A New Rainwater Harvesting System Online on the Westside
Posted by Mark Scott Lavin
Hello all! Once again I can’t say much because the pics speak for themselves. I just did a one day install at the home of Chris Toussaint, LA Westside permaculturist and filmmaker, said install consisting of a vinyl downspouts leading inexorably and leak-free(!) to a rain harvesting barrel provided by Sustainable Works in the City of Santa Monica… my second rainwater harvesting system. I got to see firsthand the lessons I learned from the Sugar Shack install working beautifully here, and I must say I left the work site ready to celebrate, pumping the tunes loud and hard in the hump-day traffic toward home.
As you can see in the little photo-diagram below, in the initial consultation we discussed a number of actions for optimizing passive water use on the property. Wednesday afternoon, the downspout went up beautifully; the rest may come later.
The celebratory mood came not only from the seamless installation, or from the fact that I have gained more wisdom to offer in the upcoming e-book, or from the new information we will gain from this install as it functions in months and years to come. It came also in the recognition that this little 55-gallon system is another tiny but definitive step in the direction of freedom for all of us; after all, if everyone in LA put up a little system like this, it might be enough to give our aqueducts and maybe the Sacramento Delta or the Colorado River enough time off to regenerate the abundance they can provide for all of us.
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Thank you Chris for creating the opportunity and caring for people and planet. And thank you all for listening. I hope I’ve inspired you.
Toward a culture of abundance, ho!
About Mark Scott Lavin
By age six, Mark was building cities that touched the ceiling of his bedroom. Since then, Mark has initiated large-scale collaborations around the culturally recombinative Burning Man festival, earned a Masters Degree from SCI-Arc and a Permaculture Design Certificate and served on the core team that wrote Los Angeles’s award winning Integrated Regional Water Management Plan. Since 2009, Mark has thrown himself into urban ecological design/build and designed, built and consulted on more than a dozen structures including bamboo structures, super-adobe structures in Haiti and several geodesic tree houses and greenhouses with one of the most innovative tree house design/build firms in the world. Through the invention studio Vertecology LLC (www.vertecology.com), Mark has been creating geodesic luminescent sculptures quickly gaining attention in the Los Angeles art scene, community scale rainwater harvesting systems, a home-scale hanging garden system that will soon go to manufacture, a line of pollinator habitats and a forthcoming line of e-books and curricula to support other makers in creating “vertical ecologies” or vertecologies of their own.Posted on February 26, 2012, in Installs, Land, Uncategorized, Water and tagged barrel, collect, downspout, ecology, gutter, harvest, rainwater, runoff, system, vertecology. Bookmark the permalink. 3 Comments.
nice job, Mark
When can we see the timelapse video?
Already compiled and coming shortly. Thanks!