REF-21img/water.jpg · Water doing its own work — a drainage, a headcut healing, a wet meadow, rain moving through ground.
Treating a household as a watershed — rain and greywater captured, cleaned and returned to use on site, with the well as backup rather than source.
What if the house drank from its own roof and its own ground, and the well was the thing you almost never used?
Most houses on private land already own every component of a closed loop. They are simply plumbed in a straight line instead of a circle: water in from the well, water out to the leach field, and nothing in between that returns anything.
The method I keep returning to is not mine. Bill Zeedyk spent a career restoring degraded watersheds in the Southwest by reading what water was already trying to do and then placing very small structures — a rock, a log, a one-rock dam — exactly where they let the water do the rest. Induced meandering. You do not build the stream. You give it a reason to behave like a stream, and then you leave.
That is a design philosophy dressed as a fieldwork technique, and it is the one I trust most. It is also the opposite of how I built the NS-1, which was an attempt to supply every condition rather than to create the conditions.
Not yet written.