Brad Lancaster: podcast appearances and interviews

Brad Stewart Lancaster, born in 1967, is an expert in rainwater harvesting and water management, passive solar design, and community-stewarded native food forestry. He is a permaculture teacher, designer, consultant, storyteller, and co-founder of the Dunbar/Spring Neighborhood Foresters and Desert Harvesters, both nonprofit organizations. Lancaster resides on an eighth of an acre in downtown Tucson, Arizona, an area with less than 12 inches of annual rainfall, where he demonstrates the viability of capturing and using large quantities of rainwater to sustain gardens, food-bearing trees, and landscapes. He has actively promoted urban water harvesting by helping legalize the harvest of street runoff in Tucson, initially through illegal curb cuts at his and his brother’s home, which allowed street runoff to irrigate native vegetation and landscape features. After proving the concept, he collaborated with the city to legalize, enhance, and incentivize water harvesting practices. Lancaster co-created and helps organize the Neighborhood Foresters program, which since 1996 has coordinated volunteers in planting and maintaining over 1,700 native food-bearing trees and thousands of understory plants within water-harvesting earthworks. These efforts collectively harvest over one million gallons of stormwater annually and promote community participation in sustainable landscape management. He also co-founded Desert Harvesters, an organization dedicated to teaching the public about native plant foods and organizing community milling events for native foods such as mesquite flour. Lancaster resigned from Desert Harvesters in 2020 and has also participated as a U.S. State Department representative on projects in the Middle East.