Any environmental project has many parties invested in its outcome. Consider the stakeholders. Listening to everyone is critical.

For any restoration or conservation endeavor there are certain groups involved. Government, whether it is local, state or federal, sets and enforces regulations and tries to increase tax revenue.

Business owners are concerned about how these projects and their publicity will affect business in their establishments and whether regulations or projects will hinder their ability to do business. There may also be other institutions invested in a site like nonprofit organizations or schools.

Residents care about how their lives will be affected in terms of environmental quality and cost of living. Different groups of residents are likely to have diverse perspectives on environmental projects. No project will be successful without community support. The people directly affected by a project need to welcome it into their community.

For a restoration class, we took a walking field trip to the Near Westside of Syracuse to get a better understanding of the conditions in that neighborhood. This was never better illustrated than by a sign that said something to the effect of ‘penalty of dumping is 15 days in jail,’ with four or five TVs underneath it that appeared to have been dropped far enough to crack the screens. I think the city of Syracuse hoped its signage would help clean up the neighborhood. Didn’t seem to work.

A classmate and I were invited in by a woman getting her hair done to talk about cleaning up Onondaga Creek in her neighborhood. Without a formal education on the topic, she had still figured out all of these principles of ecological restoration on her own. She hadn’t given up.

Another creek restoration project I was involved with was in a similarly economically depressed neighborhood where the creek was in a tunnel underground. There was a park where the creek could potentially be brought to the surface, at the expense of getting rid of athletics fields used by the neighborhood.

The group I was working with wanted to create a complete design before talking to the residents and people who use the park and ask for their blessing. It left me with the uneasy feeling of taking ownership of a place where I don’t live and don’t fully understand its needs. This neighborhood needs to be a partner from the beginning, not a recipient of a finished design.

Collaboration is changing as the means of communication change. Open source communities are popular online in software development and moving into environmental do-it-yourself projects. The idea is to make all of the information necessary to understand a problem available and allow people to contribute their own ideas. The more people looking at a problem, the greater the potential is for innovative ideas to surface faster. Every stakeholder is empowered to be part of the conversation.

This model, as far as I know, has not been applied to projects that would involve major regulatory hurdles like a municipal sewer system or site remediation because there are limitations on what information is released. But it is comforting to know that this sort of collaboration is possible.

Talk to everybody.

Leanna Mulvihill is a senior forest engineering major and environmental writing and rhetoric minor. Her column appears every Tuesday. She can be reached at lpmulvih@syr.edu or followed on Twitter at @LeannaMulvihill. 

Published on April 2, 2012 at 12:00 pm