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The Watershed As The Context For Preservation |
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Robert A. Durand, Arthur Bergeron, and Sharon McGregor
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© & Author Info |
As diverse as communities are across the U.S., they share a similar history of settlement and growth. A combination of geography, natural history, ethnicity, political dominance, and economics gives each community its identity, an identity that community residents come to cherish over time. Time takes its toll on this identity, as communities struggle with growth and development. If preservation of community identity could be made an overarching concern of communities, growth might not overwhelm them and they would at once achieve economic and environmental sustainability. How can we resolve this identity crisis that is epidemic among cities and towns across America? I propose that a watershed approach, and ultimately an ecosystem approach, to not only environmental decision making but also economic decision making, is the means by which we can restore community identity, preserve all that we cherish about our cities and towns, and achieve true sustainability for our communities.
Typically, when people talk about "saving the environment", they talk about "saving the water" or "cleaning the air" or "saving the bald eagle". Our air and water seem to be cleaner, we are "saving" more open space, and the bald eagle is back at record levels. But not all is well. Our urban our rural economies stagnate while the rest of the state lurches inexorably toward the great gray sameness that we sometimes call "sprawl." This picture suggests that we need a new direction, one which builds upon the successes of cleaner air and water, more and larger parks, and some restored species. Before we chart this new direction, we need to assess where we’ve been. I’m going to walk you through the assessment I have done, beginning with my hometown, Marlborough, Massachusetts, and neighboring Hudson, Massachusetts where I grew up.
Until 1860, Hudson was a part of Marlborough. The history of both towns is the same. The first white settlers who came to the region, about 350 years ago, found a tribe of local Indians settled in the center of town. The Indians planted corn and other vegetables in the center, and hunted for game in the area around the center. They drank water from the stream that meandered through the center. When they wanted to trade, they dropped a canoe into the Assabet River and headed downstream. If they paddled long enough, they found themselves partaking around the falls in what are now Lowell, Lawrence, and Haverhill, and cooking clams on what is now Plum Island.
In many ways, the settlers lived in town the same way the Indians did. They built their first houses close together, next to the Indian village. They cleared the land around their houses for farms, and they left the rest for hunting, fishing, and whatever Sunday picnics the Puritan minister, Reverend Witherbee, would allow.
There were a few differences between the Europeans and the Indians, however, differences that became more apparent with the passing years. First, the Europeans believed in cutting up the land into separate ownership. Second, the Europeans raised domesticated animals, and that meant they needed a lot more land. Where a family of four could grow all its food on two acres, each family cow required another three acres for pasture. Add in a few horses, and the next thing you knew, colonial sprawl was kicking in.
The third difference between the Europeans and the native Americans was by far the most important: There were a lot of Europeans, and they just kept on coming. By 1660, when Marlborough was incorporated, there were already five times more Europeans in Massachusetts than Native Americans. The consequence of this booming human population was no surprise. By 1700, the entire beaver, deer, moose and other large game populations of the state were nearly wiped out. By that date, only about 25 percent of the state was covered with forest, substantially less than the 80 percent forest cover we have today. All in all, the settlers did not seem to miss these changes. For those who wanted to, and didn’t mind digging up stones all their lives, there was farming. There were also small "mom and pop" businesses, like cobbling or milling, that blended into the agrarian economy. While the pay wasn’t great, the water was clean, the milk supply was plentiful and you certainly didn’t have to commute to work. If you didn’t like life on the farm, you could always move to the big cities on the coast, like Salem or Boston. You could also do something else. You could move to the frontier—to that forest, or plain, or prairie—exactly what your ancestors had done.
Marlborough, like most places away from the ocean or the Connecticut River, was just a farm town until the early 1800s, when two things happened: the railroad from Boston came to town, and some of Massachusetts’ famed industrial entrepreneurs came too—to build small factories, make things with cheap labor from the farm families, and export them to Boston and beyond. Suddenly, just before the Civil War, the small farm town started to change into something different: a shoe town in the center, with inexpensive housing for the shoe workers and fancier houses for the manager and professional people, surrounded by the old farms. Those houses, built in downtown Marlborough 100 to 150 years ago, are still standing. In 1960, Hudson separated from Marlborough, and the same thing happened there. Since the Assabet River flows through the center of Hudson, woolen mills that needed the water relocated to Hudson. Now, 150 years later, the brick mill structures still run along the old river.
Of course, in those days, no one worried much about the waste products, either on the farm or in the factory. If you had "junk", you threw it "away", meaning out back, or down the road, or buried "someplace." Manufacturing processes, like the woolen mills in Hudson and the Marlborough shoe factories, needed water for washing or dying. These factories withdrew fresh water from the Assabet River, and discharged wastewater back to the river (1). In Marlborough, the tanneries that were attached to the shoe factories simply dug big, deep, dry wells for the manufacturing residues, or, when things got more sophisticated, flushed the residues down the city storm drains. Nobody worried especially about any of these disposal practices. Workers worked in the factories and fished in the rivers, which their children swam in and drank from, without too much care for the occasional bizarre-looking fish.
In time, the expanding factories required more workers. That meant immigrants. The first big wave into Marlborough was Irish, and with their presence they turned what had been called "West Village" on the west side of town to "Sligo Hill". After the Civil War, they were followed by the French Canadians, people like my father’s grandparents, Memere and Pepere Bergeron. While Memere raised the ten kids, Pepere made shoes in the summer and went to Maine to cut trees in the winter.
While the factories boomed, the workers’ housing expanded and the professional housing became more ostentatious. The downtown expanded. The people still working the farms began to consider alternatives. Discouraged by the lousy soil and tired of plowing rocks, they either left for the West or started working with their relatives in the downtown factories. The percentage of Massachusetts land covered by forest, down to 20 percent in 1800, went back up to 35 percent in 1900, despite the fact that the state population increased from 500,000 to 2,000,000.
The "factory," part of the factory cities like Marlborough, flourished, connected to a larger world by the ubiquitous railroad and then by the electric trolley cars (2) Still, housing and factory growth stayed compact, because, like today, no one was excited about commuting to work, especially if that meant walking. I remember my Aunt Laura, who is now 99 years old, telling me about her daily 30-minute "commute", on foot, to the shoe factory. Of course, the factory was only about a mile away. Rush hour wasn’t bad, and you could often "footpool", or walk together with your friend.
Then Marlborough moved into the 20th century. The entrepreneurs, just like those today, started seeking more profits and cheaper labor, and moved South to get it. Marlborough’s population stagnated at about 15,000 people from 1900 to 1960, as factories deteriorated and closed and the housing stock looked increasingly shabby. But people went on with their lives. My grandfather Durand worked in the Frye Shoe factory, and he and my grandmother raised six children. My grandfather, who was one of the founding members of the Massachusetts Fisheries and Wildlife Board, loved the outdoors. He raised hunting dogs, and brought his sons out on hunting trips. While sometimes they hunted in distance places, like 100 miles north and west in Vermont, there was also plenty of land to hunt nearby, in the new forest located where the old 19th century farms had been. My grandfather, the outdoorsman, did not find hunting game in the woods incongruous with watching the river run pink. That was just the way "civilization" was.
In the 1950s, that great wave of progress, the federal interstate highway system, swept through Marlborough, destroying everything in its path, including Memere’s house. In the fall, passers-by can see, in the center of the cloverleaf at the Rte. 20 exit to I-495 in Marlborough, a perfectly shaped 100-year old maple tree with flaming orange leaves. My mother’s grandfather planted that tree, in what was then his front yard.
With I-495, came "progress"—first in the form of Marlborough’s first large subdivision, about 50 houses located just off the Rte. 20 exit, and then, in the late 1960s, in the form of the Digital Equipment Corporation, which bought a large existing facility and promptly built new ones. Eventually, Digital, one of the many giants now humbled by the changing world of high-tech and recently bought by Compaq, employed a lot of local people, but it also attracted thousands of newcomers to town. So did the other hardware, software, telecommunications, and related factories that followed. These new people seemed very different from the few remaining farmers and the remaining factory workers.
Over the next 30 years, a few important changes took place. The remaining farmland became a fairly continuous wave of subdivisions, with names like "Sylvan Acres" and "The villages at Crane Meadow". They all have the same basic look and feel, with 38-ft. wide roads designed so that a fire truck can get through with cars parked on both sides, never-used sidewalks on both sides of the deserted streets, and standard issue 4-bedroom "colonial" houses with monocultural front lawns. In the older, downtown neighborhoods, owner-occupancy declined while shabbiness and dangerousness of the streets went up (3). New immigrants, speaking Spanish and Portuguese, scared the grandchildren of people who spoke French and Italian. The old factories, which people were afraid to restore because of contamination, sat for a few decades and were torn down.
In many ways, my town has become two towns: the outside "donut" that used to be farms and is now suburban sprawl, and the aging "hole" of downtown and the older residential neighborhoods, fighting the curse of investor-owners and the perception that "old is bad".
What is the environmental movement? Before the 1960s, it was basically the efforts of leaders at all levels to preserve or restore some of the "wilderness" that remained from the frontier. The leaders of this movement tended to divide into two camps: the Teddy Roosevelts and Gifford Pinchots who wanted a wilderness for man’s use, one that could be logged and hunted, and the John Muirs, who wanted a more pristine, untouched and untouchable wilderness in which to meditate. While a grand debate about the purposes of the wilderness continues to this day, the undeniable common ground of these two approaches is that wilderness is where you go to get away from civilization.
In Massachusetts, two state agencies evolved during this period, each one dedicated to taking care of a "wilderness" constituency. The Department of Fisheries and Wildlife (DFW) was in charge of making sure that there was enough game to hunt and enough fish to catch. Initially, it didn’t seem necessary to worry about the land where the game lived or the rivers and streams where the fish swam, since these seemed to be present in abundance. However, as the land was eaten up in certain areas, farsighted planners at the DFW realized that unless they started acquiring land, hunting in some parts of the state would vanish. They also started looking for land next to lakes, ponds, rivers, and streams, to assure public access to these places.
For the constituency looking for a pristine and public place to hike, camp, and "get away from it all", the Department of Environmental Management (DEM) was created. By 1960, the DEM was managing 30 parks, containing a total of 100,000 acres of land, around the state. The parks were typically located on a lake, maintained a beach, and were designed to be used by families looking for a quick getaway in the country.
In the meantime, isolated from all this and having no apparent connection to it, the Department of Food and Agriculture (DFA) kept doing what it had been doing since its founding in 1830: providing technical advice to farmers and taking care of them as a constituency.
In the early 1960s, as we all know, the so-called Environmental Movement exploded. The movement was not motivated or driven by hunters, fishermen, family daytrippers, or farmers, and, in some ways, was actually in opposition to many of these interests. Instead, the 1960s Environmental Movement was really about public health, a dramatic response to an apocalyptic vision of contaminated waste sites and burning rivers. The problem, it seemed, was that numbers of large polluters, most of them in the private sector and many of them with knowledge of what they were doing, were maintaining manufacturing processes that were poisoning our air and water.
The response was a frontal attack on pollution, employing the full power of government. Practically overnight, federal and corresponding state laws were passed, requiring government permits for any significant so-called "point source" discharges into the air, water or ground. Those owning land that was already polluted were deemed responsible for cleaning up the pollution, no matter what the cost. The new federal and state environmental agencies mushroomed, as hundreds of engineers and lawyers were hired to administer and enforce regulatory programs. In the private sector, an army of similar size grew to represent the corporate owners whose economic lives now depended on the permits and other enforcement decisions of the environmental agencies.
The sums spent on cleanup of pollution skyrocketed. In Massachusetts alone, over $5 billion has been spent on the cleanup of contaminated sites since 1970. Another $6 billion has been spent on the construction of water and sewer plants and related structures. Additional untold billions have been spent on various new technologies, to either keep "pollution" from getting into the environment, or get it out of the environment once it’s there. Whole environmental industries have been born. In some ways, the results have been stunning. About 500 miles of Massachusetts’ rivers and streams, in which it was not safe to swim or fish back in 1979, are now swimmable and fishable. The quality of the air we breathe and the water we drink has, on the whole, improved substantially. Notwithstanding these gains, there are estimates that the cost of repairing and maintaining all the publicly-owned water and sewer pipes would cost about $5 billion, if anyone had the money. No one has even attempted to put a price tag on how many tens of billions of dollars would be required to clean up all the known and suspected pollution sites.
Those who run the environmental agencies keep looking for more money for these things, and their perceived needs run right up against the perceived needs of the so-called land agencies, DFW and DEM. In the meantime, all these agencies are competing for state capital dollars with the old folks from the DFA. The DFA’s major strategy in protecting local farms has been the acquisition of so-called "development rights" from farmers, buying their future ability to turn their farms into residential, commercial, or industrial developments. Everyone claims to be fighting hard to keep open space. However, over the last 20 years, while the Massachusetts population increased by only 6 percent, the percentage of land covered by development increased by 36 percent!
While all these great environmental policy programs have evolved at the state and national levels, how has my town fared? Not so hot. All the great environmental laws to clean up the old factories never quite seemed to work as planned. Instead of cleaned up factories, in Marlborough, we ended up with closed-up factories. About three weeks ago, the old Frye Shoe factory, the place that made the boots worn by many of the old Earth Day participants, was torn down. The Frye factory building has been empty for nearly 15 years, as one proposed occupant after another abandoned plans for the site because the cost of cleaning the residues of the old shoemaking processes was greater than the value of the whole site. One of the other old factories, where Rockport shoes were made until recently, was bought by Osco Drug and torn down. A 150,000 sq. ft. factory and jobs center is now a 15,000 sq. ft. Osco.
In the last 20 years, about 4,000 acres of former farms and forest land in Marlborough have turned into residential and industrial subdivisions. The last remaining working farm in Marlborough, Mello Lanes, where Mr. Mello has been raising and selling Thanksgiving and Christmas turkeys to the locals (including me) for years, closed last year. The subdivision homes are already under construction. While the big "point" sources of pollution in the Assabet River are mostly gone, the "nonpoint" sources caused by runoff form roads and subdivisions produce too much pollution. Consequently, you still can’t fish or swim in the river. As far as folks in the community are concerned, all the state environmental agencies and programs are distant and unknowing.
What is wrong with this picture? Over 80 percent of the citizens of Marlborough in particular, in Massachusetts in general, consider themselves to be environmentalists. The environmental agencies in Massachusetts have a staff of about 3,000 employees, including countless engineers, lawyers, and experts in various aspects of the environmental field. The Commonwealth spends over $100-million every year in bonded appropriations to support various environmental purposes. And yet, while the rivers seem a little cleaner and some of the big old polluters have been called to task (the hazardous waste site described in the recent movie, "A Civil Action" is in Massachusetts), there is widespread consensus that the general quality of life in my town and across the Commonwealth is getting worse, not better, that we are drifting inexorably toward becoming a state filled with decaying urban "holes" surrounded by spiraling and colorless "donuts", where the farms and factories are either gone or museums, where deer graze primarily in the backyard of people’s large tract subdivision homes. Does this sound at all like your town?
I have been thinking about these problems for a long time. In fact, focusing on the environment was the focus of my campaigns for election to the Massachusetts House of Representatives (where I served from 1984 to 1990) and to the state Senate (where I served from 1990 to 1998). When my friend from Hudson, the car dealer’s son, got elected Governor of the Commonwealth last year, he asked me to become his Secretary of Environmental Affairs. As of this writing, I have been on the job for five days. I cannot say whether any of the solutions proposed here will work. But I can say that, at least in Massachusetts, nothing else has. First, three guiding principles:
1) Focus on preserving both the cultural and natural resource heritage of communities.
As I described my town’s history, you may have found some similarities to the place where you live. Then again, maybe you didn’t. The important thing is that each of us lives someplace in a community whose cultural history was indelibly stamped by its natural history and geography. We all want our own community to be special. Saving farms in Marlborough could be justified theoretically in terms of preserving the views, the open space, and the connection of our citizens with their history on the land. Saving Mello’s turkey farm was important because going to Mello Lanes was part of many people’s Thanksgiving ritual. The old shoe factories in Marlborough were the reason why most of our grandparents came here. By losing them, we lose a vital sense of neighborhood pride, and an anchor to rebuilding our older neighborhoods. These landmarks would mean nothing, of course, in New Bedford, whose environmental heritage has to do with that port city’s early connection to whaling (remember Moby Dick), a tradition that has hardly anything to do with the agricultural heritage of Acushnet, the next town inland, but a lot to do with that of neighboring Fairhaven, the seaside community next door where the whaling ships were built.
2) When grouping communities regionally for land use planning and decision making purposes, group them by watershed.
In Massachusetts, all the early commerce that didn’t travel along the coastline went down the river. The rivers tend to run through the town, the old factories tend to be on the rivers, and many road networks connecting places run along the rivers. By focusing on watersheds, we are asking local activists to think regionally in a way that makes some natural sense to them, not in terms of regional planning agencies whose jurisdictions of multiple communities follow political boundaries. The watershed approach is compelling because it provides a clear geographical rationale for people from neighboring communities to concentrate on their shared interests. This leads, incidentally, with the most fundamental dilemma of planning: How should we sell watersheds as the "regions" within which planning and, consequently, all subsequent environmental and economic decision making, is performed?
This problem is, in my view, basically a political one. Regionalization of any kind tends to elicit cries of "home rule" and stories of faraway bureaucrats unacquainted with local needs. It is unwise, if not unfair, to ask locally elected political leaders to think beyond their political borders, in the absence of a political mandate to do so. Before political leaders can be made to think regionally, their constituents must be doing so.
3) Connect species preservation with community preservation.
Biodiversity, probably the central tenet of sound environmental planning, still sounds pretty arcane to the average voter. But make that endangered bug your community’s endangered bug, and suddenly saving the bug becomes as important as saving the town common. Interestingly, this is simply an extreme extension of the rationale for zoos, that they lead to the preservation of the animals in general by bonding people to them. To me, the best way to save the bugs, frogs, and other little creatures that adults often either dismiss or despise is through the kids. We will be launching a major educational initiative aimed at getting the kids out of the classrooms and into the remaining "wild" areas in their hometowns, finding the vernal pools, adding up the salamanders, and doing all the other things that kids like to do in the woods. My promise is that, given households where all the adults work, the only thing left to volunteer for is something involving your child. Get the kids to love the bugs, and their parents will surely follow.
But first, you may ask, why save the bugs? I propose that in order to save the land, the water, and the air, and to preserve the quality of our communities as places we will want our grandchildren and their grandchildren to reside, we must save the bugs. If the bugs go, the ecological web that supports us, too, will vanish. Like it or not, human well-being is inextricably linked to bug well-being.
Where do these guiding principles lead us? For my town and your town, they lead us to using the watershed as the context for preservation. In Massachusetts we call this the watershed approach.
If I had to sum up the one reason environmental and land use problems have gotten out of control across America, it is because Americans as a society have lost their the connection to the natural world. In Massachusetts the watershed approach has reconnected people across the state—including state and local government leaders, business people, and just plain folks—back to the natural world. The distinction between environmental and economic sustainability has blurred. The watershed approach is teaching us that they are the same.
In essence, the watershed approach is back-to-basics environmentalism. It uses the watershed as the context for community preservation (community, i.e., the community of all living things).
At the foundation of the watershed approach is the Massachusetts Rivers Protection Act, landmark legislation that I championed as a state Senator in 1996. The state’s major rivers define 27 watersheds, each with their own cultural and natural resource identity. 65 percent of the state’s rivers and streams do not meet some or all Clean Water Act water quality standards, despite about 4 billion federal, state, and local dollars that have been applied around the state to constructing and upgrading wastewater treatment facilities and infrastructure, and another 3 billion dollars spent to dredge rivers and filter water supplies. Steps are needed to address diffuse nonpoint sources of pollution to these water courses. More fundamental than direct controls on nonpoint sources—controls that should be administered locally, watershed by watershed—is preservation of the natural purification function of the land along rivers and streams. This is where the Massachusetts Rivers Protection Act comes in. It establishes a 200-foot setback (25 feet in high population or high-density municipalities, and state-designated densely developed areas) from the banks of rivers for the purpose of creating a vegetated buffer to absorb polluted runoff. With 70 percent of Massachusetts’ rare species inhabiting this riparian zone during all or parts of their lifecycles, the second major purpose of the Act is to preserve wildlife habitat in the form of a continuous wildlife corridor along our riverways.
The Massachusetts Rivers Protection Act establishes the setback by adding a new Riverfront Area to resource areas protected under the Massachusetts Wetlands Protection Act, thereby expanding jurisdiction under that law. Virtually all activities along the state’s 9,000 miles of rivers and other flowing bodies of water are regulated within this Riverfront Area. The controls are strict: to develop anywhere within the 200-foot Riverfront Area, a developer must prove by a preponderance of the evidence that there is no practicable and substantially equivalent economical alternative to the proposed project with less adverse effects, and that the project will have no significant adverse impact on the Riverfront Area. Few projects should pass this dual "alternatives and impacts" test. The Massachusetts Rivers Protection Act is a model for other states on how to protect the nation’s valuable river resources.
No other state has a Rivers Protection Act, but every state should adopt such legislation if it wants to reduce nonpoint sources of pollution to rivers and streams, make these waters fishable and swimmable again, and so achieve the promise of the Federal Clean Water Act.
Massachusetts’ watershed approach is a natural extension of the Rivers Protection Act. Now in its fifth year of implementation, the state’s Watershed Initiative strives to manage, coordinate, and integrate human activities within the natural boundaries of the watershed, so as to protect or improve environmental quality. In each of the 27 watersheds, diverse stakeholders come together in Watershed Community Councils to assess needs and agree upon solutions. The work of these councils is supported by a new watershed-based intergovernmental structure, consisting of Watershed Teams whose members draw from seven different state agencies (Department of Environmental Management, Department of Environmental Protection, Office of Coastal Zone Management, Department of Food and Agriculture, Metropolitan District Commission, Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, and the Office of Technical Assistance for Toxics Use Reduction) and four federal agencies (the Environmental Protection Agency, Natural Resources Conservation Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Army Corps of Engineers). The charge of the cross-agency teams is, simply, to serve the watersheds. The service orientation of the Watershed Teams and the collaborative dynamic of Watershed Community Councils dissolves the age-old barriers between federal, state, and municipal government agencies, the business community, and environmental groups in favor of cooperative relationships to accomplish watershed-based assessment, planning, and decision making.
The crowning objective of the Watershed Initiative is the allocation of federal, state, and municipal dollars to each watershed based on relative environmental and public health risks and according to where the most environmental benefit can be achieved for the limited dollars. We have begun to allocate dollars this way, through an annual budgeting process that is driven by the watershed priorities. In addition to the Rivers Protection Act, this watershed-based prioritization is just what Massachusetts needs to address failures of the Clean Water Act. In some basins, point-sources are still the primary source of water quality degradation, and additional dollars must be directed to these sources. In others, nonpoint sources are the culprit and will receive the lion's share of available funding.
Here are the most important features of Massachusetts’ Watershed Initiative for you to know:
Through the Watershed Initiative, we are coordinating wastewater discharge permitting, water withdrawal permitting, and monitoring activities in each basin on a five year rolling schedule. We are beginning to fold nonpoint source program implementation and stormwater discharge permitting into the same schedule. This coordinated permitting recognizes the relationship between water quality and quantity, the relative contribution of point and nonpoint source pollutants to nonattainment of water quality standards, and allows us to choose among a variety of regulatory tools the most effective means for achieving environmental quality.
Another component of the Watershed Initiative is a wetlands restoration program. Through this program, we are inventorying potential wetlands restoration sites within watersheds. The program will follow up the inventory with a search for project sponsors and funding for restoration work. Currently the wetlands restoration program is operating in at least three of our watersheds, with plans to extend to all 27. An initial objective is to restore 5000 acres of wetlands by the year 2010.
The Watershed Initiative recently took a giant step forward with efforts to ensure that growth planning and land use decision making are integral parts of the initiative. The Watershed Community Council stakeholder collaborations will provide municipal boards the technical support they need to incorporate watershed considerations into land use decision making. At the same time, there is tremendous bipartisan support for legislation I sponsored while a state Senator—the Community Preservation Act—that will legally and financially empower municipalities to protect open space and stem the tide of overdevelopment that is irreversibly degrading the character and quality of communities. Massachusetts should see passage of this legislation this year.
Other objectives of the Watershed Initiative as it is implemented in all 27 watersheds over the next decade will be:
The Watershed Initiative is continually evolving to encompass new opportunities for improved environmental and economic decision making. One of our latest innovations is to act on the obvious connection between our rivers and watersheds and historic preservation. In any given watershed, communities are linked by a common cultural heritage as well as by a common natural heritage. Early settlement patterns in New England followed river courses and spread to upland areas within watersheds. Each Watershed’s "personality" is therefore reflected not only in the natural features of the watershed, but also in the region’s historic structures and landscapes. It makes sense to plan and implement historic preservation regionally, by linking local historic preservation constituencies in a collaborative, watershed-wide network.
Our strategy for historic preservation within the watershed context is, first, to make community preservation relevant to a larger constituency. Community preservation is not just jobs and tourism; rather, a diversity of interests has a stake in community preservation and will both support and participate in such preservation. It is important that diverse interests are surveyed, in order to assess and document what each interest is seeking in community preservation. The multiple interests should be brought together regionally in the watershed context to prioritize preservation needs.
Second, we suggest that historic preservation interests from across the watershed join together to develop an action-oriented Historic Preservation Plan. In selecting specific tools and funding mechanisms to carry out the historic preservation actions, we refer such groups to a report entitled "Saving Our Future" developed by a Special Commission on Historic Preservation that I convened in 1994 while a state Senator. Among the report’s recommendations that will work best in a watershed context:
As Secretary of Environmental Affairs for Massachusetts, I wish to chart a course for the watershed approach in the new millennium that makes biological conservation and ecosystem integrity central to environmental and economic decision making. My premise is that unless the watershed approach includes protection of animal and plant species and ecological processes, it cannot achieve environmental and economic goals—because the living beings, together with the nonliving elements, comprise the life support system that sustains the environmental and economic systems.
My goal is the make the watershed approach an ecosystem approach. Watersheds are ecosystems. They contain smaller ecosystems, called ecological communities (such as alpine meadow, red maple swamp, or saltmarsh), and are nested within larger ecosystems, called ecoregions (for example, the Northern forest, New England coastal plain, or Mississippi delta). The ecosystem approach acknowledges a role for ecological science in mediating the relationship between humans and these nested ecosystems. It advances the following themes:
I will advance the ecosystem approach through a three-part program. First, a multifaceted and broad-based education program: My staff will work with established state-level, regional, and local education organizations and institutions to educate governments, corporations, and citizens about biological diversity and ecosystems; humans’ dependence on plant and animal species and ecosystems for survival; the ecosystem approach to environmental and economic decision making and the shared role of government, nonprofit institutions, businesses, and citizens in implementing the ecosystem approach; and how the ecosystem approach to decision making is the key to environmental and economic sustainability. Information about these concepts will be delivered through a combination of publications, radio and television PSAs, feature articles for local newspapers, school curricula, lecture series, a corporate education campaign and municipal government education campaign.
The primary tool for teaching the public about the ecosystem approach to environmental and economic decision making will be a new Massachusetts publication called A Citizen’s Guide to Protecting Biological Diversity and Ecosystems. First and foremost, the guide is intended to get citizens (nonprofit, government, corporate, and private citizens) out in their own backyards and neighborhoods to inventory the plants, animals, natural communities, and ecosystems with which they share their community. I believe that the public’s discovery and appreciation of local species and habitats spurs citizen advocacy for protection and restoration of natural resources before local boards, state and federal agencies. Our nonprofit and corporate education partners will assist in the publication’s broad dissemination and use.
Second, using the education campaign as a foundation, I will call upon existing and newly forming watershed collaboratives of government, corporate, nonprofit, and private citizens (i.e., the Watershed Community Councils and Watershed Teams) to incorporate biological conservation and ecosystem protection goals in their resource assessment and action planning. Biological conservation and ecosystem protection should be the core objectives that bolster the broader environmental and economic goals for the watersheds. I would like the data gathered from "Citizen Guide" inventories of species and habitats to be compiled in Habitat Assessment Reports for each watershed. Using this data, the watershed collaboratives can make biological conservation and ecosystem objectives central features of their Watershed Action Plans. These plans will be submitted to state and local governments and private corporations to inspire and support ecosystem-based decision making.
Finally, I hope to make some fundamental changes in how my environmental agency makes decisions. Policy, regulatory, and resource management decisions should be ecosystem-based, with biological conservation—the well-being of animals, plants, and their habitats—primary among the host of considerations made. Biological conservation and ecosystem integrity should be forethoughts, not afterthoughts, in environmental decisions. They should also be forethoughts, not afterthoughts, in economic decision making. I intend to reach out to economic development and transportation agencies, and to private corporate leaders, to teach them that the ecosystem approach is the key to economic, not just environmental, sustainability.
So, what does all this mean for my town? If the watershed or ecosystem approach was in place in Massachusetts ten, twenty, or thirty years ago, Marlborough and Hudson might have had very different destinies. Rather than the "donut" effect, with an aging downtown hole and urban sprawl replacing farmland further and further out from the hole, my town might have a vibrant downtown supported by a mix of suburban, farm, and conservation land in outlying areas. Diverse interests—including the common citizens’ voices—from within the communities and external to them from across the watershed might be united in working for common goals related to economic development, agricultural preservation, and natural resource conservation. These common goals would be supported by targeted financial and technical assistance by the federal and state agencies who have pledged to serve the communities and the broader watershed.
Marlborough, Hudson, and all Massachusetts communities still have much to gain from embracing the watershed or ecosystem approach today. There is urban revitalization and historic preservation still to be done, farms to save, and natural resources to protect and restore. The watershed or ecosystem approach, I believe, is the magic combination of bottom-up, collaborative, ecologically-based decision making that can enhance our environment, boost our economy, and make our communities livable again. I invite other states to join us in implementing the watershed or ecosystem approach to community preservation, and so chart a course for true environmental and economic sustainability in the new millennium.
1. I remember my grandfather, who grew up in Hudson, telling me about going to work in downtown Hudson. En route, he checked to see what color the river was—pink, purple, or green, depending on the color dye the mill was running that day.
2. The recently redone traffic circle at the center of Hudson has a beautifully landscaped circle that used to be the place where the electric cars would turn around.
3. New neighborhood associations have formed to try to overcome some of these problems, to bring owner-occupants back and embarrass investor-owners into fixing up the properties.
Robert A. Durand
Secretary, Massachusetts Executive Office of Environmental Affairs (EOEA)
Arthur Bergeron
General Counsel, Massachusetts EOEA
Sharon McGregor
Assistant Secretary, Massachusetts EOEA