This book is for everyone, especially:
- Community members: Get inspired and take action. Learn from the lessons of previous systems. This book is already being used to build inspired systems around the world.
- Makers: Find the DIY details ready to be adapted to your local and global projects. See how other makers solved their problems.
- Teachers: Use this in your Middle School, High School, and University courses. Provides context for education and practical experience to back up math, science, and social curriculum. Includes problem-sets to reinforce the knowledge in the book.
- Students: Rejoice in strong practical reasons to be learning. The real stories bring the math and technical details to life. The custom diagrams and pictures deepen the learning.
- Homesteaders: Size your system so that you have the water you need, when you need it.
- International development workers: Be ready with appropriate systems and examples.
- Preppers: Build systems to be water secure. Have the book around in case you need it!
- Practivistas: Expand the resilience and impact of the idea that, instead of telling people what not to do, we can build better systems that people want to do.
- People looking for inspiration and follow-through.
To Catch the Rain includes project details and images from dozens of Appropedia contributors. The Appropedia Foundation is a non-profit dedicated to "sharing knowledge to build rich, sustainable lives." Up-to-date resource pages on Appropedia support each of the projects and resources in the book for long term follow-up. Some of the projects have been updated periodically online for over a decade!
Thanks to a special arrangement with the publisher, Humboldt State Press, all of the net proceeds from sales will go back into the book and to the Appropedia Foundation. In addition, the content is licensed open source, as Creative Commons, so you can share it however you like!
Lonny Grafman is an Instructor at Humboldt State University; the founder of the Practivistas summer abroad, full immersion, resilient community technology program; the project manager of the epi-apocalyptic city art project Swale; the Chief Product Officer of Nexi; and the President of the Appropedia Foundation, sharing knowledge to build rich, sustainable lives. Lonny has developed courses at universities in many countries and facilitated engagements around the world. He has worked, and led teams, on hundreds of domestic and international projects across a broad spectrum of sustainable design and entrepreneurship – from solar energy to improved cookstoves, from micro-hydro power to rainwater catchment, from earthen construction to plastic bottle schoolrooms. Throughout all these technology implementations, he has found the most vital component to be community. His first book, To Catch the Rain, covers inspiring stories of communities coming together to catch their own rain, and how you can do it too.
