Tao Fellowship
Tao Fellowship’s Sedona Mago Retreat Center – Acclaimed Water Management
Tao Fellowship
In 2008, the new Mayor of Sedona, Rob Adams, and his wife Christine made their first visit to the Sedona Mago Retreat Center at the invitation of Tao Fellowship. After a tour that emphasized the way water was wisely used at Mago Retreat, May Adams praised the Tao Fellowship for practicing what it preaches in the area of water management.
The City of Sedona and Tao Fellowship both realize that water is a precious resource in a dessert area like Sedona. While the City is still trying to work out how best to create a system of fresh water, waste water and its applications, Tao Fellowship from day #1 has a goal of optimizing the total system of water on its property at Mago Retreat.
Mayor Adams admitted that he was highly impressed with how all the elements of the water management system fit together to benefit Tao Fellowship’s Mago Retreat, the people who live and visit, and the Earth itself.
Here are the various ways that the Tao Fellowship manages water at Mago Retreat:
Water from Tao Fellowship’s four wells is used for drinking, washing, and watering plants (planned for eventual elimination as the gray-water system is expanded).
Water run-off from mountains is captured by Tao Fellowship to fill the man-made lake and the two ponds terraced above it.
Tao Fellowship’s Earth Hall uses a system in which run-off is stored in a septic for watering the plants around it.
Gray-water recycling system takes water from all Tao Fellowship’s Casita Guest Rooms and Welcome House (sinks, bathtubs/showers and toilets), filters it four times, stores it in two 10,000-gallon tanks, and sends it through rubber pipes to water trees and plants.
Tao Fellowship’s gray-water system pumps the filtered water to four small ponds, where 190 plants around them specifically purify the water.
Tao Fellowship’s Casita Guest Room signs urge guests to use towels and linen longer before changing them.
Some of Tao Fellowship’s Casita Guest Room showerheads save water; 100% conversion is planned.
All toilets provided by Tao Fellowship are low-pressure; some have a sign that all paper is to be put only in near-by receptacles. Low-pressure toilets and waterless urinals for new buildings are planned (to be tested and if found effective, installed elsewhere).
The Tao Fellowship plans solar pump for the fountain in the Lake.
Conversion of water in Tao Fellowship’s swimming pool and hot tub to saline (salt water) from chorine is under consideration.
Tao Fellowship’s plastic Mago Retreat-logo water bottles are for sale to enable guests to refill them from large spring-water urns during their visit, to replace the sale of bottled water, planned.
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February 20th, 2010 at 12:41 pm
I live next door to these very nice, but misguided folks. I am a Buddhist and an engineer with specific training in energy efficiency, storage, transfer and alternative energy technology. I have taken a tour of their facility and carefully read your marketing message. Please allow me to address your points: 1. The thousands of gallons of waste which are composted are the result of thousands of human beings traveling by petroleum fueled planes and SUV’s to their secluded resort in the desert. They have drilled four 1000 foot+ deep wells into the aquifer to supply fresh water for two swimming pools, landscape watering and a man made pond as well as the toilet flushing and showers for their resort guests. 2. Serving fish in the desert is not ‘green’. And eating any animals is suspect. 3. Everything else you mention is either ‘being planned’ or ‘under consideration’. Those particular ideas while interesting, are not difficult to accomplish – certainly easier than drilling four $50,000 wells and building a pond in the desert. The fact that those ideas have not been yet implemented in many years of operation indicates to me that a business decision has been made by resort management to not implement these ideas because they will cut into profit. Perhaps you have never been there; that would explain your enthusiastic ignorance of the truth.