I have held many goals this semester, but one overarching pursuit in my academic life has been to clarify my engineering degree choice. I came into NC State with an environmental engineering intent, but that choice was made more for the sake of putting something down on an application than for my certainty. I wanted to find out more about the options that were available to me, and I felt like I needed to do a bit more digging beyond the surface of E 101.
My first step was to reach out to members in different fields of engineering at NC State. Through many scheduled meetings with upperclassmen, department heads, and faculty members, I came to a professor in the department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering (BAE). We quickly bonded over the concept of ecosystem services.
The idea of ecosystem services lies in the fact that humans receive many varied benefits from the mere presence of ecosystems. These services often go unnoticed, as they are difficult to properly quantify. A wetland ecosystem, for example, which helps filter pollutants out of water is much more obscure than a man-made water treatment center. And because of this discrepancy in innate value, the man-made system is far too often preferred over the ecosystem.
The professor pointed me towards a project enacted by the city of Detroit. Detroit, experiencing some economic drain in the past years, has witnessed a number of neighborhood communities left dry. Many houses stand abandoned or demolished, leading to an urban blight plaguing the area. The Detroit Water and Sewerage Department partnered with the University of Michigan Water Center to establish a new program. The government took control of these “brownfield” areas and worked with the surrounding neighborhood communities to turn them into gardens and parks.
These gardens help soak up and filter stormwater in a way the abandoned areas could not. In addition, they cleaned up the aesthetic aspects of the neighborhoods, improving adjacent property values as well as making residents feel “safer.” The residents took ownership of their projects, making the effort much more effective.
There is so much disconnect between ecosystem services and their man-made alternatives. However, the Detroit project proves that when implemented properly, a “green infrastructure” solution rooted in the concept of ecosystem services can give more to the community than the effort it takes to establish and upkeep it. Proper implementation lies in the education and involvement of the residents. An outside, contracted company cannot just come into a community, enact change, and leave as if nothing is different. Change needs to have community input and proper plans in place for the change to last, because something is different once it has been implemented.
For this reason and many more, I have decided to request CODA into the BAE department. What other ways can we get people involved for effective sustainability? Are successful programs marked by key relationships with their communities? Within the next three and a half years, I hope to gain a better understanding of these questions.