story i wrote again

Ward 3 residents employ alternative water harvesting practices such as rainwater harvesting to restore natural beauty and reduce pollution in the area.
The Ward 3 council came together with Watershed Management Group in 2006 to start a number of water harvesting programs that would teach and allow residents to re-use rain water as a means of making the area greener and more beautiful. These programs are becoming infinitely more popular in Tucson, especially considering the growing concerns with Tucson’s natural beauty and a large environmentally conscious population.
“The purpose of rainwater harvesting is storm water management and taking advantage of a renewable resource,” said Ward 3 council aide Holly Lachowicz.
According to Agua Solutions, rainwater harvesting is simply collecting, storing and purifying the naturally soft and pure rainfall that falls upon your roof. The collected rainwater can be used for domestic purposes such as laundry as well as for non-domestic purposes like irrigation. Rain water harvesting proves particularly effective in areas like Tucson where water is scarce and sometime polluted. There are numerous benefits of using collected rainwater, but the most beneficial is the fact that it is free to those who use it.
Watershed Management, according to spokesperson James McAdam, practices two different types of rainwater harvesting. The first is active rainwater harvesting, which, “Captures run-off rainwater into a cistern to be preserved and used to enrich the soil,” McAdam said. The other is passive rainwater harvesting that consists of shaping the Earth in such a way that the runoff rain water sinks back into the ground as opposed to running off into the streets and polluting the environment.
“Passive harvesting is directing the water directly towards plants,” said Nature Conservancy of Arizona’s director of operations Jim Cook, “Active requires the installing of gutters and cisterns for the storage of rainwater for later use.”
According to Lachowicz, the Watershed Management group is involved with numerous projects in the Ward 3 area including water harvesting renovations to the Glenn Road corridor and to neighborhood associations like Samos neighborhood association and the neighborhood at Campbell and Grant.
The most interesting of these projects is that in which Watershed Management works with the Samos Neighborhood Association, a Ward 3 neighborhood, in what would be considered a passive rainwater project, said McAdam. The project is called “Green Streets – Green Neighborhoods” and seeks to show that right-of-way harvesting features that promote native street trees throughout the area. McAdam said the project was funded through a grant from the Arizona Forestry Division.
“The right-of-way harvesting technique consists of altering roads and sidewalks that will make rain water re-usable and beneficial to the environment, as oppose to running off and becoming polluted by things like car oil and dog poop,” said McAdam.
McAdam says that the massive interest in water harvesting techniques can largely be attributed to one man; Brad Lancaster is a Tucson resident and has written the two foremost important books on water harvesting, “Rainwater Harvesting for Dry Lands and Beyond, Volume 1: Guiding Principles to Welcome Rain Into Your Life and Landscape” and “Rainwater Harvesting for Dry Lands and Beyond, Volume 2: Water Harvesting Earthworks”.
In an interview with students from Santa Barbara City College, Lancaster said he became interested in waster harvesting during a trip to Zimbabwe where he met a subsistence farmer that taught him the ways the ways that rainwater can be used to promote life and the environment, and when he related the water problems of Tucson to the subsistence farmer, the farmer told him that he must go back and help solve these problem.
According to Lancaster’s bio page, rainwater harvesting can be used to grow, “Food-bearing shade trees, abundant gardens, and a thriving landscape incorporating wildlife habitat, beauty, edible and medicinal plants and more.”
The Nature Conservancy of Arizona located at 1510 E. Ft. Lowell Rd. is used as the structural example to the rest of the city for how to use rainwater harvesting effectively, according to Cook.
“We were approached four years ago by a small loose network of individuals with the group Tucson Catch Water who are dedicated to explaining the benefits of rainwater harvesting to the community,” said Cook, “They wanted to see if we’d help apply transitions to our landscape to use our site as example displaying rainwater techniques.”
Cook says that the Nature Conservancy of Arizona has assisted in the building of three water harvesting-designed buildings, including the University of Arizona’s dance center. He added that by 2010, a new Pima County ordinance requires commercial property owners to have their buildings equipped to provide irrigation through captured rainwater.
With so many worries about energy conservation and retaining geographical beauty in Tucson, rainwater harvesting techniques are becoming a popular method to conserve water and provide irrigation to the lands throughout all of Tucson, with many residential neighborhood associations, businesses and buildings at the University of Arizona applying the techniques to buildings on campus.
“Living in a desert of low rainfall with a growing population,” said Dorothy Boone of the Nature Conservancy of Arizona, “We need every drop of water we can get and to put it to the very best use. The water is so crucial to our lives, and water harvesting is an inexpensive way of using every drop.”