Smart Growth Around America

The Chesapeake Bay, one of our country’s most precious natural resources and one of its most troubled, is suffering in a new way these days. Agriculture was once its biggest problem; improperly treated waste from farmland contaminated the rivers that lead into the estuary. As farmers have gotten smarter and more diligent about their role in contaminating the waterways, a new problem has emerged: development.

It’s one of our most basic needs, and one we take most for granted — clean, fresh water. But polluted stormwater runoff, overtaxed sewer systems, increasingly urbanized areas and shrinking forests and grasslands are threatening Americans’ water quality. Tell your Representative to support green infrastructure now!

Across the country, older cities are struggling with outdated water-sewer systems that collect sanitary sewage and stormwater runoff in a single pipe system. When a big storm occurs, the system gets overloaded: sewage combines with stormwater and runs into lakes and streams, causing serious water pollution and health issues. Cities are beginning to turn instead to “green” infrastructure as a viable alternative to addressing combined sewer overflow. Green infrastructure uses plants and porous pavement among other tools as natural ways to filter water, increase infiltration, and reduce stormwater runoff into pipes.

A fishing boat on the Chesapeake Bay. Photo from WikiCommons.

The Chesapeake Bay is the country’s biggest estuary — and one of its biggest failures. Despite over 20 years of clean-up efforts, we have barely made a dent in the extreme levels of pollution from which the Bay suffers. In today’s Baltimore Sun, an op-ed [...]

This is the latest edition of the Washington Update from Smart Growth America. The Washington Update is a typically policy-heavy newsletter covering federal policy developments here in Washington. If you want to know more about the details of policy and would like to receive this regularly via email, you can sign up for it (and [...]

The town of Edmonston in Prince George’s County, Maryland, just outside of Washington, D.C., is a small hamlet of under 2000 residents, most of them blue-collar workers. Like many other cities in America, times are tough in Edmonston, which has high rates of unemployment and foreclosure. What makes life particularly hard for Edmonston is that it is bisected by the Anacostia River. Due to poor environmental practices, the Anacostia periodically floods the town, wreaking devastation on a place already struggling to get by.

View of Puget Sound. Creative Commons Flickr photo by Chas Redmond.

Learn more about the work of the Coalition For Smarter Growth

Learn more about the work of the Piedmont Environmental Council

Learn more about CSG & PEC’s “Blueprint for a Better Region” vision for the DC Region

While we’ve done much to clean up our water sources [...]

“This 2007 drought is telling us we can keep on wasting, or we can keep on growing, but we can’t do both.”
— Sally Bethea, Chattahoochee Riverkeeper
Think of it as Hurricane Katrina in slow motion. As you may have heard, the Southeast is withering under a drought unlike any other for at least 100 years. Blame [...]

An announcement from the Smart Growth Leadership Institute (SGLI):
SGLI, working with The Trust for Public Land (in partnership with the Association of State Drinking Water Administrators and the River Network) launched a new program to help state governments develop innovative ways to protect drinking water sources by improving the coordination between state land use management [...]