Green Roof Resource

Last week I attended the Smart Growth speaker series at the National Building Museum. Two speakers presented on green infrastructure strategies.

The first speaker, Nancy Stoner of that Natural Resources Defense Council, presented a summary and update from the 2006 NRDC report, Rooftops to Rivers: Greening Strategies for Controlling Stormwater and Combined Sewer Overflows. I enjoyed the definition of green infrastructure that she presented:

“Green infrastructure uses soil and vegetation in urban and suburban areas to manage and treat precipitation naturally rather than collecting it in pipes.”

The majority of Stoner’s talk focused on the efforts to promote green infrastructure technologies by cities. Cities that were highlighted in the talk include Chicago, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Portland, Seattle, New York, and Washington, DC.

Jennifer Malloy from EPA’s water quality permitting program stated that EPA supports green infrastructure (as noted in a previous post). To effectively tackle stormwater management and improve our surface waters, Malloy encouraged the idea of “rain as a resource, not a waste.” This may be apparent to gardeners, but this is a radical idea to those involved in large-scale stormwater infrastructure projects.

Green infrastructure is easy to adopt in eastern states, but under western “use it or lose it” water law, adoption is more complicated. Water that is not immediately used cannot be retained for future used. However, prior to development, a greater percentage of rainfall infiltrated the ground and a smaller percentage ran off to surface waters. Urbanization has shifted this balance sending more water downstream. Green infrastructure could serve as means of restoring this balance, but this depends upon how the laws are written in western states. Will the courts be determining the fate of green infrastructure?