A new framework emerges.

It seems like such a tall order: Proactively plan human activities so that they mesh with the natural environment. Try to approach nature as a system, even though we don't now, and may never, fully understand all of its' complexities. Maintain and manage wild areas with the same level of commitment we accord to systems of roads, water mains or power lines. Bring together business, political and environmental leaders to work toward this goal when these groups are more polarized than ever. Call for building a new federal framework to accomplish this even as recent failures in federal response--to Hurricane Katrina, for instance--have been less than inspiring.

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Thinking in new ways is never easy. Translating new visions into new actions is even more difficult, with even more daunting economic and political challenges. Yet in many quarters, there is a growing recognition that we've got to try to do things differently--because business as usual isn't working. Consider, for instance, that municipalities nationwide now quite commonly band together in regional associations rather than laboring alone on problems like transportation or air quality. While most of these groups lack enforcement power, and many are plagued by internal disputes, at least they are trying to start some sort of regional dialog on issues of common concern.

For instance, while governor of Maryland from 1995 to 2003, Parris N. Glendening spearheaded a series of initiatives requiring developers to meet state criteria for "Smart Growth." And in California, where regional "councils of government" control state transportation dollars, these councils recently decided that only regions adhering to the councils' master plans for development will be allowed to tap those funds.

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"I don't know if we're at a tipping point now," says Judy Corbett, executive director of California's Local Government Commission. "But we're making progress."

In other places around the country, new frameworks are forging new visions, new successes. Some of these new ways of tackling problems encompass whole cities. Others encompass whole regions; a few cross state and national lines. These stories show what is possible, even in the imperfect present.

FRAMEWORK FOR A CITY: BELLEVUE, WASHINGTON 

Just a few decades ago, Bellevue remained a sleepy suburb just across Lake Washington from Seattle. In 1963, a second bridge was built to connect this bedroom community to the big city. Bellevue started to grow, and fast. Today, it's one of the largest cities in the state, with its own soaring skyline and a business community anchored by technology giants such as T-Mobile and Expedia. It's fiscally conservative town; many CEOs live there. But it's also a place that people call "a city in a park." It's a place that has managed to keep Chinook and Sockeye salmon running through suburbia, a place that has created wildlife corridors through the subdivisions, a place that has preserved 2,500 acres of forest, wetlands, bogs and parks within a stone's throw of the skyscrapers. In some of the city's watersheds, one-quarter of the land remains wild. There, the otter, beaver, coyote and osprey go about their lives with the soft hum of urban life in the background.

That melding of natural and human systems didn't happen the way people might think, says Sheida R. Sahandy, an assistant to Bellevue's city manager and a senior policy advisor for strategic planning. "Thinking of systems did not come out of a green sense of 'Let's be holistic,'" says Sahandy. "It came by asking, 'What's the most efficient thing to do? How can we focus on multiple benefits, leveraging things?"

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Bellevue's growth accelerated during the early 1970s. The rapid development created more and more "hardscape," sidewalks and streets and parking lots. Now, when Washington's relentless rains came down, there was less open soil to absorb them. So they rushed over the impervious concrete and asphalt, picking up contaminants and draining into the city's sewers. Unable to handle the runoff, the sewers began overflowing into the 60 streams that thread through the city and feed its three lakes. Soon every severe storm was followed by beach closings. The salmon runs began faltering. Property began flooding. Concerned residents and business people complained to the city council.

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City officials responded in 1974 by creating a storm water utility. The first in the nation to start operating, the utility separates storm runoff from the sewer system. But they didn't stop there. "We tried to look at systems of controlling water, thinking in terms of bodies of water, where the natural flows would be," says Sahandy. Recognizing the need to preserve undeveloped land to absorb rain and filter runoff, Bellevue began buying up large swathes of land along the headwaters, middle reaches and down streams of Richard's Basin, Kelsey Creek Basin and other watersheds, essentially letting the streams trace wildlife corridors through the city. Homeowners liked what the green space did for real estate prices. Building on this good feeling, the city began offering incentives for developers to set aside land. For instance, builders could add a few more stories to a project if they reduced a building's "footprint," leaving more green space for indigenous species and water filtration.

"We didn't see it only as storm water management, we looked for ways that wildlife could pass through our systems. We looked for visual greenbelts. We emphasized how this added to property values and the quality of life here," says Sahandy.

In the 1980s, the planning department instituted an "open streams" policy, resisting the engineer's reflex to confine natural watercourses to pipes. During the same period, the council passed the states first "sensitive areas" ordinances, providing the model for a later state law. The Bellevue measures mandated that waterways, shorelines and wetlands be protected by "buffers" of open land, that no building would occur on steep slopes. They required that private drainage systems maintain the high standards of the public system. While Lake Washington was a sickly blue-green a few decades ago, now it is clear, a destination for swimmers, kayakers and boaters. Bellevue now has 70 miles of open, healthy streams.

In the last decade, the city has embraced the philosophy that open space is not just land waiting to be developed. It has a value all its own. In the years since, storm flooding has decreased and salmon runs have begun rebounding. A recent one-day census along just one small stretch of Kelsey Creek near backyards and parks logged 54 salmon, some of them as large as 30 pounds.

"They're still not to historical levels," says Kit Paulsen, the utilities department environmental scientist who conducted the census. "But Chinook populations are better than they were in the early '90s."

Mercer Slough Nature Park, a large wetland preserve near downtown stands as evidence that people with conflicting agendas can find common ground.

"Other cities may not have bought it because you could not "use" it for anything--there was little popular understanding about the myriad of benefits, ecosystem services and otherwise, that urban wetlands could provide," Sahandy says of Mercer Slough. "It could also have become a divisive issue, with fish and wetland activists pushing for "no disturbance" and the community recreation interests wanting "total use."

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Yet that's not what happened in Bellevue. Various constituencies contented themselves with partial wins. Teaming up with the Pacific Science Center, Parks & Rec got an education center. The conservationists got seven miles of carefully designed paths and viewing platforms that minimize the disturbance of wildlife. The utilities department got natural water filtration. Property owners got value-enhancing views.

"In the end, there was a decision that we could not afford not to set aside Mercer Slough," Sahandy says. "Trying to recreate all the functional services it provided, water filtration, storm water management, native growth protection, habitat protection, visual amenity, etc. would have been costly and much riskier."

Following that success, the city created Lewis Creek Park, another large urban wetland that incorporates recreation, preservation and water management, including an underground vault filled with sand to settle out polluting solids. The parks and utilities staff are focusing on acquiring more "natural open spaces," not just lots for ball fields.

"Meanwhile, the City Manager has been encouraging and leading the organization to take a "cross boundary" approach: to take actions internally in a way that reaches across departmental boundaries as well as focusing on regional collaboration in addressing regional issues. For example, Bellevue is teaming up with nearby communities to acquire satellite data that will enhance the "geographic information system" (GIS)--advanced satellite data--that the cities already use. This enhanced GIS data will make it possible for planners and developers in several municipalities to quickly calculate what percentage of a watershed is covered by asphalt, or to see how natural systems such as forests flow through their communities.

"Streams cross boundaries, urban forests and wildlife cross boundaries," says Dan DeWald, a city natural resource manager working on the GIS project. "The environment doesn't respect city limits."

"Again, it's multiple benefits," says Sahandy. "Multiple benefits enabled by a government that understands there's a broader way of looking at things."

FRAMEWORK FOR A WATERSHED: GREAT SWAMP, NEW JERSEY

Just 25 miles west of midtown Manhattan, New Jersey's Great Swamp lies in a shallow basin surrounded by ridges scoured out by a retreating glacier at the end of the last ice age. Today, more than 200 bird species, 33 mammal species and nearly 40 different kinds of reptiles and amphibians live in the watershed's rich mix of grasslands, sandy knolls, ponds and woods of oak and beech. The 57 square mile swamp hosts one of the state's largest breeding populations of Eastern bluebirds, as well as a thriving Great Blue Heron rookery. Five streams in this part of northwestern New Jersey empty into the swamp and finally drain through Millington Gorge and into the Passaic River.

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It's difficult to believe that this wild, healthy ecosystem survives in the middle of crowded suburban New Jersey, the land of choked expressways, flashy diners, strip malls and Tony Soprano. And it almost didn't, says Leonard W. Hamilton, a professor of psychology at Rutgers University who lives in a 240-year-old house nestled in the Great Swamp and who helped to save the watershed.

The effort began in 1959, when the Port Authorities of New York and New Jersey announced plans to build the world's largest airport right in the Swamp, says Hamilton. "They forgot that some of the richest and most powerful people in the country live right here," he says. "Those people started a grass roots campaign. They blocked the jetport and lobbied to have part of the watershed declared a national wildlife refuge, the first one east of the Mississippi."

A 3,000-acre section of the Swamp's basin was declared a refuge in 1968, but the collective sigh of relief was short-lived. In the course of documenting ecological diversity and water quality in the area, researchers discovered that contaminated storm runoff and treated sewage flowing in from surrounding towns were fouling the swamp.

Concerned citizens responded by forming The Great Swamp Watershed Association (GSWA) in 1981 to try to control development near the wilderness area. Years later, in the early 1990s, the town of Chatham announced a plan that it was going to expand its wastewater treatment plant. Surrounding towns and citizen groups protested. The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and the GSWA brought together more than 30 groups to study what impact the proposed expansion might have. They came up with a solution: Manage storm water so that there would be no net gain in the pollution nor in the volume of the water that runs into the Great Swamp.

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A state representative introduced a bill in Trenton, the state capital, to require the ten towns within the Great Swamp watershed to better manage their water. But the bill went nowhere. So the towns said, "We can do this ourselves," and formed the Ten Towns Great Swamp Watershed Management Committee.

"I was the biggest skeptic," Hamilton says. "I just didn't think the word 'cooperative' was in any township's vocabulary. They not only proved me wrong, they made me chair."

Three years later, in June 2005, Hamilton cataloged some of the region's accomplishments in a speech he delivered when he stepped down as chair. Among them: The Committee has developed a watershed management plan that all the towns adopted. GSWA has built water-monitoring stations on all five of the watershed's streams, and completed detailed water-quality analysis on four of the five. They now conduct an annual census of large invertebrates such as the caddis fly, whose populations can be a gauge of stream health. In 2002, this data was used to help formulate the first water quality standards for the watershed. The committee has run best water management demonstration projects in several locations and has mounted an ambitious effort to clean up Loantaka Brook, the Swamp's most polluted feeder stream.

The Committee has also inspired real change in its member towns. It has written a set of model ordinances for managing storm water. More than 160 municipal decisions resulted from these models.

"In the early days, the engineers kept claiming, 'We can't do this'," Hamilton says. "But we said, 'Yes you can, and not only can you do it but it ends up being 30 percent cheaper than all the concrete pipes and so on.'"

Early on, he says, the Swamp's defenders also had to "go down to Trenton and fight for doing these things" because towns aren't allowed to impose standards stricter than the state's. That's changing now. In 2005, the state passed the New Jersey Storm Water Management Act, new statewide regulations patterned closely on the Committee's model ordinances.

Stream health--as measured by numbers of "macro-invertebrates" like mayflies and crustaceans--has improved steadily in the less compromised streams. This is also true of the Passaic River, even at monitoring sites near roads and interstate highways.

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So is the Great Swamp completely clean? No. Development pressure in New Jersey remains intense. Redevelopment of old retail and industrial sites will certainly pose challenges, local leaders say. But the Ten Towns Committee has won a $250,000 grant to clean up the headwaters of Loantaka Brook, the dirtiest of the swamp's tributaries. The committee also works on retrofit solutions, such as constructing "bioretention basins," natural areas that will filter runoff, from the parking lots of several large churches.

Inspired by the Ten Towns Committee and GSWA, other regional watershed groups have formed in New Jersey: the Rockaway River Cabinet, the Whippany River Action Committee, the Raritan Highlands Compact. "It makes pragmatic sense to work together," says Joan Fischer, executive director of the Great Swamp Watershed Association. "If each municipality only eyes what's happening within its own boundaries, that doesn't control what happens under the ground or what runs off the ground. You really have to look at water on a regional watershed basis."

"Any one town can have the best storm water management, but it wouldn't matter if their neighbors don't," Hamilton says. "The water would still come down and wash over them. Those realizations have made some inroads now."

A FRAMEWORK FOR A CONTINENT: YELLOWSTONE TO YUKON

The vision could hardly be more immense: a network of wildlife corridors connecting the large wildlife parks and reserves that already exist, stretching nearly 2,000 miles from Wyoming's Yellowstone National Park to Canada's Yukon Territory. As imagined, the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative (Y2Y) would create an "animal superhighway," a wild heart of North America where grizzlies, wolverines, redband trout and other threatened species could skirt developed areas and coexist with human settlements and industries.

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This is "the world's last best chance to retain a fully functioning mountain ecosytem," explains the Y2Y website (www.y2y.net). Since it was first explored 200 years ago by William Clark and Merriweather Lewis' expedition, not one species has been eradicated by human development. Few places in the world can boast that. The region includes some of the world's most spectacular wilderness.

But it's not only a rich variety of wild habitats that makes these places special but the richness of human cultures. The idea, say Y2Y proponents, is not to prohibit human use. Rather, they hope to convince governmental agencies and citizens that it's possible and necessary to find ways for natural and human communities to co-exist.

This bold proposal has its roots in the last several decades of conservation biology and "island bio-geography." There's no argument that setting aside national parks like the iconic Yellowstone National Park and Banff National Park of Canada were key steps. But research in these fields has shown that isolated preserves merely delay trouble. Yellowstone's buffalo population, for instance, suffers from inbreeding. In the Selkirk Mountains along the Idaho-Washington-British Columbia border, the woodland caribou count hovers stubbornly around 30, despite an attempt to resuscitate the community by bringing 100 caribou in from other areas. When the range of large animals like these dwindles or becomes fragmented, threatened species become isolated on, as the Y2Y website puts it, "islands of wilderness that rise from a sea of development." For long-term survival, it seems, animals need to move around.

At present, much of the region encompassed by the Y2Y plan remains intact, but human activities are encroaching: The Bozeman-Livingston area of Montana, for instance, is booming. In the Crow's Nest Pass area in southern British Columbia and Alberta, roads and industries have begun to transect the Rockies and divide the wild territory into smaller parts. That's when problems begin: roads cut off the range of wolves and wolverines. Grizzly bears find dumps. Cougars wander into backyards. These interactions endanger humans; they almost never end well for the animals.

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Concerned by these developments, a group of top scientists and conservationists met near Calgary, Alberta in 1993 to discuss the feasibility applying the principles of conservation biology to the northern Rockies. By 1996, the group had grown considerably and the "Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative" was born. Y2Y opened a small office in Canmore, Alberta the next year. Today, Y2Y boasts more than 280 affiliated groups, ranging from the large and established such as the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society to smaller coalitions such as the Alberta's Bow Valley Grizzly Bear Alliance in Alberta and Friends of the Stikine (River) Society in based in Victoria, British Columbia.

Y2Y puts a priority on funding research critical to the initiative's success. "Over the past decade, Y2Y has worked relentlessly with some of the continent's finest carnivore, bird and aquatic scientists to identify the region's key wildlife habitats," explains Y2Y Executive Director Rob Buffler. "The science is continually refined and applied in conservation strategies."

Between 1999 and 2005, Y2Y granted more than $1.4 million to 80 projects that seek to increase scientific partnerships and outline what is necessary to maintain the region's land and water ecosystems. This research has help the Y2Y coalition identify 17 areas that it calls "critical cores and corridors," places that are integral to maintaining the ecological health of the entire region.

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The website hosts a forum for sharing data with scientists, activists and decision-makers. The on-line library boasts articles from scientific journals, everything from grizzly bear surveys and migration patterns to wolverine ecology in Yellowstone to the conservation of long-toed salamanders in the Alberta foothills.

Y2Y has also created tools such as a collection of eco-regional conservation planning maps. It has also produced a downloadable document, "A Sense of Place," the first scientific overview of the region's species and processes as well as its cultural and economic setting.

Several Canadian government groups have praised Y2Y

Canada's blue-ribbon Panel on the Ecological Integrity of Canada's National Parks recognized that parks--"islands of pseudo-protection"--cannot protect wild species indefinitely and noted that large, landscape-scale planning of the kind Y2Y proposes is necessary.

The Initiative has made some headway in realizing its vision. Some 16 million acres of the Muskwa-Kechika Management Area in northeast British Columbia have been protected from development. Work is underway to restore and maintain wildlife corridors across the Trans-Canada Highway in Banff National Park.

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But limited funding has forced Y2Y to focus on preserving just three of the 17 "critical cores and corridors" it has identified. In order to be successful, Y2Y needs to rally support from a dizzying array of people and institutions: two countries, five states, two provinces, two territories and any number of smaller groups, down to individual ranchers and townspeople.

"It is a daunting task to effectively work in an environment that requires such a vast network," Buffler says. "But it's one that we fully embrace."

Meanwhile, forestry practices in western Canada consist mostly of clear-cutting, which fragments habitats. U.S.-Canadian treaties lack the power to curb these practices.

Reviewing the shortcomings of these treaties in the March 2006 issue of the Journal of International Wildlife Law & Policy," Clayton Jernigan, then a judicial law clerk and now an associate attorney for Earthjustice, concluded, "The goal of eco-regional planning may simply be politically infeasible without the active involvement of civil society."

Translation: If we really care about saving this wild heart of North America, it's up to every citizen to make this desire known. It's up to us to build a new framework.

Brooklyn-based writer and editor Heather Millar has written for many magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, Smithsonian, Sierra and National Wildlife. She is the author or co-author of four books.

RELATED ARTICLE: BUILDING A NEW FRAMEWORK: WHAT'S NEXT

During the next 18 months, AMERICAN FORESTS will continue to focus on the subject of "People-Nature: Building a New Framework." America, and the world, is at a crossroads. We simply must develop new strategies for reconciling human systems and ecosystems in ways that allow both to flourish. In the months ahead, we will devote all our energy to this goal.

In upcoming issues of AMERICAN FORESTS, we will report on various eco-regions of North America, how they currently intersect with human networks and how both can be helped to better co-exist. We'll interview creative thinkers who are developing new ways to bring human and natural systems into better balance. We will profile coalitions that are testing new ideas in real places in the United States and showcase innovative projects that are bearing fruit.

We will also practice what we preach. We will join collaborative endeavors to develop model regional projects, assess what we learn and use these lessons to streamline the process of building a more solid and sustainable connection between humans and nature. Already, several leaders in their fields have joined the AMERICAN FORESTS initiative: the strategic planning and design firm of Michael Gallis & Associates; the global mapping and geographic information system (GIS) services firm of Sanborn; and ESRI, the GIS and mapping software leader. We plan to expand this coalition going forward.

We will focus on promoting efforts to build a new framework for the coexistence of humans and nature for the next year and a half. This first phase of our Initiative will culminate in an international conference on urban ecosystems in Orlando, Florida in May 2008. The conference, People-Nature: Building a New Framework, will bring together members of the business, government and conservation communities. The conference will allow us to solidify and expand partnerships assess our progress and plan strategies for the future.