Over the weekend, Burning Man attendees were forced to shelter in place when the usually-parched Black Rock Desert got roughly 3 months’ worth of rain in 24 hours. … In the U.S., there’s strikingly little mainstream discussion of scaling what’s arguably the simplest, cheapest and most sustainable solution for harvesting water: catching it from the sky. The time is ripe for a national policy agenda to dramatically scale up rainwater harvesting. Around the world, humans have been systematically gathering rainwater since ancient times. The technologies are simple: Collect rainwater from rooftops—on homes, warehouses, factories—and send it down gutters into tanks, where it can be filtered and used for domestic purposes, landscaping, or industrial processes. For farms, harvesting rainwater typically means configuring land with slopes and basins that maximize natural irrigation.
-Written by Justin Talbot Zorn, senior adviser to the Center for Economic and Policy Research; and Israel Mirsky is a New York-based writer and technologist.