Ridge to Valley – a Holistic Watershed Perspective
Biological Cleaning, Conservation, Dams, Earth Banks, Gabions, Irrigation, Land, Material, Potable Water, Regional Water Cycle, Rehabilitation, Soil Erosion & Contamination, Storm Water, Swales, Terraces, Water Contaminaton & Loss, Water Harvesting — by Craig Mackintosh PRI Editor January 31, 2013
This excellent little 20-minute video does a great job of covering the basics of watershed management and landscape rehydration. You won’t hear the words ‘permaculture’ or ’swales’ once, but it’s clear that both are in use here, to great effect. If we can get these simple but profound concepts driven into social consciousness, and applied broadscale, we would see that investment in labour pay dividends, as many of our increasingly expensive natural disasters and resource limitations would simply disappear, as we reinstate nature’s own moderating capabilities.
Our environment is progressively getting degraded because of overexploitation of natural resources. In a degraded landscape with little or no tree cover, and subsequently little soil cover, rainwater is not able to percolate into the ground. We lose rich top soil with this running water, which flows away into the streams. It is a vicious cycle — no top soil, no vegetation, increased run off of water and further erosion of top soil. Holistic watershed development is the answer to break this vicious cycle.
This video film explains the importance of the ‘Ridge to Valley’ approach. It explains the various area treatments in non-arable waste land, cultivable land and also speaks about drainage line treatments. This video film highlights the technical and social components and the reasons why watershed work should start from the ridge and progress downwards towards the valley. — YouTube
Further Reading/Watching:
- Hope for a New Era: Before/After Examples of Permaculture Earth Restoration – Solving Our Problems From the Ground Up
- The World’s Largest Water Harvesting Earthworks Project
- A Swale Plume in action
- The Muffin Tin and the Sponge
- Gabions: Water Soaks in the Desert
- The Dehydration and Rehydration of the Australian Landscape
- A Guide to Back-Flood Swales
- Floodplains: the Biggest Slow-Release Water Source Around
- Keyline Swales – a Geoff Lawton/Darren Doherty Hybrid
- Imprinting Soils – Creating Instant Edge for Large Scale Revegetation of Barren Lands
- Swales: The Permaculture Element That Really “Holds Water”
- Brad Lancaster: “Urban Water Harvesting Systems” (IPC Presentation – Video)
- Roman- and Byzantine-era Cisterns of the Past Reviving Life in the Present
- Let the Water Do the Work: Induced Meandering, an Evolving Method for Restoring Incised Channels
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