There could not be a better time to think about sustainable land development. There are a number of dynamics that allow me to make that statement, in particular:

• The economics of energy and water are changing perspectives on development.n Communities are assuming management responsibility for their common-pool resources.

• Consideration for the establishment of a viable resilience among economic, ecological and social interests (the “triple bottom line” of sustainability) will make planning more continuous and adaptive than comprehensive.

• The values of habitat, diversity of species and natural-systems services previously externalized in our economic models will be increasingly internalized.
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• Water and wastewater technologies, properly integrated with community and private interests are revealing value propositions that were not visible under traditional approaches.

Specific to wastewater management, consider the long-established processes of the past and the innovative potentials of the future made evident with a glimpse at the Boston suburbs and Cave Springs, Arkansas.

Greater Boston
“Give me one home per acre,” a developer in Boston’s metro west suburbs exclaimed, “and I will give you back 50 percent open space, a performance-based, wastewater-treatment system and $11,000 to $20,000 in impact fees.” Tragically what the developer was telling us is that the cost of regulation in some Boston suburbs was the price of a one-acre house lot plus the price of advanced wastewater treatment and up to $20,000 in impact fees. In other words, between $100,000 to $200,000 and the costs associated with waiting almost four years to complete the permitting process.

Approximately 60 percent of the water flowing into the metropolitan Boston sewers is inflow or infiltration or essentially ground water resources. The most easily permitted alternative—a septic system—frequently exceeds $30,000 per home. Take note that 31 states consider the septic system to be their first or second largest source of groundwater pollution.

I make the point because it emphasizes that neither the traditional, platform-centric approach to wastewater management that we know as central sewer, nor its default alternative—the onsite septic system—are sufficient to address the larger issues involved in sustaining human community development. Nevertheless, they are locked in place by legislation and regulation.

Without a viable, adaptive, affordable,-beyond-compliance and readily-deployable infrastructure that serves as an interface between human communities and natural systems, sustainable, prudent land development is at risk or restricted, if not inhibited.

At some administrative levels, the EPA recognizes this is an issue of governance and it is struggling to be heard.

Shortly after his arrival in Washington in 2001, Tracy Mehan (assistant EPA director for the Office of Water) established a new expectation for the agency and the country. In his presentation to the Environmental Economics Advisory Committee on November 30, 2001, “Building on Success – Going Beyond Regulation,” he exposed the institutional obstacles to the practice of sustainable principles:

•  “The remaining water pollution problems are significantly more complex when compared with the problems that we have already addressed.”
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•  “Point source controls alone are not capable of achieving or maintaining ambient environmental standards.”
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• “The assimilative capacity of our ­environment is limited and the technological and economic limitations of our existing regulatory framework are at hand.”
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•  “Complex problems require innovative solutions and entail a change in ­paradigm.”

Mehan suggests that there is no path to sustainable development with respect to water other than to collaboratively engage the complexity with which we are confronted. Many developers know this. Many have been very creative in pursuing alternatives. However, for the most part American corporate innovation is not trusted in the public sphere. Affirmation is met by regulatory institutions that have no capacity to negotiate for their objectives in the affirmative. Affirmation in a command-and-control structure at best manifests itself as “maybe,” and a regulated “maybe” drives up risk and cost.

In order to achieve a natural balance between the needs of human communities and the natural systems upon which they depend, we must create an adaptive interface that places processing power where it is needed in a centrally managed network.

Cave Springs
On the edge of a sensitive, Ozark-Mountain ecosystem and next to the recently developed Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport, is the town of Cave Springs. With just over 300 homes, this rural town was confronting the pressure of a ten-fold increase in housing which it was in no position to provide services.

In the caves which fostered the community’s name are endangered species that represent obstacles to development and especially for wastewater treatment and disposal. The prospects for development, and particularly for rapid development, were complex at best.

However, under the leadership of two developers and a thoughtful mayor, a very unusual and creative, public-private arrangement began to emerge that understood the difficulties and complexities of the issues involved.

One developer was in a valley and had constructed an elaborate golf course. The other developer had a significant portion of the land in the sensitive zones. An arrangement was made whereby the golf-course developer would fund the treatment and disposal system for the community. He would do it with collateralized pledges from the other developer and use the treated wastewater to irrigate his golf course.

He would also secure a revenue stream from the pledges to help fund additional infrastructure for the town and existing homes. The initial treatment and disposal system would be sold back to the town on a discounted basis, while he retained the rights to the treated wastewater and receive a royalty from the ongoing revenue for having put the project together.

A traditional public approach to infrastructure could not have put this arrangement together. The regulatory codes are not structured to do it.

Further, elected and administrative leaders in cities, towns, and counties often lack the expertise or networkings for such endeavors, and rarely, if ever, have the will to take the associated political risks.

Network Centric Distributed Sewer or network-centric, integrated, water-resource management, is the language I like to use for situations like Cave Springs (“Network Centric” is used by the Pentagon where they practice Network Centric Battlefield Warfare). Unlike the platform-centric or traditional approach, which is informed by the available technology, the network-centric approach is informed by the context or battlefield itself. It is the­ ­site and the local circumstances that ­inform the skills, technologies, processes and organizational structures with which the site is ­approached.

As the town of Cave Springs learned, networks of trust that can respect the possibilities and limits of the others involved, and when creatively structured properly, release value propositions that revealed the capacity of the infrastructure to pay for ­itself.

A more revealing look
On July 12, the British Environment Agency cut river withdrawals to protect habitats. They required water companies in the country to slash the amount of water they take from rivers and aquifers, which required them to find alternative supplies. The move came after a review that found current withdrawal practices were responsible for widespread damage to wildlife.

This fall the Water Environment Federation (WEF) will release its new educational program, “Water is Life and Infrastructure Makes it Happen.” One fundamental premise of the program is that water should be withdrawn, used, treated, reused and returned to its source.

Some traditional utilities are thinking about how network-centric, distributed sewer could assist in strategies for flow control of discharges into Chesapeake Bay. Others are beginning to think about their collection systems as reservoirs from which to draw water for treatment and reuse as close to the source of initial supply as possible

In Massachusetts, the Harvard Urban Economist, Edward Glaeser observed that regulation which appeared to make sense at the town level led to land-use policies that drove housing starts down in some suburban Boston communities while driving housing prices up by the cost of living plus 179 percent to 204 percent.

The dilemma is that the regulatory climate has not yet modified its command-and-control framework for pollution and disease control. The demands of natural systems and human communities must and will be brought into some semblance of equilibrium. Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) compliance and similar efforts to sustain the integrity of watersheds and resources are indicators of the policy shifts that will release the capacities in technological innovation that are already demonstrated and available.

However, this is no longer a scientific, technological or policy option. It is an ethical imperative and it is not achievable without a change in governance on the one hand and responsible, private-sector creativity on the other.

It seems to me that the point of engagement is simple. Innovation requires confirmation that the rewards are worth the risk.

Institutions are structured to be either enabling or restrictive. The Department of Agriculture is enabling. The EPA is not. If you have an innovation, an enabling institution is structured to say “yes” and a restrictive institution is structured to say “no.” In this situation the best you can get is “maybe.” The risk of failure to any prudent business person is not worth acting on the “maybe.” The result is that we continue to use unsustainable, central sewers and septic systems.

To alter the processes exemplified in Boston while searching out the capacities inherent in a Cave Springs, we need an institution that can negotiate affirmatively for integrated, water-resource management within the context of a viable, triple bottom line.

Sustainable land development will require the capacity to create accountable, autonomous institutions to bridge the historic distrust between the public and the private sectors and enable them to see that in the context of the triple bottom line and the practice of sustainable principles, there are opportunities for capital and job formation as well as community preservation and sound resource stewardship that they were literally unable to see without this change in perspective. SLDT