This page collects books, papers, videos and websites on Water Retention Landscapes (WRL), the practice sometimes called “slow water”: holding rain on and in the land so it soaks in, feeds vegetation and groundwater, and leaves the catchment slowly. The collection is informal and will grow. Practitioner films, talks and project websites sit here beside a few papers. The peer-reviewed evidence base, and the argument for why retention matters to a bioregion’s economy, are on the Water Retention Landscapes concept page.
Rainwater harvesting is the narrower practice inside WRL: collecting rain from a roof or other hard surface into a tank, cistern, pit or pond. Dew and fog can be collected too, with nets. Several resources below cover harvesting at the household scale; the rest work at farm, catchment and regional scale.
Claims made in a film or on a website are the maker’s own account. Figures quoted from them carry [TBV] until checked against an independent source.
Videos
Water is Earth’s Blood: the old and new water paradigms
Watch on YouTube · Water Stories, 2022
Zach Weiss contrasts the old water paradigm (drain the land, move water off it fast) with the new one (hold water in the ground so vegetation, transpiration and cooling return). He traces the “watershed death spiral” from the Fertile Crescent to drained modern floodplains, then shows Sepp Holzer’s Krameterhof and community-led retention in India as the way out.
What it adds: the clearest short introduction to the paradigm set out in Kravčík et al. (2007), in a practitioner’s voice. A good first film for a BioHub group meeting before anyone reads the concept page.
The Secret About Floods: “natural” disasters are man-made
Watch on YouTube · Water Stories, 2023
Argues that roads, roofs, drained wetlands, bare farmland and cleared forest concentrate runoff and turn heavy rain into disaster. Floods, droughts and fires are presented as one cycle with one cause, and decentralized water retention as the response. The film cites a community project in India credited with reviving seven rivers and lowering local temperatures by two degrees [TBV].
What it adds: the flood-risk side of WRL. Most of the wiki argues from water yield. Avoided flood damage is a second value a restored catchment produces, and it is the argument a municipality or insurer will recognize when a BioHub proposes a performance-based bond.
Reviving Rivers with Dr Rajendra Singh, the Waterman of India
Watch on YouTube · Water Stories, full film
A documentary on Rajendra Singh and the villages of Rajasthan that built johads (earthen check dams) to catch monsoon runoff and bring dry rivers back to perennial flow.
What it adds: a visual record of the most cited community-scale case on the wiki, showing village labor and local materials at work. One caution for anyone quoting it: the concept page gives five restored rivers in the Alwar district, while Water Stories material speaks of seven [TBV]. Reconcile the figure before citing it.
Heal the Planet with Ponds
Watch on YouTube · Andrew Millison, 2022
Andrew Millison treats beavers as ecosystem engineers, visits beaver dams and several Oregon permaculture sites designed to copy their effect on water, and shows drone footage of large-scale water harvesting in Rajasthan. He closes with simple design rules for ponds that serve people and ecosystems together.
What it adds: a living model for the riparian scale described on the concept page. Beaver dams show what slowed water does to a valley floor, and the design rules suit a small landholder starting with one pond.
America’s Big Mistake: Watershed Democracy Rejected
Watch on YouTube · Andrew Millison
Millison on the idea of drawing political boundaries around watersheds, and on the United States’ decision against it [TBV].
What it adds: the governance argument underneath WRL. Water moves by catchment, and the bioregional premise is that coordination should follow the same lines. Pairs with watershed mapping as the first step in defining a BioRegion.
Planting the Rain to Grow Abundance
Watch on YouTube · Brad Lancaster, TEDxTucson, 2017
Brad Lancaster describes learning to treat rain as something to plant. In the Sonoran Desert, with about 11 inches (280 mm) of rain a year, he and his brother harvest roughly 100,000 gallons (about 380 cubic meters) a year on an eighth-acre (about 500 square meter) urban lot and the public right-of-way beside it [TBV]. The water grows food-bearing shade trees, gardens and wildlife habitat. Lancaster wrote Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond and co-founded DesertHarvesters.org.
What it adds: the household and street scale, which the wiki’s practitioner lineage (farm and catchment work) does not cover. It shows that retention starts on a single urban plot, including land the household does not own.
Dryland-harvesting home gathers sun, rain, food and more
Watch on YouTube · Kirsten Dirksen, about 2021
A tour of Lancaster’s Tucson property and neighborhood: roof and street runoff, greywater, sun and shade, soil fertility, and a neighborhood food forest.
What it adds: the working detail behind the TEDx talk. The camera stays on the earthworks, basins and curb cuts long enough for a household practitioner to copy them.
Thriving Off Grid in the Desert without a Well
Watch on YouTube · Paragraphic, 2023
A tour of an off-grid home in Rio Verde, Arizona, an area where some properties lie beyond the water network and depend on hauled water. The house runs on roof-harvested rain stored in tanks, with solar power. The video gives the US rule of thumb for yield: collection area in square feet, times rainfall in inches, times 0.623, gives gallons. In metric, square meters times millimeters of rain gives liters, before losses.
What it adds: tank arithmetic for a household sizing its storage. It also marks the limit of tank harvesting: a tank keeps water for one household, while a retention landscape stores it in soil and groundwater where the whole catchment can draw on it.
Dhun: changing the fortunes of a barren land with traditional water wisdom
Watch on YouTube · Down To Earth
The story of Dhun, a 500-acre property at Phagi near Jaipur, Rajasthan, where Manavendra Singh Shekhawat has applied traditional water harvesting since 2013. Down To Earth reports more than eight new waterbodies, over 120 bird species and 70 native tree species on land that once held about 30 trees, with better water supply in neighboring villages [TBV].
What it adds: restoration led by one landholder on a large property, a counterpart to Rajendra Singh’s village-led model. Useful to a BioHub working with large private landowners, where one owner’s decision covers a whole sub-catchment.
Zephaniah Phiri’s in situ rainwater harvesting
Watch on YouTube · Earth Reborn
The story of Zephaniah Phiri Maseko, the Zimbabwean farmer whose pits, contour ridges and ponds held water on his farm through drought. The video is AI-generated. It is useful as an introduction and unreliable on detail.
What it adds: an accessible way into an African case the wiki treats in depth. Check any fact from the narration against the entries on Phiri and the Muonde Trust in Landscape Restoration in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Books and papers
- Kravčík, M., Pokorný, J., Kohutiar, J., Kováč, M. and Tóth, E. (2007). Water for the Recovery of the Climate: A New Water Paradigm. PDF. The founding text of the tradition, arguing that drained and paved land breaks the small water cycle and that retaining rain on land restores it. See the source page, Water for the Recovery of the Climate, and Michal Kravčík.
- Sušnik, J., Masia, S., Kravčík, M., Pokorný, J. and Hesslerová, P. “Costs and benefits of landscape-based water retention measures as nature-based solutions to mitigating climate impacts in eastern Germany, Czech Republic, and Slovakia.” Land Degradation & Development. doi:10.1002/ldr.4373 · PDF. Models retention measures across 15 sub-regions and finds croplands offer the most storage, the strongest local cooling and the lowest cost per hectare. The authors present the results as order-of-magnitude estimates and call for field studies. One of the few cost-benefit treatments of WRL, and a candidate for its own source page.
- Lancaster, B. Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond. Rainsource Press. The household and neighborhood manual behind the two Lancaster videos above.
- The books by P.A. Yeomans, Sepp Holzer, Peter Andrews and Walter Jehne are listed with source pages under Sources on the concept page.
Websites and organizations
- Water Holistic: a Košice, Slovakia company working on rainwater management, flood and drought prevention, urban cooling and soil restoration with natural methods.
- Decentralized water retention design: Sepp Holzer’s own page on his design approach.
- Tamera: Water Retention Landscape: a community in southern Portugal that documents the retention landscape it has built.
- Harvesting Rainwater: Brad Lancaster’s site, with articles, videos and the book.
- Rainwater Harvesting 101: WaterCache’s primer on roof harvesting systems.
- Rainwater Basics: Texas A&M AgriLife Extension’s introduction to harvesting for home and landscape use.
- The Weather Makers: company page (LinkedIn) for a firm working on landscape and water cycle restoration [TBV].
Articles and interviews
- Water Cycles series: interviews from Investing in Regenerative Agriculture on restoring small water cycles and regreening, with guests including Neal Spackman, Antonio Nobre, Douglas Sheil and Rodger Savory.
- Walter Jehne: stop talking about carbon emissions and focus on restoring the water cycle (Koen van Seijen, 2021). Jehne’s case that water and vegetation cool the planet faster than emissions cuts alone. Background to the soil carbon sponge.
- Millán Millán and the mystery of the missing Mediterranean storms (Resilience, 2023). How coastal land-use change in Spain cut off summer storms. See Millán Millán and the Bioprecipitation brief for how far the evidence goes.
- The fire-sponge triangle and the four principles of good fire forestry (Nik Bertulis, Ritual Biology, 2023). Links soil water retention to wildfire, through fungal networks, grazing and prescribed burns co-managed with holders of traditional ecological knowledge.
Short posts
- Loose boulder structures (Sarayu Kamat, LinkedIn). A short video of a very basic structure: loose rock laid across a drainage line to slow water.
- Water paradigm (Tijn Tjoelker, LinkedIn). A post on the water cycle paradigm.
Related
- Water Retention Landscapes
- Water Retention Landscape (glossary)
- Soil Carbon Sponge (glossary)
- Bioprecipitation
- Landscape Restoration in Sub-Saharan Africa
- Zach Weiss, Sepp Holzer, Rajendra Singh, Andrew Millison, Walter Jehne, Joe Brewer
Provenance
Compiled from Michael Haupt’s Roam pages WRL and Gully Stuffing (the “Additional Videos” section of the latter). Video titles, channels and dates were checked against YouTube metadata on 2026-10-23; the description of the Watershed Democracy video could not be retrieved, so its summary rests on the title and is tagged [TBV]. Notes on what each resource adds were written for this page. Figures reported by filmmakers and websites carry [TBV]. The gully stuffing technique and its school activities are left for a separate page. Links in the Roam page to subjects without wiki pages (Nabataean water management, gully stuffing, Deliberative Watershed Denizenship, LandScopeOS, Two-Legged Climate, Brad Lancaster, Brian Kerkvliet) are not carried over.