Ecologically Based Municipal Land Use Planning

William B Honachefsky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351453912
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Environmental Management
• Index: Technology & Engineering

In the decades following the first Earth Day in 1970, a generation has been enlightened about the unspeakable damage done to our planet. Federal, state, and local governments generated laws and regulations to control development and protect the environment. Local governments have developed environmental standards addressing their needs. The result-an ecologically incongruous pattern of land development known as urban sprawl.
Local land use planners can have a greater effect on the quality of our environment than all of the federal and state regulators combined. Historically, they have existed on the periphery of land management. The author suggests that federal and state environmental regulators need to incorporate local governments into their environmental protection plans. Ecologically Based Municipal Land Use Planning provides easily understood, nuts and bolts solutions for controlling urban sprawl, emphasizing the integration of federal, state, and local land use plans.
The book discusses ecological resources and provides practical solutions that municipal planners can implement immediately. It discusses the most recent scientific data, how to extract what is important, and how to apply it to the local land planning process. The author includes the application of the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to problem solving.
Despite compelling evidence and sound arguments favoring the implementation of an ecologically sensitive approach to land use planning, municipal planners, in general, remain skeptical. It will take considerably more encouragement and education to win them over completely. Ecologically Based Municipal Land Use Planning makes the case for sound land use policies that will reduce sprawl.

1	Why Ecologically Based Land Use?

The planet Earth has been the one home for all of its processes and all of its myriad inhabitants since the beginning of time, from hydrogen to men. Only the bathing sunlight changes. Our phenomenal world contains our origins, our history, our milieu; it is our home.…

That poignant summation by Ian McHarg in his 1969 tome, Design with Nature, should be inscribed over every entranceway to every planning board meeting room in every municipality in the United States. It should likewise be part of, if not the preamble to, every municipal master plan. Perhaps then the nation’s land planners would have a permanent reminder as to what land use planning is really all about. It is not about guaranteeing a profit for landowners, investors, or developers. It is not about encouraging a steady improvement in the gross domestic product (GDP) or lowering real estate taxes. It is about protecting our home and standing watch over the air, water, vegetation, and soil on the Earth’s crust that makes life possible on what would otherwise be a planet as barren and inhospitable as our moon.

That the nation’s local land planners have yet to fully, or as some claim, even partially embrace this stewardship ethos is painfully reflected in the landscapes they are continuing to produce — landscapes that have changed little from three decades ago, when McHarg³ described them as, “the expression of the inalienable right to create ugliness and disorder for private greed.” Beneath the most conspicuous manifestations of this environmentally incongruous pattern of land development, which Gurwitt⁶ calls the ills of suburbia — such as traffic congestion^*, miles of cookie cutter housing, soul-less commercial strips, and roads that make pedestrians feel like an alien life form — lie even more sinister effects only rarely brought to the public attention. Those narrow ribbons of concrete and asphalt, for example, which we call roadways and which relentlessly carve up the countryside, carrying more and more cars and more and more humans farther and farther into the last remaining open space and farmland, bring hazards much greater than traffic congestion (Figure 1.1 and Table 1.1). Much like your dog or cat constantly sheds hair and dander, so too does the automobile shed; only its by-products are considerably more dangerous. Asbestos and copper particles are scraped from brake pads every time the brake pedal is applied;⁷ zinc, lead, and cadmium wear off tire treads; petroleum hydrocarbons and detergents flow from leaking oil pans and crankcases; and ethylene glycol drips from overheating cooling systems. The amounts are minuscule, but multiplied by the hundreds of millions of vehicles nationwide, a few ounces quickly turn to pounds, and on a national scale the amounts add up to tons per year. Deposited on adjoining soils in the highway corridor or on the roadway surface itself, these by-products await the next rainfall; then they are flushed into the nearest surface waterway or groundwater aquifer to inflict damage on unsuspecting organisms, including unwitting human receptors. If this were not enough, some 12 million tons of deicing salt (principally sodium chloride^**) also are applied annually to the nation’s roadways, to be carried later into the nearest surface and groundwater, driving up levels of sodium^*** in downstream wells and sending fish gasping for breath. Even newer pollutants such as the gasoline additive methyl tert-butyl ether (MTBE)^* are adding to this dangerous cocktail of pollutants. Not only the nation’s water resources are being affected. It is estimated that motor vehicle emissions of carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, sulfur and nitrogen oxides, and carbon particulates in the United States cause up to $93 billion in damage to human health, vegetation, and structures each year.

FIGURE 1.1 Common highway engineering design practices remain troubling for the nation’s waterways. Common techniques shown here, such as channel straightening, channel widening, and application of sterile riprap, combined with an impending increase of storm water runoff, almost assuredly limit or prolong the recovery of this section of trout production waterway.

TABLE 1.1
Highway-Related Pollutants

Constituent	Primary Sources
Particulates	Pavement wear, vehicles, atmosphere, maintenance, snow/ice abrasives, sediment disturbance
Nitrogen, Phosphorus	Atmosphere, roadside fertilizer use, sediments
Lead	Leaded gasoline, tire wear, lubricating oil and grease, bearing wear, fungicides and insecticides
Zinc	Tire wear, motor oil, grease
Iron	Auto body rust, steel highway structures, engine parts
Copper	Metal plating, bearing wear, engine parts, brake lining wear, fungicides and insecticides
Cadmium	Tire wear, insecticide application
Chromium	Metal plating, engine parts, brake lining wear
Nickel	Diesel fuel...