Playing with the Rain

Week of July 17, 2021

The Art of Playing with the Rain
As fresh clean water becomes more and more precious, we are all being encouraged to transform our relationship to water: to truly treasure it. Who better than artists to inspire us?

We’ll explore ways (from wacky to poetic) that artists “dress up” rainwater catchment and storage—hopefully alleviating some folk’s aversion to anything they view as industrial.

We’ll also consider alternatives to “disposing” of stormwater (with its accumulated pollutants) directly into the nearest waterway. Increasingly artists are included on design teams treating stormwater as a valuable resource, not only for its life giving properties, but for the spectacular beauty it can contribute to any project.

Warning— HIDDEN AGENDA: you may feel compelled to go home and play with your rain!

(So a few tips will be included.)

 

Twice Is Nice:  Reusing Your Lightly Used Greywater
Have you been wondering why that perfectly clean cold water in your shower has to run “away” while you’re waiting for hot water to arrive? Are you one of those heroic people who captures it in a bucket and carries it to the garden?

We’ll explore simple, low tech, low cost, low maintenance greywater systems for irrigating the garden, and also glance at some higher tech drip irrigation systems.

More importantly we’ll discuss why it is so beneficial to reuse this greywater rather than “disposing” of it, and consider new initiatives to have “greywater ready / drought ready” plumbing installed during residential remodeling and new construction. This enables a greywater irrigation system to be added in the future with much less cost.

As we increasingly recognize that every drop of water counts, we need to regard greywater as a precious resource!

 

Christina Bertea
As a union-trained contractor, Christina plumbed alternative straw bale and rammed earth residences, eventually designing and building a passive-solar rammed earth house in downtown Oakland (fully permitted). In 2008 she teamed up with the Greywater Guerrillas, shifted focus to alternative water systems, and in 2009 helped craft the breakthrough CA Greywater code that legalized the systems they had been teaching. With the now mainstream Greywater Action she continues to instruct hands-on workshops where homeowners learn to install greywater and rainwater systems.

As a permaculturalist, Christina is excited about the emerging awareness of the importance of living soil —and especially the capacity of microbes to sequester carbon from the atmosphere into the soil where it exponentially increases the soil’s water holding capacity. This bodes well for healing climate chaos.

The producer of Women Eco Artist Dialog’s Art+ Activism series, Christina makes eco art that slyly disseminates solutionary ideas.