After familiarizing myself with the issues surrounding the Reedy Creek restoration plan and the opposition movement against it, I want to take time to outline a few of the key points as I understand them now. After a first reading, some of the issues are nuanced, but I am leaning toward opposition to the project.
The US Environmental Protection Agency initiated a plan several years ago called the Chesapeake Bay Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL), an effort to clean up the bay from pollutants and restore the rivers and streams throughout the eight-state watershed area. Local government entities are held responsible for executing plans to clean up streams and creeks falling within their respective jurisdictions. One of the City of Richmond’s initiatives is to restore a section of Reedy Creek, to “mitigate flooding, prevent stream bank erosion, improve in-stream water quality, and to strengthen the city’s stormwater infrastructure.” It sounds good on the surface—everyone should get behind a project to improve the environment, right? Turns out it’s more complicated than that.
One issue is clear—we are constantly finding ourselves in situations in which we need to repair human-made systems that have failed us, sometimes on a colossal level. This is a concrete example of life during the Anthropocene Epoch. Years of pollutants and chemicals in the form of runoff from industrial sites and stormwater drainage laden with toxic fertilizers from lawns have flowed into streams and rivers, which in turn have badly polluted the Chesapeake Bay. The way we built infrastructure in the past has also created huge problems for us that have compounded over time. In an effort to contain flooding decades ago, the City of Richmond built a concrete containment device for part of Reedy Creek. The way I understand it, if you think of the concrete channel as a larger version of a drain pipe, the water pressure coming out downstream is high and concentrated, leading to erosion and other issues on the other end of the creek. Everyone seems to agree that we have a mess on our hands, but opinions differ greatly on the plans to fix the issues.
The Reedy Creek Coalition is a group of community members with a compelling argument against the restoration project. Their main point of contention is that the city’s plan only addresses the symptoms and not the causes of the problems. Symptoms include erosion and unclean water, but they argue the larger problems are the lack of a more comprehensive plan, poor choice of location for the restoration work, and lack of education with the public regarding their own contributions to the problem and, in turn, their potential involvement in solutions. They acknowledge that the project might actually help the Chesapeake Bay in the short term, but the effects on the local environment would be disastrous. (This sounds eerily similar to issues I’m investigating with the interstate highway system—it alleviated automobile congestion and made inter-city travel easier, but it left community destruction in its wake. It actually disrupted the communities it connected.)
This is a systemic issue. RCC asserts that we need to talk about solutions for system-wide issues rather than respond to surface-level issues that create the biggest short-term political splash. It’s the same as a legislature saying we need to build more lanes on the highway to alleviate congestion, when the issues are the flaws in the larger systems of urban planning and transit. It’s easy for governments to appeal to the public with immediate solutions—”we will clean up the water now, we will improve traffic congestion now, we will stop panhandling now, we will improve school performance now, we will reduce crime now“—but it takes more effort and deeper engagement to work toward systemic change.