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Last week, I spent two days in Buffalo, NY, at the Clean Water Network Conference, Smart, Green, and Clean: 21st Century Water Management in the Great Lakes. The meeting revolved around what environmental NGOs can do to promote green infrastructure in the Great Lakes basin. Green infrastructure refers to the use of natural, sustainable systems in land-use planning. Methods include green roofs, rain water harvesting, bio-retention, manufactured wetlands, rain barrels and rain gardens. These methods can be implemented in back yards, but also on a municipal scale that can help reduce the need for traditional gray infrastructure, non-environmental methods, like detention basins, wastewater treatment facilities and stream and river channeling. Basically, by using green infrastructure we let the planet's natural systems keep water clean, flooding to a minimum and create habitats rich in biodiversity.
The conference sessions were generally broken into "Top down" and "Bottom up" approaches to implementing green infrastructure to manage municipal water. Top down approaches included local and federal laws and policies that reinforce the Clean Water Act and fund green infrastructure. The bottom up speakers talked about places that have gone beyond traditional methods to build and encourage the use of green infrastructure.
These two approaches really helped see where there are problems with the on-the-ground implementation that could be helped by changes in policy, and where there was policy that needed the help of public support. There are barriers to building Green infrastructure that I had never thought of, like the permit process. It might take a few days to get a permit lay a big pipe, but it may take weeks to get a permit to lay the same pipe using a green method because green methods are not always approved in a lot of city codes. Outdated city codes are a barrier to installing green infrastructure and updating them is clearly a local policy issue.
But there are also barriers to creating green infrastructure that have less to do with policy and more to do with public perception. At a meeting a few weeks ago, a woman was talking about a rain garden they installed on city property. There were some very vocal opponents to this "ugly"-a.k.a. natural-planting. These opponents organized a petition and got the city to take the garden out.
While there is much research, development and implementation happening now in alternative energy, green infrastructure and other green living sectors, I wonder if we have a robust enough public outreach capacity to build the public support that is needed to implement the necessary infrastructure changes for the Great Lakes.
The Great Lakes are home to 20% of the world's surface fresh water, but with this wealth comes complacency. Few people probably know what type of sewer system their city or town uses, or where the water that falls onto their street ends up. We need to make infrastructure part of the average citizen's life. Topics like sewage treatment are not pretty, but talking about them now could prevent raw sewage from overflowing into our local rivers later. We must stop putting band-aids on gray infrastructure when we know there are better, cheaper, more ecologically friendly methods we can use instead. To do this, we will need champion policy-makers and an informed public.
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A little off the Great Lakes topic but about water...