Watershed restoration approach

To expand the range of ecological design, several new directions include the following:

1. Modifying hydrological cycles on a microscale

2. Working first upstream then downstream in the watershed

3. Developing many local point s of intervention

4. Allowing local topography, including buildings, parking lots, and roadways, to direct design.

5. Employing natural systems engineering

6. Incorporating organisms such as fungi, mosses, and higher plants to sequester metals, bind phosphorus, and destroy pathogens or to break down organic compounds, including petroleum-based products.

Understanding hydrological cycles is key to this onsite approach. Rainfall descends through vegetation and is filtered through the soil before reaching the water table and, eventually, surface waters. The process proceeds gradually and takes time. When rain falls on built environments such as city streets, shopping malls, or parking lots, the hydrological cycle is interrupted. There is no filtering process. Runoff is collected in storm drains and discharged abruptly into local receiving waters. To counter this, designers and engineers will attempt to re-create ecological elements that mimic the function of the forest or the meadow within the built environment. Water collected on rooftops, for example, can be filtered through constructed wetlands or used to irrigate rooftop gardens. Parking lot runoff can be directed through a series of swales or low-lying wetlands between the paved surface and the receiving body of water.

The approach is to work at the level of the household, farmstead, city block, mall, industrial part, and road way, rather than attempt a single large-scale solution. Ecological design substitutes information, appropriate technologies, and organism for costly hardware and engineering. Appropriate bioremediation intervention technological elements can be installed at appropriate locations.

Summarized and quoted from Nancy Jack Todd, A Safe and Sustainable World, the promise of ecological design, p.183