Gardeners and urbanists unite

Michael Pollan is known for writing about food, but his first book still stands as a classic gardening autobiography. One of the enduring premises of Second Nature (and an earlier NYT feature) is his eloquent description of the strangeness and pervasiveness of American lawn culture: those sheer-cut acres of the same Kentucky Bluegrass layering the ground from coast to coast. Today, there are burgeoning lawn reform movements among gardeners to question the convention.

Research has measured the total acreage of lawns in the U.S to be about 40 million (and growing), making turf grass the number one irrigated crop in the country. Although yards may literally be green, there is very little environmental benefit to them.  The compacted soil functions as an impervious surface for stormwater run-off, and grass under six inches does little good for erosion control. The species monoculture of most lawns creates habitat dead space. A large chunk of household water use goes to lawn upkeep. Although they may sequester some carbon, the methane released by trashed grass clippings cancels a lot of this out. And the big one is the pesticides and fertilizers applied and washed into surrounding waterways.

Pollan asks: Why do we still do this?

The easy answer is because we have to. Many HOA covenants and zoning laws prescribe specific requirements for mowing and upkeep. If this doesn't do it, the often intense social pressure to mow will get the message across. But, sure, how did that regime come into existence? According to Pollan, the lawn conveys a number of important social messages:

"The American lawn is an egalitarian conceit, implying that there is no reason to hide behind hedge or fence since we all occupy the same middle class."

 And

"We are all property owners here, the lawn announces, and that suggests its other purpose: to supply a suitably grand stage for the proud display of one's own house."

The lawn also represents, and dramatizes on a weekly basis, our dominance over nature:

"For however democratic a lawn may be with respect to one's neighbors, with respect to nature it is authoritarian. Under the Toro's brutal indiscriminate rotor, the landscape is subdued, homogenized, dominated utterly."

His recommendation is to convert the lawn into a garden, that is, to subdue our patch of nature artfully, working with the rhythms of time and particularities of place. Sounds good, but this is where a sense of urban scale may help this transition along. It's hard for me to imagine the average large-lot suburban homeowner finding the time to creatively arrange a significant portion of his plot. Short of a sizable landscaping budget or loads of free time, most people will opt to simply fire up the riding lawnmower. You can even set your beer in the cup holder.

Small-lot homes on well-appointed streets are a much more manageable scale for most people. And there will be plenty of passers-by stopping on the sidewalk to admire the handiwork. A move toward more thoughtful and ecologically beneficial lawns is unlikely to be successful without a concurrent reform in overall land use patterns in America.

The accompanying pictures are of front yards that I found attractive on a quick ride around Charlottesville yesterday. Some are from more affluent neighborhoods and some less so, but they are all fronting a good street.

The managed chaos of a Zoöpolis

Black-tailed Prairie Dog. Flickr: blucolt

I drop quotes from A Pattern Language often on this blog. There's one section that seemed especially outlandish to me when I first read it: #74 Animals. The architect Christopher Alexander inverts our notion of the zoo and of pet ownership and recommends we integrate wild and domesticated animals alike into the heart of the city, allowing them to roam along connected greenways or in private fenced pastures. He notes that everyday contact with "animals in their animalness" enriches our lives, especially children.

"Examples of ecologically useful animals in a city: horses, ponies, donkeys - for local transportation and sport. Pigs - to recycle garbage and for meat. Ducks and chickens - as a source of eggs and for meat. Cows - for milk. Goats - milk. Bees - honey and pollination of fruit trees. Birds - to maintain insect balance."

Another professor at UC Berkeley, Jennifer Wolch, uses the term Zoöpolis to describe the "reintegration of people with animals and nature." In a recent article in the Journal of Urbanism, she describes efforts being made in the exurban planned development of Harmony, Florida to do just that. According to their website, it was "consciously designed to offer a peaceful balance with animals and nature." Wolch's ultimate goal is to raise the stature of animals in the eyes of humans, and she believes that everyday exposure to other species will naturally lead to a stronger ethical commitment to protect them.

Whether or not we want to completely collapse the boundaries between human and non-human habitat, the fact still remains that animals currently do share cities with us, and we may be able to expand our tolerance - in certain strategic ways - for sharing this space more amenably. The only other options are expensive relocation or unpopular extermination. Much attention has been paid to the loss of animal habitat due to the encroachment of suburbanization, but it's also worth considering those that have stuck around and adapted to us.

Animal control and protection is something that all cities have to grapple with. My personal favorite is this single sentence lifted from a Columbia, South Carolina ordinance.

"It shall be unlawful for any person to kill, maim or otherwise annoy with firearms, air rifles or slingshots, or in any other manner, the squirrels and birds within the limits of the city or within the limits of any park or playground owned by the city, or to disturb the nests of such birds and squirrels; provided that any owner, authorized agent, lessee or tenant of real estate in the city frequented by squirrels in number sufficient to create a nuisance on or cause damage to any property thereon may apply to the police department for a permit and may be authorized by the police department to trap squirrels on such premises and dispose of the squirrels, provided that the disposal of such squirrels is accomplished in a humane and sanitary manner and that the disposal of the squirrels is not accomplished by the use of firearms, air rifles, slingshots or poison"

The Smithsonian magazine tells the story of the "street-smart prairie dogs" of Denver. The black-tail prairie dog has been depleted in population throughout the western states, but researchers are finding that some colonies have actually been adapting fairly well to urban conditions. Surveys of residents show an almost even split between those who want to protect them and those that want them dead. They apparently can't decide whether they are lovable, cuddly creatures or pests that burrow through their yards. If we can be assured that there is no significant threat of disease, it seems reasonable to me that humans could adjust our own landscaping preferences a little to make room. But what do I know.

As far as urban domesticated animals go, chickens have certainly been in the forefront of the movement. Friends of ours have a flock in the city that's just about ready to lay eggs. They somehow ended up

An eclectic, but not entirely unusual, street scene in Cuba. Source unknown.

with a rooster by accident, which are too noisy for cities, but fortunately their warranty allows them to exchange him for a hen. The two-year-old neighbor spends hours in the coop, chasing the hens around and attempting to hug them. Soon our friends will have their daily protein taken care of, right from their backyard.

Exploring Cuba the other day on Google Earth, I came across a number of interesting uses of donkeys, mules, and horses throughout the streets of Havana. Without easy access to oil or parts for automobiles, Cubans have been forced to improvise in their transportation. In the year 2000, there were 16,000 registered public transportation operators using animals. Many cities in the United States have horse-drawn carriages as a novelty experience, but this is an everyday reality for Cubans.

About a hundred U.S. cities have a mounted police unit, but many are just now falling victim to budget cuts. Boston ended their mounted police program last year, prompting one citizen activist to lament,

"Except for police dogs, they are the last working animals in this country who are around people who aren't around animals because they are in the city."

Is this something that has value in its own right?

Whole Earth Discipline: from the land back to town

"Cities are probably the greenest thing humans do."

This quote comes from the man behind the Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand, in an interview with NPR's Marketplace. As a luminary for the back to the land movement from the 1970's, he wrote the original catalog to provide the tools necessary to live self-sufficiently. However, it was only a few years after adopting the rural lifestyle before he and many others in the movement went "back to town." He has now published a new book Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto to, among other things, disabuse his fellow environmentalists of the notion that surrounding oneself in greenery and mimicking a primitive way of life is sufficient for meeting global environmental challenges.

Brand's version of environmentalism seems to be about the opposite of that of Thoreau and his followers. Instead of passively folding ourselves into the ecosystem and trying to interfere as little as possible, Brand sees the human role as much more active. We have the responsibility of being gardeners (more aptly geoengineers in his parlance) and we ought to avail ourselves of whatever tools we can. You see the general industriousness and reason from the Whole Earth Catalog, only magnified to a much larger scale. Cities just happen to be the best tool for energy and resource efficiency around.

Brand is quick to point out that humans don't have to be forced to live in cities; we generally want to. He notes that this is as true for Bismarck, North Dakota as it is for Lagos, Nigeria. The ongoing trend toward urbanization has gone on unabated. He has a special appreciation for the squatter cities evolving on the periphery of every city in the developing world. Formerly rural families want to better their lives by moving closer to the dynamic wealth-creation agglomerations while still shaping their environment as independent agents. They naturally form vibrant, walkable, mixed-use communities with both strong social ties and personal liberty.

In terms of design and development, he falls firmly on the side of self-organization over rational planning.

"To a planner’s eye, squatter cities look chaotic. To my biologist’s eye, they look organic."

I've wrestled with this question here before and mostly believe this laissez-faire approach is less helpful for the fully modernized West than it is for the developing world. But Brand doesn't see much of a future for the aging residents of the West, hence the scant attention.

Not that he has to cover ever single issue in one swing, but this would seem to be an oversight. Much of the world's consumption will still be in the West into the foreseeable future, and, as he notes, the slums will only gentrify in time raising the same issues. Then there's the fact that almost everyone reading this book will be from affluent nations. Knowing that sustainable and prosperous slums are emerging somewhere else doesn't strike me as particularly ecopragmatic in terms of managing our own challenges.

The Whole Earth Discipline seeks to slay several sacred cows of environmentalism. I can't speak to any of the others, but it is certainly refreshing to hear a person who has been a figurehead for romantic ruralism endorse vibrant human settlement so unequivocally. The first line of the book could easily be read as commentary on Genesis 1:26 (with emphasis on the "as"):

"We are as gods and have to get good at it."

Stewart Brand offers cities as a helpful tool toward meeting this responsibility of stewardship.

Manhatta Project presentation

Eric Sanderson delivered this fantastic presentation at the TED international conference and it was posted a few days ago. The Manhatta Project he has been working on uses historic and ecological research to recreate what Manhattan would have looked like when Hudson first sailed into the bay. An online map allows users to explore the island down to the individual blocks and compare the natural ecology with its current urban function.



In the last two minutes of the presentation, Sanderson takes the message in a different direction than you may expect. The implication is not that the pristine natural state is superior to human civilization, but that they mirror each other. They are both "interconnected, based on diversity, and having resilience." He imagines a world where a more compact city, traversed by bicycles and pedestrians, would be interspersed with the natural world.

"This is the future we need, a future that has the same diversity, abundance, and dynamism of Manhattan but learns from the sustainability of the past, the original ecology of nature with all of its parts."

I'm hesitant to say that global cities like New York are the only kind of place we need, but certainly his overall idea of blending the natural ecology of a place with human needs would be pretty universally relevant.

Hiking through Arlington County

Last weekend I hiked along the Appalachian Trail in the Shenandoah National Park, and this weekend I hiked the Arlington corridor, outside of Washington D.C., from Ballston to Rosslyn. These are both beautiful places in very different ways.

It seems like everyone in the country is watching Ken Burn’s series on the National Parks. It really is a remarkable homage to some of the most spectacular pieces of natural landscape our country has and the ideas that have developed to conserve them. I’ve lived for two summers in a national park, and I don’t take for granted the fact that these places have been preserved. Yet there is also something a little sad about locating our culture’s primary experiences of transcendence so far away from where most of us live our regular lives. Attributing to wild nature god-like qualities, means that god is always “out there,” only reachable by getting in the car and driving away on vacation.

John Muir was a great naturalist, but 300 million people cannot, by definition, live the John Muir lifestyle. It’s a self-defeating ethic when pushed to universal proportions. Many people have pointed to an urban aesthetic as well as the natural, one that celebrates not the absence but the presence of other people and their artifacts. This why we need Jane Jacobs, the Muir of cities, to give description to this other form of beauty:

“The order of the city is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance – not a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.”

I picked up a brochure in Arlington County for "walkabouts," short, self-guided tours that allow residents and visitors to explore streets and neighborhoods. Any national park visitors' center would supply trail maps, why not Arlington County?

Runoff is (mostly) a transportation problem

Over the last decade, some much-needed attention has been directed at the problem of stormwater runoff in metro areas. Heavy rains rush down hard surfaces eroding stream banks, intensifying flooding, burying aquatic biodiversity, and carrying every variety of pollutant and unwanted nutrient into our waterways. While the nature of the problem has been studied very thoroughly, we're still in the process of figuring out how to manage it well, both at the level of regulation and individual practice. I think we'd do well to remember Bruce Ferguson's words in his classic Introduction to Stormwater from 1998:

"The runoff and pollution from a contemporary city result not so much from the number of human beings, as from the lavish support given to their automobiles in land use and land development."

Therefor,

"A given population can reduce its needs for pavement by reducing its dependence on the automobile. Development that provides for non-automotive transportation has compact mixed of land use, where many of people's everyday needs can be met within small distances, and safe, convenient paths for biking among the various neighborhoods. When people are not using cars, there are no emissions and there is no demand for parking pavement when they arrive at their destination."

There a couple of lessons to draw from this. First of all, rooftops are less important than pavement, particularly in urban areas where multiple floors of activity can occur under one roof. Green roofs and rain barrels get lots of press for a good reason. They can promote food production, help conserve water for human use, and are just cool. But as any glance at Google Earth will confirm, parking lots and roadways create far more impervious surfaces (up to a quarter of all land used in metro areas), and importantly more interconnected impervious surfaces, than rooftops. Rooftops also do not generate or convey pollution like ground-level impervious surface does.

The second observation to make is that stormwater management is as much a part of an interconnected system as transportation is. Evaluating nutrient load on a site-by-site basis makes as much sense as considering only the transportation needs internal to a proposed development when assessing its impact. Often a residential subdivision can get a gold star for using low-impact development techniques to virtually eliminate on-site runoff, but if it's still auto-dependent and generating a significant number of vehicle trips the problem is only pushed somewhere else. What roadways are these motor vehicles using? Where are the three parking spots for each vehicle going to be located?

My intent is not to downplay all of good techniques being developed to mitigate the impacts of our transportation system, but let's not lose sight of simplicity when thinking about regulations. The best solution is to create and promote the kinds of places where driving is less necessary in the first place.

Stormwater Management should work with, not against, Smart Growth

Raining downtown, and that's just fine. flickr:bobtravis

Virginia is in the process of updating statewide Stormwater Regulations. A draft has been written, and it's open for public comment until August 21, 2009. Some people are concerned that the stricter caps on nutrient loads, as they are currently written, will promote low-density development and ultimately hurt the water quality and quantity of runoff in the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

I believe there is merit to this case ...

Here’s a simple and, I think, realistic hypothetical scenario. Developer A wants to develop 100 dwelling units on 1000 acres of land, and developer B wants to develop 100 dwelling units on 10 acres of land. Developer A will only need to cover 10% of her large site with impervious surface, while developer B will need to cover 70% of her small site with impervious surface. Developer A assumes that 100% of residents will use an automobile for transportation, while Developer B assumes 50% will primarily walk or use transit. Therefore, Developer A’s project will require twice as many parking spaces and approximately twice as much road width in the region, but most of this will be accommodated for off-site.

Under the stormwater regulations being proposed, Developer A will likely score an A+ with a pass to move forward, while developer B will fail. This is because the standards are determined, site-by-site, on a per acre basis and not a per unit basis. Developer B may have the option of purchasing off-site water quality improvements or implementing a set of BMPs to offset the damage she is incurring, but she takes a hard look at her balance sheet and decides to join developer A as a business partner. What benefited the individual acres of the sites in question clearly was an overall loss for the watershed as a whole.

And considering opportunity costs makes the situation even dicier. What if these developers bypass infill redevelopment of an industrial site for a more compliant and cheaper greenfield development? (Stormwater controls will generally be more expensive for redevelopment than new development). Now you have impervious surfaces in two places, instead of one. Super.

The economic market analysis, conducted for the Department of Conservation and Recreation by a Virginia Tech professor, bears this out in more detail.

"Based on this site-by-site method, low density developments would produce less estimated phosphorus runoff than medium or high density areas. Very low density developments (1 dwelling unit per 3 to 5 acres) would unlikely face any water quality control requirements. Yet, on a watershed basis, low-density ("sprawl") development increases dependence on auto transport (thus increasing emissions and roadway impervious surfaces). Highly impervious areas accompanied by dense population settlement can produce net water quality improvements, independent of whether stormwater controls are implemented ... Higher phosphorous control costs in high density developments create financial disincentives that may work at cross purposes with larger watershed objectives." [my italics]

Now I'm no hydrologist. Not at all. Most of the science and bureaucratic mechanisms behind this policy are pretty bewildering to me, and I don't really have the time to try to figure them out. Furthermore, I thought it might be safe to assume that as glaring a potential problem as this is, somebody in the state offices must be working to sort it out. Then I read this comment from a member of the Technical Advisory Committee that helped craft the policy, and I changed my mind.

“Stormwater management seeks to replicate the water quality and quantity benefits that are provided by a natural, undeveloped landscape. Development that contains more natural landscape (e.g. rural dev.) will consequently find it less costly to comply. This is not a fault of the stormwater management regulation; it is a natural consequence of the hydrologic cycle.”

In other words: That's life. Deal with it. He went on,

"Stormwater codes should be judged on how well they manage runoff quantity and quality, not how well they do or don't control growth ... Smart growth codes should be judged by how well they control sprawl."

This is where the trouble lies.

Sometimes genuinely smart and well-intentioned people err by focusing intently on the piece of the puzzle they have been commissioned to solve, thereby missing the larger system within which their problem is embedded. It's the classic widen-the-freeway-to-reduce-congestion scenario. It may solve the technical problem at hand, but it exacerbates the Real Problem.

The fact is that Stormwater Management and Smart Growth have everything to do with each other. Treating them separately and pitting one against the other is a losing game for both water quality and growth of development.

This was demonstrated pretty convincingly by a 2006 EPA report. Here are the three scenarios proposed by the study:

From Protecting Water Resources with Higher-Density Development

They put this model to empirical tests and mined numerous other studies to back up their conclusions. Once again, the crux of difference,

"The results indicate when runoff is measured by the acre, limiting density does produce less stormwater runoff when compared to the higher-density scenarios. However, when measured by the house, higher densities produce less stormwater runoff."

They show that this is the lapse in logic that lead so many regulatory agencies to assume that sprawl is good for controlling stormwater runoff,

"Many communities assume that low-density development automatically protects water resources. This study has shown that this assumption is flawed and that pursuit of low-density development can in fact be counterproductive, contributing to high rates of land conversion and stormwater runoff and missing opportunities to preserve valuable land within watersheds."

And I should add that this report focuses exclusively on quantity of water runoff. If you look at the issue of quality and factor in the introduction of pollutants such as motor fuels, de-icing chemicals, vehicular exhaust, lawn fertilizers and pesticides, faulty septic systems, etc. into the water supply the case against promoting low-density development grows and grows.

Let's not strike out on this one.

Crossposted at Greater Greater Washington

When is an urban forest large enough?

Forested Canopy in Shenandoah National Park

In the 2007 Comprehensive Plan, the City of Charlottesville set for itself the ambitious goal of creating a 40% tree canopy. At least it seemed ambitious at the time. After performing an analysis of aerial photos this year, city officials realized that 46% of the area is actually already covered by trees. In response, a new Urban Forest Management Plan has been drafted that calls for yet more trees. City Council has reviewed the plan, and everyone who spoke wholeheartedly endorsed making this a reality.

The plan recommends several methods for increasing the scale of natural forest land within city limits, including protecting forested parkland and/or forested private lawns in perpetuity with conservation easements, increasing the tree planting requirements for all new development, and acquiring more public land to be converted into green space. To clarify, we're talking specifically about the 10 square miles within the limits of the City of Charlottesville.

I should stop here and make it clear that I love trees. I've spent two summers living in a national park, getting out into the mountains and forests as often as the opportunity allowed. Deforestation has been a major global problem for many years now, contributing to the rising levels of GhG in the earth's atmosphere due to loss in carbon sequestration potential. Street trees are a wonderful accoutrement to the urban fabric, enhancing the aesthetic value of streets, soaking up particulate matter, and providing energy-efficient shade. Trees are great.

From 2009 aerial-photo study (Enlarged Picture)

But ... and it's pretty obvious where this is going ... there are important differences between urban areas, rural areas, and wilderness areas. They each have their own ecological and economic function, form, and aesthetic properties. As enticing as it is may be to have the best of both worlds, with wilderness/rural/urban all mixed together across the landscape, this strategy of suburbanization has resulted in a number of unintended consequences throughout the 20th century. What was idealized as a rainbow of land types coexisting often turned out, in reality, to become a beige mush of none of the above. And acres of parking lots as a bonus.

Charlottesville happens to be an urban area, at least that's how it's conceived of by many of its residents. The current map of the urban tree canopy is pretty clearly an inverse of the population density map for the city, with the downtown the least treed and the more low-density residential districts showing more trees. Makes sense. More trees appear to mean less people. More forest would seem to mean less city.

So what's the right amount of trees for an urban area? There is a spectrum of options. Brooklyn, New York, recognized by many for it's tree-lined streets, has a 12% canopy coverage. So does Frederick, Maryland. On the other coast, The City of Vancouver has about 20% coverage throughout its jurisdiction. Portland, Oregon clocks in at 26%, mostly on account of its forested hillside parks west of downtown. As the Charlottesville plan notes, American Forests, a national forest advocacy group, recommends for towns and cities east of the Mississippi a 50% canopy coverage for suburban residential areas, 25% coverage for urban residential, and 15% coverage for the downtown.

This seems to me like a reasonable ideal to set. The more suburban a city would like to become, the closer to 50% tree coverage the better. The more urban a city would like to become, the closer to 15-25% tree coverage the better. But perpetual growth of the tree canopy with no limits would not seem to be a prudent way to plan for a city's future.

Two different lawn strategies

From flickr user PhilTizzani

The town of Perris, California, which sits right in the middle of California's "inland empire," has decided to paint lawns of foreclosed houses green, as part of a larger effort to keep up appearances in quickly hemorrhaging neighborhoods. The paint is biodegradable, and it will last for six months. Each lawn will cost $550 to paint.

On the other side of the county, Michelle Obama has broken ground on a vegetable garden on the White House lawn. The garden will help provide food for White House meals, as well as a local soup kitchen. The garden will occupy a quarter of an acre of the White House lawn, which is slightly larger than the average lawn size in America.

From the Washington Post,

"The 1,100-square-foot garden, the first of its kind since Eleanor Roosevelt planted a victory garden during World War II, will grow dozens of vegetables, berries and herbs. The collection of crops, a wish list from White House kitchen staff, will include lettuces, squash, fennel, rhubarb, cucumbers and sweet and hot peppers."

A Rattlesnake Transect

The notion of a transect was proposed a few years ago by New Urbanist founder Andres Duany as a way to categorize and form the variety of human settlement patterns, from dense urban cores to wilderness areas. The idea is essentially borrowed from ecology, where lines of transects have been used to describe the gradual changes in animal and plant life, and applied to the gradient of dense to sparse human environments.

It occurred to me that my area of the Rattlesnake valley in north Missoula offers a fairly linear and condensed journey from T5 (urban center) to T1 (Nature). A trip along Van Buren/Rattlesnake drive is very satisfying because of the measured flow from one transect to another while still maintaining distinct borders between them.


View Larger Map

This is yesterday's journey in pictures from T1 to T5.

T1: Rattlesnake Wilderness



T2: Rural Rattlesnake



T3: Upper Rattlesnake Neighborhood



T4: Lower Rattlesnake Neighborhood



T5: Downtown

The Botany of Roads

Lewis Mumford wrote admiringly of the medieval city, formed through thousands of small decisions over long periods of time. He marveled at how this organic kind of growth would actually yield very sensible results. The gently curving cow path, adapted into a road, often fit the human practice of walking better and provided more visual stimulus than the strict grids later imposed though a centralized plan.

Now some French and American physicists are attempting to draw mathematical parallels between the cellular structures of certain organisms and the roads from various cities around the world. When the system grows gradually rather than being planned according to the larger scale, they have found that the efficiency is localized. As new nodes are developed, which need a means of transporting nutrients or waste, they connect into the system at the closest point and form gentle curves. Their thesis is that this pattern is, in fact, universal across cultures and economies.

From New Scientist,

"Previous models of urban development assumed that efficient transport across the entire network motivated the system's growth – as if planned from the top down. Focusing instead on the structure of local connections seems truer to real life."

A new Clark Fork river

Today is a pivotal day for the Clark Fork river. The largest EPA superfund site ever, right up the road from me, reached a point in the clean-up process when they were ready to breach the Milltown dam. At about 11:30 today the Clark Fork river ran freely for the first time in over 100 years. A couple of us went up to the bluffs overlooking the project to watch the new stream carve its way through the mud around the dam.

It may take a few years, but the cleaner and unobstructed nature of the Clark Fork could profoundly change how we view its use within the urban landscape. In the past the river was seen primarily as a vehicle for industry, either for transport or waste disposal. It's hard to imagine now, but a downtown butcher reportedly used to simply throw his leftover carcasses into the river and let them wash away. In recent years, probably through both a loss of industry in general and an enhanced environmental awareness, we are much more careful in how we use our rivers. After some restoration they could become again a wonderful place for humans to be, and they could provide that essential connection with nature even in the heart of the city.

Here's an example right near where I live: the Eastgate shopping center.

This strip mall occupies about 85,000 square feet right along the Clark Fork, about a two minute walk to the university campus and a 10 minute walk to downtown. It's essentially a gateway into downtown Missoula, coming in from I-90 through the Hellgate canyon. Instead of utilizing this amazing location, the developers opted to construct a standard strip mall facing Broadway and put an empty brick wall with dumpsters along the waterfront. What a waste? But it does give some insight into the older view of industrial rivers. They weren't exactly a community focal point.

Now imagine if the Eastgate center kept its existing retail, but also opened up another strip of shops and restaurants or cafes along the river. A small nicely landscaped walkway could be extended out from the pedestrian bridge to serve these locations, and perhaps a terrace could be built with stairs down to the river to provide public access. Instead of wasting all of this valuable land with a single-story building, two or three more stories of residential units could be put on top. They would be very desirable places to live and provide more vibrancy and safety to the riverfront life. If this were legal in a zoning sense and I had a few million to throw around, I would be all over this. The time is right for a renewed waterfront.

Parks and recreation areas are a wonderful way to use the waterfront areas, but that can't be the only goal we pursue. urban areas can also make use of the clean natural amenity with dense, mixed-use, and publicly accessible development.