Two decades ago, Brad Lancaster and his neighbors broke curbs, guerrilla-planted the verge, and did other crimes to harvest storm runoff. Their once-barren neighborhood became healthy and beautiful, so they put on their lobbying hats; today, the city of Tucson gives incentives to do what the scofflaws had done illegally.

Our vision is also ambitious: to use a huge, extremely destructive weed called buffelgrass — planted deliberately in the 1930s by the USDA and Big Cattle for feed — to make beautiful adobe housing for the unhoused, while paying them to help build it.

This isn’t mutual aid, or not only: once our pilot projects prove viable, we’ll lobby the city to help us build low-income housing at scale, for a fraction of the cost of commercial construction and a whole lot more benefit — social, ecological, and esthetic.

When public pressure has no effect on the top — and we honestly don't know when it will again in our country — we can work with local power to fix what's been broken. That, in turn, can help change a whole world. Just as Brad and his neighbors inspired a city to harvest water, one city can also inspire others: many movements, like women's suffrage and marriage equality, spread city to city and state to state before becoming national policy.

The corporate takeover of farming and manufacturing destroyed rural economies, creating deep hardship that our tin-pot dictator turned into false grievances. Building the muscles we need to declare independence from big corporations could potentially help prevent future slides into fascism. Who knows? For now, anyhow, it’s great fun to get our hands dirty.

For details of our work, visit our website.