Leveraging struggles & potential to grow higher capacity & greater health in myself, my community, and the world:
A case study planting rain and neighborhood native food forests to grow regenerative abundance
By Brad Lancaster (Author) and Karryn Olson (Editor) with The Regenerative Economy Collaborative
I get up predawn to pee, step outside, and am hit with the hum. Its omnipotent in the city, to the point of being unheard. But it stirs in me the concern for what cannot be heard.
The hum is of the non-living, the mechanical — air conditioners, freeway traffic, and a pump running 24/7 a block away to reduce the spread of a toxic PFA plume in our community’s groundwater.
Where is the singing of the living — the crickets, the owls, the fireflies, the toads, the coyote, and the wind through leaves that enable all to breathe?
What’s my role in this?
What could be my role?
What do I want my role to be?
In thirty minutes, before the sun rises, I will be breaking holes in the asphalt on the edge of one of my neighborhood’s sun-baked alleys to expose a few pockets of soil in the otherwise all-paved environment. Steel digging bar and a pointed shovel are all I need.
I’m going to transplant native food-bearing tree seedlings into these pot holes I’m making. I want them to be life holes that can contribute to life wholes.
Neither the holes nor the trees will block the alley for they are on the outer edge, along a property wall, a dead edge we’ll transform into a life hedge.
I’m strategic where I work. I select spots where life is most needed, and where it will most likely succeed. I strive to collaborate with the as of yet untapped potential already here.
Pipes drain stormwater from the parking lot on the other side of the wall to the alley — free irrigation. So, I plant beside every pipe outlet. I also recruit neighbors to help be the stewards of these plantings.
My dream is that this alley (all alleys, all streets, all walkways) become life corridors shaded by living canopies irrigated freely and solely with the stormwater running off the adjoining hardscapes/pavedscapes into the sponge-like lifescapes. Shaded corridors with the beauty and comfort of this life, to enjoy, to learn with, to participate with, to eat from, and to grow more of.
I’ve guerrilla planted over 100 such plantings this summer.
We’ve planted thousands more with permissions, permits, and the organized collaboration of other people over the years. All passively and freely watered by annually harvesting over a million gallons of stormwater, which used to wastefully drain out of the neighborhood. Destructive floods have been turned into productive harvests, all of which has inspired and informed the city to legalize, incentive, and mandate this practice.
Blocks that used to be bare are now lined with continuous canopies of living shade and understory life. From this shade, from these living air conditioners, life sings.
Photos: Brad Lancaster. Reproduced with permission from Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 2, 2nd Edition
But is what I’m doing enough?
Is it effective enough?
Much of my neighborhood and the majority of my city is still severely deficient in this life.
I’m always restrained with such questions and doubt. If I’m not careful, they sap my will, and my actions dwindle or stop.
Not that the questions are bad.
The deeper issue is: What am I sourcing from when I ask them?
Am I coming from a place of fear (of failure, inadequacy, desperation) or burnout?
If so, the questions pull me down.
But if instead, I ask “What truly sources me? What juices and enlivens me? And what sources the myriad life of this unique place, which enables it and me to be?” then things flip and my will grows.
The questions change, as does my state of being.
I’m consciously asking, “What is, or could be, sourcing me?”, so that I can choose a higher level of sourcing, with a higher level of potential and will.
Here’s some examples of how they differ:
Fear and doubt sourcing me, brings about internal dialog such as:
“If I do this, there is a good chance someone is just going to herbicide or cut down the plantings. So, what’s the point?”
I focus on problems, real or imagined.
But if I instead focus on the potential, and in a way that can also address problems, and lift me and my communities’ capacity and capability, I ask such questions as,
“How can we plant in a way that plants don’t just survive, but thrive?”
“How could reforesting our desert neighborhood be done so everyone could see, and experience, it as an asset — something they too would want to succeed, and that they could even uniquely contribute to?”
“How could it be done, so more of the plantings would plant and grow themselves?”
Similarly, “How could stewards of the forest grow and evolve themselves in collaboration with the forest?”
My interest and will rises.
Ultimately what I’m striving to do is more consciously collaborate with the living systems that enable us, and all life, to be. And I start where I am, by looking more specifically at how life has uniquely adapted to, evolved with, and reciprocated to this place, the Sonoran Desert, and my town of Tucson, Arizona.
Living systems frameworks help me with this, as they help me see and articulate how things are connected, and could be more consciously integrated. They also help me see what I’ve overlooked or have not yet considered.
Here’s a framework developed by Regenesis Group for regenerative development, which I find inspirational. It strives to identify and hold the key sources we need to bring together to create greater value and the highest order of motivation and spirit that we want to tap into (Making Permaculture Stronger 7–16–22).
At first it may seem abstract, but that changes when you apply it to a real-life effort and context. Use it to prompt questions that will help you try to figure out what you are missing, the potential you are not yet aware of, or are not yet collaborating with.
Do NOT use it as a checklist, whereby you think you’re done if you have an action that fits within each part of the framework. Instead, ask how an action or a state of being could evolve to more effectively lift (and collaborate with) the potential of each point of the framework, and lift your will and those you are working with in the process.
Here’s an example of how this framework illuminates our Neighborhood Foresters native food forestry organizing efforts…
Ground — the potential at hand
Placed-sourced potential
We can start by asking,
“What is the juicy potential already at hand, that currently exists in this unique place, my/our role in it, and what I/we can uniquely contribute to its ability to further contribute to the larger systems it’s a part of?”
In our urban neighborhood forestry context, we realized that while we live in a hot, dry climate, there is an incredible diversity of native plant and animal life that has adapted to make the most of, and extend, our limited rainfall while buffering our temperature extremes, and often producing a reciprocating surplus. Only small pockets of some of that diversity of life was present in our neighborhood when we began, but it had existed before the neighborhood was built in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and it still exists in the larger Sonoran Desert of which we are a part. There are over 400 native food plants in the Sonoran Desert (Hodgson, 2015), contributing to the Tucson region perhaps being the longest continuously inhabited and cultivated location in the USA (Mabry 2019) — despite this being a desert.
How might we collaborate with that?
Or better, how might we co-evolve with that?
(For me, “co-evolve” asks a lot more of me/us than “collaborate.” I/we need to consciously develop/transform, not just share. Its lifework and life-long relationships. Its culture change. It is not short term or limited to a single endeavor)
How might we do so in a way that develops our individual and community capacity as it also lifts the capacity of this ecosystem that sustains us?
Well, you can freely observe in our sun-baked ecosystem that many of these perennial native edible plants grow to create, or grow within, shaded nutrient islands where a much greater diversity of life flourishes (compared to out in the open), and enables more rainwater to be available longer into the dry season (Burquez, 1994).
Illustration: April Baisan and David Harnish.
Reproduced with permission from Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 2, 2nd Edition by Brad Lancaster
Research has found that native bean trees such as the desert ironwood (Olneya tesota) and velvet mesquite (Prosopis velutina) form symbiotic relationships with nitrogen-fixing soil bacteria to convert atmospheric nitrogen (which plants can’t use) into ammonia (a form of nitrogen plants can use), so they are living fertilizer producers. The trees also shade and cool the soil and other life below in the hot months, while protecting it from winds and winter cold. This reduces water loss from understory life to evaporation, thereby creating a more humid microclimate within the trees’ shelter, where twice as many understory plant species can live compared to areas lacking such protection (Burquez, 1994). Furthermore, the mesquite trees’ deep roots are capable of “hydraulic redistribution,” a process by which in wet times they pump moisture via their roots to store it in deep soil layers, then later pump it back up into the topsoil and their canopy in dry times, benefitting both the mesquite and plants under its canopy (Lee, et al, 2017). These trees are living pumps, air conditioners, nurseries, and migratory flyway rest stops.
To collaborate with such place-based evolution, our program has chosen to only plant trees native to here. They are the best adapted to our local climate, soils, and wildlife with whom they’ve co-evolved. For example, a native mesquite tree will support over 60 different native pollinators, while a non-native mesquite planted here will only support twelve. The insects in these native trees, along with the trees’ fruits then support bird life. A Wilson’s Warbler flying through here from Central America on its migratory journey to Canada and back can increase its body weight by 10% in just 3–4 days consuming the insects around a single native mesquite tree (Tucson Audubon, 2014). Over a million birders (humans looking at birds) annually migrate to Arizona to see the warbler and other migrating and resident bird life; such watchable wildlife activities have an annual $1.4 billion economic benefit in the state (Tang, 2011) (Coalition for Sonoran Desert Protection).
We begin to tap that potential simply by selecting from, and helping regrow, this native plant palette where it has been rapidly disappearing from our built environment. But we leverage this further by working toward the goal…
Goal — image the state you want to bring into being and the capacities you’ll have to continue to regenerate in yourself and your place to attain and sustain that state.
Regenerative capability
Currently, my city depends on imported resources, for example, our municipal water is sourced from dwindling local groundwater and shrinking Colorado River water pumped in from 300 miles away (we dried up our local Santa Cruz River from overuse and mismanagement decades before).
How might we take inspiration from the native life that survives solely on local resources, such as rainwater when freely at hand; and does so in a way that gives back more water to the aquifers and rivers than it takes from them?
Similarly, how might we, in our actions, mimic the planet’s hydrologic cycles to enable our sparse rain to linger longer, to cycle through, and contribute to, more lives more times?
(On the planetary scale, such natural cycling evolves toward ever more diverse, and life-enhancing cycles, that enable still more cycles. If a finite amount of fresh water is cycled in a way that the quality of that water [and the health of our world] is not degraded, or is perhaps even improved, the finite amount of water can be utilized and cycled infinitely).
Illustration: Joe Marshall. Reproduced with permission from Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 2, 2nd Edition
These questions prompted us to adopt the practice of “planting the rain” before planting any plants. This way there is no need for, or dependence on irrigation water extracted from, and depleting, aquifers and rivers, nor the leak-prone plastic irrigation pipe through which the extracted waters are pumped, and the associated water bills. We simply plant within or beside sunken water-harvesting earthworks, basins, or rain gardens that retain, rather than drain, the rain. This way, once established, the solely rain-irrigated native plants don’t just survive, they thrive.
Working with and observing the life and natural processes in our watershed/lifeshed evolved our work. For example, we realized we needed to size our earthworks large enough to ensure they would annually harvest enough stormwater to provide all water needs of their associated plantings (trees and understory plants) as they grow into maturity. After calculating the amount of runoff that could potentially be captured from neighborhood streets (over one million gallons per mile per year), along with the water needs of the plants at their mature sizes, we upped the size of the average street-harvesting basin to 8 feet long by 5 feet wide by 1 foot deep to annually harvest over 4,500 gallons of water per basin (Lancaster, 2019).
This way, we do not extract irrigation water from aquifers or rivers in the first place, so we contribute to indirect recharge of our local waters by reducing their extraction/depletion. Secondly, surplus harvested water then migrates below the root zone of the plantings to directly recharge the aquifers, which help recharge the rivers. Thirdly, we may even help increase rainfall with a growing, living canopy of transpiring leaves. (Forest News, 7–23–2012).
Planting in this way, further enhances the regenerative capability of the neighborhood and watershed by harvesting and cycling nutrients. Like the soft, fertile soil beneath mature trees in local bosques (native forests), the basins become sponge-like when filled with the roots of the trees and diverse understory plantings, fertile leaf drop, and passively captured bird and insect manures — all of which increase the rate at which water infiltrates the soil, and the length of time water and nutrients linger and cycle within the soil.
Research found that in Tucson, Arizona vegetated street-side rain garden basins harvesting street runoff mulched with organic material (wood chips, leaf drop, etc.) had twice as much soil moisture and twice as much soil organic matter (SOM) as such basins mulched with rock or gravel (Zuckerman, 2017).
Soil organic matter (SOM) consists of fresh and partially decomposed plant and animal residues, the living biomass of soil microorganisms, and humus (the well-decomposed organic matter). As SOM levels increase, so does the soil’s ability to sequester more climate-changing carbon from the atmosphere, as the SOM is typically estimated to contain 58% carbon. (Wikipedia, 2018).
So, we do NOT use rock or gravel within our community basin bottoms. Instead, we cut up prunings from street-side rain garden vegetation, and apply it as a mulch within the basins.
Photos: Brad Lancaster
Reproduced with permission from Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 2, 2nd Edition
Everything moves via gravity to the low spots — water, seed, organic matter, and fertility. Leaves are called “leaves” because we are supposed to leave them, and they naturally collect within, and mulch, the basin bottoms, along with cut up prunings. All that creates more habitat for soil life that is the wellspring of accumulating/cycling fertility, and helps naturally bioremediate, filter, and even consume potential contaminants from harvested urban stormwater. “Waste” is a human construct. By re-integrating/recycling them into living systems, they become resources.
These practices moderate extremes on both sides of the climate, as they reduce the length of dry seasons and droughts, while reducing flooding in wet times. And unlike non-living built infrastructure that starts to degrade once made, this living infrastructure grows, diversifies, and gets better with time — it regenerates itself.
Which is inspiration to strive to do the same with our neighborhood foresters and the larger community. It is essential, that we people are growing/evolving/collaborating with these living systems, which brings us to the next point on the framework…
Instrument — means, strategies, actions taken
Coevolving mutualism
How can we evolve in a way that is reciprocally maintaining/contributing to the whole of the living system we are a part of (and depend on)?
(True evolution is not possible without sustaining the living systems enabling us to be. If they die, we die).
That question inspired us to commit to planting and stewarding our neighborhood forests in a way that grows our capabilities and enhances our health, as it does the same for the ecological system that supports us.
This also connects us to the cultural heritage of this place. Our street runoff harvesting is a modern form of traditional O’odham ak-chin runoff farming which diverts some of the runoff from natural ephemeral waterways or arroyos onto adjoining floodplain fields in a way that rehydrates more of the land by slowing, spreading, and infiltrating more of the stormwater flow over a greater area. In our urban setting, we see the street gutter as our urban arroyo, and divert runoff from it into the adjoining floodplain of street-side and in-street rain gardens.
Photo: Brad Lancaster
Reproduced with permission from Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 2, 2nd Edition
Similarly, within these rain gardens, we emphasize the planting of native food-, medicinal-, and craft material-bearing perennial plants from our area’s ethnobotanical history and current practice. This invites the public to engage with this life on many different levels, and regrows the value the public sees in this native flora as we strive to bring it back into the urban core, where municipal-water-irrigated, non-native plants ill-suited for our climate and wildlife have become the norm.
Photo: Brad Lancaster
Since many people cannot identify, nor are aware of the many uses of these indigenous plants we have planting, identification, harvesting, plant care, and processing workshops, work parties, and festivals where they can identify, taste, and eat the foods harvested from the plants around them. This increases the depth of potential relationships people can have with them, as folks’ perception of plants shift from merely ornamental to also being living pantries and pharmacies, or even kin or family.
Neighbors plant together in planting parties, thereby literally setting roots together. Totem plants, such as baby saguaro cactus are gifted and planted to mark a birth, wedding, or new job; and the saguaro then grows with the child, the relationship, the career, and the planters.
Diverse people of our multi-cultural borderlands also interact with the neighborhood forest on their own, so in a partnership with the University of Arizona’s campus arboretum, multi-lingual plant identification signs have been installed along our public walking paths, and link, via scannable QR codes, to the plants’ ethnobotanical uses, microclimate preferences, wildlife habitat, and propagation tips, while celebrating the plant and cultural diversity of our borderlands. In addition, signage shows photos of the neighborhood “before and after” the planting of the forest, along with the resulting ecological services of the evolving life, such as how it has dramatically shaded and cooled our neighborhood, while also abating noise, air, and light pollution.
To continue to diversify the neighborhood forests, we bring in missing species that we plant by seed, seedling, or nursery-grown stock. Wildlife, winds, and runoff flow bring in and disperse some of this seed as well. Through observation, we learn which plants prefer which microclimates, which informs more effective future plantings. Once these plants are growing in the ground within our neighborhood, they become living seed banks and living nurseries. We strive to get each species growing on every block; so, neighbors need not leave their block to collect seed or transplant a seedling from beneath the mother plant.
We also provide plant material and seed collected from our plantings or the natural desert to local backyard and commercial plant nurseries to diversify their offerings. Thus, expanding the reach of multi-use native plantings into the community.
In the past, we’ve lost plant diversity and density to neighbor and city-hired landscape crews who removed or herbicided any and all plantings in “clean up” efforts or when a branch grew to block a path or driveway. So, we now train up neighbors, volunteers, and professionals on how to better identify and care for our diverse community plantings, utilizing neighborhood experts and others such as certified arborist educators we bring in as instructors. Those who live, work, and play within and beside the forests thus become the forest’s primary, and better-informed, stewards.
Shepherded neighborhood goats and trained neighbor forester volunteers help prune desired plants that would otherwise grow to block public access; while invasive, non-native species are identified and strategically consumed or removed. The friendly foresters and goats along the public pathways then invite more neighbors into interactions. Conversations ensue in which we share different ways of seeing, thinking, and acting. This then informs our programs to better suit our community’s needs and aspirations. For example, we learned from elderly and disabled neighbors that they loved being in the shaded canopy of our forest and observing the abundant wildlife, but some of our public paths were not walkable if too narrow for a caretaker to walk alongside them, or the surface was mulched with gravel into which their feet or walker wheels sunk. So, we evolved our programs and guidance to create and maintain pathways at least five feet wide, and only having approved walkable surfaces (lightly compacted native soil being an effective, free option).
Simultaneously, we are collaborating with the city and its Storm to Shade green infrastructure program to help develop their maintenance guides and train their crews and the local contractors they hire. We are helping shift the goal of their work from leave evidence of work done, which used to result in over-pruned plants sheared into unnatural balls, and blanket clearing of the ground, including removing wildflowers; to maximize the health and performance of our green infrastructure, which results in minimal pruning maintaining natural plant forms, cutting up the prunings to use as an on-site mulch, and the planting of native wildflower seed.
All this helps develop ourselves and a growing guild/community of more conscious stakeholders/partners as we focus on the core purpose behind the vocation of place…
Direction/aim — an inner compass/aspiration that inspires us to reach beyond our current ableness.
Vocation of place — connecting our role to a higher order destiny of place.
What is the essence and the vocation of this (or your) Place?
How does, or could, that inform my/your/our coevolution with Place?
“…Vocation is a calling or a pulling forth. It is the trail to which a person [place or life] is especially drawn as she knows it is hers to blaze. Every member of a living system is known, in part, by the contribution to which it is called…
…Vocation is a source of meaning for individuals and community.
An expression of essence in the form of new life that will allow both the place and its world to evolve.”(Regenesis, 2016)
The vocation of place awakens me to, or reminds me, that this work is bigger than me. Its bigger than us, which grows my will, as it guides me into more conscious collaboration with the life and natural processes of this place, in hopes that I can beneficially coevolve with them.
For example, the Santa Cruz River used to flow year-round through Tucson. It was an overflow from our lifeshed’s once-abundant groundwater that released via verdant springs, watered the Great Mesquite Forest, and could be tapped in dry times with shallow hand-dug wells (Webb, Betancourt, Johnson, Turner, 2014]). It, and the ciénegas/wetlands (with giant sacaton grass that tickled the underbelly of Spanish explorers’ horses), were effectively “vegetative sponges” that quickly absorbed rainfall and flood flows, recharging that groundwater and the river, as did many miles of trincheras and other indigenous water-harvesting strategies in the uplands.
This was a regenerative oasis in the desert that also fed and enhanced the flow, life, and oases of the Colorado River downstream.
But we’ve since killed the Santa Cruz River, its springs, its forests, its ciénegas, and drained its groundwater (by taking more from the natural system than is naturally given back/recharged). We now also take from the distant and drying Colorado River by pumping its water over 300 miles and 3,000 feet uphill to Tucson and Phoenix.
Bottom photo: Brad Lancaster
Reproduced with permission from Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 2, 2nd Edition
Tucson exists today because it was a life- and water flow-reciprocating oasis. And I believe that regenerating that natural giving/reciprocating oasis (not an artificial taking/extracting oasis) must be Tucson’s vocation, especially within our current context of human-induced ecosystem and climate change.
This is why I work and play so hard — to enable Tucson to again become a reciprocating oasis, beginning with home- and neighborhood-scaled regenerative oases that inspire and inform more community-, state-, nation-, and planetary-wide efforts.
“…Sustainability becomes possible when a person, forest, or river is in a reciprocally developmental relationship with the proximate whole [place] it inhabits…”(Regenesis, 2016)
Our neighborhood experiences our forests as life-giving in many ways including that they produce hyper-local, nutritious food. Edible plants, such as the seeds of the giant sacaton grass, carob-like pods of our mesquite trees, and their diverse edible companions once again thrive — this time in, and beside, our street-runoff-harvesting rain gardens, irrigated solely by the passively harvested rain and stormwater.
Many different people, businesses, cultures, and organizations (including our Neighborhood Foresters) celebrating, renewing, and enhancing our community’s unique placed-based food ways led to Tucson being the first city in the U.S. to be awarded World City of Gastronomy status.
When humans align with the “vocation” of their Place potential naturally expands, and we more readily look for, and see, the previously unseen. For example, when we calculated how much rain falls on Tucson in an average year, we found that more rain falls on Tucson in a year than all its residents consume of municipal water in a year. Instead of immediately draining and evaporating, the vast majority of it away, the living sponges of mesquite bosques, sacaton ciénegas, vegetated trincheras, ak-chin fields, and neighborhood rain gardens show us another way.
Our local efforts to grow rain-irrigated neighborhood native food forests and accompanying life-giving cultural practices show us that we already have what we need right here. We just need to relearn to see it, collaborate with it, and consciously co-evolve with it. As we do, it gets easier and more juicy to inspire, be inspired, and cross-pollinate ideas, practices, and transformations with others.
What enables healthy reciprocating life where you are?
How could you more consciously collaborate with that?
How could you more consciously co-evolve with that?
What are the potentials unique to you/your organization/your business/your community and your place that could co-evolve to lift all?
Brad Lancaster is the author of the award-winning Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond book series, available at deep discount, direct from Brad at HarvestingRainwater.com.
Brad is also the co-founder and coordinator of NeighborhoodForesters.org.
REFERENCES:
“Living Design Process and the Tetrad of Regenerative Development with Pamela Mang”, Making Permaculture Stronger podcast, July 16, 2022
Food Plants of the Sonoran Desert by Wendy C. Hodgson, University of Arizona Press, 2015.
“Ancient Oasis: Agriculture in the Santa Cruz River Valley” by Jonathan B. Mabry, Zócalo. June, №108:17–19.
“Islands of diversity: Ironwood ecology and richness of perennials in a Sonoran Desert biological preserve” by Alberto Burquez. Conservation International, Occasional Paper №1, April 1994
“Impact of Hydraulic Redistribution on Multispecies Vegetation Water Use in a Semiarid Savanna Ecosystem: An Experimental and Modeling Synthesis” by Esther Lee, Praveen Kumar, Greg A. Barron-Gafford, Sean M. Hendryx, Enrique P. Sanchez-Cañete, Rebecca L. Minor, Tonny Colella, and Russell L. Scott. Water Resources Research, 54, 4009–4027. https://doi.org/10.1029/2017WR021006
Wilson’s Warbler Fast Fun Facts, Tucson Audubon, 2014. https://www.tucsonaudubon.org/images/stories/temporary%20events/summ%20appeal14-letter.pdf
“Arizona increasing popularity as bird-watching hot spot” by Terry Tang, Journal Star, 8–21–2011, https://www.pjstar.com/story/lifestyle/2011/08/21/arizona-increasing-popularity-as-bird/42277557007/
“Why More Open Space is Good for our Land, Water, and Quality of Life,” Coalition for Sonoran Desert Protection, https://www.tucsonaz.gov/files/integrated-planning/1029_openspace_fact_sheet-3.pdf
Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 1, 3rd Edition by Brad Lancaster, Rainsource Press, 2019
Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 2, 2nd Edition by Brad Lancaster, Rainsource Press, 2019
“Make it rain: Planting forests could help drought-stricken regions” by Kate Evans, Forest News 7–23–2012, https://forestnews.cifor.org/10316/make-it-rain-planting-forests-to-help-drought-stricken-regions?fnl=e
“Nematode Community Response to Green Infrastructure Design in a Semi-Arid City,” by Mitch Pavao Zuckerman and Christine Sookhdeo, Journal of Environmental Quality 46(3):687–694 (2017)
Soil Organic Matter, from Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_organic_matter accessed 10–19–2018.
Regenerative Development and Design: A Framework for Evolving Sustainability by Pamela Mang, Ben Haggard, Regenesis Group, Wiley, 2016.
Requiem for the Santa Cruz: An Environmental History of an Arizona River by Robert H. Webb, Julio L. Betancourt, R. Roy Johnson, and Raymond M. Turner, University of Arizona Press, 2014).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Karryn Olson for editing and resourcing, and to Regenesis Group and Carol Sanford for inspiration, education, and resourcing.
RESOURCES
Regenesis Group, RegenesisGroup.com
Carol Sanford, CarolSanford.com
