water shortages

Making Meadows
Writing about droughts and water shortages in his March 2008 On the Level column, Bruce Zaretsky started by observing, ‘This turn of events has made me determined to design landscapes requiring as little water as possible – one consequence being that I now do all I can to avoid using large expanses of
Looking Ahead
Given the tumultuous way in which 2016 came to a close, I figured I'd kick off the New Year by being as upbeat as can be about what the future holds for watershaping.  Two news stories I've followed through the last couple months put me in a suitable frame of mind for this exercise. First up was the hovering
2012/4.2, April 25 — Building Stone Walls, Concealing Controls, Civic Fountain Woes and more
April 25, 2012 WATERSHAPES.COM FEATURE ARTICLE Building Walls, Stone by Stone Dry-stacking stone walls and…
Threatened Foundations
I spend a good bit of time almost every day wandering around the Internet, exploring and evaluating information and selecting the choicest morsels to share on the homepage of the WaterShapes Web site. In the past several weeks, I’ve spotted a whole range of stories about problems related to public-sector watershapes. On the one hand are tales of drought conditions causing various municipalities to
Ripples #3
Compiled and written by Lenny Giteck White House MysteryPool Revealed Ripples would never publish anything damaging to the national security of the United States, and we're confident that this item about a mysterious White House swimming pool won't tell foreign
Inflows and Outflows
In most watershapes, we circulate and treat water through use of pumps and filters – and although we still don’t think about it much these days, we do so because fresh water is in precariously short supply and we can’t simply fill and dump it as we please. Yet even a perfect watershape – that is, one devoid of leaks, never subject to splash-out and never in need of backwashing – occasionally requires the addition of new water if only because evaporation will carry it away, bit by bit.  In fact, there’s no way to cut Mother Nature out of her share, or to keep her from