Conservation Design Forum, Inc.

324 N. York

Elmhurst, IL 60126

Revised July, 1999

As a society, we are becoming increasingly aware that the earth’s resources are not limitless. It is less understood, however, that the ability for the earth’s natural ecosystems to mitigate the changes we impose, and still be able to continue functioning sustainably, is also limited. Jean Prior (1991) discusses this concept clearly: "People may modify the land to suit their purposes, but it is wise to remember that the land must be used in accordance with its capacities as established by geologic history and expressed in landscape shapes and underlying deposits, including groundwater and mineral resources."

Although vitally important to all life systems, water remains one of the most misunderstood and mismanaged resources on earth. When we are unaware of, ignore, or are wasteful in our relationship to the interaction of water with other natural resources, water can become a waste product and potentially a powerful source of destruction.

Our culture, however, has become functionally detached from how the natural world around us works, unaware of its realities, and unmindful of its capacities. We have lost touch with the importance of a sustainable cultural relationship with land and water, and largely forsaken the human relationship with the natural environment. Our technologies permit us to extract resources from distant places, and import them at great expense, allowing us to defer accountability for unsustainable behavior insofar as our limited resources are concerned. This curious capacity to deflect or defer accountability for our own relationships with land and water appears to be born of a belief that there are no real rules in nature.

Short of inexorable geologic change, the extent to which we mismanage natural systems, either intentionally or through a failure to comprehend the rules and inherent capacities of our surrounding natural systems, is the extent to which these systems become more dysfunctional. Mismanagement of water is a primary factor in this increasing level of ecosystem dysfunction. The range of adverse impacts associated with an inattentiveness to the relationships of water in built and natural environments is profound.

Many "natural disasters," such as floods, landslides, erosion, and other changes, such as loss of biodiversity, aquifer depletion, and climatic change can be traced to our failure to understand the ecology of water.

Understanding the human relationship to the interaction of water with the geology, soils, topography, flora, and fauna unique to a place is a first step by which a culture can learn to live sustainably. The purpose of this paper is to examine current problems associated with the human relationship to land and water and to suggest that there are creative and economically crucial solutions. It will focus on the ecology of water within the physical context of the Chicago region and the Midwest, and while the basic principles evaluated here are adaptable to other geographic contexts, the specific applications of solutions will vary.

Throughout the glaciated regions of the upper Midwest, most natural wetlands and aquatic systems, including the lakes, streams, and rivers were formed either from direct precipitation or from groundwater discharge. In our biome, aquifer recharge occurred prevailingly in upland landscapes, and few natural wetlands were formed from surface runoff water.

Historically, water infiltrated the deep-rooted vegetation of prairies and woodlands, setting up a flownet relationship below the surface that is dependent on topography and the characteristics of the underlying till stratigraphy. According to Richardson, Wilding, and Daniels (1992), there are four kinds of water movement dominant in soil development in the glaciated Midwest: 1) recharge, or water movement to the water table; 2) flowthrough, or lateral groundwater movement; 3) discharge, or movement from the water table either to or near the soil surface; and 4) stagnation, or slow water movement creating water table mounds.

The glacial geology of the upper Midwest is characterized by limestone or dolomitic bedrock, overlain by gravels, sands, silts, and clays derived from such bedrock. When water moves through these substrates, carbonates can dissolve in the slow-moving groundwater, and the discharge will tend to be rich in bicarbonates. Bicarbonate-rich water that discharges through upward movement due to evapotranspiration potentials will precipitate carbonates near the soil surface, whereas water that discharges near the water table, such as in seeps and fens, will remain both bicarbonate-rich and isothermic. Either method of groundwater discharge provides a surface habitat that is virtually stable in its physicochemical and hydrologic properties.

Although water in local wetlands varied enormously with regard to the mixture of groundwater discharge and direct precipitation, most of our more than 700 native wetland plant species are adapted to the stable habitats created by the blend of groundwater discharge and precipitation. Most of these species are denizens of either alkaline or circumneutral conditions.

According to Swink and Wilhelm (1994), there are five basic types of wetlands in the region of southern Lake Michigan. These wetlands can be classified generally as aquatic, marsh, fen, bog, and swamp. Unfortunately, few of these wetland habitats remain intact today, and few people are aware of their natural attributes, either their inherent biodiversity or their ineffable beauty. To help the reader appreciate the diversity of our local wetland habitats and the varied roles of water distribution in their formation and sustenance, the major community types are described below. (Note that surface runoff water, other than clean spring snow melt, is not a significant factor in healthy wetland systems.)

Aquatic plant communities are occasional throughout the region. They formed in potholes and in lacustrine plains where there was little or no surface discharge. Aquatic communities are sustained by waters from a surrounding watershed greater than that provided by rain over their surfaces. Generally, these excess waters filter down through vegetated ambient ground into the underlying soil until they reach impervious material, and exit by way of springs, rills, or seeps. Along our major streams, aquatic plant communities developed in alluvial sloughs and ponds derived from surface melt or tributary streams. Depending upon the groundwater contribution, aquatic waters ranged from hard to soft, or else they consisted of still-flowing alluvial waters.

Marsh plant communities generally occur along the transition between aquatic communities and drier communities, or in large flats that are regularly inundated by shallow surface waters for much of the growing season. Marshes are best developed locally in the lake plain, in lacustrine flats, and along the lower reaches of the Des Plaines and Kankakee river drainages. The sedge meadow, a community with affinities to fens and wet prairies, develops in large, shallow, lacustrine flats, and is dominated by sedge hummocks. The kinds of surface waters suitable for marshes are those received directly from rain, or as a combination of rain and the essentially clean overflow from streams fed prevailingly by base flow or snow melt.

Fens are wetland communities that occur in areas where the glacial formations are such that bicarbonate-rich ground water discharges at a constant rate and temperature along the slopes of kames, eskers, moraines, river bluffs, or even dunes, or in flats associated with these formations, provided the material through which the waters traveled is rich in carbonates. Depending on the circumstances, fens can occur where marl is at or near the surface or where peats are constantly bathed in minerotrophic ground water. Such areas can be wooded or open. Marly fens are generally found on open prairie slopes, and commonly produce constantly flowing rills discharging over the surface. Related to these hillside fens are the wooded seeps that occur sporadically on steep bluffs. As fens become peatier, there is a tendency for cation exchange to damp off, causing circumneutral or even acidic conditions, which can occur in the flat, black-soil prairies and in certain morainic depressions.

As the cation exchange capacity damps off further, bog conditions can begin to develop. Commonly, the peatland floats on a minerotrophic head of water. The deeper roots are thus exposed to calcareous or circumneutral conditions, and the shallower roots are imbedded in the upper sphagnum mat, probably in a more acidic environment. In large basins or in areas where the influence of minerotrophic waters is insignificant, acid bogs can develop. Related to the acid bog, often in sand flats or basins, are floating sedge mats that rise and fall with the water table.

Swamps are wetlands characterized by trees growing in large flats or basins that are poorly drained; most of the water leaves through evapotranspiration. They can occur in the backwaters of large, slow-moving rivers, such as the Kankakee, or in wet sandy flats in the Kankakee Sand Section south of the Valparaiso Moraine. They can also occur on moraines in wet depressions. North of the Valparaiso Moraine, in the lake plain, they are best developed in the large flats behind the high dunes, where lies one of the richest and most complicated forested systems in our region. It is characterized by a complex hydrology and is interspersed by gentle rises, shallow depressions, and hummocks, and consists of an inseparable mixture of wooded fen, bog, and mesic forest.

It is important to understand that the clear line of demarcation (edge) we often search for and identify between upland and wetland habitats in contemporary landscapes is of far less importance in the natural landscape, where the wetland/upland distinction is highly undifferentiated. Such concepts as wetland edge are more artifacts of a regulatory mandate than observable manifestations of the natural landscape.

Regional Hydrology

In natural areas, the primary recharge occurs in upland to mesic habitats, and discharge can occur anywhere along the spectrum from higher to lower gradients, depending on the relationship of geology, soils, surface and groundwater gradients, and other factors. Imagine the ecological attributes of a landscape mediated by a combination of flora, fauna, soils, and geology, such that groundwater was the dominant form of hydrology, as once occurred throughout most of Illinois and the upper Midwest.

At the time of European settlement, the Illinois River, draining more than one half of the land within the state of Illinois, was virtually still-flowing, with little perceivable discharge into the Mississippi River. According to Barrows (1910), the average fall between Hennepin and Pekin, a distance of 55.8 miles, is 0.82 inches per mile. "The Illinois is a river of relatively insignificant volume. Its natural low-water discharge is but a small fraction of that of the upper Mississippi and Ohio rivers. The nearly level channel and the small volume result in a very sluggish river, which has been described as a stream that more nearly resembles the Great Lakes than an ordinary river, and again as one that partakes more of the nature of an estuary than of a river."

Consider these accounts of the now beleaguered Illinois River, once one of the most beautiful and biologically fecund rivers in North America.

It is also significant that this portion of the continent, referred to by Transeau (1935) as the "Prairie Peninsula," lies within a physiographic region where the ratio of rainfall to potential evaporation ranges from 0.6:1 to 1:1. In contrast, in regions where the ratios are greater than 1:1, the tendency is for mesophytic forest to develop. Therefore, when Barrows did his study in 1910, of the approximately 37 inches of rainfall that fell annually across northeast and central Illinois, very little was discharged as surface runoff into the Illinois River. Instead, water either percolated into the aquifers, discharged slowly and evenly to seepage areas and fens or evapotranspired. Simple arithmetic tells us that a balanced system receiving a given amount of precipitation per year cannot continue indefinitely to evapotranspire the same amount and lose an additional amount to runoff without a considerable increase in dryness.

Weaver and Noll (1935) documented the absorption capabilities of prairie ecosystems and their unique relationship of water, vegetation, and soils, during their grassland studies. According to their findings, "The porosity of . . . moist grassland soil into which the water sinks is impressive. It accounts for the fact that on fully vegetated lands practically no erosion occurs except, possibly during storms of unusual violence, and even then erosion is seldom serious." In a study involving interceptometers in Nebraska, they noted that eleven rainfall events over a year resulted in the loss of about 1% of the total rainfall from a prairie dominated by Andropogon scoparius (little bluestem grass) and with a slope of five degrees. A wheat field under the same conditions lost more than seven times that percentage of water volume, and a fallow field lost more than nine times that of the prairie, or 10.2% of the rain that fell.

Such observations are further supported by an ongoing study at Iowa State University (Bharati 1996), where, based on eight sampling measurements, a five-year-old planting of Panicum virgatum (switch grass) exhibited the capacity to infiltrate, on average, more than 7.5 inches of rainfall per hour; an adjacent rowcrop on the same soil infiltrated 2 inches per hour.

If we wish to influence water infiltration positively, improve water quality, reduce flooding and restore wetland and aquatic habitats, the intricate surface and groundwater relationships of our natural hydrology must be understood and incorporated into planning and land use. It is essential that practitioners responsible for all forms of land use--architects, landscape architects, engineers, planners, developers, contractors, agricultural producers, and government regulators--consider the natural hydrologic patterns not only of the site, but also of the surrounding area or watershed.

Stormwater management is a consideration in nearly every development project, but traditionally, water is viewed either as a burden or as a purely utilitarian commodity. Professionals are trained to collect and convey surface waters quickly and efficiently from the site to areas remote from their purview, presumably to be dealt with by somebody else. They analyze, design, and construct storm drainage and detention/retention systems that attempt to confine site and regional impacts of surface water-generated storm flows. It is rare, however, for these evaluations to consider the natural hydrologic character of the area, or the hydrologic context in which the site and surrounding natural systems formed over geologic time: time measured not by decades or lifetimes, but by thousands of years of system development.

Every tract of land, no matter how large or small, is affected by and interacts with water. We are often frustrated by the fact that precipitation falls everywhere, not just in wetlands or in places designated by engineers and ecologists. Precipitation in the Chicago area amounts to about 37 inches, or about one million gallons of non-compressible fluid per acre per year. When it falls, two things can happen. It can infiltrate the soil and become an asset to local life, or it can run off and become a liability to life downstream.

Site development generally results in an increase of impervious surfaces associated with the construction of buildings, roadways, and walks. Even landscape systems, particularly those areas dominated by a typical turf grass lawn, can generate significant volumes of dirty surface water runoff. Nearly all of the intercepted water is collected and shunted away from the site. Most development sites contain an extensive, costly storm sewer network that quickly conveys a large portion of every precipitation event, discharging its flow into the mandatory detention basin, where its focused energy is released into the nearest stream corridor, or possibly a larger storm sewer system.

Discharged water carries with it sediments, greases, and oils from roadways and parking lots, and excess fertilizers and pesticides from conventional lawn care. Other areas have no detention at all, allowing runoff to flow uncontrolled and untreated into area sewers or drainage ways. In all cases, most of it is passed downstream to somebody else.

Much of the water falling on the ambient landscape is no longer able to infiltrate into the ground, where it once provided a constant source of groundwater seepage to sustain a stable stream hydrology, even during periods of prolonged drought. Instead of a stable watershed and associated groundwater hydrology, many systems are now dominated by erratic surface water hydrology. Waterways experience rapid fluctuations in streamflow velocity and volume, generated almost completely in response to surface water discharges. The force of these combined stormwater flows is focused on a landscape, with its inherent soils, fauna, and flora, formed with a completely different type of hydrology. The erosive power of this shift in hydrology is impressive.

Drainage ditches are gouged into the landscape where no surface drainage existed before. The collective runoff acts to carve out existing streams and rivers, resulting in deeply incised stream banks, subject to constant erosion and sedimentation at rates not seen since the glaciers receded. The loss of infiltration and groundwater recharge in the surrounding watershed, coupled with the depression of normal water levels in the stream system, combine to lower the regional water table, and starve the stream during periods of drought. On the opposite extreme, intense periods of rainfall, once mediated by a landscape highly capable of absorbing and using the water as a resource, now regularly result in flash floods in areas that were not historically subject to flooding. The economic, environmental, and cultural impacts of flooding are significant, and often catastrophic.

The instability of streamflow, coupled with degraded water quality, make it difficult for aquatic life to adjust. Desirable species of fish, birds, and other aquatic organisms must struggle for survival in a stream system that may experience virtual or complete desiccation during dry periods that exhibit increased water temperature and altered water chemistry, including low dissolved oxygen. Habitat availability becomes critically limiting to many species.

Whole sections of stream bank become overgrown with dense stands of trees and shrubs, effectively shading out the deep-rooted perennial forbs and grasses that are necessary to stabilize the soil layer. With the loss of a deep-rooted cover to secure the soil, the bare ground becomes increasingly exposed to erosive forces, resulting in accelerated streambank erosion. A new industry, streambank bio-engineering, has emerged to deal with this phenomenon. Unfortunately, many well-designed and potentially useful solutions are likely doomed to long-term failure unless we find intelligent ways of dealing also with the root cause: mismanaged water.

We have forgotten that floodplains, as we know them today, are not a natural phenomenon, but an engineering term created to describe a zone of flood-prone land that can change just as rapidly as the next upstream development. With each passing generation the culture becomes more distant from reality. Its words take on new meanings in accordance to the real experience of the young.

"River." What image does the word evoke? We picture a long channel, with steep muddy banks, that surges with brown roiling water after the rains, and during the "droughts," a scarcely wet ditch with shallow pools of gulping carp, discarded appliances, and abandoned grocery carts.

The Plight of Wetlands

Our society’s failure to comprehend and synthesize natural hydrologic processes into all forms of land use is epitomized by our management of wetlands. It is a common misconception that wetland systems throughout our region rely on surface water hydrology for sustenance, or that they are stormwater driven. Most modern wetland literature asserts that the basic value of wetlands is related to their ability to provide flood storage and to serve as a cleansing mechanism for filtering stormwater pollutants.

Yet, these two factors are most directly responsible for the degradation or outright destruction of our remnant wetland habitats and the poor performance of most wetland mitigation projects. Imagine requiring our kidneys and livers constantly to store and filter a random suite of toxicants. This problem occurs only because we have failed to take advantage of water where it falls, turning it instead into a destabilizing force to be dealt with elsewhere.

We are aware of no scientific evidence to suggest that naturally occurring remnant or recreated wetland habitats located throughout this region benefit from direct surface water discharge and inundation. To the contrary, there is overwhelming scientific evidence that illustrates that surface water inundation of wetland habitats will result directly in their degradation. Research indicates that changes in water quality, water quantity, and physicochemistry can significantly impact the function and sustainability of wetland systems.

The USEPA publication Natural Wetlands and Urban Stormwater: Potential Impacts and Management (1993), summarizes research findings describing stormwater impacts to wetland habitats. According to this document, changes in vegetative community structure, productivity, water quality, and hydrology are inseparable. Changes in vegetative community structure appear to be correlated with the time of year, water depth changes, and frequency and duration of inundation experienced in the wetland from excess stormwater discharge (Azous 1991; Cooke 1991; Stockdale 1991; USEPA 1985). Changes in water quality (chemistry and sediment loading) have the potential to affect the vegetative community structure and productivity, thereby reducing the availability of plant species preferred by fish, mammals, birds and amphibians for food and shelter (Lloyd-Evans 1989; Mitsch and Gosselink 1986; Weller 1987).

Wetland plant species are generally specific in their requirements for germination, and many are sensitive to flooding. Horner (1988) found that emergent zones of palustrine wetlands receiving urban runoff in the Pacific Northwest were dominated by the opportunistic non-native, Phalaris arundinacea (reed canary grass), whereas unimpacted wetland plant communities were composed of a more diverse group of native species. Ehrenfeld and Schneider (1990) discuss the relationship between stormwater discharge and changes in plant community composition. They found a reduction in indigenous wetland species and an increase in the colonization of exotic species due to changes in hydrology, water quality, or both. Van der Valk (1991) noted that wetland species may have limited ability to migrate in the face of persistently raised water levels; many species can spread only through vegetative methods under such conditions. The result may be lowered plant diversity in the wetland-to-upland gradient. This is evident in many remnant wetland systems, where the lower gradient zones subjected to longer periods of surface water inundation have exhibited more substantial degradation than the edges of the wetland.

Studies have been conducted to evaluate hydro-period impacts on individual species. Stockdale (1991) found that Typha spp. (cattails) survive well under fluctuating conditions, and that Phalaris arundinacea (reed canary grass) has a wide tolerance to water level fluctuations, though it does not survive long periods of inundation during the growing season. In contrast, Carex spp. (sedges) are highly specific with regard to hydrologic preferences. According to Frederickson (1982), modifying natural wetlands with impoundments may result in radically different hydrologic regimes that are not ecologically sound. The introduction of stormwater runoff or water control objectives, causing hydrological disturbances in impounded wetlands, could result in the development of stressful habitat conditions.

Changes in the pH of water associated with management practices or the introduction of stormwater also can have an effect on the biota in impounded systems. Most organisms are adapted to function within particular pH ranges, and abrupt or substantial variations in pH can have adverse effects on aquatic life, usually in the form of reduced productivity and increased mortality (Newton 1989). Urban stormwater can vary significantly in pH, so the variable nature of stormwater inflow could result in abrupt changes in pH in an impoundment. Since only a few species can adapt to conditions of changing salinity, pH, temperature, and dissolved oxygen, low species richness could result (Devoe and Baughman 1986). Given the predisposition of most native species to either ombrotrophic or minerotrophic conditions (Swink and Wilhelm 1994), wetlands dominated by waters with fluctuating physicochemistry and volumes are depauperate in species richness.

Another point to be considered is that the environment least capable of handling excess water is a wetland habitat that is already saturated. This is often the case in detention and wetland mitigation projects that involve the excavation and creation of emergent and shallow water marshland habitats that rely primarily on surface water hydrology for sustenance. Except perhaps for marshes filled pre-jurisdictionally or illegally, the creation of such habitats is not an appropriate form of mitigation. A wide range of factors must be evaluated to determine the appropriate restoration or water management strategy for any specific project or site. The solution must be one that renders the hyrdrologic condition more stable, and reduces runoff waters to a level that fosters ecosystem stability.

These findings, which are supported by many other studies, help to shape an understanding of the types of impacts and wetland degradation that are occurring in varying degrees to nearly all the remnant or created wetland systems throughout our region, particularly those that are most directly exposed to rural or urban stormwater runoff. Changes in surrounding land use and vegetative cover have altered the natural hydrology of our wetlands from habitats formed and sustained almost completely by groundwater discharge and direct precipitation, to wetland systems almost totally dominated by surface water hydrology.

As a result of these changes, increased runoff exposes surrounding wetland systems to periodic, repeated inundation. With accelerated erosion, surface water flows carry sediments that are then deposited within the wetland, altering the chemistry, nutrient cycling, root zone, germination conditions, and other critical growth factors. The combination of excess ponded water and sedimentation result in the obliteration of the more conservative native wetland species, those plants with strict physiological parameters that constitute complex systems. The high diversity of species that favor isothermic, groundwater-fed alkaline conditions and a very specific hydrological regime yield to a few weeds such as Phalaris arundinacea (reed canary grass), Typha spp. (cattails), Phragmites australis (common reed), Lythrum salicaria (purple loosestrife), and a handful of other species.

This default weed flora is tolerant of direct surface water inundation, rapid fluctuations in water levels, poor water quality, and sedimentation. The tremendous biodiversity, system stability, and biological function of our region’s natural wetland habitats are lost.

The "Outdoor Rug" Phenomenon

A trademark of nearly every cultural landscape across the country is the turf grass lawn. The aesthetic dictated by the lawn implies a landscape that requires regular watering, yet can never be wet, that must at once be short, yet lives on fertilizer. The landscape is essentially designed to divest itself of water and resources, the two input components it needs most. This is the legacy of a cultural attempt to create a water-loving landscape that cannot abide water.

To achieve this design, the topsoil is typically removed, the underlying clay is compacted and a thin layer of topsoil and sod is rolled out over it. Such sod commonly consists of Kentucky blue grass, Poa pratensis, which is not native to Kentucky or even the Americas. In the typical context, the root system is but a few inches deep, and the whole layer represents little more than a drug-dependent "rug" with an exaggerated floor pad. Because water cannot penetrate the clay floor and the shallow root system will die if it sits in water, the "floor" is tilted at no less than a 2% slope, often a requirement in local ordinances. More expensive or elaborate designs will include bumps or berms placed artistically throughout the landscape, and storm drains situated cleverly so that water drains quickly from the site, discharging into detention basins at all deliberate speed.

Current fashion makes it important to maintain the height of the Kentucky blue grass as low as is physiologically possible and still have something that looks like a green rug. This requires virtually constant mowing, lest grass blades here or there get taller than others. Mowing, of itself, might be relatively harmless if it did not use fossil fuel in unremediated internal combustion engines. For every gallon of gas burned, about 15 pounds of various oxides (mostly carbon dioxide, and other worse things), which the ecosystem of the earth has not seen since the Paleozoic (200 million years ago), are produced and given over to our atmosphere.

Since it is culturally important to grow Kentucky blue grass short, it must be fertilized regularly, which makes it grow fast, so that it must be mowed often. Inasmuch as no other living things are allowed in the lawn, the full aesthetic requires the application of as much broad-leaf herbicide and pesticide as the landscape maintenance budget will permit. When it rains, water quickly saturates the rug, inducing runoff that begins its course down the slope, carrying with it herbicides, extra fertilizer, and anything else added to the lawn.

To control the flow into local streams, engineers and designers of such landscapes have fashioned huge holes in the ground placed tactically to receive such waters and any toxicants, pollutants, or unused nutrients. There the water sits, its volume and any dissolved or suspended components to be metered into the nearest stream. Water from such landscapes throughout the watershed accumulates in massive storm surges, filling the rivers with filthy water, eventually passing it along the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico.

This regular movement of huge volumes of dirty water into the estuarine regions of the Mississippi River delta is contributing to a catastrophic decline in the productivity of the spawning grounds of the Gulf of Mexico. Meanwhile, having sent our rainwater downstream, we no longer have the water to recharge our landscapes. Since water continues to evaporate and transpire, our landscapes are soon dry and sear, often within hours of the last rain. The solution, inevitably, has been to install expensive irrigation networks to mine water from deep within the ground, a supply that is the largess of a landscape far away that still infiltrates and stores water in net amounts.

This contrived "living" rug phenomenon has lead to a curious infrastructural aesthetic: few other living things are acceptable on the rug. Only certain shrubs, planted in artistic groupings of 5s and 7s, and even-sized, lollipop-shaped trees planted in rows are allowed. Expensive plantings include huge clumps of mulch placed in small rings at the bases of the trees and shrubs. Trees growing in clay holes on bumps commonly do not live long, partly because the holes have either too much or too little water in them. In order to forestall the mortality of ill-fated trees planted out of place, a new industry has developed to provide underdrainage for the clay holes. The relevant point here is that such trees and shrubs are not really alive in the sense that they are members of a community and participate in the annual replication and stability of that community.

Other than mowing, fertilizing, and pesticiding, the only human involvement in such a landscape consists of workers who replace dead trees. Such landscapes are largely devoid of other living things as well, save, perhaps, gaggles of sedentary urban geese that have lost the capacity to migrate, . . . but not the capacity for other bodily functions.

Considering the sterility and lifelessness of our contemporary landscapes, one could get the impression that our culture regards the outdoors as little more than living rooms to be designed only with attention to the vagaries and vicissitudes of the design aesthetic of its day. The people of the culture no longer can see that there really is such a thing as an outdoors, or that it matters. Nevertheless, water remains a real thing, a noncompressible item that flows downhill. The more of it there is, the greater the volume; the greater the volume, the greater the potential flow energy. The greater the energy, the more resources it can carry with it. Water is one of the few resources that winds up on the top of the hill free, as a result of evaporation and condensation, rain, dew, or snow. Other resources, such as nutrients and soil, are less easily restored to the top of the hill. For them, the energy required is not sunlight energy, which mediates water restoration, but some other energy source, and, on the scale of the human lifetime, usually one that involves money and labor.

Water flowing downhill and carrying resources with it leaves the top of the hill bereft of resources, and render the bottom of the hill surfeited with them. The same force that brings water free to the top of the hill enforces evaporation potentials such that, in the Chicago area, about one million gallons of water are evaporated from each acre per year, which is approximately the amount that falls annually. The first principle of our contemporary culture seems to be: get as much water out of sight as fast as possible. Depending on local ordinances, the rate of disposal can vary, but all of it must leave. Just how the downstream neighbors handle it is their problem.

It is not sufficient, once the liabilities associated with the contemporary aesthetic are understood, simply to stop all the mowing, watering, fertilizing, and pesticiding, and "let nature take its course." This contemporary landscape has nowhere near the stability or biodiversity to coalesce into a self-sustaining, self-replicating ecosystem. If current human involvement were simply to disappear, the landscape would not "succeed" into some pre-Columbian Eden. Rather, if the Kentucky blue grass went unmowed, a few other weeds like bull thistle and dandelion would flourish along with the grass for a few years, eventually giving way to weedy shrubs and trees, such as buckthorn, box elder, Amur honeysuckle, and black locust. Over time, the few ground cover weeds would be shaded out, soil would erode, and the roots of the trees and shrubs would become exposed and begin to topple. There would be few butterflies, birds, or anything else, other than perhaps some roving gangs of starlings feeding on box elder bugs. All the while, water, soil, and other resources will run downhill, polluting the rivers.

It should be noted that the authors are not opposed to the use of turf grass lawns. There are many useful applications for turf grass. We are opposed, however, to the contemporary mores that demand we default the entire outdoor landscape to turf grass, particularly when other landscape treatments are available that are far more ecologically and economically sensible.

What would be so wrong, so unattractive, so heretical to look out upon, indeed, walk within, a landscape inhabited by a profusion of native grasses and sedges, replete with comely perennials and colorful butterflies, infused with flowering shrubs, and dominated here and there by groves of trees--trees with futures? Would it be so radical to propose that trees be free to grow branches in whatever manner the habitat permits, and to grow broad, expansive root systems with a diversely populated rhizosphere rich in water and mycorrhizal fungi? Would we be so unable to countenance clean streams and rivers that flourish with fish and mussels and abound with birds?

The Agricultural Dilemma

Water in nearby agricultural lands is disposed of just as foolishly. Prairie lands, with their deep roots and water holding root systems, once stored net amounts of fixed carbon each year in the creation of deep black soils. Very little water ran off the surface of the land. Most of the water either transpired through the living tissues of hundreds of different species of plants or seeped at a constant rate into the groundwater, only to discharge finally in fens and springs far from where it fell. The richness and fertility of Midwestern soils owes its properties to the hydrology of the grasslands, where subterranean reduction exceeded oxidation.

Weaver and Noll (1935) described the erosive effects of tillage on prairie soils.

This is hardly a new phenomenon. Amos Sawyer (1874) noted that:

Illinois's topsoil, once fertile beyond imagination, now chokes the last of life from the Illinois River. Demissie and Bhowmik (1987) note that the average depth of Lake Peoria in 1903 was 8.0 feet, but by 1985 it was no more than 2.6 feet deep. The huge fishery along the Illinois, which, in 1908, at its peak yielded 24 million pounds of fish, by 1964 yielded only 1.5 million pounds (Emge et al. 1974). The mussel-fishing industry, once huge, no longer exists. The reasons for this decline are many and complex, and Illinois biologists have been writing about the effects of man on the Illinois River for many years (Bellrose et al. 1979; Mills, Starrett and Bellrose 1966; Starrett 1972). For the first half of this century, the Peoria lake filled at a rate of about 0.05 foot per year, which was too fast to sustain a diversity of life forms. From 1965 to 1975 it was filling at a rate of 0.1 foot per year, and from 1975 to 1985 the Lake Peoria section of the Illinois River was gagging on 0.12 foot per year.

The Heartland Water Resources Council estimates that by the year 2040, Lake Peoria will have vanished as a water body, leaving little more than a narrow and muddy navigation channel. Mike Platt, executive director of the council, sees a grim future, the lake having "turned into willow thickets and mudflats by 2016, swarming with mosquitoes, with only a narrow, muddy barge channel open for boating. Marinas will have become ghost towns. Waterfowl will have fled and fish will have declined. Property values will have plummeted. What will properties along the river be worth when (people) look out over willow thickets and mudflats?" (Peoria Journal Star, August 7, 1996).

Soil erosion and hydrologic alterations to the landscape associated with conventional tillage practices trigger other detrimental side effects. A recent SCS study (1990) concluded that, of the original average 18 inches of topsoil across the state of Iowa at the time of settlement, 10 have been lost to wind and water erosion, and that, of the remaining 8, half the tilth (related to soil organic carbon) is gone. When soil loses tilth, it loses its organic matter, and therefore its ability to absorb water. The corollary to lost water absorption is increased erosion, and therefore exaggerated divestment of erodible resources, which then accumulate in somebody else's back yard in amounts too great to be useful, if not actually destructive. The long-term consequences on both the local and broader economy are frightening.

As the water in the soil is drained away, the reduction/oxidation relationships change dramatically. Whereas once the prairies held their water, and carbon was fixed beneath the surface in net amounts, annual row crop tillage now causes carbon to be oxidized more rapidly than it is fixed, a situation exacerbated by the constant drain of water through the tile systems and into the ditches. Consequently, during each growing season, carbon dioxide that was fixed millenia ago is now released into the atmosphere in amounts greater than it is taken up, potentially contributing to the problem known as global warning. This net release of soil organic carbon (SOC) is not a minor concern. Recent studies on the amounts of carbon stored in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), in which deep-rooted native grasses are planted in some of the less productive or more erodible soils, have shown that nearly ten years of SOC storage can be oxidized within a single growing season after tilling. These amounts can be impressive, since land in CRP, over a broad geographic area, can gain an average of 0.5 tons of organic carbon/acre/year (Gebhart et al. 1994).

Water is even overlooked as a factor in the interpretation of natural areas. In a polemic on the management of remnant natural woodlands in Illinois, Wilhelm (1991) points to the hydrologic changes occurring deep within the shade of Midwestern woodland areas. Much of the change can be attributed to the cessation of annual fire, which was practiced by the native people for millennia before European settlement.

Hydrological impacts associated with shortsighted land management practices are not limited to the Midwest. Note the following citation:

Dutton (1887) wrote this in his physical geology report on the Grand Canyon district in Arizona. Since then, overgrazing and fire suppression have so depleted the Colorado River watershed of its capacity to absorb water that the dramatic topography is able to conduct massive amounts of precipitation rapidly to this once beautiful canyon. The immense flow energies and scouring capacity of the water have rendered the canyon little more than a deep and wondrous landscape, bereft of the verdure described by Dutton. The uplands, once blessed with the deep root systems of bunch grasses and many flowers, are now heavily eroded and largely defaulted to compacted soils, shallow-rooted Asian brome grasses, and sage-brushes.

Consider the plight of the western valleys and bays. Currently, stands of pine, juniper, or oak, undisciplined by regular controlled burns, according to the custom of the native peoples, become ever more dense, and their leaves accumulate for years beneath them, unable to decompose as fast as they fall in the dry climate. The leaves shade away the ground cover vegetation, and therefore reduce the slopes’ capacity to hold water. Finally, when the winds are high and the humidities are low, the inevitable uncontrolled fire starts, with catastrophic results. The heat produced is tremendous--many trees are killed, the ground is laid bare, and life and property are lost. When the rains come, waters flow freely over the erosive, exposed soils, and fill the streams with brown, scouring, roiling waters that immediately debauch into the bays, befouling them as well. Soaked slopes without a stabilizing root architecture slip away, carrying everything upon them, including houses and roads.

Imagine the coastal ranges and the Sierras of the western states, currently so bedeviled by catastrophic wildfires, mud slides, and water shortages, again replete with healthy pines, flower-rich slopes and chapparals, and streams again filled with base flow waters. Today, people fear the fires and resent the mud slides, complain of water shortages, and decry the pollution of the bays, as if there were nothing that could be done about it. Attentiveness to the fire practices of the native people, the natural hydrology, and the local ecology could be incorporated generally into all manner of landscape designs to render a land rich in flowers, safe from uncontrolled fires, unsusceptible to mud slides, and nurturing to the major rivers and bays. As the awareness and correlative ethics of the people grew, so also would the health and safety of the land.

Impacts to historic biological systems, as a result of processes associated with European settlement, have occurred with a magnitude and rapidity without precedent in the history of the continent’s biota. In plant communities, for example, there is a striking difference between areas inhabited by a full component of locally native species and those inhabited predominantly by weeds. The conservative systems contain native biodiversity that is suited to the processes, and they will exhibit long-term stability.

Weed communities, by comparison, are adapted either to catastrophic disturbance or the kinds of activities associated with traditional cultural landscapes. These weed communities contain neither the biodiversity nor the aggregate adaptive ability to coalesce into self-replicating, sustainable systems.

In our contemporary, fragmented landscapes, the conservative elements of our native systems, supplanted in place, have neither refuge, effective migration routes, nor the time to adapt or move. Rather, their populations are decimated time and time again until their local extirpation or ultimate extinction occurs. The destiny of many systems dominated by weeds is further destabilization, during which resources such as water, soil, and nutrients are often lost at rates faster than they are replaced. (Swink and Wilhelm 1994)

What do we mean when we say we want to restore the landscape, or restore the health of the earth? What is it that needs to be restored? How do we know when the land is healthy? Such questions can be hard to answer for a people who have become so distant and removed from the idea that their relationship with the earth is integral both to the long-term perpetuation of their culture and the renewability of the earth's living surface.

One way of approaching the answers to these questions in human societies, for example, is to regard a culture healthy so long as it continues to renew itself with each new generation of individuals and families. The health of a culture is dependent upon the behavior of the individuals within it.

Each individual is born with a unique combination of genes that the culture has never experienced before, and is born into a time and circumstance that has never been before or will be again. Individuals are reared in the ways of their people by the family within the culture, and draw strength and experience from the knowledge and wisdom of their elders.

With an eye toward tomorrow, these elders have tested the knowledge and wisdom of their forebears, made scarcely detectable modifications in response to their own experience with their people and their land, and passed it along to young ones. In this way, the health of the culture is assured, as the people, utterly respectful of the experience of the past, respond to the subtle vicissitudes of an ever changing earth, so that their culture might perpetuate itself and replicate the full potential of human experience with each passing year.

Take the metaphor of the Turtle Mother, as propagated by many of the native peoples of eastern North America. The elder tells the story, a care-worn hand touching the shoulder of the young one. "The earth is on the back of the turtle. So goes the turtle, goes to earth." The young one can see that if he befouls the waters wherein the turtle lives, so also he befouls his own world. If the turtle dies, so also the people die. The circle of life is broken, and the earth falls off the back of the turtle.

So it is with the ecosystems of the earth with which human cultures interact. The warp and weft of life and human culture on any remnant acre of the earth is unique to the earth. No other complex of genetic expressions has such an experience of the singular geological, historical, and climatic definition of a place as do the organisms that have long residency in it. With each passing season there is a propagation of young with genes that are at once nearly identical to those of their parents, yet manifesting combinations of genes that have never been before. With the inborn "experience" of long-time residency in their habitat, the next generation is at the same time equipped to accommodate subtle shifts in climate and the gradual changes brought on by mountains and seas rising and falling.

This coevolution of life forms with the geological and meteorological transformations of the earth occurs at a time scale that is inextricably linked with the regular cycles of the earth around the sun, and the time periods necessary for individuals of populations both to transmit the experience of the place to subsequent generations and yet to allow small genetic changes to satisfy subtly new conditions.

Rates of change in human cultures and ecosystems are buffered against catastrophic collapse by an internal diversity that works to protect the whole against the development of exaggerated, untested individual behaviors or genetic malformations. Without such protections, rapid, system-wide changes can cripple the system's ability to renew itself and conserve its local knowledge of the place.

The health of an ecosystem or a culture degrades in accordance with the degree to which it destabilizes or simplifies itself, and there comes a time when there is not enough diversity within the system, with either enough memory of the past or enough potential for the future, to continue. The evolution of a system so compromised ceases.

Establishing a sustainable relationship with the living earth requires the reintroduction of a capacity for change. Water out of place is a primary agent in both cultural and ecological instability; therefore, our relationship with water is related to our ability to sustain a culture and the culture’s ability to sustain the living fabric of the earth.

The Challenge to Ourselves

We believe that sustainability is an overarching principle for all land use. To support the hydrologic cycle, ecosystem stability, and other critical natural processes, it is necessary to consider local, regional, or even global issues on land use of all sizes. In contrast to a sustainable approach, much of our contemporary infrastructure and conventional planning methodologies are products of a contrived visual aesthetic with little understanding, relationship, or grounding in the unique realities of place.

Such methodologies represent a cultural indifference to the function of natural systems, or even the energy required to maintain this infrastructure, much less any long-term consequences. This is especially true with respect to the dynamics of water. Site planning and development, as a whole, must evaluate local natural systems and integrate their essential aspects into problem solving techniques, such that design is based on historical patterns of terrain, water, and climate.

A primary obstacle facing sustainable planning and design is that no one profession has the depth of training and skills necessary to do it alone. Sustainability requires a multi-disciplinary approach. Traditional academic degrees and professional training lead us to believe we have earned the competence to solve very specific types of problems. As David Orr (1995) points out: "The ideal of a broadly informed, renaissance mind has given way to the far smaller idea of the academic specialist."

To overcome this impediment, the challenge to planning and design professionals is to synthesize a broad spectrum of expertise. The leaders of future sustainable development must be able to facilitate a dialogue between environmental scientists, landscape architects, engineers, builders, planners, architects, local, state and national decision makers, and a public that expects quality of life to be supported by its environment. It is encouraging to see that the seeds of sustainable planning, design, and development are emerging from a variety of disciplines.

If we are to shift toward sustainability successfully, we must first address several basic shortcomings that are pervasive in the planning and design professions, including landscape architecture. Design professionals must learn to recognize the drawbacks associated with continued reliance on the standard default, an unwieldy combination of visual aesthetics.

"If it comes down to a decision between good design and the environment, I’ll always opt for good design." Thus proclaimed a design practitioner in one of the professional design journals several years ago. This is a curious, disturbing statement, but unfortunately, it is a sentiment too commonly expressed among contemporary design professionals. How do the criteria for "good design" differ from those for "the environment"?

What is the controlling factor in aircraft design--performance and safety, or just aesthetics? Is not the performance of the land on which we live and depend just as important as the performance of a transportation vehicle? A safe, high-performance airplane is inherently attractive. So also would be a building and landscape well integrated into the place.

Sustainable design is more than artwork, and more than a painting or a piece of sculpture. It is the achievement of artistic goals within the parameters set by the chain of an unfolding past and future. Every form of development on the land, no matter how small, requires an understanding of the relationship between land use and its impact on water and other resources. The implications of this understanding must be disciplined by a cultural ethic that mandates a response that accommodates ecological and cultural stability.

Fellow humans have voices, and are subject to whims and temporal urges. They have faces and money. Too often it is easy to be seduced into believing that the exigencies of the day are paramount. Few people see the faces of plants and animals. Plants and animals have no money. Yet, attentiveness to the exigencies of their survival is profoundly informative in regard to the requisite relationship we must develop with the living earth.

Building a sustainable relationship with the living earth requires that our actions be grounded in environmental realities. In a culture-driven society, this requires an ethic. Since the beginning of the Holocene, and perhaps for much of the Quaternary, an important component in the shaping of the landscape has been mankind. Human beings are governed not only by random interactions within the ecosystem, but by choice. Fundamental interactions such as predation, competition, and foraging are complicated by the fact that humans can decide how to act, often with no immediate ecological parameter coming to bear on this decision, other than a human ethic.

According to Leopold (1966),

The design of environments where humans and other organisms interact, where actions create reactions, where the future is built on an understanding and appreciation of the past, requires that good design and the environment be synonymous. Regardless of scale, the design of sustainable environments means facilitating human purposes in concert with natural processes.

Once we understand the realities of place, there are infinite opportunities for creative expression; true design freedom is possible only within these limits. Since every place is unique, every design will require new creativity, innovation, and technology. A new aesthetic, encompassing every aspect of infrastructure, will emerge as we become more successful at designing whole systems. This requires a design process based on the interconnection of natural systems, and an increased understanding of the relationship between an individual site, the surrounding region, and beyond. The products of such design will be both visually interesting and sustainable if they integrate basic physical and behavioral factors into the solution. (Patchett and Wilhelm 1995)

As our awareness of the reality of sustainability expands, the attributes of environmentally grounded design will be simply and clearly expressed, without hindrance to a formal and purely aesthetic design paradigm. As Orr (1995) contends, "When human artifacts and systems are well designed, they are in harmony with the ecological patterns in which they are embedded. When poorly designed, they undermine those larger patterns, creating pollution, higher costs, and social stress."

In our opinion, if sustainability is to be achieved, it will require a collaboration of philosophy, science, ethics, and creativity. Water management is a key touchstone of sustainability. There is no other resource or form of energy, with the ability both to sustain or destroy, more powerful than water.

We were dismayed, although not surprised, to hear the conclusions of a recent report presented to the president of the United States by a so-called "flood expert," proclaiming that floods are a natural phenomenon, and that nothing can be done about them; that we can only plan ahead to save lives. To the contrary, floods, as we know them today, are not a "natural" phenomenon. In presettlement landscapes in the Midwest, the only substantial form of flooding generally occurred during the spring snow melt, when grounds were still frozen and incapable of absorbing the meltwater. It tended to create expansive, placid, still-flowing pools, quite a different form of hydrology from the snow melt dynamic in today’s urban, suburban, and rural landscape, the volumes and characteristics much altered by numerous hydrologic and hydraulic modifications in the land.

Until our people can comprehend that the devastating floods of 1993 in the Mississippi River valley were not caused by an unusual and excessive amount of rainfall, but rather, by an unusual and excessive amount of rain falling on a landscape sorely needing water, but stripped of its capacity to absorb it, both droughts and floods will continue to become more frequent and catastrophic.

A principal cause of many of our water problems is directly related to the self-deception built into land use policies of all kinds. Many policies consist of agendas that are characterized by unrelated values and narrowly focused priorities. For example, local stormwater management ordinances routinely focus on water quantity issues, because many voters live in flood-prone areas. Such ordinances reflect little understanding of water quality or the implications of how water is dispersed throughout the landscape, because few voters are aware of the ecology of water so long as it is not in their basement or inundating their roads.

Decisions made in such contexts may appear to be economically sound because they are supported in part by a series of federal, state, and local programs, but the long-term economic and ecological consequences of such actions are rarely recognized. A redirection in these programs that integrates sustainable economic and environmental objectives will give decision makers better choices and solutions.

Another barrier to sound policy is a lack of knowledge within the citizenry and their elected representatives regarding their environment and sustainable economic alternatives (DuPage County Environmental Commission 1993). No one factor will guide future sustainable land use and site development more than education. Making informed decisions is paramount to preserving the quality and quantity of the earth’s resources.

A primary goal of sustainable design in building and site development should be, wherever possible, to retain water where it falls, treating the water as a resource, not discharging it as a waste product. This will require new design innovations throughout the urban and rural environment in the form of buildings that detain and use water, redesigned site drainage systems that replicate surrounding natural hydrological patterns, and the integration of landscape systems with agricultural crops that have specific water holding capabilities and are uniquely adapted to the region. Many of these ideas, in various forms, have already or are currently being introduced in a wide range of areas around the globe.

Since precipitation is universal, our relationship with water must be developed everywhere. Every form of land use, whether urban, suburban, rural, or otherwise, must be based upon a clear understanding of the relationships of water within the physical characteristics unique to each place. Whatever the context of human inhabitancy or nature’s hydrology, the manor in which water is incorporated into the design, development, and management of the land should be such that water does not act as a depleter of resources. It is our proposition that a sustained economy and culture are most assured if priority is given to developing new paradigms that incorporate water into our lives in ways that sustain life and nurture our precious resources.

Today, we divest ourselves of natural resources and sterilize our imaginations in regard to creating economic growth, jobs, and prosperity. Envision, instead, a new economy, defined by the extent to which we reinvest in natural resources, as industrial, urban, residential, and agricultural North America is redesigned and rebuilt sustainably. Children who now are born into a world feeling that there is no hope for a sustained future can be enlisted into a cultural recovery program based on reality and a sense of tomorrow. Whatever their particular bent or special gift, their youthful energies, and natural openness toward tomorrow can be deployed within a new cultural ethic, one that engenders hope and a sense of self-worth–a world in which elders pass along wisdom, as well as knowledge.

James Patchett is founder and President of Conservation Design Forum, Inc. a multi-disciplinary consulting firm dedicated to the principles of sustainable land planning, design, development, and long-term systems management. The firm also specializes in natural features inventories and assessments, ecological restoration and reclamation design, watershed and regional systems planning, and post-construction site stewardship, management, and research. Jim received an undergraduate degree in landscape architecture, and master’s degrees in both landscape architecture and civil engineering (water resources). In over 20 years of practice, he has worked for academic institutions, a public conservation agency, and for both large and small private design and environmental consulting firms. Jim combines his training as a landscape architect and hydrologist in the development of natural resource-based site planning and design techniques involving the integration of native landscapes, the preservation and enhancement of natural systems, and the design of innovative stormwater management strategies. Prior to forming Conservation Design Forum in 1994, Jim served as Environmental Services Manager in the Chicago office of Johnson , Johnson & Roy, Inc., and is currently Chair of the American Society of Landscape Architect’s Water Conservation Open Committee and is heading a national task force responsible for the preparation of new ASTM "Sustainable Site Planning and Development" guidelines.

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Dr. Gerould Wilhelm, Vice President, Conservation Design Forum, Inc., is a noted botanist and ecologist, and co-author of the definitive text, Plants of the Chicago Region, one of only two such works in the world rated as "excellent" by Robert Frodin, author of A Geographic Guide to the Floras of the World. He is responsible for the development of the Floristic Quality Assessment method of evaluating the natural quality of plant communities. The methodology has now been adapted for use in Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, parts of Wisconsin and Indiana, and southern Ontario. Jerry is a nationally recognized leader in the ecological restoration movement, and has served as the Midwest Board representative in the Society for Ecological Restoration. Prior to joining Conservation Design Forum in January, 1996, Jerry was employed for 22 years as a research taxonomist with the Morton Arboretum in Lisle, Illinois.

A special thanks to Linda Masters of Conservation Design Forum and Jean Sellar of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Chicago District, both friends and colleagues, for volunteering their time and patience towards editing this article.