By DezBaa’
Reese Baker is seeking to restore ecological balance to Santa Fe’s concrete jungle through The RainCatcher, a landscaping, water recycling, and irrigation company grounded in permaculture principles that he founded in 2001. His fascination with the environment and desire to serve can be traced to his childhood in Colorado, where he often ran off into the woods to create habitat for salamanders and frogs by rerouting water into pools.
Now, armed with more than just a willingness to help, Baker, a doctoral student at the University of New Mexico, is on the verge of changing Santa Fe’s relationship with its most prized natural resource. No, not chile, but water. As the city continues to annex parts of Santa Fe County, expanding urbanization poses a threat to clean water supplies. In response, Baker’s mushroom microclimate project is turning urban runoff into less contaminated water that can recharge our sacred aquifer.
As one of the country’s driest municipalities, averaging just 14 inches of annual rainfall, it’s possible that “where’s the water coming from?” might be the second-most asked question in Santa Fe after “red, green, or Christmas?” As the city’s population grows—and suburban development expands to meet demand—so does the fear that this expansion will deplete clean water resources. Cities designed solely for population and industrial growth often sprawl with no concern for the natural environment until a resource is no longer capable of meeting the residents’ needs.
Baker wants to shift Santa Fe’s approach to development away from designs that have reduced the functionality of the million-year-old ecosystems that were in place prior to anthropogenic industrial
advancement. He argues that sustainability is not enough—cities must move toward regenerative systems and more holistic practices in urban design. Repurposing Newton’s third law of motion, Baker believes that “any action that we put into the environment is going to create an equal and opposite reaction. If we can turn that reaction back into something positive, then you create a feedback loop that regenerates itself.”
With the help of his 36 employees, Baker creates mushroom microclimates in sidewalk verges, office accessways, and parking lot medians throughout the city. Once built, the microclimates can regenerate themselves, even in our high desert climate. Baker envisions them as an alternative to the city’s current streetscape designs, which typically flood with thousands of gallons of water during monsoons, carrying debris and contaminants onto the streets.
During heavy rainfall, the mushroom microclimates come alive as Zuni bowls fill with water before spilling over media luna waterfalls into a maze of grasses and Siberian elm logs plugged with tiny cotton-swab-sized saprophytic fungi. The water flows over rock-lined channels, escaping under existing sidewalks only to reappear on the other side where the process happens all over again. Thick layers of organic mulch framing these pools slow evaporation and absorb rainfall. These green spaces provide oxygen and cool the air, in direct contrast to the concrete and gravel xeriscaping that contributes to urban heat.
The permaculture design incorporated into these myco-microclimate islands functions to care for Earth and the people. It utilizes substances that may be toxic to human health, but serve as a food source for certain plants, bacteria, and fungi. Microbes and fungal mycelium detoxify our urban runoff systems, cleaning our polluted water before it continues its path underground. Baker, who believes “there’s no waste in nature,” wants to ensure that every drop of water that lands in Santa Fe is captured and scrubbed clean before it’s returned to the earth.
Baker’s stewardship works to subtract anthropogenic contamination from the equation, facilitating a more efficient and ecologically sound pathway. In the proc-ess, it makes water more available to all living things, creating greater abundance for the City of Santa Fe—and perhaps, one day, beyond.
A raingarden fills with rainfall that has flowed into a curb cut, diverting water from roadways, irrigating roadside landscapes, reducing heat, creating habitat, and slowing the flow that contributes to erosion.
Top: An urban Zuni bowl fills with monsoon rainfall around meandering elm logs that have been inoculated with fungi spores.
From the Spring 2026 issue
