Water, pavement and streets

I know that this site is primarily about our human-built environment, but I thought this fabulous Washington Post article, "Silent Stream," does such an excellent job of showing how our built environment impacts our natural resources that it's worth reading, even for the simple reminder of how interconnected our built and natural ecosystems are. (I also loved the anecdotes about inter-jurisdictional collaboration that's required to monitor streams effectively.)

For a long time, one of our champions at NJDOT had raved about stormwater run-off and how transportation engineers should pay attention to it. After reading this article, you'll be strongly reminded that anyone involved in any aspect of the built environment should be keenly aware of the co-dependencies of our environment. A flip of a butterfly's wing doesn't need 3,000 miles before it morphs into storm.