Shrinking infrastructure – expanding nature

An article in this morning’s NY Times caught my eye in the hopes it might provide a good analogy to the type of watershed restoration that Wildlands CPR promotes.  While the title might seem completely unrelated to our work “An Effort to Save Flint, Mich., by Shrinking It,” the concepts in the article are dead on.  

The article discusses the ongoing economic crisis in Flint, Michigan and an old concept that is gaining new steam for improving this struggling city:

Instead of waiting for houses to become abandoned and then pulling them down, local leaders are talking about demolishing entire blocks and even whole neighborhoods.

City leaders, including the acting mayor, are considering consolidating the population of Flint into a smaller footprint, to create a more viable, livable and manageable city.   Some areas of Flint are entirely abandoned, others have a mix of abandoned and viable properties.  But with people interspersed throughout, the city has to pay to maintain everything – to pick up garbage on streets where just a few houses are still occupied, to provide police and fire protection, etc.    So why not cut their costs, dramatically, by being deliberate about where people live and work?  (Granted, it’s just an idea at this point, but it’s an interesting one, and they’re talking about it publicly.)

While the context is entirely different, the concept is the same as what Wildlands CPR promotes for the Forest Service and other public land managers regarding their road/transportation systems.  The Forest Service has a road system that was built for extensive timber extraction.  It no longer has the revenues to maintain and manage that system, and it no longer needs such a large system (more than 380,000 miles of roads cut through the national forests).  With an estimated maintenance backlog of $10  billion, the agency was able to maintain just 36% of their roads to standard in the western national forests in 2006, with similar percentages in the immediate years previous.  This inability to maintain the road system results in expensive and profoundly damaging impacts to clean water and wildlife habitat.  If the agency would commit to making informed, deliberate decisions about which roads it needs and which roads it doesn’t need, it could save millions, if not billions of taxpayer dollars by reducing the road system to an appropriate, manageable, minimally-impacting size.  

It won’t be easy to do this in the national forests, nor will it be easy to reduce the infrastructure, and then move people accordingly, in Flint.  Nonetheless, that’s just what people in Flint are considering.

Watching suspiciously from next door is Charlotte Kelly. Her house breaks the pattern: it is immaculate, all polished wood and fresh paint. When Ms. Kelly, a city worker, moved to the street in 2002, all the houses were occupied and the neighborhood seemed viable.

…

Mr. Kildee [the Genessee County Treasurer] makes his pitch. Would she be interested in moving if the city offered her an equivalent or better house in a more stable and safer neighborhood?

Despite her pride in her home, the calculation takes Ms. Kelly about a second. “Yes,” she said, “I would be willing.”

Flint, Michigan is not the only place where discussions like this are happening.  As difficult as such moves may be for the people affected, reducing the infrastructure in seriously declining communities makes economic, ecological and social sense.  To be clear, Flint isn’t talking about just abandoning these areas, but actually returning them to nature – restoring forests and open space to the people of the community.

If it’s going to look abandoned, let it be clean and green,” he said. “Create the new Flint forest — something people will choose to live near, rather than something that symbolizes failure.

If people can decide that it would be better for them, their families and their communities to live within a smaller footprint, and to return those abandoned areas to nature, public  land managers should be able to do a similar thing.   Even more significant, the Forest Service actually adopted a policy in 2001 to do just this with their transportation system, but as of now they have failed to implement that policy and rightsize the road system in any reasonable way.   Perhaps public land managers will end up looking to shrinking cities as a new model on which to justify future watershed restoration efforts.  The policy and regulatory structure is already in place, now we just need to help them build the political will and capacity to implement such programs, too.