One critical aspect of permaculture is water management. It’s usually one of the first things you consider when designing a home, a farm, a town, a city — even a whole region.
The crazy thing is, despite all the drought, most of our land is engineered to “ditch” water — get it off the land as quickly as possible.
This is because too much water can cause it’s own set of problems, and the flip side of drier summers can be flood-like rain in the wet months.
What permaculturists like to do is find ways to capture rain in a non-destructive way, through “swales” (winding excavations that slow the water as it moves through the land, distributing it from the valleys to the ridges, sometimes small ponds), and deep rooted perennial prairie grasses and trees that break up the hard pan souls and allow water to penetrate deeply. The overall aim is to recharge the underlying aquifer.
There’s lots of secondary benefits to this kind of whole-system approach, but at minimum we should be re-engineering our landscape to make better use of what we’re given every year.
1: https://archive.org/details/introductiontope00moll/mode/2up