Kaid Benfield's Blog: Saving Wildlife and Wild Places

Sprawl and highways hurt wildlife – so why aren’t states spending the available money to reduce the conflicts?

2008-07-01T13:33:04Z

While the emphasis of this blog is on community development and smart growth, one of the reasons I promote those solutions so enthusiastically is to reduce development pressure on our working and natural landscapes. Many species of wildlife, in particular, need room to roam in order to survive, and when we invade and divide their habitat we change our ecology and diminish the wonders of nature. Not good.

One of the most menacing man-made problems for wildlife is our road system, which according to the conservation organization Defenders of Wildlife affects animals both directly with vehicle collisions that cause roadkill and indirectly via degradation, fragmentation and loss of habitat.

According to Defenders’ Habitat and Highways program, “Recent estimates indicate between 725,000 and 1,500,000 animals are struck on our roads annually. Wildlife-vehicle collisions can take a toll on species at the population level and, in some cases, push some rare species closer to extinction. Statistics for human victims are grim as well — 200 fatalities, 29,000 injuries and more than $1 billion in property damage every year as a result of wildlife-vehicle collisions.”

Beyond collisions, roads fragment habitat by creating barriers that animals will not or cannot cross and survive. As the Biodiversity Partnership puts it, this “chops the landscape into smaller, disconnected pieces that cannot sustain healthy wildlife populations. Species dependent on habitat interiors or with large habitat area requirements are especially vulnerable to fragmentation . . . Only certain species, such as those that are adapted to habitat edges or dependent upon human activity, are able to persist in these fragmented habitats.” Plant communities are affected, too, because barriers interfere with pollination.

My friend Trisha White directs the Habitat and Highways program, and she and her colleagues have released a new publication highlighting the availability of federal funds to help reduce these negative impacts. It is called The $61 Million Question: How Can Transportation Enhancements Benefit Wildlife? and it is designed to help conservationists, departments of transportation, and resource managers tap the available resources for good pro-wildlife, transportation-related projects, many of which are highlighted in the report as examples.

The title is derived from the amount of money that could be available, on average, to each state if the states allocated one-twelfth of their available “transportation enhancements” funds equally among the twelve eligible categories, including wildlife projects. Sadly, only around $11.5 million, on average, is spent on wildlife from the available funds. Trisha and her colleagues hope to give the program a boost with the report.

(Transportation Enhancements is a federal program that recognizes the negative impacts that transportation infrastructure can have on communities and the landscape, and makes funds available for all sorts of great projects to compensate. Other eligible categories include bicycle and pedestrian facilities, scenic and historic easements, welcome centers and roadside beautification.)

As conservationist David Burwell writes in the report’s preface, “it is up to state wildlife agencies and citizen advocates to sit down with state transportation agencies and map out plans for accomplishing these important ‘wildlife retrofits.’ Many state transportation agencies do not have the in-house expertise needed to strategically program funds to maximize wildlife protection as a co-benefit of transportation planning and system management.”

Some of the best examples in the new report are wildlife crossing facilities that have been built beneath or above freeways and other roads. The crossing beneath Harbor Boulevard in Los Angeles, at left, was built with Enhancements funding and restores connectivity between patches of habitat. The photo comes originally from the Puente Hills Landfill Native Habitat Preservation Authority (all images in this post are from the new report), which was instrumental in getting the project done.

Other types of projects include acquiring habitat to re-establish habitat connectivity, installing fencing or other structures to guide wildlife towards crossings, identifying collision hotspots through tracking, telemetry, and cameras, evaluating roadside vegetation, removing invasive species and planting native species along right-of-ways and on neighboring properties, and many more listed in the report.

Download it here.

Paradise Paved - "Discover Kauai"

2008-04-28T17:00:17Z

Please forgive the lame title reference to a 40-year-old (!) Joni Mitchell song, but my creative juices are running a little low today. Fortunately, they weren't running low AT ALL for the guy who made this video. I could try to put it into some kind of context, but there's no way I could introduce the subject better than the video itself. Enjoy:

We’re making a difference: sprawl is slowing as smart growth catches on

2008-03-18T19:52:29Z

One of the things that has challenged me as an advocate of smart growth is that, while we see substantial evidence of smarter development around us, we also continue to see a lot of sprawl. So it can really be hard to tell that we’re making any progress in our efforts to stop paving over every acre of our countryside and spending more and more time in traffic, emitting greenhouse gases and getting frustrated. Statistics have been hard to come by.

But now we have some, and I’m here to report that they do, in fact, show that smart growth is starting to make a difference. In one of the most encouraging data sets I’ve seen, central cities are now starting to grow again, while the rate of growth in outer suburbs is declining. This is a huge change: when my colleagues and I were researching our 1999 book on sprawl, the trends could hardly have been more disheartening: we had statistics showing that the central areas of Atlanta, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Cleveland, Washington, Baltimore and more were all losing jobs and population, while the counties around them were experiencing dramatic growth.

This is no longer the case. Fringe counties are certainly still growing, but the near-total claim they once had on regional growth has disappeared. New analysis of census data from Dr. John Thomas at the US EPA shows that, since the mid-1990s, the portion of regional growth (as measured by housing starts) that is taking place in central cities and counties is on the increase, while the portion that is going to the sprawling fringe is starting to decline. While John’s analysis is not yet published, he has generously given us permission to share it. In particular:

Cook County, IL went from roughly a 25% share of the Chicago Region’s new housing starts in the 1990s to over 40% in 2006
Fulton County, GA increased it’s share in the Atlanta Region over the same period from 18% to 27%
In the Washington, DC region, the District of Columbia, Arlington County and the City of Alexandria more than doubled their share of the regions housing starts (less than 10% throughout the 1990’s to over 23% in 2006.)
Denver County doubled its share to 20%
Multnomah County (Portland, OR) increased its share more gradually to roughly 25%

We’ve been saying all along that rebuilding the urban core takes development pressure off the countryside. Now we can prove it. Given that we as a country are continuing to grow in population, jobs, and households, imagine the additional sprawl if those central cities had failed to recover.

But wait, there’s more good news: use of public transportation is rising again after decades of decline, while driving rates are beginning to slow.

In particular, according to the American Public Transportation Association, public transportation use is up 32% percent since 1995, a figure that is more than double the growth rate of the population (15 percent) and substantially higher than the growth rate for vehicle miles traveled (VMT) on our nation’s highways (24%) for that same period. Americans took 10.3 billion trips on public transportation in 2007, the highest level in 50 years. The share of walk-to-work commuting has also gone up since 1995.

Meanwhile, although VMT continues to grow, the rate of growth in driving has significantly slowed, from 4-5% per year in the late 1980s and early 1990s to around 1% per year in the middle of the current decade. In 2005, the growth in vehicle miles traveled was less than 1% and less than the growth in population for the first time since the days of the OPEC oil embargo and block-long lines at the gas pump in the late 1970s.

Now, I could pull out a different set of statistics demonstrating that we still have a long, long way to go. Rates of land consumption and driving in the US are still far higher than in most countries; availability and usage of public transportation are still much lower; commute times and distances continue to go up; suburban congestion is horrible; the gap between where we are in greenhouse gas emissions and where we need to be remains immense; and so on. Even with respect to the new, more hopeful trends, you can make a case that not every increment of improvement is a direct result of NRDC’s advocacy (but do keep it quiet). ;)

But this is progress, people. Remember that the smart growth movement didn’t even exist in its current form until the mid-1990s. We didn’t even have a name for it until Maryland’s then-governor Glendening popularized the phrase in 1997. But we found the right cause at the right time. And the things we have been advocating are starting to work. Maybe I’ll take the day off tomorrow.

Think globally, act regionally: large-scale sustainability planning

2008-03-12T22:18:20Z

One of the biggest challenges to managing the way we grow and develop land, or the way we conserve land, is that our settlement patterns and our ecosystems do not match up with the way that we are organized to make decisions, the way we are organized politically.

The Washington, DC metropolitan area, for example, comprises not just seven counties and the District of Columbia but also ten independent cities in the states of Maryland and Virginia. That’s not counting the scores of towns and cities that are also parts of counties.

In greater Chicago, a researcher working a decade ago identified a staggering 267 municipalities and counties, along with an incredible total of some 1250 “governments” of one sort or another, including various school and service districts and regional authorities.

Much of NRDC’s policy work is oriented toward the federal government, or the governments of the states, plus work with city governments in our big-city offices, especially New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. All of these authorities have influence over land use, but all are also unsatisfactory venues for finding remedies: the federal government’s influence over private land use can be profound, but it is often indirect; the states have more direct authority, but some regions span multiple states, and many municipalities have stronger authority than their host states; the big-city governments usually have no jurisdiction over the places where sprawl is occurring and natural landscapes are threatened.

My own work tends to be either at the neighborhood scale or the metropolitan scale. Those are very productive and creative places to think about regional growth and smarter development. But another, potentially important, scale is emerging that can help our thinking: the megaregion.

These are places that are tied together geographically and economically, and are composed of multiple metropolitan areas. Last year I was involved in a book that identified nine such regions, and some of the thinkers involved with the project have now added another, for a total of ten: Cascadia (the Pacific Northwest), Northern California, Southern California, the Arizona Sun Corridor, the Texas Triangle, the Gulf Coast, Florida, The Piedmont Atlantic, the Northeast, and the Midwest/Great Lakes.

The framers of the national planning initiative America 2050 put it this way:

By mid-century, more than 70 percent of the nation’s population growth and economic growth is expected to take place in extended networks of metropolitan regions linked by environmental systems, transportation networks, economies, and culture. These emerging “megaregions” are becoming the new competitive units in the global economy, characterized by the increasing movement of goods, people, and capital among their metropolitan regions. Just as metropolitan regions grew from cities to become the geographical units of the 20th century global economy, megaregions – agglomerations of metropolitan regions with integrated labor markets, infrastructure, and land use systems – are rapidly taking their place.

While some very important and rapidly developing places (e.g., Denver, Kansas City, Nashville) are left out of this frame, I think these folks are onto something. Some of the issues that may be especially suited to megaregional planning and even (gasp) governance include intercity rail transportation networks, watersheds, and ecosystem conservation, just to start. Most of the states in the Northeastern megaregion have long worked together on air pollution issues, and have more recently joined together in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative to develop regional strategies for addressing global warming.

Indeed, the granddaddy of all megaregions is the Richmond-to-Boston northeastern corridor, first identified by geographer Jean Gottman as “Megalopolis” in the late 1950s. The Regional Plan Association, based in New York, has published some telling maps of the megaregion, including the two above.

The map on the left shows the region’s natural areas, with areas currently enjoying protection in dark green; rural or other natural areas are in light green; and the yellow areas are already urbanized. It essentially shows current conditions. The map on the right, however, shows what could happen if current trends are not altered: the existing developed area (as of 2000) is again shown in yellow; the additional area that under current trends will be developed by 2025 is in bronze, and the additional area that under current trends will be developed by 2050 in red-orange. That’s a sobering vision, to say the least.

RPA has published a very thoughtful and enlightening paper on the various characteristics of the Northeastern megaregion, and how we might avoid the worst-case scenario through such measures as a regional smart growth compact and cooperative landscape and estuary conservation. It’s a good blueprint for thinking about growth, development, and sustainability on a large scale.

tick tock, goes the (world) clock

2008-02-28T17:53:13Z

If you know anyone who is still in denial that growth is real and that we had better get our act together quickly in figuring out how to live and develop sustainably, send them to Peter Russell's World Clock. The site indicates, in numbers that change constantly in more or less real time, world births, deaths, net population change, oil consumed, carbon dioxide emitted, forest land cut, and more. It is startling to see.

There's other interesting stuff on Russell's web site, too.

Coal miner’s granddaughter

2008-02-24T22:14:34Z

While perusing the latest issue of the excellent and soon-to-be-lamented music magazine No Depression, I came across an eloquent review of Kathy Mattea’s forthcoming album, Coal.

Mattea, of course, is the husky-voiced and melodic folk-country artist who has won numerous Grammys and whose wonderful 1986 album Walk the Way the Wind Blows has been played, oh, 40 times or so in my abode. Wonderful, wonderful collection of songs penned by the likes of Nanci Griffith and Rodney Crowell, and about as good as it gets for the genre.

Coal, the new collection, is all about the culture of coal the mineral, and mining, in Mattea’s home state of West Virginia. My colleague Rob Perks was all over the environmental and social issues of mining country in his blog entry last week, so I won’t try to repeat any of that here. But, for a different sort of introduction to those issues, go to Mattea’s website, where you can listen to a thoughtful interview (with in-studio music! click on "Coal" at the top of the site) that was first aired on Public Radio International, and just listen. Mattea’s roots in that culture (two grandfathers who worked in the mines, a mom who worked for the union) are deep indeed.

As a onetime musician myself, I am tempted to go off on so many tangents here that we might never get back to the subject at hand. But I will say that the album – which apparently won’t be released until April – will contain some of the best songs of some terrific songwriters, including DC’s Hazel Dickens, whom I used to see all the time on the #36 bus to Georgetown when I lived on that route; Billy Edd Wheeler, whose songs were some of the first I ever taught myself as a teenager and who lives in my native Buncombe County, North Carolina; and the immortal Merle Travis. There are samples on Mattea’s website where, of course, you can pre-order the album.

I wish I could link Grant Alden's review of the collection in No Depression, but it isn’t online. It is almost poetic in places: If you live in or drive through the Appalachian coal country of West Virginia or Kentucky, a fine gray grit will cover your car. It will shade your house . . . [Mattea] is someone with whom you might have a long conversation, no matter who you are, and both of you would learn something.

I’m generally not a fan of political music, since it tends to be un-nuanced and not as good as I wish at being, well, either political or musical. But I have so many connections to this album that I can’t ignore it.

So check out the music online, and if you’re a music fan pick up a copy of No Depression on the news stand. (The March-April issue also contains features on two of Canada's finest, producer extraordinaire Daniel Lanois and singer-songwriter Kathleen Edwards.) You won’t be able to buy the magazine much longer, unfortunately. The issue after this one will be the last in print, although they vow to keep the website going.

I know, this post didn't have much to do with smart growth, did it? What, you thought I was a single-issue kind of guy? And, anyway, figuring out ways to cultivate and maintain a healthy economy and community (and, by the way, generating electricity) while developing and conserving the landscape is a huge part of sustainability. Coal puts all of those in bold relief. Back on topic in a more mainstream way next time.

First bathwater, then baby: NIMBYs win in Lancaster, but to what end?

2008-01-30T22:01:24Z

Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, has a wonderful character that is well worth preserving. The heart of Pennsylvania Dutch Country, Lancaster's most memorable landscape features are small Amish farms on beautiful rolling hills. It’s also the most productive farmland in the Commonwealth. History, culture, rolling vistas, productive agriculture, it’s all there.

The problem is that large-lot, automobile-oriented sprawl is threatening to overrun the county’s farmland, arguably its greatest asset. And, apparently, that is just fine with the good citizens of East Hempfield Township, who have just forced their supervisors to rescind a “Traditional Neighborhood Development” ordinance that would have replaced sprawl in the future with more compact, walkable, development that makes much more efficient use of land. They also forced the tabling of approval for a proposed TND called Independence that would have placed 3000 homes on roughly 300 walkable acres, rather than the 1500 acres that would be required to accommodate them under prevailing patterns of new development.

Look, I can’t say whether Independence was the right development in the right place or not. I didn’t see the plans or study the context. It clearly would have saved a lot of land, and generally speaking I like TNDs. But, in the wrong place, it could well be a disaster that would exacerbate rather than displace sprawl. What I can say, though, is that tossing the TND ordinance that enables compact development is not the right answer and, in fact, effectively guarantees sprawl. What I can also tell, based on the article in which the story is reported, is that the debate is not taking place on the right issues. As one resident apparently put it with regard to walkability, “you're going to pry my car from my cold, dead fingers."

What I suspect from a distance is that the right kind of groundwork hasn’t been laid in Lancaster for TND and developments like the apparently ill-fated Independence. As long as we keep presenting new development one increment at a time, of course we’re only going to find suspicion and resistance. But when citizens are encouraged to think ahead, and wrestle with projected growth information, along with good information about where the best farmland is and where the best growth infrastructure is, people almost always come to the right conclusions about where and how to develop, and what should be preserved. If they have participated in the planning, they understand that there are places and kinds of development to say yes to, and they can better accept the development when it does come.

They really need to do this. My fear is that, by trying to save their community’s character, many well-intentioned citizens in Lancaster and elsewhere may in fact be hastening its demise by staying with business-as-usual sprawl.

By contrast, the right kind of groundwork was laid in Ontario, as I previously posted, leading to their excellent Places to Grow plan. And it’s also the sort of citizen-based collaboration that takes place with the aid of one of my favorite planning tools, “Reality Check,” a mapping and visioning exercise being sponsored in locations around the county by the Urban Land Institute. That will be the subject of a future post. In the meantime, enjoy Lancaster while you can.

R.I.P. Sir Edmund, 1919-2008

2008-01-11T16:55:18Z

Sir Edmund Hillary died yesterday at the age of 88.

I grew up in a mountainous region, and mountains have always held a special place in my heart. They had everything to do with my interest in environmental values and, eventually, an environmental career. And, as nearly everyone knows, the highest in the world, Nepal’s Mount Everest, was first scaled successfully in 1953 by New Zealander Hillary and his lifelong friend, Sherpa Tenzing Norgay. (Norgay passed away in the 1980s.)

I’m hardly the only environmentalist to become fascinated with our planet’s wild extremes, of course. All you need to do to confirm that is look at the logos of environmental groups. It’s not coincidence that NRDC’s, for example, depicts a wild forest and a “spirit bear,” which requires remote wilderness to survive.

But mountaineering wasn’t all that Sir Edmund did. He avidly pursued the cause of bettering the lives on the Himalayan people, building their first hospitals and the airstrip that first gave them access to the outside world. A dedicated environmentalist, he came to decry the spoilage and commercialism that later came to characterize mountaineering and attempts by others to reach the Everest summit. He was pretty easy for me to adopt as a hero.

Hillary was not a city boy by disposition, and probably would not have been the kind of guy to pursue the smart growth dream of walkable urban neighborhoods and public transit that I usually write about in this blog. But I have no doubt that he would have understood completely that, to save earth’s wild, extreme places, we must also concentrate our human settlements, and make that concentration as attractive and livable as possible. I like to think he would have applauded our efforts. I certainly am proud to take this moment to applaud his.

Bye, bye, birdie

2007-11-30T19:27:08Z

Earlier this week, the National Audubon Society and the American Bird Conservancy released a new report warning that more than a quarter of the bird species in the US are in danger of extinction. Suburban sprawl is among the principal threats, as are global warming, agriculture and natural resources development. The red-cockaded woodpecker, golden-cheeked warbler, Florida scrub-jay, and the California gnatcatcher are among way too many species listed as imperiled by the two organizations.

This is obviously bad news.

Unfortunately, it is consistent with the threat to the entire range of wildlife and plant species whose habitat is being irrevocably lost or fragmented due to runaway development. An earlier report issued by the National Wildlife Federation, Smart Growth America, and NatureServe found that nearly a third of the nation’s animal and plant species are at risk, and that as many as 500 species that once lived in the US may already be extinct. That report concluded that “the primary threat to most of these species is the destruction or degradation of the habitats on which they depend. While many human activities—from agriculture to military training—can alter natural habitats, the conversion of green space to urban and suburban uses is the fastest growing threat to the nation’s wild species.” The report cites California research demonstrating that, in that state, sprawl is the leading cause of imperilment.

Although this is discouraging, it shouldn’t be surprising. Check out the two maps of Maryland accompanying this post. Look first at the one just to the left, with the yellow detail. The large blue body of water is the Chesapeake Bay; the square-ish boundary in the center is the city of Baltimore. Washington, DC’s suburbs are to the southwest of Baltimore. The detail in yellow represents the locations of all the building permits issued from 1900-1960. Not too bad, really. There's a lot of open space left.

But now look at the one below, in which the red detail represents the location of all the building permits issued from 1961-1997. What a dramatic difference. Is it any wonder that we have critters who aren’t doing too well?

I wish the Audubon – American Bird Conservancy report this week had been more aggressive in identifying the smart growth solutions to the chaotic habitat degradation caused by sprawl. Unfortunately, it never quite gets to the issue. But the NWF report is unambiguous on the subject: “if the U.S. is to protect its current array of plant and animal species for future generations, the nation must plan carefully to guide development so that it leaves life-sustaining green infrastructure intact.” And it identifies a six-point strategy, including the establishment of urban growth boundaries, for doing so.

At NRDC, we do a lot of work to save endangered landscapes and wild places, and we do a lot of work to promote the smart growth solutions to suburban sprawl. We also do some endangered species work, and we strongly support those organizations that focus on it, including NWF, Audubon, Defenders of Wildlife, and others. With respect to endangered birds, my colleague Joel Reynolds did pioneering work for years to protect the habitat of the California gnatcatcher, and made a difference. We will being doing more for wildlife, and I hope smart growth will play a major role in our strategy.

Incidentally, “Bye, Bye, Birdie” was my high school play, a musical. I wasn’t in it, and to my classmates I say, you’re welcome.

Best-laid plans: Ontario gets it right on growth

2007-11-01T15:22:53Z

I’ve been mulling whether or not to post this particular blog entry because, truth to tell, it’s a little wonky and abstract compared to its predecessors. But it’s a great story that needs to be spread.

In particular, ours is a growing country. Not everyone may like that, but it is happening. As a result, it doesn’t work simply to oppose development. All that does is channel the growth to the places that complain the least, which in many cases may be forests or cornfields. As the old saw goes, the reason developers build in the countryside is “because cows and corn don’t come to public hearings.” The result of always saying no is only more sprawl, more pollution, and more of all the things we hate.

The only constructive environmental response is to manage growth, and channel it to the places where it minimizes per-capita environmental impacts or, even better, to places, like distressed inner cities, that would benefit from more investment, jobs and people.

That is exactly what the growth plan for the region of Ontario surrounding Toronto, the “Greater Golden Horseshoe,” does. Canada is a growing country, too, and it now can boast the best land-use plan I have ever seen.

The Horseshoe, a region about the size of New Hampshire in area, is forecast to grow by 3.7 million people and 1.8 million jobs by 2031. It is already home to a quarter of Canada’s population and will soon be the third-largest urban region in North America. Imagine the consequences if development is allowed to spread all over the land, without good planning. Imagine the lost landscape, the additional roads and traffic, the pollution, the lost habitat, the global warming emissions.

Thanks to Ontario’s foresighted government, that won’t happen. Instead, the most important urban region in Canada is likely to grow in a relatively compact, orderly manner that, compared to unchecked sprawl, will reduce pollution, conserve natural and financial resources, and save land.

In particular, the 25-year Places to Grow plan protects the environment by avoiding sprawl and channeling growth to places that already have or can accommodate the infrastructure to handle it. It plans for a variety of types of communities for residents to choose. And it saves land. Here’s how:

By 2015, a minimum of 40 percent of new residential growth in each municipality must occur not on what is now forest or farmland but within existing cities and towns, via such measures as building on vacant parcels, converting brownfields and grayfields to new uses, and redeveloping obsolete properties.
The plan places special emphasis on downtowns, transit corridors, and “major transit station areas.” Downtown areas, in particular, must strive to accommodate about 90 residents and/or jobs per acre by 2031, with highly urban Toronto’s target set at twice that amount.
The plan recognizes that not all growth can occur in existing communities, and municipalities may also go through a process to designate greenfield areas for development. But greenfield development, when it occurs, must create complete communities, with development configurations and streets that support transit services, walking, biking, parks, and a mix of housing and jobs. And it must be built to a scale that makes efficient use of land, accommodating a minimum of about 20 residents and jobs per acre.
All growth areas must accommodate affordable housing.
Development generally may not occur outside of the designated areas. Areas important to natural resources or the environment must be protected, and there are restrictions on development of prime farmland.
To support the plan, the government hopes to provide $8 billion in public transit investments and other necessary infrastructure over five years.

We know from a large body of research that growing in a compact rather than sprawling pattern will reduce driving, and associated carbon and other emissions, compared to sprawl. As a general rule, compact development will reduce driving 20-40% compared to sprawl, depending on circumstances. It can also reduce stormwater runoff by a comparable or greater amount per capita. In this context, Places to Grow already represents a huge triumph for the environment. But the story doesn’t end there.

Perhaps the greatest, and certainly the most visible, contribution of the new plan is that it will allow the continued protection of a greenbelt comprising 1.8 million acres of rural and conservation land. Check out the map image of the Horseshoe just to the left. The large purple area is Toronto and its immediate suburbs; the large blue area is Lake Ontario. And everything you see in green on the map will remain green on the ground. (At least when there’s no snow.) More than anything, this illustrates the potential of smart growth: if we allow our existing communities to develop, and we build to a compact, walkable scale, we can save the countryside. I attended a meeting once when former US EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman said, “For every acre we are able to develop or redevelop in town, we can save 4-5 acres outside.” That potential is being made real in Ontario.

And wait, it gets even better. Places to Grow has the full force and effect of law, thanks to Ontario’s Places to Grow Act of 2005. That law requires that local planning decisions, including zoning, conform to the policies in the regional plan. If there is a discrepancy, the provincial government has the authority to amend municipal decisions.

Major transgressions are unlikely, because of all the groundwork that has been laid for the plan. The process began six years ago, with the convening of a “smart growth panel” comprising representatives from municipalities, the development industry, environmental groups, and the academy. That panel’s recommendations led to the first draft growth plan, in 2004, and a series of revised drafts, multi-stakeholder workshops, public meetings and one-on-one meetings with key municipal and civic leaders. Places to Grow wasn’t handed down from above so much as jointly constructed by its stakeholders. They got it right.