Welcome....And a Short Comment on Short-Sightedness

Thanks for visiting the Urban Watersheds blog. This is the first post in what will be a long series of discussions regarding:

• Rivers and streams, and the environments that they connect
• Impacts on their functions
• Communities’ interactions with urban watersheds
• Economic development
• Water quality
• Riparian corridors
• Habitats
• Stormwater

Yes, the categories are broad….there is much to discuss.

Our approach to urban watersheds is multi-objective.  Regardless of their settings, watersheds and streams are complex systems that will respond to impacts upon them.  They are also the raison d’etre for communities, provide a primordial link to our environment and reason for being, are an endless source of attraction, and can serve utilitarian functions as well.  Oh, and yes, they will cause great damage from time to time if not respected.

I say “our” because there are 3 hosts for the blog.  My name is Kevin Conner.  I’m a landscape architect and planner with 20 years of experience in design of river-oriented projects.  Randy Alexander is an environmental scientist with 13 years in wetlands, aquatic habitats, riparian ecosystems, and labyrinthine permitting at the federal level.  Jacque Thomas is a hydraulics and hydrology engineer with 15 years of experience in streams and floodplains.  All three of us will be primary authors for the blog, and we will also feature occasional guest posts from other subject matter experts in the upcoming months.

We encourage discussion on a professional level.  Normal blog posting customs apply.  Please see our “terms and conditions” on the About page (link is on your right).

To be quite honest, I was shocked that there wasn’t already a blog that directly addresses this topic.  Not that the subject of watersheds, streams, and rivers can compete with paparazzi and Nicole Ritchie’s latest antics (hmmmm….OK, sarcasm intended), but I expected to find more discussion on this far-reaching subject in the blogoshpere.

Now that we’ve introduced ourselves and established the rules of the playground, on to the first short post:

I was once told by a less-than-enlightened engineer that “it was just easier to ditch the river.  That way, you only have to deal with the drainage, and that’s it.”  That mentality was repugnant then, and has not gotten better with age.

The bottom line is that urban streams are complex systems that can pay off handsomely in terms of multiple benefits within the same piece of real estate:

• Economic development (lots of examples of that)
• Recreation opportunities (even more examples)
• Transportation (navigation and land-based multi-modal routes)
• Habitat preservation  (a healthy river takes less $$$ to ‘maintain’ than a dead one)
• Utility corridors
• And of course, flood control, or at least damage reduction.

There are likely other uses as well.  The point is that a single-focus, magic-bullet, short-sighted approach (see the quote above) is 1970’s thinking that has no place in our communities.  We deserve to get better results for the public dollar.

posted by Kevin Conner

Comments

[John DeHan]

I commend you for your enlightened outlook on our urban waterways.
I think we are all better off cooperating rather than fighting with our natural environment.