Archive for the 'Sustainability' Category

Sea walls do more harm than good

Published on December 24, 2006 in Community, Environment, Governance, Mysteries, Science and Sustainability. 1 Comment

Glynn’s Folly, as the Summerplace Sea Wall Atrocity is commonly called, has already cost the public a fortune in legal fees, ongoing sand pumping, damages to adjacent property, and lost recreation value.

Additional actual costs must include the catastrophic erosional impacts on the adjacent public Wabasso Beach, immediately down-current from Summerplace. Lawsuits from Disney’s Vero Beach Resort loom as a potential future liability of the sea wall. And, then, there are the environmental impacts…

Recently the Vero Beach Press-Journal noted that the beach in front of Glynn’s sea wall is non-existent at high tide, having been washed away because of inevitable changes in beach dynamics resulting from the armoring.

All Summerplace residents have deeded beach access, and the right to use this beach. Now, their beach has been destroyed by the actions of a few, selfish property owners. These folks live in an unsustainable location: on top of the primary dune in a State-designated area of a critically eroding shoreline. How long will we have to wait for a rational, science-based solution to the current mess we call our County’s beach management policy?

Fighting for our National Wildlife Refuges

Published on December 18, 2006 in Community, Environment, Mysteries and Sustainability. 0 Comments

It all began with one man and one boat protecting pelicans on a tiny five-acre island in Florida. Now, Pelican Island, the birthplace of our National Wildlife Refuge System, is threatened once again.

For generations, residents of Indian River County have taken pride in knowing Pelican Island was a very special place. However, with this special gift comes the responsibility to stand up and fight to protect Pelican Island and its wildlife heritage.

For generations, residents of Indian River County have shouldered this responsibility. Beginning with Paul Kroegel, continuing through Joe Michael, Maggie Bowman, and others, they stepped up to fight for Pelican Island. Now, it’s our turn.

Today’s threats are real. Yet our ability to protect Pelican Island is being eroded by actions far away in Washington. In the end this place is ours to protect. And protecting it is a sacred trust we keep for the future.

This is about more than just a special place – the land, water, and wildlife – it’s about who we are. I know you will join with us in urging our elected representatives and officials in Washington to restore full funding for our national wildlife refuges.

Today, Pelican Island National Wildlife Refuge is 5,000 acres larger and over a hundred years older, and its protection needs more than just one man and one boat. We must fight for a renewed commitment to our refuges, one that will benefit wildlife and our community for the next one hundred years.

Conservation by development?

Published on December 14, 2006 in Community, Economy, Environment, Growth, Mysteries and Sustainability. 0 Comments

Florida’s population and development are projected to double in the next fifty years. 1000 Friends of Florida’s new Florida 2060 report raises the question of what Florida will look like when the population goes from today’s sprawling 18 million or so residents, to 36 million in 2060?

In our central Florida region growth will be explosive and vitually all natural landscapes will be fragmented or consumed by urbanization. It’s likely that there won’t be public monies available to buy enough conservation lands to sustain native ecosystems, and preserve our quality of life.
Mary Dawson, founder of the new Sustaining Community Lands, Inc. in Martin County, came up to Vero Beach today to share a story about an alternative model for conserving land as we develop. Building on the work of the Sonoran Insitute of Tucson, and the Liberty Prairie Conservancy of Lake County, Illinois, she told our Conservation and Rural Lands Group about the Community Land Conservancy (CLC) Model. Also called Community Stewardship Organizations (CSOs), these nonprofits are established when a developer is trying to set aside significant environmental land as part of the development process.

Lands within the development are set aside for conservation or open space, and the developer requires a transfer fee to be paid for the benefit of the CSO each time a home is sold in the development. The funds from transfer fees and other sources available to nonprofits (grants, memberships, donations, etc.) are used to hire professional scientists and land managers to maintain and/or restore the conservation land, and to conduct public outreach programs to promote conservation in the community. Such projects work best if the developments are situated within a larger landscape containing natural resources worthy of protection.
Conservation is directly paid for by development in this approach, and stewardship is local and nongovernmental. We welcome Mary’s vision, and hope that it offers one more tool in the toolkit we’ll need to build our future.

Gopher tortoise extinction is up to us

Published on December 12, 2006 in Environment, Governance, Mysteries, Science and Sustainability. 0 Comments

The plight of Florida’s gopher tortoise is largely in the hands of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. Recently, they have “uplisted” the tortoise from Species of Special Concern, which allows killing tortoises as long as certain rules are followed, to Threatened status, which will more tightly limit killing tortoises during land development. The new management plan and rules are not likely to be completed until June, 2007, however.

Dr. Jennifer Hobgood of the Humane Society of the U.S., is participating in drafting the new management plan for the gopher tortoise. She says that the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) is likely to honor all Incidental Take Permits issued under the current management plan, and may continue to issue Incidental Take Permits even under the new plan. Note that “incidental take” means “killing incidental to development.” It is not incidental to the tortoises, or to those concerned by the dramatic decline in gopher tortoise numbers incidental to our explosive growth.

Gopher tortoises are not alone. Turtles everywhere face the threat of extinction by habitat destruction and automobile predation. Humans are their problem in almost every case, as documented in Natalie Angier’s excellent article on the extinction crisis facing turtles, in today’s New York Times. The threats to turtles are global, yet protective actions in thousands of localities can help assure their survival.

Here in Indian River County, Florida, a concerned group of citizens has formed the Gopher Tortoise Coalition to protect and conserve our reptilian neighbors. Working together we are conducting our county’s first “emergency humane relocation” of tortoises, fully permitted by the FWC. Next, we need to address the Incidental Take issue through our county ordinances. Gopher tortoises will continue to be killed, and killed by entombment, for the foreseeable future, perhaps even under the new statewide management plan. We must prohibit take by entombment county by county if we are to stop state sanctioned animal cruelty and ensure tortoise survival.

The water cycle and sustainability

Published on December 11, 2006 in Environment, Growth, Mysteries, Science, Sustainability and Water. 0 Comments

Water is a naturally circulating resource that is constantly recharged, unlike oil. The amount of water on our planet will not diminish on shorter than geological time scales (Oki, 2005). Therefore, even though stocks of water in natural and artificial reservoirs are helpful to meet our water resource needs, it is the flow of water that should be the main focus in water resource assessments (Shiklomanov, 1997; Korzun, 1978; Oki and Kanae, 2006).

For example, the amount of water stored in all the rivers in the world is only 2000 km3 , which is much less than the annual water withdrawal of 3,800 km3/year. A more accurate measure of water availability is the 45,500 km3/year of annual discharge flowing through the rivers to the sea (Oki and Kanae, 2006).

Water flux is the most relevant measure of water resources. Therefore, the speed of water circulation is crucial. How long water molecules stay in a given reservoir, that is, their mean residence time, can be estimated by dividing the volume of the reservoir by the mean flux into and out of it. For rivers unaffected by humans, the mean residence time of the water is about two and a half weeks (Oki, 2005). In contrast, the recharge rate of some groundwater aquifers is very slow, and the mean residence time is considered to be hundreds or even thousands of years. When water is extracted from such an aquifer, it will take a very long time, measured on a human time scale, to return to the original volume stored; in practice, the water is exhausted once it has been used. For this reason, the groundwater in such aquifers is called fossil water.

The global population will continue to grow for at least a few decades, and water demand will thus increase. Reliance upon slowly recharging groundwater aquifers is not sustainable as a global strategy. Circulating renewable freshwater resources are essential to meeting the growing human demand for water.

Korzun, V. I. 1978. World Water Balance and Water Resources of the Earth, Vol. 25 of Studies and Reports in Hydrology. UNESCO, Paris.

Oki, T. 2005. In Encyclopedia of Hydrological Sciences, M.G. Anderson, J. McDonnell, Eds., Wiley, New York,Vol. 1, pp. 13-22.

Oki, Taikan and Kanae, Shinjiro. 2006. Global hydrological cycles and world water resources. Science 313:1068-1072.

Shiklomanov, I. A., Editor. 1997. Assessment of Water Resources and Water Availability in the World. World Meteorological Organization/Stockholm Environment Institute, Geneva.