Smarter Growth. John H. Spiers
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Название: Smarter Growth
Автор: John H. Spiers
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Техническая литература
Серия: The City in the Twenty-First Century
isbn: 9780812295139
isbn:
Twenty months after the lawsuit was filed, the parties negotiated a consent decree. The WSSC agreed to make long-term improvements to comply with the conditions of its permit and relevant federal and state clean water policies. The terms required WSSC to overhaul or replace its water filtration plant, to immediately undertake $8.5 million in pollution control projects at the existing plant, including $1 million to reduce sediment pollution, better monitor pollution, and find ways to minimize the need to discharge pollution. The improvements will reduce pollution by over two million pounds in the first year and greater amounts in later years. The agreement also included $100,000 in civil penalties to be paid to the state. According to the agreement, which has to be ratified by the U.S. attorney general and the U.S. District Court, the WSSC would have up to ten years to comply or face an additional $1 million in fines.111
The legal director of Potomac Riverkeeper noted, “the work of restoring the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay will take a big step forward with this agreement,” as the settlement “ensures that years of unmitigated pollution discharges into the Potomac are at an end.”112 In thinking about how to use the money, an attorney for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation recommended farm conservation projects in western Maryland to prevent runoff at its source rather than trying to clean it up later.113 The WSSC’s general manager, however, worried about the high costs of long-term improvements to the existing plant, built in the 1960s, which he estimated could exceed $100 million.114 This was in addition to the commission’s struggle to pay for $1.5 billion of work to reduce sewer spills required under a 2005 agreement as well as undertaking an independent program to replace aging water pipes. Forty years after agreeing to rein in its pollution, the WSSC continued to face sharp criticism for polluting the Potomac, suggesting that perhaps the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Today, the Potomac is healthier than it has been in decades. In part, this is due to the CWA and federal lawsuits to force compliance with cleanup and water quality standards. The bulk of the river’s cleanup, however, has been the result of state and local action on the ground. Upgrading wastewater treatment facilities was the primary way in which public officials at these levels have acted to clean up the Potomac. Environmentalists during the 1970s contested these efforts out of concern that they would catalyze growth, which they did, although the scale of the Potomac’s pollution certainly warranted cleanup. The emergence of nonpoint pollution as a more significant issue in the late 1980s accentuated the importance of efforts to curb runoff through land use regulations that reduced erosion, preserved open space, or limited the scale of development. Unlike the command-and-control regulations of CWA, improving land use planning and restoring local habitats has varied in scope and success across communities.
Figure 5. The Great Falls of the Potomac, just upriver from Washington, D.C. Source: Carol M. Highsmith Archive.
The case of the Potomac confirms that grassroots activism to harness the tools of smart growth in support of environmental protection was central to the cleanup of the river. In focusing on policy over politics, scholars have obscured the crucial role of citizens in lobbying and litigating for compliance with environmental policies, blocking undesirable treatment facilities and development projects, educating the public about the importance of environmental stewardship, and undertaking hands-on activities to put environmental ethics into practice. Moreover, citizens have been primarily responsible for broadening the view of the Potomac from more traditional conservation-based values of open space to modern ideas of pollution cleanup to newer practices of ecological restoration. In short, more citizens became more involved in a variety of ways to act as stewards of a river that not only knits together Greater Washington but also serves a symbolic role as “the nation’s river” in the capital area.
Other cases of citizen involvement produced markedly different outcomes for development and illustrate the fractured nature of local politics in the context of metropolitan growth and preservation. The next chapter examines how a high tide of environmental consciousness in the early 1970s inspired a dramatic grassroots movement in an affluent community in Fairfax County to preserve one of the last forested landscapes in the county. The following chapter moves us into the turn of the century, where Prince George’s County saw a groundswell of support for upscale commercial development in a county long passed over for it. These two cases underscored how an unequal distribution of people and development could favor environmental protection in certain communities while undermining it in others.
CHAPTER 2
Where Have All the Forests Gone?
In the spring of 1970, a national television crew traveled to Fairfax County to record the public’s involvement in a dramatic environmental movement. Just a month earlier, millions of Americans had participated in the first Earth Day, raising awareness and learning about environmental issues locally and globally.1 Earth Day was a headline event in a banner year for modern envisronmentalism, but so too was the news story the television crew covered.
The event in question was a public hearing on a proposal to preserve a forested landscape along the Potomac from being converted into a luxury housing project. More than two hundred people attended and more than fifty testified, including a number of teenagers.2 The highlight of the meeting was a stirring rendition of a folk song written by high school student Susan Daniel. Modeled after Woody Guthrie’s iconic “This Land Is Your Land,” Daniel’s song offered a reflective, youth-centered perspective on the environmental impact of postwar suburbanization as she called for preserving the hills, plans, wildlife, and Potomac waterfront that the Burling tract offered.3
The year 1970 is often remembered for national events like Earth Day and the creation of the EPA. Indeed, the decade more broadly represented a golden era of environmental policy making reinforced by the rise of national environmental organizations as a potent force in American politics. Even as environmental politics was scaling up, the Burling case testified to the enduring importance of grassroots activism. Indeed, local environmentalists in Fairfax defined the contours of “smart growth” two decades before the term came into official use.
After a quarter century of rampant suburbanization, residents, officials, and organized interests in Fairfax spent 1970 debating whether the Burling tract should be developed for upscale housing or protected as a park and nature preserve. A year earlier, a local development firm acquired the 336-acre parcel in the mostly white and affluent community of McLean. The firm proposed unusually significant measures to control runoff into the nearby Potomac associated with developing the site’s steep slopes and to preserve half the land as open space. A small group of nearby homeowners, however, had strong misgivings about the potential loss of one of the few wild, forested landscapes left in the county. As they organized for a battle in their backyard, they were joined by hundreds of high school and college students who wanted a nature preserve in the midst of suburbia. A new generation of local elected officials committed to reining in runaway growth joined an intense community struggle to convince the Burling tract’s developer to preserve the landscape for future generations.
The Burling controversy showed how environmental consciousness among the white middle and upper classes grew as suburbanization intensified. The leisure time that came with the material abundance of postwar СКАЧАТЬ