Category Archives: Environment

Permit for a dam on your property

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I bet many homeowners have received cease and desist letters from the authorities for an unauthorized construction on their property. More often than not, the ignorance of the homeowner is attributed to the lack of permits. But not so in this case.

Read an actual letter sent to a man named Ryan DeVries by the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, State of Michigan. This guy’s response is hilarious, but read the State’s letter before you get to the response letter.

Don’t we love our bureaucracy?

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Integrating Hazard Mitigation and Local Land Use Planning

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Land use planning can be used as an effective tool in reducing the economic and social risks of natural hazards. The local governments provide the better authority to implement planning mitigation strategies due to extensive and comprehensive potential for tapping into community resources and public participation. The local governments are also in a better position to tailor the comprehensive planning strategies to align in line with the region’s specific vulnerability to natural hazards.

The authors advocate a combined strategy of sustainable development and hazard mitigation to draft land use plans. Use of high risk areas such as flood plains, steep slopes, earthquake fault zones, coastal areas should be discouraged for human habitation. Sustainable practices advocate relocating land use away from hazard areas and relying on resilient building practices to withstand natural hazards.

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Disaster Mitigation & Sustainability

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Disasters have caused tremendous loss of life and property around the world especially in the United States. This trend has seemingly increased in the 1990s. The conflict between natural disaster occurrences and choices of places where people want to live has often proven to be the cause of these losses. The government, at the federal level and state& local level has consequently increased their role in disaster recovery. Although traditional responses to disaster have entailed reactive measures like preparedness, response and recovery, more attention is being paid in recent times to proactive responses of hazard mitigation. Simply defined, hazard mitigation is advance action taken to reduce or eliminate the long term risk to human life.

The governmental intervention especially by the federal government has involved drafting and implementing legislation starting from the first disaster relief act in 1950 to the more recent Stafford Act in 1988. Since then, other piecemeal plans and proactive measures like NAPA’s report, Coping with Catastrophe (1993), NFIR Act (1994), and Office of Technological Assessment’s report recommending an action-oriented approach instead of an information provision approach has signaled changing trends in disaster management. Agenda 21, an action agenda adopted at the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Summit focused on reducing natural hazards and encouraged proactive measures for disaster management. Uses of new concepts like ecological footprints as a way to understand the implications of consumption and development patterns helped to identify the regional trends in population toward disaster vulnerability.

Federal acts like the Stafford Act which is increasingly used to combat disaster recovery outlined the “provision of orderly and continuing federal assistance to state and local government to alleviate suffering and damage caused by disasters.” But recent trends have moved away from federal responsibility to holding individuals and local governments responsible for increasing susceptibility toward natural disaster. State and local governments are now required to evaluate the nature and extent of vulnerability to effects of natural hazards and accordingly develop systematic hazard mitigation plans. There also has been a significant shift in implementing ‘softer’ approaches such as watershed management, land use planning, using flood insurance and storm insurance as disincentives, and increasing awareness regarding relocating from vulnerable areas as opposed to traditional ‘hard’ structural solutions like levee construction.

The government has realized the importance of moving people out of harm’s way rather than continually fund reconstruction and recovery post-disaster. The federal government also makes federal assistance subject to condition before disaster strikes and adjusts share of federal assistance in order to get state and local governments more involved in disaster mitigation. This is supported by upping the level of public education and awareness of locating in high-risk velocity zones and inventorying and disclosing all properties within the flood hazard zones.

Another school of thought talks on the use of sustainable communities to fight a more sustained battle against disaster recovery. Emphasis on high density development and efficient use of space and land outside the high-risk areas that are susceptible to disasters like flooding, earthquake, and hurricanes is the hallmark of sustainable-oriented mitigation. Sustainable communities effectively balance risk against other preferable social and economical goals. It promotes a closer connection and understanding of the natural environment instead of the traditional school of thought of dominating nature.

Sustainable communities better understand the interconnectedness of social, economic, and environmental goals. Of course, this requires a new ethical posturing that errs on the side of caution and helps us refrain from actions that may have serious or long-lasting effects on our survival. Understanding that sustainable community planning is largely participatory and community based helps delegate more responsibility to the individual to prevent loss from disaster. However, it may also entail clarifying and reestablishing the ethical content of private property ownership and use to see and purse a larger public good.

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Arborsculpture: Making Chairs in Trees

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(image source: Arborsmith)

Ever hear of arborsculpture? Well, I never had until I read this interview with Richard Reames, one of the world’s foremost arborsculptor. Before you cast any befuddled looks my way, let me define it for you: Arborsculpture is the “art of shaping tree trunks to create art and functional items through bending, grafting, pruning, and multiple planting.” It is almost akin to bonsai which is a gardening art that specializes in making miniature trees. I consider the art of bonsai somewhat ‘insensitive’ plant life because you are restricting and controling its natural growth. I remember a Marathi movie, Chaukat Raja in which they had likened a mentally retarded person to a bonsai. But then, anything even hedge trimming could be considered unnatural.

Another interesting thing that caught my eye was when Richard Reames brought up the topic of ‘living houses’:

I believe that if enough people put their minds to using living trees,
we can learn to grow houses. I believe that if we put our minds to it,
like going to the moon, there’s no reason we couldn’t all be living in
houses where the walls and ceilings are composed of living tree
material and there are leaves coming out of the roof. We could
accomplish this in one generation. We’d build doorways and windows that
the trees would grow around, and also plumbing and electrical conduits.
The trees would just swallow all the pipes. We’re going to call this
“arbortecture.”

This ties in perfectly with my personal philosophy that we can never have enough trees and a better way of living would be to live in harmony with trees instead of just cutting them down. The environmental effects of trees in living are well documented (see image below):

 

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No More Beachfront Property?

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Thanks to global warming and climate change crisis, beachfront property might not seem like a feasible option in the future. Increase in sea level will definitely impact such properties as the world’s geography undergoes some serious changes. The New York Times mentions that:

According to a 2000 report by the Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment, at least a quarter of the houses within 500 feet of the United States coast may be lost to rising seas by 2060. There were 350,000 of these houses when the report was written, but today there are far more.

That is indeed a significant impact and this time, it will not affect the lower income group of people like it did in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Denial may work for some time but in the long run, beachfront properties will be the first line of defense in our battle against rising waters. And as we have been constantly reminded, nature always wins.

Too Ambitious

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We finally heard back from the EPA’s P3 [People, Prosperity, and Planet] Request for Proposals and sadly, they rejected our grant application. The reason – too ambitious and infeasible for the allocated grant money. Well, they are right. We had submitted a proposal suggesting developing a sustainable model to rebuild Southern Louisiana by seeking to analyze risk perceptions and economic necessities of residents that force them to make unsustainable choices.

On the flip side, it is not entirely lost. We can always choose to divide up our proposal and resubmit to other funding organizations or just modify this and send it off to a larger funding organization. In lieu of Katrina hurricane, we found our proposal quite timely and had managed to keep the scope of the project broad enough to warrant adequate examination of the research issues involved. Restricting ourselves to a particular region of Louisiana or just to media-popular New Orleans would have led us to ignore correlational factors that influence every move in the southern state.

Climate change data has shown how everything is interrelated and a little bit of tweaking elsewhere can have larger implications often unintended elsewhere. Developing a sustainable model for Louisiana (and New Orleans) cannot be a piecemeal project but has to encapsulate the larger region. This may not have been possible within the parameters of the P3 Project but hopefully, the EPA takes this issue seriously enough to allot more funds for such a study.