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Green Infrastructure: Smart Conservation for the 21st Century
In the 1970s, when we began working in the conservation movement, conservation organizations worked to protect individual parcels of land. Today we realize that we must protect networks of open space. Still, too many land conservation efforts are haphazard and reactive in nature. They deal with whatever comes over the transom. The result is haphazard conservation and haphazard development. From our perspective, successful land conservation in the future will have to be:
The key to accomplishing this, we believe, is “green infrastructure”, a new framework that provides a strategic approach to land conservation. Just as growing communities need to upgrade and expand their built infrastructure (roads, sewers, utilities, etc.), so too they need to upgrade and expand their green infrastructure—the network of open space, woodlands, wildlife habitat, parks and other natural areas that sustains clean air, water and natural resources and enriches our quality of life. The concept of green infrastructure repositions open space protection from a community amenity to a community necessity. Green infrastructure can even help reduce opposition to development. When citizens think all land is up for grabs, they oppose development everywhere. On the other hand, when people have some assurance that special places will be saved, they become more amenable to accommodating new development. One of the biggest challenges, of course, is MONEY. We need a lot more of it. Every state and local government in America needs not only a green infrastructure plan, but also the financial resources to implement the plan. Over the past three years, over $17.5 billion in state and local government funding has been directed towards open space preservation. This is an important step in the right direction, but we must do more. The total funding devoted to land conservation is just a small fraction of what we spend on transportation and other infrastructure needs. We need new sources of conservation capital, both public and private. The final challenge is PEOPLE. We need to broaden our movement to include more people of color and young people. We also need to remember that our work is fundamentally about people — our children and grandchildren. It’s about the future and planning for it. When we started in conservation many of us were winging it. We hadn’t been educated or trained for what we were doing. There wasn’t much science and even less thinking about economic development, and there were few opportunities for professional development. By almost every measure, the work of conservation is becoming more complex. Conservationists need to understand marketing, business planning, real estate and tax law, as well as ecology and geographic information systems. We need to build the capacity of our movement embracing the concepts of training, education and lifelong learning. We also need to educate the public about the benefits derived from green infrastructure. We believe that now is the time for a more strategic and comprehensive approach to land conservation. This monograph sets out that approach.” Mark A. Benedict & Edward T. McMahon
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“Oliver Wendall Holmes said that “to live fully is to be engaged in the passions of one’s time.” Clearly land conservation is one of the passions of our time. Over the past few years, poll after poll and ballot measure after ballot measure have demonstrated Americans’ support for land conservation. However, we need new approaches to land conservation to address the accelerating rate at which land is being developed.