Very well said. Rarely do our important choices involve all good versus all bad. We could scarcely call them “choices” if they were.
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There was a case in Oregon where some farmer was being fined and made a big stink in the media about how they were being fined for collecting the rainwater from their roof, but actually the fine was for damming and diverting a stream which ran through their property.
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Done.
Now what?
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I think it’s more that the recharging of the groundwater aquifer by rainwater, unfettered should be the priority on lands not paved to prevent infiltration. Even these LA restrictions reflect that ultimate goal. Catching rainwater in order to let it infiltrate to groundwater is different than capturing it for irrigation or sale.
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Doesn’t this only apply for people with onsite septic processing? It’s probably more of an issue for people on deep sewerage, where the water drains into it and winds up dumped somewhere else, where that somewhere else may or may not ultimately lead to the local aquifers.
There of course is the option of communal rainwater collection as practiced in much of Southern Italy.
Time for Los Angeles to learn from Sassi di Matera and it’s ancient rain water harvesting system organised by the community for the community… Worked for millennia in an isolated aired part of the world
Cisterns and water collection[edit]
Matera was built above a deep ravine called Gravina of Matera that divides the territory into two areas. Matera was built such that it is hidden, but made it difficult to provide a water supply to its inhabitants. Early dwellers invested tremendous energy in building cisterns and systems of water channels.
The largest cistern has been found under Piazza Vittorio Veneto. With its solid pillars carved from the rock and a vault height of more than fifteen meters, it is a veritable water cathedral, which is navigable by boat. Like other cisterns in the town, it collected rainwater that was filtered and flowed in a controlled way to the Sassi.
There was also a large number of little superficial canals (rasole) that fed pools and hanging gardens. Moreover, many bell-shaped cisterns in dug houses were filled up by seepage. Later, when population increased, many of these cisterns were turned into houses and other kind of water-harvesting systems were realized.
Some of these more recent facilities have the shape of houses submerged in the earth.[5]
EDIT: To say it’s an incredible place, the water collection system amazing we saw it in mid August and you get a real sense of the struggle for survival and vital interdependence.
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A well uses a shared water table. The water that soaks into the earth replenishes both your well and others near you.
But that’s just nit-picking. You’re perfectly right that the vast majority of rain water collection is either just borrowing the water for a short time or replacing tap water, and it would be very hard for individual users to negatively affect the system in any way.
Fake ass, fake grass or fake cash. (In L.A.) no one rides for free!
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Thanks for this. Really impressive and cool!
A water-cathedral of a different sort, but very much a human-engineered water management system for regulating who got how much water when and for how long:
… and here’s what happens to large human settlements when the weather goes bad, water management is marginal anyway, and there’s no rain for decades:
Mesa Verde, Southern Colorado
Chaco Canyon, New Mexico
I bet plastic lawns were the least of these peoples’ worries.
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