and have all these piles and
things where there's just a little bit of information in
each one of these things. Got to put it all
in something where it's way more easily digestible and it's
not such dry writing. It's you know, it's more more inviting.
Hopefully it's got a better story and some pull to it.
So I wrote the book the books that I wanted
and that I couldn't find elsewhere. But I not just
for myself. I realized when working with the city, working
with neighbors, a lot of them they weren't that receptive
when we're having one on one conversations or in public meetings.
But if I could give them a resource that they
could just absorb in the privacy of their own home,
not you know, with the stress of anyone else checking
them out, they could slowly absorb information, ponder it, and
consider a different way. And I found that was really
instrumental in bringing about the change. So we were able
to accomplish a lot before my books came out, but
once they came out, things started changing way faster, in
a way more dynamic way. And so I'm curious, you know,
that's some of the reasons why I wrote the books,
But I'm curious, like, why did you write yours? You know,
what was your aim or mission with your book?
Speaker 1: I mean, I think the main thing, I mean, the
main thing for me has always been how people view plants,
and you know, and I would always get whether it
was I'd be telling someone something about a plant that
was exciting as hell, like it evolved to mimic the
shape of a female wasp because it duped the male
wasp into trying to mate with the pedal and then
pollinating in which I think was just fascinating completely fucking
I mean, that's insane. That's yeah, natural selection, and it explains,
you know, that method how that happened, explains how everything
around us it's alive, came to be. It's all natural
selection by the environment and how much the environment affects
what grows there and how they look and how they
grow and what chemistry they have, et cetera. And I
would be explaining these people and then they ask me, well,
could you eat it? Or like, you know, which is like,
I get it, that's a basic thing people want to know,
but that is just so uninspiring and boring to me
compared to this stuff, you know. Or they would ask like, oh,
what does it do you know? And it's like and
I just realized at some point the entire way that
people that we're all indoctrinated to view plants. It's just
so disconnected. You know. Our technology has allowed us to
get so disconnected from the living world and so cocky
is to think we don't need it. And the way
that we're doing things because of this mentality, in this
paradigm we have is killing us and it's killing everything.
It's this It's that we're in the six mass ex State,
right and so I just was like, and modern horticulture
reinforces this. I mean, the plants you see if you
go to the bank or some bleak strip mall, they're
all non native garbage. They've all been planted in uniform rows.
They look horrific, you know, it's all tied in. And
then I thought of, you know, I used to do
graffiti as a kid, and I would ride freight trains
and I had this really like young mischievous life that
was fun as hell and also, you know, not really
unethical either. That's debatable, I guess, but it wasn't you know,
it wasn't like I wasn't like shooting heroin or in it,
you know, yeah, fucking robbing people or anything like that.
It was just like young, young, mischievous fun. And while
I was doing that, I'd be out in these abandoned
city scapes, were on the edge of a train yard,
and I would notice the things that were growing there,
and a lot of it was like invasive species and
a handful of native pioneer species that were able to
grow there. But it just looked so much cooler. It
looked all over grown. The plants were spilling over the fence,
and I was like, why does that look so much
nicer to me when it would look messy to other people?
Why does that look so much nicer to me than
the plants that I see planted in landscaping and like
bank landscaping or something like, why is looking at bank
landscaping and the stuff planted in front of the drug
store make me want to die? Only being only half
joking there too, by the way. Yeah, and the landscapes
we create in modern consumer America are hellish. They're just
they're sinfully ugly. And why when I look at this,
like if I see a plant growing out of an
abandoned loading dock, growing out of the concrete, why does
that look so much cooler to me? If I see
like a fern growing out of a brick wall in
New Orleans? Why is that so? What is it about
that that has me so fascinated and admiring it? You know?
And I thought more about it, and I was like,
because this is what we evolved in, Like, we didn't
evolve in these these tilled, manicured English garden landscapes that
just look terrible, you know. And I think what it
tied down to was a whole societal problem of how
people viewed plants, and it was something that because they're
endless sources of fascination for me, and then I see
people just either butchering the hell out of them, disrespecting them,
or just like looking for the lowest common denominator, you know,
uh metric to rate their value on, Whereas to me,
it was like, man, these things are the base of
the food chain. This is everything. Without these, life on
land isn't possible. Like there's no terrestrial life if you
don't have you know, plants, plant life on there, and
they're so and they're just so cool, they're so they're
so endlessly varied. You know, there might be three species
of a genus of animal, but there's like eight hundred
species of a genus of a plant. So yeah, so
I think it would just came down to that. I
was like, man, I just I want to show people
how cool this is and also point out how weird
the status quo is, like weird and dangerous. It's really
bad for us. It's like it's literally killing the world.
And so that was kind of where it came from.
But I didn't know I was going into it like that.
I just had a bunch of shit to say in
rent and whatever. So that's how I and I just
liked I was curious about the plants that grew in cities.
I did a number of videos on like, oh, the
plants growing on the side of the train tracks in
Oakland or on the La River. I did an La
River video, you know, and yeah, it was just it
was just interesting to me. And so that's how I
kind of ended up there. But yeah, that was That
was the non abbreviated version of that answer.
Speaker 2: So how did you make this transition from now you're
able to support yourself by pursuing your passions, So how
were you able to shift from that not being the
case because you've taken you haven't taken typical pathways, You've
taken very unique pathways, it seems to me. So how
how did you make that trans that transition, that transformation?
Speaker 1: Uh, I think early on I learned college wasn't for me,
and more so, I went to college for two years
and then it just became apparent to me that it
was a joke and that these kids are getting milked
and really that's what it came down to. And that's
only been and that was like twenty years ago, and
that's I feel like, especially where America is at now,
that case has only further been proved correct. You know,
Like I had so many friends graduate that had degrees
they couldn't use, and it was just, you know, the
fucking money it cost to go to some of these schools,
to just be around a bunch of prestigious cunts. For
lack of a better word, you know, it was just
I just realized it was a scam. I just felt like,
this is a hustle man, this is crazy. And so
then I dropped out and I traveled around the country
for three years basically for free. But I was still
hanging out in libraries and I was really avoiding, you know,
you know, behavior that was too hedonistic or stupid, and
always wanted to you know, was still drawing. I keep
a journal everywhere I go. I was really I knew
learning felt good, and I was still dedicated to my
own education.
Speaker 2: And so.
Speaker 1: Because that's what it's all about. You got this mine,
you can do amazing things with it, fucking use it.
And so I did that. And then I after three
years of that, I wanted to put roots down somewhere.
And then I went to community college. But not because
I wanted to get a degree, and not because I
wanted to exist in academia. I literally just wanted the knowledge.
I wanted to know, you know, about geology. I wanted
to know what those squiggly lines in the side of
a road cut were. Therefore, I wanted to know, you know,
I just realized I was ignorant, and so I did
that for a while and then hired out with the
railroad just on a whim. And then I was like,
this is cool, this is great. I'll do this for
a while, because it was you know, it's one of
the few jobs you can get that pays well. And
and you know, but we always hated the company. And
that was fun too, because I grew up, you know,
with a pension for hating authority, because authorities just people.
It's just phonies. It's just people faking it right, It's
just people pretending they've got the answers and trying not
to look stupid in front of each other. And so,
you know, that was fun. The railroad was fun. I said,
I'll do it till it sucks, and right around just
I just lucked out. By the time it started sucking.
The botany stuff was picking up and people seemed to
like what I do. Not everybody, of course, and uh
and so and so uh yeah, So I don't know,
I just lucked out and do it. And I'll do
this for a while till it sucks, uh and then
maybe I'll go on to someone else. But I don't
think this. I mean this, You could study plants and
science natural sciences for your whole life and I don't
think it would ever suck. You know, it's never gets tiring.
So but there's definitely other stuff I want to learn too,
and so yeah, I don't know, I just lucked out.
I just fell into it. Nice but it works. But
I think that, you know, definitely, Like people will ask
me like, oh, should I go into a botany program,
and echo mean I was like fuck no, I was like,
go to community college, take a couple basic natural science classes,
but only ones that you want to learn. Don't focus
on getting good grades, Just focus on actually understanding and
comprehending the material, right, and don't you're not a show dog,
but don't look. It's not about jumping through hoops and
you know, it's about actually understanding the material. If you
don't understand the material, don't fake like you do, ask
questions until you understand it, you know, and then get
go to go to a fucking trade school, like learn
to be an electrician or a fucking plumber or something,
you know, and do that, but make sure you keep
a foot, don't take on a lot of debt, and
make sure you keep a foot in the in the
world of education and exercising your brain as well. You know,
it's because that's basically what I did. I was like
working at the railroad, but then I was like reading textbooks,
you know, at work, or you know, going on my
own self guided field trips on my days off. So yeah,
I think that that's really important for people. But yeah, weird,
especially in the United States. I mean, if we lived
in a society that respected science, would I be giving
this same advice. No, But we don't live in that society.
We don't live in a society that rewards science. We
don't live in a society where they are going to
be jobs where that stuff is funded, you know, for
science or for studying the ecosystem, the living machine, that's
the ecosystem. We don't live in that society. We live
in a society that elevates fools to rich heroes. And
you know, people with like the lowest common denominator human impulses,
we put them in positions of power. It's like, it's
it's disgusting, and so, you know, it's that's not the
world we live in. So go to trade school, you know,
or leave or go to a different country. Maybe, I
don't know, I just know the US.
Speaker 2: So, and when did you figure out that you could
use this this internal draw and desire to keep learning
to actually be your vocation.
Speaker 1: I didn't. It wasn't a plan. Just again, it literally
just happened like that. And then it at a you know,
because I always liked talking about this stuff and seeking
out that knowledge anyway, and whether whether it paid me
or not. And so but you know, but then I
also like make art on the side, and I've been
I've been an illustrated for a while and been doing
you know a multitude of different things. So you know,
people ask me, like, where's your income come from? I'm like, man,
I got like nine different things like do from like
selling T shirts, arts, t shirts with my art on them,
selling art, selling stickers, doing presentations, doing readings, you know,
me and me and my friend made this you know
hack TV show called Killer Lawn that was it was
like actually like well like professionally produced it, just you know,
maybe you can catch it at two am at like
a Motel six on channel two sixty sevens, you know,
because they were supposed to stream The network that bought it,
earth XTV, was supposed to stream it, but they decided
not to stream it and they were gonna see so
they sold it to cable, which was like what the fuck?
In an age where cable is like dying out and
breathing its last breath, you know, it was like you
had a built in audience for a show and you
sold it to cable, Like what the fuck? Like who
watches cable? Like you know some like boomers, some boomer
like lives in Florida and like just has like Dish
network on it. It was really fuck you guys doing
I mean, I don't care. We got paid and then
you know people pirated it and shared it anyway, but
it was it was just funny, man, you know, and
it was a funny fucking show to make, and it
was like we had a mutiny. The production company had
other plans for the show, and we had our own plans,
but we had a friend that was in with the
production company too, so we had this like mutiny and
it was just chaos, and but it was. It was hectic,
but it was fun and I feel like the show
is I mean, it was. It was definitely. There's nothing
else like it. It's fucking hilarious. But yeah, I don't know,
I don't know. That's just how I ended up where
I am so and now, like where I live, I
kind of ended up where I live by accident too.
I didn't move to Texas intentionally. I moved to the
desert when I knew I had to get out of
Oakland because Oakland was just getting too weird and expensive.
And then I ended up down here after my daughter
got sick. She's better now, but I ended up down here,
and now it's like, fuck, I'm here, but like I'm
on a mission, like I can actually be of use here,
whereas like if I was in California, there's already a
million people doing a little native plant stuff, and you
know it's all wholesome and shit, and you know, i'd
be deemed problematic out there or something because of my delivery.
Speaker 2: Whereas here.
Speaker 1: It's like it's you know, I got work to do
and it can actually be of use and of service.
So yeah, yeah, I don't know, but man, I want
to come. I'm gonna come visit you next time I
go through Tucson, like once or twice a year, so
I'm gonna come. I'm gonna hit you. Please do, mister Caster,
and thank you so much for your time. Man, this
was a great conversation and I know a lot of
people got a lot out of it.
Speaker 2: So yeah, well, thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity
to talk with you, get to know you better and
share some of the good word. And along with some
of the other resources I share it, I'll just say again,
check out Harvesting rainwater dot com, the books Rainwater Harvesting
for dry Lands and Beyond, and my neighborhood forestry website
Neighborhood Foresters dot org.
Speaker 1: Yeah, man, I see why you kept hyping the website
so much, because man, there's a shit ton of resources
on it. It's uh yeah, it's incredible. You really put
all this shit together in such a like succinct and
palatable way. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Man, more to come in the next two months. Thanks
you's gonna be a whole other Stef. It's gonna blow
you away.
Speaker 1: I need we need you down here, We need you
in South Texas. Brother, Holy shit, man, seriously, this God
damn I'm gonna I'm gonna send you. I'm gonna send
you like gore porn, like photos of streetscapes from South
Texas in July, like the McCallan shopping district, the frontage
road next to the freeway, just tree lists and just
one hundred and fifteen degrees. Yeah, man, you give me hope.
So thanks a lot. Really appreciate it.
Speaker 2: Yeah you bet well, you give me hope too. So
it's we're cross pollinating.
Speaker 1: All right, my friend. All right, I'll be in touch,
and yeah, thanks a lot. To take care of everybody else.
Have a grocery daygo focus it by