Friday I had a meeting with some wonderful university
students, a group from University of Illinois in Chicago (UIC) and a group from
DePaul, Liam Heneghan’s students. It is always refreshing and hopeful to meet
young people willing to take on the challenges our generation seems to neglect.
The UIC students are helping to identify city ordinances that challenge the
Bioshaft® design solutions and the DePaul students will help with the research
to prove to the city that these concerns are met. This is where the rubber
meets the road, as they say. We are fashioning a strategy to get support from
the most enlightened of our representatives before approaching the authorities
for permits. During the panel discussion hosted by the Institute of Cultural
Affairs (ICA) I heard the familiar story about Chicago being the leader in many
aspects of the green cities movement. Many cities actually make the same claim,
but Chicagoans are comfortable believing they are the flagship community. I
could acknowledge this if it was not pointed out by the students’ research,
thus far, that at least sixteen ordinances exist that pose obstacles to our
project. Also it was reported to me that when the bioshaft design process was
briefly mentioned to a key person in the chain of command, her immediate
reaction was resistance to the concept. This is a typical reaction of municipal
employees that are in charge of safeguarding standards. Having worked at the
municipal level for a number of cities I understand the reluctance to change,
there is great fear of liability and enforcement mentality that interprets
challenges to ordinances as crime, decisions are made usually under council of municipal
lawyers whose natural tendencies are conservative. Job promotions are not
easily given to those that question the status quo and cause tension.
Case in point: In the late 1990's I worked as a landscape
planner for the Village of Schaumburg, a municipality NW of Chicago. One day I
was given the task to create the planting plan for a creek mitigation project.
This creek traversed city hall property and over the years had been
channelized, straitened and due to daily fluctuations had scoured itself deep
and was now quickly eroding the parking area. The engineering department had
been placed in charge to stop this erosion. They had arrived at a plan that
called for extensive use of gabion baskets and replacing the culverts under the
bridges with new ones. In the past they had simply dumped gravel and large
boulders at the scoured areas without achieving desired results. I saw the
opportunity to remeander the creek, daylight portions of it, regrade the
shorelines to accommodate flooding and proposed the replacement of culverts with
bridges with a wide span to reduce velocity of flow. I used formulas found in a book on stream geomorphology written by Luna Leopold. The engineering
department was furious that I even questioned their solution. A debate began
between the planning department and the engineering department. It escalated to
the point where my job was placed in jeopardy. I had to endure meetings where the
accusations were up front and personal. Luckily I
had learned to deal with municipal conflicts and had saved all my e-mail
correspondence which proved my version of events. This bickering
prompted a visit from Village President Larson, one morning he stepped into my cubicle and
asked to see my proposal. He took a good look and asked that I present it at
the weekly council meeting. I quickly produced sketches to visualize
the proposal and created a booklet with a full length of creek analysis including flood-prone areas, plant communities and fauna observed along with an historical map showing conditions before development for the city council members. The day of the meeting I displayed the drawings
on one of the walls in the meeting room. The council members stopped to take a
look at them before sitting down. The engineering department had come prepared
to take me down. Before the meeting began one of the council women remarked on
the beauty of the concept that was on display and asked if that was the plan?
Mayor Larsen opened the meeting and a vote was taken, it was unanimous in favor
of adopting my plan. When he asked if there were objections everyone was
silent. The debate I expected did not take place and my booklet remained closed in my hands. After the meeting my boss told me that I was never to repeat that, meaning the sketches, without his consent. I knew then that he in fact had not intended to support my work and only due to the impact my sketches had on the council members that a foreseen debate had not occurred. I began to search for other employment. Meanwhile, the engineering department reluctantly agreed to work with
me but kept throwing obstacles in my way, the final battle was won when my hand
drawn contours where analyzed through a hydrology modeler software by a local
engineering firm. The results where unexpected, the revision needed was the
shifting of one contour line the distance of five feet upstream along the thalweg of the
creek. The project was completed after I had left my job. Even though the
hydrology model proved my contours, the engineering department could not bring themselves to follow them, resistance for professional pride was too strong resulting in some portions of this creek still prone to erosion. The
project was awarded Chicago Wilderness and EPA awards a couple of years later,
the engineering department had no reservations accepting the awards and
claiming the project.
The news that the initial reaction to the bioshaft proposal
is one of refusal does not surprise me. However, we must ask, in the immediate
aftermath of a powerful storm if it is wise to take a stubborn stance in
defending existing ordinances. In a period of twenty hours Chicago received
about 8.5 million gallons of rain causing vast areas to flood, the current
infrastructure, including the Big Tunnel (costing billions of dollars), could
not handle the flows, the reservoirs will be completed by 2030 and according to
one expert it would still not suffice for storm events such as these. It would
also be business as usual, treating this most precious resource as nuisance.
Huge potholes swallowed multiple cars, geysers jetted out of manholes and locks
on the Chicago River had to be opened to have the river flow into Lake Michigan
carrying with it a lethal cocktail of untreated combined sewage outflows,
debris and toxic chemicals. This obvious proof that our water
management infrastructure is limited in handling these storm events, which in
the climate change era are expected to intensify, not to mention the expected
sea level rise that would create backflows in coastal cities, significant
changes must be made including changes to existing ordinances. Some communities are putting their ordinances through revision. In a newscast
the evening of the largest rain pour invited representatives spoke about the
good of rain barrels and rain gardens, even though it was obviously clear that neither would have an impact; I did not know whether to laugh or
curse, I did both. We have settled in a pattern of thought and practice where
the least amount of change is preferred to actually tackling the problem at its
core to solve it. We still hold high regard for technological tinkering rather
than lifestyle change and biological earth-friendly solutions. In the aftermath of
terrible devastation we must have the courage to adopt alternatives. There are
no experts in this new era; the experts we often consult are the architects of
the current system, most unable to see beyond the demagogy of their own
professional silos. In the panel conversation at ICA familiar numbers were once
again trotted out, a 20% reduction in our CO2 emissions by 2020 and a 50%
reduction by 2050 from 1990 levels. Why is the year 1990 the defining marker? I
don’t particularly remember it as a good year, the beginnings of the first Gulf
War and the crisis in Eastern Europe just to mention two of the catastrophic
events of the times and certainly not a good year for air and water quality. At
the 2005 Society for Ecological Restoration conference held in Zaragoza, Spain,
I attended a talk given by Bob Costanza on the planet’s carrying capacity, he
pointed out that studies show the year 1975 to be the last time the Earth was
in relative equilibrium, we have been losing ground since; so why 1990? The
answer from the panel to my question was that these numbers are simply
arbitrary goals that once met we can promote more reductions. OK, granted that
these may be the political correct figures so as not to frighten any country
away, should they be the numbers that those of us that wish to make significant
change use? The 350 movement is an example of a science-based goal for carbon
emissions, but there doesn’t seem to be one for water. It seems to me that as
we pat ourselves on the back for achieving the minimum possible while witnessing
biological degradation worsen; it is time to remove the rose-tinted glasses and
embrace reality.
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