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Watershed Restoration
Your community's sustainable revitalization
program should eventually encompass your
entire region for maximum effectiveness.
But, it
can start with a primary focus on any of the
12 sectors of restorable assets, at any scale.
One of the best restorable assets on which to base
regionalization efforts is your watershed.
If you've already got a strong
watershed restoration program, it could be an ideal sponsor for your
community's
Real
Revitalization Program.
Is this organization trusted and effective? Does it wish to
take a larger role in the community's future? If so,
sponsoring the Real Revitalization Program is also the best way
to help it create (or become) a revitalization forum.
A revitalization forum is a
permanent public-private organization that supports an
ongoing revitalization program. [Note:
Readers of
reWealth (McGraw-Hill, 2008) will recognize
this type of organization as what that book technically
referred to as a "renewal engine". It was revealed as
the key factor behind the most dramatic urban
regeneration success stories documented in
reWealth.]
Definition &
overview: There are a number of definitions of
"watershed". Here is one from Webster's New
Collegiate Dictionary: "The whole region or area
contributing to the supply of a river or lake; drainage
area." The Federal Hydrologic Unit Code used
in the U.S. (especially in the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers), divides water resource areas into the
following taxonomy, starting with the largest and
descending: region, sub-region, basin (as in river
basin), sub-basin, watershed, and sub-watershed.
Integrated
water resources planning is the most powerful trend in
water industries today. Given the distressed,
overtaxed condition of most watersheds around the world,
and the decrepit, obsolete, and overtaxed condition of
most sewage and drinking water infrastructure in
communities around the world, it's no surprise that the
largest component of most integrated water resources
plans is restorative, as in
redesigning/replacing/renovating existing water
infrastructure, restoring watersheds, etc.
To illustrate
this integration trend, here's a quote from "River
Basins and Coastal Systems Planning within the U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers" (National Research
Council of the National Academies of Sciences, 2004): "An
ideal environment for fully integrated water project
planning that addresses social, economic, and
environmental objectives at all relevant spatial and
temporal scales would require a substantial amount of
advance investigation and planning at the scale of river
basins and coastal systems.... The Corps and other
federal agencies have been charged with fostering an
'ecosystem approach' that seeks to integrate social and
economic goals with the restoration and preservation of
natural ecosystems. Simply minimizing harm to the
environment is, therefore, no longer sufficient. The
Corps should endeavor to improve environmental quality
in all of its projects (not just its restoration
projects)."
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