Books

Embrace & Harvest the Rain

July 22, 2013 |

Brad Lancaster, a Tucson gem and water harvesting guru.

Most desert dwellers love, crave, the summer monsoons.

The magical intensity of clouds building up to bring forth los chubascos results in a full-body experience. The scent and taste of the showers, the cooling of the air; the visuals of grey and purple skies lit up by white-hot lightning, the BOOM of the thunder claps and the sound of the sheeting downpours is always so mind-blowing.

What isn’t so awesome are the resultant flooded streets, trying to navigate roads turned into rivers, while watching rainwater whisked away from thirsty ground.

Locally, lassoing rainwater to change the dire and dangerous flooding has been turning tide with the help of many organizations, city codes and the tireless work of Brad Lancaster.

Lancaster is a Tucson gem and water harvesting guru who, according to his bio at HarvestingRainwater.com, culls from the sky, at his abode, “100,000 gallons of rainwater a year on a 1/8-acre urban lot and adjoining right-of-way.”

Anyone who has watched the evolution of Lancaster’s Dunbar/Spring ‘hood over the last decade knows this. A few months ago at a lunch meeting with Arizona State Representative Steve Farley, Lancaster’s efforts came up and the District 28 Democratic Representative said: “Brad Lancaster has transformed that neighborhood.”

Besides transforming a neighborhood, Lancaster has helped to transform a city, and a dominant paradigm in a country that regards water as an endless resource that comes from the spigot. In 2006, he released his first book, Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands Volume 1: Guiding Principles, and followed that up with Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond Volume 2: Water-Harvesting Earth Works in 2008.

This June, Lancaster released a second edition to Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands Volume 1, which features “100 pages of new information, 120 new images, 40 additional images revised, and more,” he wrote via email.

Lancaster was a road warrior in June 2013, spreading rain harvesting techniques on a whirlwind tour of seminars, talks and book signings between New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Nevada and California. We tried to connect on the phone, but his vehicular travels between the mountainous regions of Utah and Nevada thwarted cell phone interview efforts.

We settled on an email exchange about Volume 1’s upcoming new addition, his thoughts about Tucson’s efforts in the rain harvesting arena and advice for the novices interested in saving water from the sky.

Zocalo Magazine: We caught you at a really busy time! Looks like June has been packed with events – book signings, readings, seminars and talks. How long have you been on the road for this last go-round?

Brad Lancaster: Well. I was a relative hermit working on finishing the book before its release on June 13 (2013). Though this past spring, I did teach in Baja, Mexico; Madrid, NM; Albuquerque, NM and a few other locations. But now that the book is out I’ve been on the road since June 13. I’ll return July 1. The Events section of my website lists some of my upcoming events. Some teaching trips abroad, perhaps not yet listed, include southern Italy and Ciudad Obregon, Mexico.

ZM: For the novice, let’s say a mid-westerner or an east-coast transplant to Tucson, what basic steps would you recommend one takes for getting their proverbial feet wet (and not getting overwhelmed!) 

BL: Get out in the rain to see where it goes, where the runoff flows, how much there is, and the tremendous potential you’ll likely have to harvest. This is the really fun stuff – dancing in the rain!

Then I recommend they simply shape the earth with a shovel (when the soil is moist and easy to work) to redirect the runoff to their plantings where it is a resource, rather than to the street or elsewhere where the water is wasted and lost.

Often this entails digging a simple basin around or beside plantings, using the dug out soil to create a section of raised pathway that will redirect and harvest still more water. Then harvest organic matter and fertility as well by mulching the basin with organic matter, or at the very least just let any fallen leaves beneficially collect there.

We call leaves “leaves” because we are supposed to leave them where they fall beneath plants (in water-harvesting earthworks) where the leaves (and cut up prunings) will break down and build healthier, more water-absorbent, more fertile soil for free.

ZM: Have you seen positive changes locally, regionally, nationally when it comes to harvesting rainwater?

BL: Yes. When the first edition of my first book was released in 2006, it seemed only a few people were harvesting water. Now there are many, many more citizens, businesses and neighborhoods doing it all over town, the southwest and the globe.

Tens of thousands have been inspired into action by my books, presentations, and teachings.

And these numbers are swelling even more by the work of a growing number of water-harvesting installers, groups teaching and promoting water harvesting such as Watershed Management Group, Sonoran Permaculture Guild, our City, and people creating demonstration sites on their property, at their kid’s schools, or in the public right-of-way along their neighborhood streets.

For example, when I started harvesting water I was the only one doing so on my block. Now 80% of the folks on my block do so!

ZM: What would you like to see from Tucson’s citizens and city government? What aspects do you applaud and where can we improve?

BL: I would like Tucson to be known as a water-harvesting capital of the southwest. Thus I’d like passive water harvesting to be the norm in every private, public, and commercial landscape in such a way that rainwater and storm water runoff would be the primary irrigation sources of all our landscapes, and greywater would be a secondary source where available. This would be a huge shift from the current common/dominant practice of using drinking water from Tucson Water as the sole source of irrigation water in most landscapes.

I would also like to see Tucson become a sun-harvesting capital of the southwest where every new or retrofitted building and landscape is oriented and designed to maximize the free winter heat and light of the sun, while maximizing the free cooling of shade in summer. In addition, Tucson should get the majority of its power and water heating from our abundant sun, rather than coal and natural gas. A solar rights act protecting buildings’ year-round access to the sun for active and passive solar harvesting is key to this. New Mexico already has such a solar rights act in place, which could inform our efforts.

My new book shows many ways to do this, while also harnessing other free on-site resources such as the wind and community.

I applaud those who have already made this a reality in their own lives, homes, businesses, and/or schools and places of worship.

I also applaud the City for its incentives such as the $2,000 per home rainwater-harvesting rebates and the $1,000 per home grey-water harvesting rebates. I also applaud the City for mandating that commercial landscapes provide at least 50% of their irrigation needs with harvested rainwater, and all new city streets harvest at least the volume of water falling in a half inch rainstorm. I want to see this mandated for all new private streets in new housing developments as well.

ZM: What will your talk and demonstration cover at the downtown library on July 27?

BL: I will cover all the above and more in an entertaining and informative way. I’ll show folks myriad ways we can simultaneously enhance the quality of all our lives, our community, our economy, and our environment. I’ll show folks how we can all enhance more vibrant life.

The July 27 event runs from 11am-1pm at 101 N. Stone Ave. Details on it, and Lancaster’s techniques, are at HarvestingRainwater.com.

“The Sin Eater and Other Stories”

June 2, 2013 |

Elizabeth Frankie Rollins

Elizabeth Frankie Rollins
Queen’s Ferry Press, 2013

It’s a refreshing April morning at Café Passe. Elizabeth Frankie Rollins’ blonde hair is backlit by the springtime sun burning beautifully bright, creating a halo of golden-white. She glows with genuine happiness – it shines from her blue eyes. It is a time of celebration, the release of a book years in the making, the culmination of life experiences lovingly collected and turned into a graduate school manuscript (2001). Stories added to and subtracted from that grad school project, then, more years spent trying to get it published.

“I had an agent for awhile, who didn’t have a clue about social media, so I fired her.” We laugh, acknowledging that social media is a super important marketing tool while admitting the fact that we are still learning about the nuances of the Twitterverse, we aren’t reading on Kindle or Nook but it is most certainly OK for people to purchase “The Sin Eater & Other Stories” on those platforms. Why limit distribution?

But for some of us, there’s nothing like holding a book, the physicality of turning the pages, feeling the cover, dog-earing the corners. To devour stories as richly vibrant as these it seems better to grip onto the pages and crease that spine. Maybe it’s not logical, but it seems right because the characters in “The Sin Eater & Other Stories” aren’t logical yet their actions are understandable. We all have to find a method to and/or out of the madness, to reconcile life’s uncertainties, hope for the best and try to expunge our transgressions.

In each of Rollins’ thirteen stories, her scribing ferries the reader to surreal lands of odd circumstances that somehow ring with unexpected normalcy. You are this character, you’ve lived this life. It’s a Vulcan mind meld, a body swap, you are the protagonist and you know what they know and feel what they feel and ache with their pain and rejoice with their unexpected wins. This is masterful storytelling.

Rollins’ is perfectly honest about her muses: “I just steal from the world.” As they say, reality is oft times stranger than fiction, and her life has provided much fodder for these fantastical tales. This is what a writer does, gathers experiences and Rollins’ thirty-seven jobs helped create these characters. She explains the background for “I See Her,” a haunted story about a woman murdered on the beach: “I worked in a crumbling hotel that had bed bugs and barely working air conditioning and there was a murder there. I did get that porch furniture, and I did sand it, and I did cry.”

The background may be personal, but the themes are universal. Like a great song, any story that is relatable to diverse individuals channels the waters of humanity’s collective unconscious. The ability to craft symbolism that speaks to unique viewpoints is a gift.

“It has been an incredible experience,” Rollins says about the book’s publishing. “Every day, I get feedback about how it has touched someone. It is really magical.”

 

“The Sin Eater & Other Stories” is available online at QueensFerryPress.com and locally at Antigone Books, 411 N. 4th Ave.


Boom, Bust, Boom: A Story About Copper, the Metal that Runs the World

November 23, 2012 |

Boom, Bust, Boom: A Story About Copper, the Metal that Runs the World, by Bill Carter
Scribner Books

Bill Carter’s third book, Boom, Bust, Boom: A Story About Copper, the Metal that Runs the World, does indeed tell a story, one that is so squarely in front of our collective faces and yet so hidden from view that the fact that’s it’s never really been told is simultaneously bewildering and perfectly understandable. Like copper, it’s a conundrum and a paradox: and that, in and of itself, is one of the central themes of this provocative, maddening and moving book.

Copper is ubiquitous: it is, seemingly, in everything; cell phones, computers, wiring, innumerable household and construction items, virtually all motorized vehicles, on and on. Try going a day without using or encountering copper: try going an hour. Good luck with that. Copper is everywhere in the modern world, but, with a few exceptions, largely unseen. Furthermore, who really thinks about it, especially where it comes from and what has to happen for it to be turned into a useful commodity? Fortunately for us, Bill Carter got interested.

Bill Carter is uniquely suited for this task. A current resident of Flagstaff, a former Tucsonan and longtime resident of Bisbee, Carter is the author of two previous, equally wonderful books, Red Summer (about salmon fishing in Alaska) and the remarkable Fools Rush In, about his time spent in Sarajevo during it’s siege in the Bosnian war of the 1990s. In all of his books, he has shown an unerring gift for blending the personal with the universal, and using his own personal experiences as a jumping off point into much larger stories with larger import.

Boom, Bust, Boom is perfect Carter material. Like I said, he was a longtime resident of Bisbee: a town built into existence because of its copper mine, at one point one of the biggest in the U.S. Carter uses his own experiences as a parent and a resident having to face the forces that mining has unleashed in the town—and the possible reopening of the mine—as an entry way into the tangle of complexities that the mining and use of copper unleashes.

What he uncovers is remarkable, fascinating, maddening and full of dire warnings for our collective future. The short story is that we need and rely on copper to live in the modern world, but the extraction of copper ore from the earth, the refining of it and the appalling waste that it leaves behind is one of the most grievous injuries that mankind has inflicted on the earth. Carter walks us through not only the extraction and production of it, but the buying and selling of it, the stockpiling of it, the geopolitical significance of it and how it, literally, wires the world together.

Herein lies the unavoidable, seemingly insurmountable crux of the copper “issue;” we apparently can’t live without it in the modern world, but we are hastening our end to get it. Unless we are prepared to return to some sort of hunter/gatherer and subsistence farming form of civilization—not terribly realistic, as there’s not much left to hunt or gather—until someone comes up with a better way of running computers and cars, we’re stuck with the stuff.

Along his journey Carter interviews numerous apologists and functionaries working in the mining business, and his encounters with them provide many of the most memorable and revealing aspects of his story. For the most part they are polite and helpful in their own way, as long as they can control the narrative; but when pushed on issues they also push back or just check out. Carter has a truly advanced gift for cutting through all of the benign bullshit that is tossed his (and our way) about “safe mining” and “low impact on the environment” rhetoric. He listens, reasons his way through it, then time and again puts their arguments to a reality-based test. They loose, of course: mining is inherently destructive, from a world impact point of view.

But we all really lose, as we also win the right to live in the modern world, a dilemma that Bill Carter paints with tremendous empathy in Boom, Bust, Boom.

The 1960s: Urban Renewal and Barrio Destruction

February 4, 2012 |

This article is part of a special February 2012 issue commemorating the 100th anniversary of Arizona’s statehood. The complete section of Tucson snapshots over the last 10 decades begins at this link.

Cover of "La Calle: Spatial Conflicts and Urban Renewal in a Southwest City," published by UA Press.

Cover of “La Calle: Spatial Conflicts and Urban Renewal in a Southwest City,” published by UA Press, 2010.

No discussion about Downtown Tucson over the last 100 years would be complete without paying homage to Los Tucsonenses and the late 1960s decimation of la calle – 80 acres of Downtown that was once a culturally diverse residential and business district.

Tucsonenses, as described by Lydia R. Otero in her book “La Calle: Spatial Conflicts and Urban Renewal in a Southwest City,” is a self-indentifying term for a population of (mostly) Mexican-Americans which “dates back to the nineteenth century that expresses a distinct cultural and historic connection to the city and the region around it.”

As Tucson’s population grew post-Gadsden Purchase (1853), the immigrating Anglos overtook the city’s business core along Congress Street and settled Downtown’s north and east ends. “In 1860,” Otero wrote, “Anglos constituted less than 20 percent of the population but controlled 87 percent of the wealth.”

Over the subsequent decades, Anglo dominance prompted Tucsonenses, along with Asian and African-American residents, to shift their businesses and homes (generally) south of Congress Street and west of Stone Avenue. These populations built and encompassed a thriving, ethnically diverse community.

Otero cites the “WPA Guide to 1930s Arizona” description of la calle: “Residents of Mexican extraction comprise around 45 percent of the Old Pueblo population. Most of them live in Old Town, called El Barrio Libre… Old Town is centered around South Meyer [Avenue] near the city’s main business area, is also peopled by Chinese and Negroes… This is the exclusive Mexican shopping district… In most of the bars around Meyer [Avenue], Negro chefs are busy concocting hot chili sauce to pour over barbequed short ribs.”

However, Tucson’s municipal power structure seemed to view the area as a hindrance to modernity and growth. In “Rehabilitation of Blighted Areas: Conservation of Sound Neighborhoods,” the 1942 study published by the Tucson Regional Plan strongly asserted the area’s real estate “ruination.” Some telling descriptions in the publication of the city’s motivations include defining blight as “the visible evidence of inability to attract profitable investment, the intermingling of incompatible uses… overcrowding of dwellings designed for fewer persons, occupancy in violation of local zoning.”

It is a wry irony that the current and ongoing goals of Tucson’s downtown revitalization call for mixed retail and residential use, in order to create critical mass and reduce vehicle dependency, yet when this was happening south of Congress Street for many decades, it was considered a worrisome zoning issue.

But the most telling description to shed light on the ambitions behind the recommended “rehabilitations” was the statement that an “intermixture of racial or ethnic groups” was considered another attribute of blighted neighborhoods. The 55-page study specifically targets the barrios as areas that “required major redevelopment.”

Aerial view of the barrio and la calle pre-urban renewal, circa 1940s. Photo courtesy Arizona Historical Society #1303 (A.E. Magee Collection)

Aerial view of the barrio and la calle pre-urban renewal, circa 1940s.
Photo courtesy Arizona Historical Society #1303 (A.E. Magee Collection)

In 1961, the city’s Urban Renewal Director/Assistant City Manager S. Lenwood Schorr issued the “Urban Renewal: For Slum Clearance and Redevelopment of the Old Pueblo District” study.

While not as overtly racist as the 1942 publication, the undertones were still there – stating the district was afflicted by “crime, fire and juvenile delinquency rates,” without providing specific evidence, such as hard numbers of police and fire responders to the area over any given time period.

The cumulative effects resulted in Tucson voters approving the Pueblo Center Redevelopment Project on March 1, 1966. Despite the efforts of the La Placita Committee, the city razed 80 acres of irreplaceable culture, shops, homes, restaurants, entertainment venues (notably La Plaza Theatre) – wiping out over 100 years of historically significant buildings and scattering its residents asunder. In its place stand government buildings, the Tucson Convention Center complex and the La Placita Village complex.

All that remains of the neighborhood’s cultural heritage north of Cushing Street is the gazebo in La Placita Village, a kiosko originally called Plaza de la Mesilla. The locale dates back to the early nineteenth century and was the site of innumerable neighborhood fiestas.

Details on “La Calle: Spatial Conflicts and Urban Renewal in a Southwest City,” are available at UAPress.arizona.edu and on Amazon.com. Also check out these great titles by Thomas E. Sheridan: “Los Tucsonenses: The Mexican Community in Tucson, 1854-1941,” and “Arizona: A History, Revised Edition.”

The Power of Music

July 1, 2011 |

Pioneering Discoveries in the New Science of Song
by Elena Mannes
Walker Publishing Company (2011), 288 pages

Power of MusicScience will not embrace visceral knowledge without evidence to back it. What humans, and our species’ ancestors, have innately known about the importance of music for hundreds of thousands of years is now being proven through modern science. Namely, that music and/or sound are fundamental aspects of individuals, societies, creatures on this planet, Earth, other planets and the universe as a whole.

In Elena Mannes’ new book, which grew out of her 2009 PBS documentary “The Music Instinct: Science & Song,” she covers biochemistry, neuroscience, physics, anthropology, ancient history, the cosmos and countless experiments that point to the fact that music, basically, rocks hard core.

Heady at times, as music theory and science are, the book is still accessible to the layman, but having a science and music background certainly helps. The coolest elements in this read are the numerous factoids that should convince anyone of music’s potency. Only four percent of the human population won’t get it, those individuals who are amusic and lack normal pitch perception. Speaking of pitch, it turns out that the auditory cortex is laid out in pitch order!

With the technological advances in medical science, researchers have conducted experiments that map brain activity when subjects are listening to and playing music. “There are so many different brain areas involved,” Mannes writes, “that one can say we have a veritable ‘brain orchestra’ going on inside our heads when we are involved with music.”

Beyond just hearing music, there is also the physicality of sound vibrations. The process of hearing involves the energy of sound waves moving through the air, into our ears, through our eardrums with cellular activity telling the brain what frequencies are coming through. Because sound is vibration, this doesn’t limit it to the hearing. Deaf people can also experience music, albeit differently, but all of us consume it bodily.

Our relationship with sound starts in utero. Studies have found that fetuses begin their auditory education in the third trimester. Because of this, newborns have experienced the cadence of their parents’ language pre-birth. In turn, it affects the way they cry. The wails of a baby have musical intervals, which are different depending on their parents’ language: “French infants have more rising melody contours than English and Japanese infants.”

The process of learning to play music and sing builds more brain matter and neural pathways, making the brain of a musician physically different from that of a non-musician – and markedly so in people who learned at a young age. However, the beauty of the brain’s plasticity means that adults still have the ability to “develop new neural networks to process music.”

Listening to music also targets the brain’s pleasure zone. I call it the musicgasm, science links it to the neurochemicals released during those Oh My God parts of a song. Hence the saying – sex, drugs and rock & roll.

The beauty of music is that it doesn’t have the same consequences of sex and drugs; it is good medicine, if you will. It helps with depression, eases physical pain, creates joy and brings people together. We all know this. It’s nice that science is finally catching up to prove it.

More information on Elena Mannes is at MannesProductions.com.

 

« Previous Page