|
|
 |
Farmland preservation
Green infrastructure/watershed protection
Greenways
Land conservation
Landscapes
|
Open space
Parks
Rural issues
Sewage treatment
Stormwater control
|
Tools
Transportation planning and choices
Urban parks
Urban trees
Water quality
Zoning issues
|
You can search for these
items by typing the keywords in the Search box.
The prevalence of many of our current environmental challenges -- air and water pollution; global warming, habitat fragmentation and conversion -- is in part due to the way in which we have built our neighborhoods, communities and metropolitan areas during the past half-century -- dispersed, inaccessible, and automobile-oriented -- in a word, sprawling.
The farther we have to travel between home and work, work and play, the more likely it is that we will drive. Thus it should not be surprising that as the distances between trip origins and destinations has increased so has the amount of driving we have done. The end result of all of this driving is that the nation's air quality has suffered. Research has shown that compact, pedestrian and transit friendly communities have a positive impact on air quality by improving travel alternatives.
As we build, we replace our natural landscape -- forests, wetlands, grasslands with streets parking lots, rooftops, and other impervious surfaces. The effect of this conversion is that stormwater, runoff which prior to development is filtered and captured by natural landscape, is trapped above impervious surfaces and accumulates and runs off into streams, lakes, and estuaries, picking up pollutants along the way. Runoff can be reduced through clustering of development, thereby leaving larger open spaces and buffers. Although compact development generates higher runoff and pollutant loads within a development, total runoff and pollutant loads are offset by reductions in surrounding undeveloped areas.
As development moves further and further to the metropolitan fringe it competes with open space habitat and prime farmland. Loss of open space impacts the environment in multiple ways. First, we lose many of the natural landscape features we value -- forests, wetlands, etc. Second we lose the functions that these features provide -- runoff control, wildlife migration, etc. And in the instance of farmland loss we hasten the use of lesser quality soils for production; thereby heightening conversion of forest and wetlands for crop production; and increasing dependency on irrigation, fertilizers and chemicals. Smart growth enables communities to pursue open space protection and development objectives through the clustering of development activity away from sensitive natural areas.
|
 |
