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Our communities are enhanced by the natural resources in and around them.
But as our communities grow, these resources are threatened.
Between 2010 and 2016, the amount of urban land in the United State will nearly double,
growing by 95.5 million acres – an area the size of Montana.
How will we plan for it?
NEIL KOROSTOFF, Landscape Architect:
I feel that my generation failed utterly.
We knew what was coming, we knew, we understood that the population explosion was going to
bury the earth in a human population and our demands for energy and material and food.
And we failed utterly.
Well, we have a big challenge with water quality and, of course, this all starts with what
happens on land.
So, if you can really manage your opportunities on land to clean water, that’s where it
all begins.
And so, if a community doesn’t think that through in the beginning, then the engineering
costs of solving it later are much more expensive.
And I think a lot of people get involved late in a development process.
The zoning’s already in place, the plan’s already been done.
At that stage, you are only adjusting things.
To be proactive, to ensure that natural areas remain an important part of our communities,
planners, natural resource professionals and community members need to work together to
practice smart land use planning.
We do not put an appropriate value, even a monetary value, upon those environmental services
that natural landscapes provide to our society.
And what we are trying to get people to understand is that, yes, forest land, there are benefits
coming off that land to you.
There’s so much research that shows that communities that have access to parks and
natural spaces – property values, people want to live there – there’s so many benefits
of having these resources.
There are a lot of tools available to work with various communities.
Sometimes the issue though is that a lot of the communities aren’t aware of the tools
that are out there to help them as their community grows and/or changes.
That’s why we have inequity in our tree canopy coverage.
That’s why we have inequity when it comes to quality park access because the folks who
were relegated to certain neighborhoods maybe didn’t have as many resources allotted to
them and didn’t have as many parks.
I think it’s important to have a planning process that bring people together to kind
of figure out, okay what do we want, how we’re going to get there, how we’re going to get
there in a way that makes the best sense for the community as a whole.
The Changing Landscapes curriculum is a set of 21 fact sheets focused on land use planning;
what it is, the policies that direct it and the tools to carry it out.
By building knowledge among those at the planning table, Changing Landscapes helps ensure that
natural resources are considered, protected and sustainably managed to the greatest extent possible.
For more information, visit, Changing Landscapes.