Cleaner, Safer, Cheaper

• Author: Lynn Scarlett
• Position: Visiting Scholar at Resources for the Future. She is a former Deputy Secretary of the Interior in the George W. Bush administration
• Pages: 34-39

Page 34 ❧ THE ENVIRONMENTAL FORUM Copyright © 2010, Environmental Law Institute®, Washington, D.C. www.eli.org.

Reprinted by permission from The Environmental Forum®, Sept./Oct. 2010

co v e r sT o r y

In September 2009, Philadelphia issued its

plan for stanching the overf‌lows of its sanitary

sewer and stormwater systems. Its dream is not

one of pipes and tunnels and concrete city-

scapes. Instead, its vision, “Green City, Clean

Waters,” is one of trees, open spaces, and perme-

able landscapes — a “green legacy for future genera-

tions,” according to local of‌f‌icials.

In its long-term plan to comply with the Envi-

ronmental Protection Agency’s combined sewage

overf‌low regulations, the city proposes to realign its

infrastructure, converting 34 percent of the land to

permeable surfaces. Using full lifecycle costs, plan-

ners concluded that every dollar spent on “gray” in-

frastructure such as CSO tunnels generates a dollar

and ten cents in environmental and other costs. Its

greening approach, in contrast, would meet CSO

requirements while also producing cleaner air,

cleaner water, and greenhouse gas reductions — the

proverbial win-win situation.

Philadelphia, like many of the nation’s cities, is

rediscovering the many benef‌its of nature. Natural

landscapes — wetlands and sea marshes, watersheds

of free-f‌lowing rivers and streams, forests, grass-

lands, even urban parks and greenways — purify

water; absorb pollutants from the air; help protect

coastal communities from catastrophic storms; and

prevent erosion.

As Philadelphia and countless other metropoli-

tan areas are discovering, greening ef‌forts are yield-

ing environmental results while reducing costs to

provide essential infrastructure. New York City in-

vested over $1.5 billion to protect and restore the

Catskill Mountain watershed to sustain the city’s

water quality, rather than spending up to $9 billion

on f‌iltration plants. Using similar ecosystem servic-

es concepts, Seattle reduced the volume of runof‌f

by 98 percent in one neighborhood with extensive

use of green infrastructure that cost 25 percent less

than traditional alternatives.

ough they can result in cost-ef‌fective environ-

mental solutions, urban greening ef‌forts sometimes

face regulatory barriers. At times, these obstacles

result from the absence of clearly developed mea-

sures of their benef‌its. In some cases, these ef‌forts

face institutional hurdles linked to agency turf,

fragmented government jurisdictions, and coordi-

nation dif‌f‌iculties within cities and between cities

and their neighboring countryside.

Despite implementation challenges, urban

greening is nudging its way onto city agendas across

the nation. Greening options have moved beyond

Cleaner, Safer,

Cheaper

Bottom line economics and a quest for

better environmental performance are

impelling a closer look at urban greening

and the benef‌its natural systems can

provide. But such ef‌forts are running into

regulatory barriers

Lynn Scarlett, Visit ing Scholar at

Resources for the Future. She is a

former Deputy Secretary of the Interior

in the George W. Bush administration.

This article is adaped from her report,

“Green, Clean, and Dol lar Smart:

Ecosystem Restoration in Cities

and Countryside,” published by the

Environmental Defense Fund.