Mapping your water supply
Excerpt of the ‘Ecological Design Dimension’ of Gaia Education’s online course in ‘Design for Sustainability’
Water is used by agriculture, industry and municipalities. Unsustainable extraction from aquifers lowers the groundwater level. Within a bioregion it is good to assess the water budget — inflows and outflows. Sustainable communities can then ensure they are using water from sustainable sources and conserving wherever possible (see picture Conceptual Water Budget).
Do you know where your water comes from and how it is treated?
After understanding how the water cycle works, a useful next step into designing appropriate water systems is to take a close look at your building’s, community’s or bioregion’s water budget, depending on what scale of design you are focussing.
Even if you are only designing a single house in your community, to integrate your design appropriately in its unique place you will have to also pay attention to water flows at the community and regional scale.
Here is a link to more information about creating a water budget. If you want to learn more about watershed management at the regional scale enjoy this excellent talk (19min) on rethinking and retrofitting for resilience.
Brock Dolman, the director of the Water Institute at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Centre, shares how we can all become part in creating appropriate water use patterns through practicing conservation and regenerative watershed management. His matra for water management is: Slow it! Spread it! Sink it!
Too often water is channelled off the landscape as quickly as possible. Compacted agriculture field with no ground cover lead to rainfall not filtering into the ground and washing a way into storm water drainage systems. Build surfaces are too often created with impermeable coverings like tar or cement, further reducing water filtration into the ground and adds to pollution of water as runoff picks up the heavy metal residues left by fossil fuel exhausts.
In many places rain falls in seasons, yet rainwater is not retained and stored int the landscape and is allowed to rush of to rivers and back into the sea. For sustainable watershed management at local and regional scale we need water to be retained for use throughout the year. Also polluted water is frequently moved away where we can learn to regenerate wate quality in place in smaller, more decentralized and resilient waster systems.
The sustainable approach is to store rainfall in the landscape, grow forests, install check dams, minimise water pollution, treat polluted water close to the source of pollution and recycle within the region. This maintains the social and ecological integrity of the community.
The climate is changing and in many places the monsoons or seasonal rainfall patterns are becoming less predictable. We need to design water systems for an erratic and often catastrophic climate future to prepare for the years to come.
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… [this is an excerpt from the ‘Ecological Design Dimension’ of Gaia Education’s online course in ‘Design for Sustainability’. Your can enroll in this course at any time. The next installment of the ‘Ecological Dimension’ will start in mid January 2020. The material in this dimension was co-authored by Lisa Shaw, Michael Shaw, Ezio Gori, and Daniel Christian Wahl, author of ‘Designing Regenerative Cultures’ and Head of Innovation and (Programme) Design at Gaia Education.]
