The T.R.E.E.S. demonstration house was designed to work with nature's cycles of flood and drought (not to fight them) and to heal the damage we have done to our environment and to ourselves by paving the earth with concrete and asphalt. The team that designed the best management practices (BMPs) considered how the way we use water affects the local environment and how it affect those far away places like the Owens Valley, Mono Lake and the Bay-Delta where we get our water.

Applied on a wide scale, the techniques used at the demonstration site will help heal the city by:

• Capturing, cleaning and storing the rainwater that falls onto the property;
• Reusing water and releasing it slowly into the ground;
• Preventing floods;
• Improving air quality by reducing the demand for energy;
• Saving money by reducing the need for costly imported water; and
• Creating urban forestry and watershed management jobs.