Why Plan Green?

Green Infrastructure is the earth's natural life support system - a strategically planned and managed network of wilderness, parks, greenways, conservation easements, and working lands with conservation value that supports native species, maintains natural ecological processes, sustains air and water resources, and contributes to the health and quality of life for America's communities and people.

A Green Infrastructure network encompasses a wide range of landscape elements, including: natural areas - such as wetlands, woodlands, waterways, and wildlife habitat; public and private conservation lands - such as nature preserves, wildlife corridors, greenways, and parks; and public and private working lands of conservation value - such as forests, farms, and ranches. It also incorporates outdoor recreation and trail networks.

According to Webster's New World Dictionary, Infrastructure is defined as "the substructure or underlying foundation, especially the basic installations and facilities on which the continuance and growth of a community or state depends". When we think of infrastructure we think of built infrastructure such as roads, electric power lines and water systems as well as social infrastructure such as schools, hospitals and libraries. However, the concept of Green Infrastructure elevates air, land, and water to an equal footing with built infrastructure and transforms open space from "nice to have" to "must have." At the same time, green infrastructure helps frame the most efficient location for development and growth - and related gray infrastructure - ensuring that developers, citizens, and communities capture the cost advantages of location and create and protect household and community amenities.

What gives the concept of Green Infrastructure its staying power is its ability to invoke images of planned networks of green spaces that benefit wildlife and people, link urban settings to rural ones and, like other infrastructure, forms an integral part of government budgets and programs.

In recent years, there has been growing awareness by local and state governments of the need to plan for Green Infrastructure:

"Just as we carefully plan the infrastructure our communities need to support the people who live there - the roads, water and electricity - so must we begin to plan and manage Florida's green infrastructure" Buddy MacKay, Lt. Governor of Florida, 1991-1998.

"Just as we must carefully plan for and invest in our capital infrastructure-our roads, bridges and waterlines, we must invest in our environmental or green infrastructure-our forests, wetlands, stream and rivers." Paris Glendening, Governor of Maryland

"The key to quality of life in the city is our parks, open spaces, and wildlife. To preserve and enhance nature right here in the city -- this is the commitment we make as adults for another generation. We're trying to educate people about restoration so we can allow nature to be preserved in an urban area." Richard Daley, Mayor of Chicago, Summer 2000

The conversion of natural areas and working lands has resulted in increased habitat fragmentation, loss of biodiversity and wildlife populations, disruption of natural landscape processes, impairment of carbon storage and the degradation of air and water resources. It has also had numerous social consequences including the loss of vital services provided by natural systems (for example: stormwater retention resulting in flood protection; filtration of pollutants yielding clean air and water), increased public and private costs of providing services to dispersed development, a decreased sense of community and the loss of the connection people feel with nature and with each other.

To address these concerns, national, state and local governments have developed a variety of uncoordinated voluntary, market-based and regulatory approaches to resource conservation, species protection, facilities siting, air and water quality and land management. Local jurisdictions have implemented comprehensive plans. Communities have approved bond referendums and invested heavily in roads, sewers and other public works or "gray infrastructure." Increasingly, communities are investing in parks, open space, farmland and forest protection and in other elements of green space.

Although current approaches can count many accomplishments toward protecting natural systems and processes, improving environmental quality and delivering transportation and other community services, important objectives still go unmet. One can only conclude that this patchwork of well-intentioned plans and regulatory approaches by themselves are not sufficient to arrest the decline of species, natural resources and systems or dispel the feeling that we are still losing our quality of life and important measures of the "good life." Growth related problems just seem to keep migrating beyond city or county boundaries, plans and authorities… along with the suburban population.

Given the rate of open space consumption, one potential solution to this challenge is to begin to make Green Infrastructure an integral part of land use, conservation, development, and smart growth plans, policies, and practices.

Sprawl and the associated consumption of open lands are causing widespread concern in America's communities. For citizens and planners alike, the problem is not growth itself but the patterns of growth. Where do we put it? How do we arrange it? How does it fit into the area's ecological, social, cultural and economic landscape? Simply put, some places are better to develop than other places. Over the last decade smart growth has emerged as a key tool to strategically direct and influence the patterns of growth/land development. But just as we must address haphazard development, we must also address haphazard conservation - conservation activities that are reactive, site-specific, narrowly focused or not well integrated with other efforts. Just as we need smart growth to strategically direct and influence the patterns of land development, we need "smart conservation" to strategically direct our nation's conservation practices. Smart conservation is conservation that promotes resource planning, protection and management activities that are proactive not reactive, systematic not haphazard, holistic not piecemeal, multifunctional not single purpose, and multi-scale not single scale.