Browse capsule story pages: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7
Compiled by Amanda Suutari
Editing: Regina Gregory, Ann Marten
This plan was designed for the flood-prone Napa River valley which took a new approach to river management. Usually, conventional flood control emphasizes forcibly altering a river's natural flow and tendencies by combining various types of infrastructure such as dams, channels, dredging, widening, or levees. This approach is often expensive, environmentally insensitive, and may create new problems whose long-term costs (such as silt buildup or drying up of downstream areas) outweigh any initial benefits.
Floods are assumed to have been a part of the Napa River Basin for thousands of years, and many have been recorded there since the area began to be settled. A few attempts at flood control have been made over the years. In 1944, a dam was built on Conn Creek, which created Lake Hennessy, which didn't solve much. The County went through a period of creating flood control plans following a flood, but never received much support, and so the plans would be shelved until the next flood. In the past 36 years, Napa County residents have suffered $542 million in property damages.
With the imminent expiration of federal funding for the Flood Control Act of 1965, a few actors from different sectors were moved to create a new, restorative approach which broke with the traditional flood control model. With funds from the state and federal government, they raised the local portion by voting to introduce a half-cent sales tax increase, which would be used to contribute to the project. The collaboration included residents, industry, local, state, regional and federal state entities, academics, environmental organizations, the US Army Corps of Engineers, and various non-governmental organizations.
After spending thousands of hours planning in town hall meetings and workshops, a comprehensive plan was created. This plan instead took a "living rivers" principle and worked with the Napa River by reconnecting it to its historic flood plain, buying over 600 acres of reclaimed pastureland and returning it back to a wetland. Among other things, this would hold excess water. Other plans included installing two levels of terracing on the river banks, which would allow the river more room to spread out in times of flooding. Several bridges were targeted to be replaced with larger ones to allow more room for the river to pass under it. At one "oxbow" (a horsehoe-shaped kink in the river which overflows when fast-moving flood waters are less likely to follow sharp natural curves of the river) will be fitted with a bypass channel to shortcut the oxbow in times of flooding. The plan also includes the cleanup of disused contaminated industrial properties. When completed in 2007, the project will protect 2,700 homes, 350 businesses, and over 50 public properties, which means $26 million annual savings a year ($1 billion for the life of the project), while sustaining migrating fish and wildlife.
For more information visit the Napa Flood and Water Conservation District.
In 1990, the New York Department of City Planning and Housing Preservation and Development (CPHPD) leaked a draft of plans to redevelop a derelict 30-block area in the South Bronx. While the plan seemed innocuous, a closer look revealed that it could not have been less suited to the lower-income, mainly Hispanic and African American people who lived there. Large parts of land were to be bulldozed to make room fore new housing which was well out of financial reach for most of the 6,000 residents. Angered by being left out of the proposal's 9-year planning process, and feeling betrayed by local elected officials and city agencies, local residents formed "Nos Quedamos" ("We will stay"). This group united homeowners, tenants and businesses who decided the only way the residents would not be displaced was if they become an active part of the project.
When the plan was finally presented, Nos Quedamos members voiced their numerous objections over affordability, opportunities for local business, social and community services, use of open space and streets, and building materials, to name a few. In 1994, the CPHPD finally agreed to withdraw the original plan and to meet once a week with the community to develop a new one. Out of these working sessions, and while members actively sought residents' feedback through several go-by-block surveys and workshops, several goals were developed:
The project attracted assistance by many professionals including urban planners, architects, and lawyers, who were able to address social, environmental, housing, infrastructure and design layouts and other community issues. For example, the original plan to have a large park in the center was rejected as it was thought to attract crime, so it was relocated. Some of the buildings were to be designed as low rise housing with stores on the ground floor, which would provide enough people on the street to make them safer. Plans to extend transportation routes were included, to reduce the amount of private parking space.
Environmental concerns were also designed into the project, with the creation of a one-acre public park, smaller midblock parks and community gardens, with options for rainwater harvesting explored and design for water retention. Another area, now with disused railroad tracks, will be a tree-filled buffer zone to separate the commercial/residential areas from the manufacturing area. Materials for buildings will be chosen for environmental soundness. Construction began in 1999 and is expected to take about a decade to complete.
This case shows a few stages in the process of transformation of an urban wasteland to a viable mixed-income, self-sustaining community within the city that worked with, not against, the neighborhood's cultural and historical identity. It set a rare example of grassroots organizing successfully resisting urban redevelopment, and has attracted the attention of city planners from LA and Chicago. It was a model of collaboration between all diverse groups who had a stake in the process, local institutes and university as well as public and private planners, architects, business, residents, and non-governmental organizations. Finally, it restored people's sense of community and civic responsibility, and reinvigorated local democracy.
For more information visit the Sustainable Communities Network.
The Lummi Nation occupies some 12,500 acres of land and 8,000 acres of Puget Sound tidelands in the Northwest corner of Washington State, about 200 km north of Seattle.
The Lummi people have lived in Northwest Washington for about 12,000 years and there are about 4,000 members of the nation today. Fishing, especially salmon, has been the basis of their culture and survival, with ceremonies and folklore centered around salmon and salmon fishing. According to Lummi legend, a deity known as the Great Salmon Woman tells them that if they only take the salmon they need and protect the spawning areas, the salmon will thrive; this teaching has shaped their relationship with the salmon and its habitat throughout the generations.
The last decade has seen dramatic drops in salmon stocks all over the Pacific Northwest, with two of the four salmon species considered endangered. This has been due to logging of headwater areas, small dams on salmon streams, ground and water pollution from industry and agricultural wetlands, and inappropriate development of wetlands. The Lummi Nation maintains the largest Native American fishing fleet in the Pacific Northwest, and the most extensive fisheries protection program in the region. Many of its highly qualified tribal fisheries technicians and specialists were trained at Lummi Community College or Lummi School of Aquaculture. The fisheries department has an annual budget of 3 million dollars and overseas one of the country's most successful productive salmon hatcheries in the US.
The goals of the program are to sustainably manage fisheries stocks, including protection of salmon spawning habitat, conducting salmon counts in many small river tributaries near Nooksak Basin, monitoring the return and harvest of salmon and increasing production of hatcheries, pursuing new and stricter laws to protect salmon habitat, and launching an aggressive public education campaign to better inform the public of the importance of salmon as a sustainable source of livelihood. It also manages an extensive shellfish hatchery in the Puget Sound tidelands.
The Lummi Nation is also represented on the International Salmon Commission, among whose goals are to regulate activities of offshore driftnet fisheries. It is a model for involvement of indigenous peoples in planning and management of natural resources, both local and internationally, and its traditional values, such as "generational time" (the impact of today's policies on distant future generations) and management practices have great potential to influence fisheries management policy at the state or national level.
The Lummi Nation also has launched a variety of social programs such as a mobilization against drugs, education and youth programs, and a wellness program aimed at improving physical and mental health.
For more informtaion visit the Lummi Indian Nation.
This emerging technology is marketed under various names like "Wastewater Gardens" or "Living Machines." It is also commonly known in industrial ecology as "phytoremediation" or "bioremediation." But the underlying principles are similar: a system whose design is to facilitate natural processes "doing the work" of cleaning up wastewater, restoring degraded ponds, streams or wetlands, treating sewage, or more controversially, toxic waste sites.
The use of wetlands to treat wastewater is not a new idea. The Chinese and Egyptians, for example, used them, but the concept of actually constructing a wetland was first attempted in 1904 in Australia. The technology became more developed in the seventies and eighties as part of the emerging fields of industrial ecology and ecological engineering. The goals of these fields are to optimize natural processes to perform industrial functions with reduced costs both to the economy and environment.
The system relies on the use of specially chosen native species of plants and non-pathogenic microbes specifically targeted to the system in question. With a diversity of regions and applications, experts are refining their systems especially in bioregions which have other successful projects which have served as models. The systems have been used in the US, Mexico, Indonesia, Australia, the Philippines and elsewhere.
Generally the sites are used for more benign types of wastewater and sewage treatment, but they are also being used to clean up oil fields, abandoned mines, weaponry testing sites, fertilizer spills and other sites contaminated by toxins. The potential of using them for "remediation" of dangerous zones caught researcher's attention after sunflowers grown hydroponically on floating styrofoam rafts were used to "vacuum" radioactive waste in Chernobyl.
Specifically chosen plants act as "pumps" which draw and concentrate pollutants from the soil, and stimulate the growth of chemical-degrading bacteria. The plants can then be disposed of. This is seen as a less expensive alternative to removing or transporting soil or waste materials. On the other hand, there are concerns over whether animals and insects feeding off these plants would then reintroduce these toxins to the food chain. It also might discourage corporations from using cleaner industrial processes in the first place as they could use the process to justify creating toxic pollution.
These systems may have their greatest potential in the developing world, where sanitation services are not keeping up with growing rural and urban populations. Warm climates are ideal, as vegetation grows easily year round. Their potential, as with alternative energy, could represent a shift towards "decentralization and diversification" of wastewater services, with systems introduced for apartment buildings, schools, hotels, or small factories, which would remove dependence from and take pressure off of a distant, centralized, and costly treatment plant.
Like conventional wastewater treatment, the systems generally operate on several levels, where sewage (blackwater) first enters a sealed primary holding tank, where bacteria reduce the waste by 65-95% in a good system. Then it passes into a wetland cell, or layered garden, a bed of gravel with specially selected vegetation on top. Additional third gardens sometimes are designed which receive the wastewater that can be used for non-drinking water purposes such as irrigation or toilet flushing. Well-designed systems have met EPA and European Health Authority standards.
The costs are an estimated 5-10% of ordinary maintenance and operation costs, and can be designed to rely on gravity, thus reducing/eliminating the need for energy. They can reduce the amount of fecal coliform bacteria by 99% without the use of any chemicals, such as harmful and expensive chlorine.
For more information visit the U.S. Geological Survey.
In the past three decades, the population in US prisons has been growing exponentially, as a direct result in shifts in policy towards mandatory minimum sentencing. While the majority of these prisoners were incarcerated for nonviolent crime, two-thirds of these return to prison after release. The US state and federal prison population recently exceeded two million. This has led to overcrowding in prisons, and an increased burden on the states (which have outsourced many services and aspects of the system onto private industry).
The San Francisco County Jail was built in 1934. Originally it had grown its own food, but prison counselor Cathrine Sneed began to revive the practice in 1982. Trained as a lawyer, Sneed chose to be a counselor in order to find a way to get people out of prison instead of putting them in. While in the hospital with a serious illness, she had a revelation reading Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath," which showed what happened when people were disconnected from their land, and realized that this was what was missing from the prisoners' daily lives. Using abandoned buildings and fields, organic farms were set up where prisoners would work for two hours a day. The produce from these fields were donated to local soup kitchens and family shelters. The program was successful, prisoners looked forward to spending time outside and there was a waiting list for the program. But Sneed noticed that when prisoners were released, they had no skills, no money and no services to facilitate their reentry into society, and so recidivism (reincarceration) rates remained high.
In 1992, the Garden Project was started. This was a post-release program aimed at giving parolees confidence and skills. Participants of the program are paid a living wage of $11.00 per hour, with medical and dental benefits. They work eight-hour days five days a week, growing broccoli, lettuce, chard, collards, squash, leeks and pumpkins. These are sent to voluntary organizations helping poor seniors and families, and some 800 families per week receive food. Some of the food has been sold to local restaurants. The project has also grown to include the Garden Project Tree Corps, which works with the San Franscisco's Department of Public Works, planting and maintaining newly planted trees throughout the city. It employs twenty people who have planted 3,000 trees in the city. There are also nutrition, literacy, and computer training programs. The Garden Project is made up of partnerships between the private and public sectors: for example, the San Francisco Sheriff's Department, the San Francisco Department of Public Works, the California Department of Forestry, as well as private donations and customers.
Ex-prisoners, once leaving the program, have gone on to start their own landscaping businesses, some have entered the construction industry, and another started a licensed day-care center. Called by the US Department of Agriculture "one of the most successful post-release programs and community development programs in the country," the initiative's record has shown results. So far, some 4,300 participants have completed the program. Normally the nation's recidivism rate of prisoners after a year is 55%, but after two years, only 24% of participants of the Garden Project return to prison within two years. This shows one successful way that former prisoners can return to society and out of the costly cycle of crime and incarceration.
For more information visit the San Francisco Gate and The Garden Project.
The cleaning industry is notoriously toxic, with products containing ammonia, chlorine, and other dangerous chemicals that cause rashes, nausea, dizziness, and respiratory problems--or worse, with regular prolonged exposure, putting many cleaners at risk. Many new female immigrants to the US find underpaid jobs in the cleaning industry, with large hotel chains and offices or under-the-table cleaning houses. Before co-forming the cooperative "Eco-Care Professional Housecleaning," Mexican migrant Mayda Iglesias used to clean houses on her own, earning $40-50 for 6-7 hours of work, where she developed asthma and headaches. She didn't link this to the products she was using, assuming these were normal reactions to dust and dirt.
While taking English classes at a neighborhood church-sponsored program, she and her partners learned about WAGES (Women's Action to Gain Economic Security), a project aimed at helping low-income women form cooperative businesses. WAGES had begun in 1995, and some early trainees chose the cleaning industry as this was the field in which they felt most comfortable and experienced. The "eco-friendly" approach was chosen for reasons both economic and social: not only to find a competitive edge in a market niche, but also to promote workplace and community health and safety. Now all the cooperatives WAGES sponsors are eco-friendly cleaning companies. The training program gives skills in communication, business, decision-sharing with co-owners, and technical skills.
In the case of Mayda Iglesias' cooperative, four are co-owners and employees of "Eco-Care Professional Housecleaning." Each works 20-25 hours/week and earns $12 per hour, cleaning houses for some 50 customers. All products are natural, home-based solutions such as vinegar for cleaning windows, baking soda for scouring, and liquid vegetable-based soaps for general cleaning. Materials like rags are recycled from old clothing such as T-shirts. The cleaning requires some extra effort and planning (for example baking soda must be sprinkled first on ovens and left to wait while other parts of the house are cleaned), but since she stopped using these products, Iglesias's asthma and headaches disappeared. The sustainable practices also extend to its promotional literature (printed with soy-based ink on recycled paper) and its office equipment and practices. While 4-5 other cleaning businesses operate in Morgan Hill, none use environment-friendly methods, and cooperative members believe that three-quarters of their customers choose them because of their practices. The enterprise has won local awards for environmental responsibility.
Another WAGES-inspired cleaning cooperative in Redwood City, California, "Emma's Eco-Clean," began two years before EcoCare and began initially with five owner-members, but has today grown to fourteen. Each new member receives training not only in environmentally safe cleaning but also air and water pollution as well as energy use, and the cooperative has managed to get full medical and dental insurance for its members. Products are chosen carefully and are biodegradable, scantily packaged, and non-toxic. Initially clients used to leave the house while the house was being cleaned (to avoid the chemicals) but now they stay when the cleaner comes. "Emma's" has also won several awards, and has gotten a license to sell products which satisfy their eco-safe screening process. They have exhibited at San Francisco's "Greenfest," a trade show for sustainable business and organizations, and through this have promoted their practices and offered advice for similar cooperatives in other states.
The high level of trainees' performance through the WAGES program has challenged assumptions that low-income women can't grasp financial issues. With estimates by WAGES that its cooperatives have prevented the release of nearly 4,000 pounds of toxic materials into the environment, programs like this one have shown that eco-friendly cleaning businesses have the potential to transform an exploitative and toxic industry.
For more information visit WAGES.
Founded in 1993 by the late Samuel Mockbee, Auburn University's Rural Studio is a pioneering experiment which combines practical architectural education and badly-needed social services to low-income residents of Hale County, one of the poorest counties in Alabama. Mockbee's vision was that architecture could be a strong force in combating the squalor and inhumanity of poverty, pointing to the often institutional facelessness of housing and other facilities for the poor.
In 1993, Mockbee left a lucrative private practice and began the Rural Studio. His later projects with his firm had done some projects for charity, and he realized that good design should not be a privilege for the rich. Founding the Rural Studio, he began inspiring students to create simultaneously radical and functional designs for low-income clients. He promoted the innovative use of cost-effective materials, much of which was salvaged and recycled, for example carpet scraps, car parts, old tires, waste cardboard bales, colored bottles, old license plates, concrete or rubble. His vision was a fusion of modern and traditional Southern elements with a strong sense of rootedness to place. He believed that architecture could be oriented towards the community and motivate architects to transform the social environment. This was contrary to the prevailing trend in architecture towards the flashy, grandiose, big-name projects in urban centers.
The first Rural Studio project was completed in 1994, for the Bryant family, a couple in their seventies raising three grandchildren in a dilapidated shack. Their modest needs were for indoor plumbing, a septic system, and comfortable places to sleep. The "Bryant House" was a compact home constructed of hay bales (which were good for insulation) covered in stucco, with a covered porch running the length of the house used for entertaining. The hay bale construction kept the costs down to $16,500. Since then, Rural Studio students have been designing not only low-income homes but a variety of unique structures including churches, chapels, playgrounds, community centers, playgrounds and outdoor pavilions, all of which followed the same resourceful methods of scavenging and recycling materials. It has won grants and awards, and after Mockbee's death in 2001 he was awarded a posthumous prize for his accomplishments, and the Rural Studio still continues to thrive.
The Rural Studio has also been credited for influencing the education of architecture in the country; for example, in 1992 there were about 8-10 design-and-build programs, but today there are 30-40. Normally projects take place over one year and involve three sets of usually fifteen students working over each semester, so the project progresses like a relay race. The first group establishes contact with the clients and begins the design with the clients' needs in mind, which is then passed on to the second set of students who choose materials and work out increasingly finer details as the project then gets passed onto the third group of students. Students are not allowed to remove anything created or designed by the previous groups. This gives students hands-on experience in designing and building something real and functional, exposes them to the realities of poverty and related social and environmental issues, as well as giving them an opportunity to provide a valuable community service. The emphasis on local and salvaged materials promotes environmental sustainability in architecture and encourages students to think beyond the discipline's definition of what building materials are appropriate.
For more information visit the Architectural Record.
Started in 1998 by Shane Endicott and his partners in Portland, Oregon, The Rebuilding Center is a "nonprofit enterprise." As a young man Endicott faced the dilemma of many socially-conscious people in search of livelihood: how to support a family without also supporting "the suicide economy." He had been interested in construction and demolition, but didn't want to simply "crunch and dump, grind up all that useful wood, metal and brick and dump it in a landfill then go and chop down more trees and mine more iron to build something else."
With a private loan of $15,000, Endicott and his partners, along with some volunteers, set up shop in a garage in an economically depressed area of Portland. Entirely by hand, they began calling friends, contractors and developers, offering to pick up unwanted items and equipment, and set about gutting apartment buildings, demolishing wood or brick houses, removing old built-in furniture like kitchen cabinets or toilets, renewing them, and selling them at half or less of the retail cost.
The Rebuilding Center now occupies a half-block long building full of its goods where customers from around the city come to buy anything from light fixtures to movie theater seats, door frames, roofing, church pews, hot tubs, appliances, fountains, and other salvaged goods. Its new warehouse, built in 1999, was made from recycled materials. It tries to maintain a closed-loop cycle, where every scrap is saved and renewed, which has diverted thousands of tons of useful materials from landfills while reducing demand for a shrinking supply of raw materials. It recycles an estimated 3,000 tons of materials per year.
While the Center could now afford to expand and ship out more desirable refurbished furniture out of the region, it refrains from doing so as the use of fossil fuels would contradict its goal to reduce fossil fuel use and other environmental impacts and support the local economy. The work is labor-intensive, requiring a large number of staff, but without the maintenance and fuel costs of sophisticated machinery, the Center is still able to pay living wages to its employees (starting at $10/hour for the most unskilled work and increasing with regular reviews and hikes), who also receive full medical and dental benefits. While four other centers in the city opened and failed, RC survived because it was not as commercially-oriented, as it receives support from some 500 part-time volunteers and functions as something like a community center, where customers can also borrow do-it-yourself books from the center's library.
The Center's organization is democratically structured, with a low ratio between the lowest-and highest-paid members, the same number of votes per staff on work-related issues, and a hiring process where new people are hired by the people he or she will be working with. With 36 full-time employees, most of whom are from the neighborhood, the Center has been credited in local media for revitalizing the local economy. Financially the company has been operating at surpluses, which are either reinvested into the business or paid out to community projects, one of which, Our United Village (OUV), is a nonprofit organization started by Endicott before he teamed up on the Rebuilding Center. OUV is a mechanism to link people in the community, for example elders teaching neighbors how to make jam, or community scholarship funds paid to young people doing odd jobs like lawn mowing.
The Center received Portland's "Best Business" award as well as other awards in recognition for its practices.
For more information visit The Rebuilding Center.
The Tsleil-Waututh Nation occupies some 190,000 hectares of the Indian River valley just north of Vancouver, Canada, living off the richly forested land with salmon and chum-filled rivers. Their way of life depended on salmon, deer, elk, bear, mountain goats, cedar, berries, and medicines; today although dramatically altered, some of these traditions still continue.
During the 1950s-1980s, industrial logging and other industry caused salmon runs to decline, affected other sea life, and degraded the water quality of the Indian River which drains into the Burrard Inlet. Concern over the ecosystem's state and health of the community inspired the Nation leaders to find new ways to conduct stewardship of the land.
Among other things, they signed an agreement with the British Columbia (BC) government to co-manage the region's provincial park, held a conference on integrated stewardship, began a watershed and restoration study, began an ecotourism business with canoe and boat tours, and signed cooperative agreements with the BC forest ministry and forestry operations to create sustainable logging ventures. They joined forces with foundation Ecotrust Canada in 1998, which provided funds, support and training for various programs, including: use of GPS for restoration of salmon habitat, field work and data collection, and cleanup of industrial waste in the valley left behind by logging camps and sawmills. They also deactivated 100 km of logging roads, which has been key in restoring the watershed.
They are applying for FSC (Forest Stewardship Council, the eco-labelling system for wood) certification for their logging, and plans are advancing for more ecotourism development.
Services/benefits: Watershed quality improved, salmon runs recovering, sense of stewardship and pride among TW nation, economic benefits
For more information visit the Tsleil-Waututh Nation.
This case is interesting because it is a radical departure from the boom-bust cycles characterizing Canadian Pacific Coast economies and ecosystems since the early 1900s. These include whaling, sealing, mining, sardine canning, and logging.
Clayoquot Sound includes coastal temperate rainforest, rivers, lakes, marine areas and beaches, and is home of the Nootka first nations peoples. It is best-known as being the focal point of one of the country's largest civil society campaigns to stop industrial logging, culminating in 1993 when the provincial government allowed logging of old-growth forest in the region. Activists organized blockades and other acts of civil disobedience which finally resulted in the region being declared a World Biosphere Reserve in 2000. (However, critics are skeptical of this because "reserve" does not legally protect the resources. Environmentalists insist that the same companies under changed names are using the sanitized euphemism of "conservation-based forestry" to continue industrial logging in a form virtually unchanged, which has lulled people into the belief that the area is protected.)
Anyway, as the economy searches for solutions to wean itself off its past addictions to resource extraction, aquaculture of shellfish began growing in the region since 1985 as a way to diversify the economy. An important difference between farming of shellfish (mainly oyster but also scallops and clams) and what has gone before is that it depends on a pristine marine ecosystem to thrive. It requires fertile water, good currents, and nutrients, including leaf litter from the shore, which means the marine ecosystem is recognized to include the neighboring terrestrial ecosystem. Because they grow in such good conditions, the oysters themselves are said to be of very high quality. In fact, shellfish farms have had to close a few times by law after heavy rainfall when fecal levels in the inlets where they are raised are too high. The practice itself is low-impact and relatively pollution-free (it does have some impacts and must be monitored carefully). The sector is expected to expand by up to three times by 2007.
This is another illustration of how markets can shape long-term preservation of a resource (as in silvofisheries in Malaysia, tree frogs in Peru, agroforestry in China's upper Yangtze watershed) as much as they were incentives for earlier short-sighted use of resources through the same pattern of discovery, exploitation, and depletion. Finally it shows some residents have learned important lessons after watching history repeating itself for a century.
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