Project Highlights

New Book on Care Ethics by Center Staff Member

Frontiers of Ethics: Ethics of Care and Place

May 12th, 2012

Bruce Jennings, Director of Bioethics, has co-edited a newly published book entitled, End of Life Ethics: A Case Study Approach, ed. by K. Doka, A. Tucci, C. Corr, and B. Jennings. Washington, DC: Hospice Foundation of America, 2012. He also contributed a chapter to the volume, “From Rights to Relationships: The Ecological Turn in Ethics Near the End of Life.” For further information visit: http://register.hospicefoundation.org/products/companion-book-individual-for-end-of-life-ethics

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Soundwalk in the Indiana Dunes

City Creatures: Rediscovering Human-Animal Relationships in Chicago’s Urban Wilderness

May 2nd, 2012

Gavin Van Horn and David Aftandilian, co-leaders of the City Creatures project, are pleased to be partnering with the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology to explore a portion of the Indiana Dunes through sound on May 26, 11:00am-12:15pm.  This soundwalk will be led by Eric Leonardson, founder and director of the MSAE, and is intended to provide participants with the opportunity to experience and reflect on how we encounter other animals aurally.  The soundwalk is open to the public and location details can be found here.  In June 2012, be sure to check back at the Center for Humans and Nature website, where we will feature nature sound recordings and compositions on the soon-to-be-launched City Creature blog, “Animal Encounters.”

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CHN helps launch the Marseille Water Ethic

The Biosphere Ethics Initiative

April 16th, 2012

CHN Director Kintzele presenting the Marseille Water Ethic to the full plenary

CHN Director Kintzele presenting the Marseille Water Ethic to the full plenary

The 6th World Water Forum (WWF), the premiere event for water law and policy in the world, was held in mid-March in Marseille, France. CHN Director of Global Programs, Kathryn Kintzele, was invited by the Secretariat of the WWF to be part of an International Working Group (IWG) on ethics and culture. Other members included Jean Conrad, UNESCO permanent representative (France), David Groenfeldt, Director of the Water Ethics Network, Alain Cabras of the University of Aix-en-Provence, Remi Caucanas of the Mediterranean Catholic Institute, as well as representatives from the Water Academy, Marseille Esperance,  the French Union of Buddhists and the Inter-Islamic Network on Water Resources Development and Management. The group held an expert panel during the Forum, as well as launched the Marseille Water Ethic, to be developed and revisited during the next three years before the next Forum, to be held in the Republic of Korea in 2015. The current draft, available in English and French, is now open for comment. It was the result of the partnership among the IWG and the work of the Biosphere Ethics Initiative. You can view the Commitments of the IWG, given by Dr. Kintzele, as well as excerpts from her interview.

IWG on Ethics and Culture panel

IWG on Ethics and Culture panel

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CHN Senior Scholar, Ingrid Leman Stefanovic, Weighs in on the Road Question: To Build or Not to Build….

The Center for Humans and Nature asks: To build or not to build a road . . . how do we honor the landscape?

February 2nd, 2012

By Way of Thoughtful Decision-Making

According to the National Research Council, “practical decision making begins by identifying the elements of a responsible and competent decision-making process.”[1] What might such a process consist of when it comes to the question of whether to build a new road?

Following a brief overview of what constitutes a rational decision-making process, I propose that it is hardly value-neutral. I then offer some virtues of a good road, recognizing that rational decisions not only reflect narrowly logical, technical matters but also incorporate essential elements of moral virtue, wisdom, and ultimately a respect for sense of place.

Values and Rational Decision-Making

Experts often utilize technical models to ensure that complex problems are addressed in a comprehensive manner. Decision trees, cost-benefit analysis, decision-making matrices, and calculations of expected monetary value are examples of such tools.[2]

This is not the place to delve into the specifics of such models. However, in my experience, typical approaches to rational decision-making follow generic steps, from defining the problem and opportunities to identifying constraints, alternatives, evaluation criteria, and a preferred option, all while monitoring and adjusting the strategy, if necessary.

While this process appears logical and perhaps even blatantly obvious, let me highlight a few issues. Defining the problem and the opportunities is sometimes no simple matter. For instance, in this case, the problem is not, strictly speaking, whether to build a road. Rather, the problem may be that travel times are currently too long, or perhaps—as in the case of some First Nations communities in Northern Canada—there may be a lack of easy access. Carefully identifying the problem and also the objective in addressing it (which, in this case, may consist of reducing travel times or improving access) will also identify opportunities and options that may or may not include the construction of a road and may consist, for instance, of improvements to various modes of public transport.

Other challenges present themselves within this apparently lucid and logical decision-making process. Often, constraints—notably, the impact of certain stakeholders—are ignored or under-valued. Broad consultation is essential—a point to which I will return shortly.

When it comes to identifying constraints, alternatives, and evaluation criteria, it is also important to take a broadly interdisciplinary approach, to ensure that social, cultural, regulatory, economic, technological, and ecological functions are considered in a comprehensive and ethically responsible manner.[3]

Moreover, taken-for-granted values and attitudes affect decision-making in significant ways. For instance, most decisions present risks: risk-takers will respond to such challenges differently from those who are risk-averse. Motivational and other biases often inadvertently structure the way in which a problem is posed.[4]

Distinct value systems also may color conflicting judgment calls. For instance, some people may implicitly favor a utilitarian system of values, evaluating the viability of a new road by assessing the trade-offs between its costs and benefits. Others may argue that it is wrong “in principle” to build a road that dissects a vibrant and coherent community, even if that community consists only of a single, small town amongst many others. This community’s rights may be seen as inviolable, no matter what broader utilitarian trade-offs are considered.

Finally, distinct paradigms may frame problems and solutions very differently. For instance, the Government of Canada acknowledges that First Nations’ ways of knowing (described as “Traditional Ecological Knowledge” or TEK) provide a unique worldview that complements standard scientific knowledge.[5]

Identifying and resolving these sorts of different, sometimes conflicting risk perceptions, personal biases, societal value systems, and worldviews is a necessary requirement of any decision-making process if that process is to be comprehensive, transparent, relevant, and judicious.

Virtues of a Good Road

So what constitutes a “good” road, if that becomes a preferred option?

Presumably, it is one that genuinely reflects the outcome of a broadly consultative process. Through a “rational weighing of all considerations,” the aim is to make transparent the kinds of values described earlier, so that deeper, taken-for-granted roots of conflicting positions are addressed.[6] Ideally, meaningful communication moves beyond token newsletters or public forums, ensuring a genuine collaboration and respectful, personal, engaged listening amongst stakeholders.[7]

Moreover, no matter how “rational” the process, it is essential that decision-makers step back to look at the problem holistically. Does the proposed road enhance a sense of place?[8] Place is not simply a container of our activities. It reveals our culture and our explicit value systems, but, equally important, it uncovers and preserves our implicit, pre-linguistic understanding of who we are.

In that regard, I would suggest that building a road is much less a matter of imposing a rational and efficient solution with universal technical criteria than of discovering a way forward through a careful listening, seeing, and revealing of what is appropriate in each particular instance.

Each road invites diverse criteria that should reflect local conditions. There may be instances where, rather than razing the landscape, the road will more appropriately follow the existing topography—tracing the natural riverbed or mounting the hillside, providing unique vistas that would otherwise be lost by simply cutting through geological obstructions.

Rather than viewing the proposed road rationally “from above” in an abstract planning exercise, questions should be asked about the actual experience of being on this road once it is built. A road connects spatial locations, but also “every stretch of road has meaning in itself.”[9] A road that meanders through a diverse landscape will preserve the mystery of what lies ahead. Perhaps such a road will properly waver from its direct, linear route to acknowledge and pay heed to a unique village or town.

A more modest planning process ensures that the natural landscape, both flora and fauna, are respectfully incorporated into the road design. A road should find its way within the genius loci of the local forest or mountain range. It should respect and preserve animal migratory patterns by incorporating habitat corridors.

New road technologies must be developed that allow for natural drainage and are less intrusive than traditional asphalt or concrete paving.

Altogether, a “good” road reflects the positive values of the local communities. It enhances experience of place and preserves an appropriate “fit” with the landscape. And it is never easy to accomplish.

[1]. National Research Council, Decision Making for the Environment: Social and Behavioral Science Research Prioritie, (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2005), p. 27.

[2]. See Michael Stefanovic and Ingrid Leman Stefanovic, “Decisions, Decisions,” 2005 Proceedings of the Project Management Institute Global Congress.

[3]. See C.A. Doxiadis, “Ekistics: The Science of Human Settlements,” Science, 170 (1970): 393-404.

[4]. Stefanovic and Stefanovic, ”Decisions, Decisions.”

[5]. See Environment Canada, “Aboriginal Traditional Knowledge and Environmental Management,” in Science and the Environment Bulletin, no. 32 (September/October 2002).

[6]. Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1970.)

[7]. A. Poetz, “What’s Your ‘Position’ on Nuclear Power? An Exploration of Conflict in Stakeholder Participation for Decision-Making about Risky Technologies,” Risk, Hazards and Crisis in Public Policy 2, no. 2 (2011): article 2.

[8]. See I.L. Stefanovic, Safeguarding Our Common Future (Albany, NY: SUNY, 2000.)

[9]. M. Kundera, Immortality, trans. P. Kussi (New York: Harper and Row, 1990), p. 223.

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Green Fire along the Frozen River

Advancing the Land Ethic, Green Fire: Aldo Leopold and a Land Ethic for Our Time

January 30th, 2012

After a welcome respite from traveling with Green Fire since Thanksgiving, I came out of my winter den in Wisconsin and headed over to the Frozen River Film Festival in Winona, Minnesota.   Yes… you are reading that right!  This is the sort of thing we do in the upper Midwest to get ourselves through the coldest, darkest days of the year.  Our Minnesota neighbors started this film festival in 2005, and this was my first opportunity to attend.

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I was looking forward to visiting Winona, and not only because the festival organizer selected Green Fire for a special featured screening.  I have many friends and family in the area.  And on the way to Minnesota I was able to pass through Coon Valley, which we of course highlight in our film.  The opportunity to share the story of Coon Valley’s  innovative role in the history of conservation — as a birthplace of watershed restoration and management — has been one of the great pleasures of being on the Green Fire trail.

We have had an unseasonably mild winter in the upper Midwest until recently.  But the last couple weeks have been more typical of January in Wisconsin.  When we filmed in Coon Valley, it was early fall.  Here is what it looks like now:

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On then through La Crosse, Wisconsin and across the Mississippi.  And, yes, the river was frozen!  Winona is a beautiful town, bounded by the big river on the east and high bluffs on the west.  Here’s the view downriver from Garvin Heights Park above the city:

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Winona is home to a thriving community of creative spirits who care deeply about their place and its well-being.  The festival proved this to me once again.  Some 500 people came out for the screening last Thursday evening!  Eric Barnard, who is an outdoor education instructor at Winona State University, introduced the film.  Eric grew up in Baraboo, Wisconsin, and became a close friend to the Leopold family.  He credits Nina Leopold Bradley with stimulating his interest — and now his career — in connecting students to the natural world.

As with so many stops along our trail, this one was rich with such connections.  My host at Winona was my friend Tex Hawkins, who recently retired after a career in public service with the Minnesota DNR and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.  Tex’ father was Art Hawkins, one of Aldo Leopold’s first graduate students at the University of Wisconsin.  Art was a legend in the world of waterfowl biology and conservation.  He was also a good friend, and immensely helpful to me when I was pursuing my research on Leopold — and for many years afterwards, until he passed away in 2006.  Here is a photo I took of Tex and his father some years ago, at the Coon Valley historical marker:

Hawkins

I thought of Art and his wife Betty often during this visit.  Art was always a passionate, positive, and thoughtful conservationist, even when confronted with difficult professional and personal challenges.  I had him in mind especially when a hot topic of important local and national interest came to the foreground during my visit.

During the post-screening discussion of Green Fire,  one of our audience members asked about the land ethic, and how it might inform the current debate in western Wisconsin and Minnesota over frac sand mining.  Here’s the background. Over the last couple years, the technique of hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”) to release natural gas has become widely adopted and employed in many parts of the central and eastern U.S.  Fracking has become a major environmental issue, due to concerns over groundwater and surface water contamination, air quality and emissions, and even the possibility of induced earthquakes.

Largely overlooked, however, in the debates over fracking is the impact now being felt in this region.  Fracking requires the injection of a highly pressurized fluid into the rock layer that is being exploited.  The fluid comprises a mixture of water, chemicals, and sand.  And it turns out that the sand derived from certain sandstone formations of western Wisconsin and adjacent Minnesota has optimal properties for use in fracking.  The result is a still-accelerating frac sand mining boom in the region — and Winona County may well be the epicenter of the boom. Knowing this, it was no surprise to see train cars full of sand for export on my way into Winona:

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The issue was literally in the headlines during the film festival.  Swirling around the festival were discussions about the impacts, economic and environmental, of proliferating frac sand mines. The mines are bringing jobs and income to our economically hard-pressed rural counties.  But it has also brought a raft of problems, including concerns involving surface and groundwater quality; public health and safety (especially associated with airborne silica dust); noise, truck traffic, and infrastructure; property values and taxation; the loss of valuable prairie remnants and the lack of even basic requirements for reclamation.  The issue was also on the screen.  Among the films being shown was a work in progress, The Price of Sand.

In my answer to the question I made the point that, at the very minimum, a land ethic asks us to have serious, informed conversations about the moral implications of land-use options and decisions — and never moreso than when a new source of fast economic returns blinds us to the long-term impacts on human and natural communities. Right now, those conversations are not happening.  And how disturbingly ironic it is, that the very sand of Leopold’s sand counties should be at the heart of the matter.

I was struck by other connections through my time in Winona.  Many of the films shown at the Frozen River festival shared themes (and in some cases, landscapes) that intersected with those of Green Fire.  Chasing Water is a literal exploration of the same — but devastatingly altered — Colorado River delta system that Leopold explored in 1922.  Mad City Chickens looks at the backyard chicken movement in Madison, Wisconsin.  Queen of the Sun is a fantastic film about the catastrophic impacts of colony collapse disorder in honeybees, and the complex and evolving relationship between bees and humans.  Happy is a fascinating examination of the values, factors, and behaviors that promote human happiness and well-being.  Dakota 38, just completed, tells the powerful and moving story of the mass execution of 38 Dakota warriors in 1862, the terrible burden of that memory, and the recent journeys of healing and reconciliation across the landscape of South Dakota and Minnesota.

Thank you to everyone in Winona and at the festival for inviting and hosting me, for showing such great support for Green Fire, and for pulling together this wonderful community event.  I feel inspired, informed, and warmed!

More posts about Aldo Leopold, Green Fire, Land Ethic, Wisconsin, environmental ethics

Dana Beach, M.B.A., Weighs in on the Road Question: To Build or Not to Build…

The Center for Humans and Nature asks: To build or not to build a road . . . how do we honor the landscape?

January 23rd, 2012

By Knowing When Not to Build a Road

Spurred by important questions presented by a very real proposal for a new road, the Center for Humans and Nature asked me for my opinion about roads and the building of new roads. I live 954 miles away from the specific road that prompted this question and have spent much of my professional career opposing new highways in the South CarolinaLowcountry, so my qualifications for commenting on that proposal are therefore dubious.

I thought initially that the responsible approach would be to gather all of the information I could find and deliver a thorough, balanced response, with the qualification that there are wide gaps in my understanding of the issue. I studied three route maps, read the project description, found the area on Google Earth, and concluded that further research was unnecessary. The answer is that the project is a bad idea.

My reason has nothing to do with wetlands or air pollution; I don’t know enough about the specific area to weigh in on these, although they are important issues, and ones we’ve cited consistently in our road battles. The issue with any road project has to do with whether we use public dollars to concentrate and enhance strong communities, or to decant and diffuse them.

I’ve observed that the area northwest of Chicago that spurred this series of essays is a mix of traditional town centers, a few farms (too few, for my taste), roads, highways, strip malls, and sprawling subdivisions—in other words, a snapshot of a typical American exurban landscape at this particular moment in history that is unique but structurally similar to other places around the country.

That area, like any, is not what it was fifty years ago, and it’s not what it will be fifty or one hundred years from now. Over time, more houses will be built, stores will be abandoned, offices will arise, businesses will come and go. A lot will change, except for the roads.

Of all of the components of a human landscape, roads last the longest. Researchers at the University of Chicago, examining satellite images of Iraq and Syria, discovered remnants of five-thousand-year-old roads leading to the ancient city of Ur. Roads shape regions more substantially and for a longer time than any other single human construct.

For the past decade in South Carolina, we’ve warned that a proposed interstate extension to a rural sea island south of Charleston will change forever the island’s character and landscape. The people who want the road argue that land uses can and should be determined by planning and zoning, and that even a large road should have no impact of the future layout of our communities.

This view is either very naïve or intentionally misleading. Zoning is the most ephemeral of all the forces that shape a region. It is easily manipulated politically, and when it goes against a strong economic force, it never prevails. Ur may have had zoning of a sort, but no sign of it remains today. If you want to shape a region, you do it with roads. That’s why powerful people care more about serving on transportation commissions than on zoning boards.

So the question we should ask when we contemplate building a new road—especially a large one that connects distant places—is this: What will the road cause to happen in the area over the next two, three, or four centuries? What will people decide to do with land, and with themselves, because the road is there that they would not have done without it? Are those things consistent with what we believe, to the best of our limited vision, should be the future of the place in question?

Most people believe that small towns are worth saving, that people should be able to work closer to their homes, that local food and nearby farms can benefit communities in many ways, and that places should have an identity and a physical completeness about them. In short, it shouldn’t be too easy to hop on a high-speed road, or even a train, and head to the other side of Chicago or Charleston to go to work or to shop. Instead, we should push harder in the direction of helping people stay put—building community, rather than tearing it apart. There should be some built-in friction that holds communities together.

Wallace Stegner, who was born in Iowa and grew up in Montana and Utah, divided people into two categories: stickers and boomers. Boomers were constantly on the move, looking for the next get-rich-quick scheme (enabled by the next new road, no doubt). The stickers stayed in one place and built communities. On a small scale, places like Libertyville need more stickers and fewer boomers in their future.

Building more arterial roads that connect suburbs and cities, however, would tip the balance in favor of the boomers. While some might say that the transformation of the American landscape over the past fifty years is simply a manifestation of our system of capitalism at work, that is not really the case. New roads represent an enormous public subsidy, one that favors a particular future—a very different one than what would emerge in the absence of such a massive public expenditure.

So rather than putting public dollars into new roads, our communities should invest instead in parks and playgrounds, bike lanes, sidewalks, local food kitchens—whatever will produce better, stronger, more complete communities for future generations of stickers.

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Meg Walker, M. Arch., Weighs in on the Road Question: To Build or Not to Build…

The Center for Humans and Nature asks: To build or not to build a road . . . how do we honor the landscape?

January 22nd, 2012

By Creating a Meaningful Sense of Place

Project for Public Spaces, Inc., a non-profit planning firm that specializes in place-making, has a saying that can apply just as well to highways as to streets: “If you plan for cars and traffic, you get cars and traffic, but if you plan for people and places, you get people and places.” A new road should be about building stronger and healthier communities for the people who live there, not about building a way out of congestion. For decades, transportation planners have been trying to reduce congestion by building and expanding the highway system, and it has only led to more traffic and sprawl, along with their accompanying environmental, social, and public health woes.

Extensions to arterial highways between suburban communities and urban centers will not reduce the travel time by more than a few minutes in the long run, and this may not warrant billion-dollar investments, especially at a time when construction costs are skyrocketing, older infrastructure requires attention, and state highway budgets are being slashed. If arterial roads are built as conventional freeways without careful regional land-use planning, case studies from around the United States clearly show that within ten years such roads will likely become just as congested as existing roads in the area are today. But if roads are built to meet other objectives—to create healthier, more livable communities; to preserve open space and wildlife habitat; to create real, long-lasting economic value in neighboring towns; and to create places, rather than more faceless suburban sprawl—the enormous investments required to build such roads will bring benefits that could last for decades and enhance the entire region, rather than just providing temporary fixes.

Here is a vision for a road built to be a place and a link between strong, healthy communities:

Go Slow. A sustainable road will be a slow and gentle road, instead of a straight, high-speed freeway. Its maximum design speed should be 35–40 miles per hour (not the typical 60–70 mph) to allow it to bend around wetlands, farmlands, existing communities, and other sensitive features, rather than cleaving them in two. It will be an attractive parkway with a maximum of four lanes separated by a median, or alternatively, a two-lane boulevard with left-turn lanes; neither option will have grade separation at intersections. Eliminating overpasses will reduce the cost considerably, leaving extra money for place-making and open space preservation. Roundabouts will be utilized to create efficient intersections and provide attractive gateways into neighboring towns and parks. Contrary to popular belief, roundabouts pass traffic through an intersection far more effectively than conventional intersections.

Enhance Connectivity at the Local Level. The roadway will be designed to tie into a new grid of local streets, built over time to link to neighboring communities. Thus, the road will knit the region together as a local and regional connector instead of slicing through communities and fragile habitat. Isolated subdivisions, existing commercial districts, parks, and new compact development will be linked to the new road and to each other through the new road network.

Integrate Land Use and Transportation Planning. A sustainable road must be viewed as a transportation and land-use system to avoid the runaway sprawl and commercial strip development that has accompanied most new freeways. A new regional land-use plan will require compact mixed-use development and will protect open space, farmland, and other natural and cultural resources. New site development standards will reduce the impact of parking lots, multiple curb cuts, and stand-alone big-box development, as well as enhance the street environment for pedestrians and transit-users. This will do more in the long run to reduce congestion than massive infrastructure.

Incorporate Multi-Modal Transportation Opportunities. As a transportation system, the new road will be planned to offer a variety of transportation options: Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) or eventually light rail, bike paths, and walking trails. Bus connections, sidewalks, and bike lanes will feed into the adjacent communities using the new street grid, expanding transportation options throughout the region.

Engage the Community. All community stakeholders will be invited to help plan the road, as well as to envision the future of their own communities—their neighborhoods, businesses, commercial districts, and open spaces. The principles of “context-sensitive solutions” (CSS) will be utilized throughout the process. In Illinois, for example, various agency documents have recognized the importance of CSS by stating that “[t]hrough early, frequent and meaningful communication with stakeholders, and a flexible and creative approach to design, the resulting projects should improve safety and mobility for the traveling public, while seeking to preserve and enhance the scenic, economic, historic, and natural qualities of the settings through which they pass.” A state agency contemplating constructing a new road will put these principles into action.

Create Places and Destinations. Through place-making, an array of destinations will emerge, both along the roadway and in neighboring towns, that will give the road and the region an identity and a sense of place all its own. A place-making approach will challenge citizens to transform their public spaces into vibrant places that highlight local assets, revitalize local economies, and serve common needs. Such places help to forge healthier and more livable communities. For example, the citizens of Littleton, New Hampshire, a traditional New England village, used a state highway repaving project and a grant from the Federal Highway Administration to transform their downtown by widening sidewalks, improving pedestrian crossings, slowing traffic, and adding landscape elements and pedestrian amenities. The result is a more walkable Main Street with welcoming public spaces that encourage tourists to stop and local residents to gather downtown.

Project for Public Spaces uses a tool called the “Power of Ten” to help communities plan and program vibrant places. The “Power of Ten” is simply the idea that any great place should have at least ten things to do, but the concept can be extended to a city-wide or regional scale. For example, a sustainable road should offer at least ten great destinations, such as a park or revived downtown, and each of these destinations should have ten places each offering at least ten things to do. This would create a lively network of connected places throughout the region. Places and activities will complement and enrich each other. For example, a restaurant with outdoor dining on a lovely lake that offers boating and swimming, a playground for young children, and a path for strolling provides a wealth of activities in a park, transforming it into a destination.

Build a Parkway in Every Sense. A sustainable road will not look at all like the straight, wide, and fast highways we have come to know over the last sixty years. It will evoke a bucolic parkway from the early twentieth century, celebrating the area’s natural resources and scenic views and offering recreational opportunities that allow people to enjoy its pastoral beauty—a true link between humans and nature. It will be programmed, like a park, to accommodate many different uses and even closed regularly to cars to allow for a variety of recreational uses that bring the surrounding communities together.

It could resemble the nation’s first parkway, the Bronx River Parkway, which runs for 12.5 miles from the Bronx in New York City to the city of White Plains in Westchester County, New York. The parkway is a scenic, narrow highway completed in 1926 that winds through a park built along the Bronx River. It shares the park with walking trails, wildlife habitat, trees well over one hundred years old, and beautiful stone bridges and retaining walls. The maximum speed along most of its length is 40 mph. The parkway is closed on Sundays in the summer for biking and roller-blading, bringing communities along its length into contact with one another.

If it achieves the vision described above, a sustainable road will not become the high-speed shortcut that commuters in the area are looking for to get them to work in half the time. But it could never possibly be that. Rather, it will be the catalyst for change, transforming a suburban environment into a cluster of compact, livable communities adjacent to preserved green space, highlighted by wonderful places to walk, bike, and enjoy nature and vibrant places for communities to gather.

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Dennis Dreher, M.S., Weighs in on Road Question: To Build or Not to Build. . .

The Center for Humans and Nature asks: To build or not to build a road . . . how do we honor the landscape?

December 10th, 2011

By Enhancing Green Infrastructure


Highway design traditionally has been regimented to focus on “hard” engineering approaches to efficiently convey traffic and deal with incidental concerns like the movement of stormwater. Evolving national environmental regulations and regional concerns over flooding and groundwater have begun to push designers of roadways and other “gray infrastructure” systems to consider alternative approaches. This has led to a consideration of more holistic “green infrastructure” designs that not only provide environmental benefits, but may save money in the process.

Green infrastructure has been championed by Chicago Wilderness, a regional consortium of more than 250 public and private organizations that work together to restore local nature and improve the quality of life. Green infrastructure also has been embraced by the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning as a core theme of the recently adopted GO TO 2040 Plan.

So, what does green infrastructure mean in the context of roadway planning and design? Green infrastructure is used to describe products, technologies, and practices that use natural systems—or engineered systems that mimic natural processes—to enhance overall environmental quality and provide more sustainable utility services. More specifically, it includes techniques such as porous pavement, rain gardens, and vegetated swales that use soils and vegetation to infiltrate and/or recycle stormwater runoff. On a larger scale, green infrastructure refers to strategically planned and managed networks of natural lands, working landscapes, and other open spaces that conserve ecosystem values and functions and provide associated benefits to human populations.

Following are several brief examples of recommended green infrastructure approaches in the context of proposed roadway projects.

Preserving Ecosystems: The northeastern Illinois landscape contains an abundance of sensitive natural communities, including lakes, stream corridors, wetlands, prairies, and woodlands. Some of these systems have been identified as regionally significant “resource protection areas” in the Chicago Wilderness Green Infrastructure Vision. Highway projects have the potential to damage such systems directly, as well as fragment wildlife habitats and adversely affect critical water flows. The siting of the road rights of way should attempt to minimize direct ecosystem impacts and fragmentation. It also is recommended that highway planners work with local and regional conservation agencies to design plans for habitat damage mitigation, enhancement of ecosystem connectivity, and wildlife movement that take into account regional biodiversity considerations and opportunities. This task should include the development of refined inventories and maps of existing and potential green infrastructure in the project vicinity.

Protecting Water: Roadway construction can dramatically increase stormwater runoff, resulting in increased flooding, water pollution, and reduced groundwater recharge. In response to such concerns, most counties in northeastern Illinois have developed comprehensive ordinance requirements that address both runoff quantity and quality. These provisions should be used as a starting point for roadway and stormwater design. However, it is suggested that local watershed plans also be utilized so that specific pollutants of local concern and local hydrologic considerations are used as the basis for optimizing the design of best management practices (BMPs). Further, it is recommended that state-of-the-art national guidelines and research be utilized in selecting and designing the most effective BMPs to address the locally identified water quality and hydrologic concerns. Finally, it is recommended that a green infrastructure theme be used for the design of roadway and water management systems. Simply put, such designs would minimize impervious surfaces and treat water at the source using soils and cleansing vegetation. This approach would value water as a resource, not a waste product to be disposed.

Enhancing Landscapes: Traditional roadway designs contain rights-of-way that feature turf grass and ornamental shrubs and trees that often bear no resemblance to local native landscapes. Such landscapes can be expensive to maintain and offer little in the way of ecosystem services or visual appeal. As a consequence, suburban roadways in Illinois look much like roadways in Atlanta, New York, or almost anywhere in the country. A recommended alternative is natural landscaping that utilizes appropriate native grasses, forbs, trees, and shrubs to create an ecologically functional and aesthetically appealing corridor that reflects a local sense of place. The extensive use of deep-rooted native vegetation also can help to mitigate the impacts of climate change by acting as a carbon sink. Natural landscaping was recently incorporated into a “green roadway” system for a four thousand-acre intermodal project in Joliet. Other midwestern states such as Iowa have provided leadership in the natural landscaping movement through a Department of Transportation Living Roadway Trust Fund. One important proviso is that mechanisms must be adopted for the ecologically sustainable, long-term maintenance of natural landscapes so that installed landscapes thrive and corridors do not become routes for the spread of invasive species.

Green Infrastructure in Surrounding Communities: While much of the focus of new regional roadways is on mitigating the direct effects of the road corridor, far greater impacts may potentially be caused by the spin-off development spurred by the roadway. That is why it is critical that neighboring communities also consider green infrastructure principles in their plans and ordinances. At a minimum, these communities should consider green approaches to stormwater management, landscaping, and infrastructure designs as mentioned above. They should promote green infrastructure in neighborhoods, school grounds, and back yards. They should consider integrated approaches to open space and natural area protection, greenway connections, and trail and bikeway planning. These initiatives should be done not just to counteract potential adverse effects of the roadway, but to build communities that are more walkable, livable, and ultimately more healthy. Chicago Wilderness, through its Sustainable Watershed Action Team (SWAT) has supported the development of green infrastructure plans in several counties and communities that could serve as models for other communities in the region. These include the Mettawa/Lincolnshire/Riverwoods planning area, McHenry County, and the cities of Crystal Lake and Woodstock.

In conclusion, the design of a potential new roadway provides an exciting opportunity to embrace green infrastructure as a core theme. Green infrastructure reflects a fundamental paradigm shift that minimizes environmental impacts, enhances community livability and sense of place, and also has the potential to reduce construction and maintenance costs. While there are numerous green infrastructure references, a good starting point on northeastern Illinois principles and practices is the Ecological Planning and Design Directory: http://www.chicagowilderness.org/sustainable/directory_documents.php

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Christopher Preston, Ph.D., Weighs in on Road Question: To Build or Not To Build. . .

The Center for Humans and Nature asks: To build or not to build a road . . . how do we honor the landscape?

December 9th, 2011

BY KEEPING VALUES IN MIND

Big public infrastructure decisions are often couched in terms of comparing costs and benefits. Highway projects pitch commute times against the destruction of wetlands or potential economic development against the integrity of small communities. Though there are differences of opinion about how to quantify the pluses and minuses (especially as these measures stretch far into the future), the decision-making frame is essentially thought to be mathematical. It is what we believe big public decisions are about.

The mathematical framing, however, leaves out a central issue. Large-scale infrastructure forms the material within which we live our lives. For those of us who don’t live in the backwoods (and for some who do), roads, homes, city parks, and shopping centers all form our immediate environment, the place within which we forge our lifestyles. We interact with this material structure continuously and inevitably. Philosophers have said that there is “a strange but necessary connection between place and mind.” Part of what this means is that the physical setting with which we surround ourselves is not a neutral and passive background for human life, but an active and determining influence on us. It gets into our minds and shapes our conception of the world. This is part of what makes up a person’s “sense of place,” an embracing of what is embodied in a particular geography.

People like to say that nature “speaks to” them. In fact, all environments—natural and built—constantly speak to us. Part of the language they speak is the language of values. Infrastructure embodies values and reflects them back at us, immersing us in what they say. Values are “made material” in infrastructure, carrying messages about how to live. The way we build, then, even when we build something as instrumental as a road, needs to be “value-sensitive.” Choices made about road building are not just choices about costs and benefits, they are long-range statements about the values in which we choose to immerse ourselves and our children. They will dictate where to focus our attention and what to dwell upon. The material structure of the highway system will instruct us in what to take as significant in our lives.

In order to make a design project value-sensitive, a number of deep questions about goals and metrics of success need to be asked. These questions include: What outcomes would constitute success for this project? How does the technical success of this project differ from social or ecological success? Which aspects of design could be altered in order to increase success, broadly defined? Rather than evaluate the road in terms of surface costs and benefits, it is necessary to probe the values the road might speak back to its users over the generations.

The probing might look like this:

Is the purpose of the road to increase quality of life? Do we have agreement about what quality of life means? Does it mean allowing people to live as far away from their work as possible, with the desired outcome being to make this one regrettable part of the day—the commute—as short as possible? What is at stake when people separate where they live from where they work? What does it mean to “relieve congestion”? Will the road solve or postpone this problem? When something is relieved, what is depressed? Are the values that are gained similar to the values that are lost? Is the public informed about how to meaningfully compare them? Will this road make us better or worse people? Will it build community or fragment it? Whose interests are being represented in the desire to spur economic growth?

If a road is built, which values will the infrastructure speak back to its users over the next several generations? Will it speak of efficiency, dreariness, community, or joy? Will the road increase options, or will it reduce them? Will the road be given a chance to ask each driver “might you be better off in a train?” Will the road be designed to showcase or erase the landscape? Occasionally, a road can be aesthetically positive (e.g., the Going-to-the-Sun Highway in Montana and the Southern Appalachians’ Blue Ridge Parkway). Is there a way to make the outcome of “road work” beautiful? How might a road be designed to enhance a sense of place? Will the road speak to the importance, the history, and the interest of its various destinations with unusual signs and local information, or will it serve only as an artery with a smooth, fast flow and little else? Will the road be designed to maximize speed or to maximize interest? Will the road impose itself on the landscape, or will it respond to the shape of landscape? Will the road respect diversity (of people and of place) or eliminate it? Will it be a source of pride to anyone but the engineer?

A framing that probes the deeper values at work is the way decisions concerning public infrastructure should be made. These values need to be solicited from the public through as much community involvement as possible. The idea that a certain percentage of the population “support” the road and others “do not” is only minimally useful information. Designers need to know what the public support and what they want built. Importantly, these wishes need to be informed by the highest aspirations of what is possible. Artists, visionaries, and philosophers need to inspire the public with images of the rich potential of this important piece of public infrastructure. The most enthusiastic vision of what is possible needs to be promulgated so that people are not making choices between yes and no, but between value sets that enhance both community and nature.

The built environment matters profoundly for the constraints it imposes and the opportunities it provides. It plays a role in creating or destroying a sense of place. A two-billion-dollar construction project shaping the landscape for the next hundred years that says only “here is a way to surround you in concrete as you speed between point A and B” would be a moral failure, even at the same time as it might be an engineering success.

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