approach to managing the life cycle of a gre-
enway is the result.
Are there any conflicts or challenges in
trail-development-related conservation and
preservation that can impede the process?
In general, there’s always been tension
between conservation and recreation. At the
federal level, there are wilderness strategies
that keep many acres of land roadless, yet
many recreation advocates want more access
into them. And there are certainly key habi-
tats we do need to protect and don’t want to
put a paved trail across. But that doesn’t nec-
essarily mean natural surface trails would be
inappropriate. So it’s all about balance and,
I believe, making sure that the people stay
engaged and care about conservation, or we
will have trouble gaining support for future
conservation, much less new parks and trails.
With urban land, we have to be very
careful about how we go about conserva-
tion and at what levels. We need to under-
stand the ramifications and how everything
works together. Ultimately, I see trails and
greenways as green infrastructure in urban
settings. e questions for me are: Where
are the most appropriate places to locate
trails? Where will they have the biggest com-
munity benefit and the least habitat impact?
ere is a balance to be found, particularly in
urban areas where development has already
occurred.
en we can encourage appropriate use as
a catalyst for conservation, as opposed to the
black-and-white thought process of “Use it,
or don’t use it.”
What is the most important thing people
can do to be good trail stewards?
People need to be active. Use greenways
and take care of them. Introduce them to
neighbors and friends. If there isn’t strong
advocacy for them, beginning with use and
awareness, trails aren’t a foregone conclu-
sion in many communities. Funding can be
incredibly elusive for trails.
e more a community is involved in
efforts to create trails and greenways, the
higher the chance they’ll happen.
Amy Kapp is editor-in-chief of
Rails to Trails
.
value. e perspective change that comes
with trail use helps start different conversa-
tions about how communities can conserve
land and how that helps improve the lives
of residents. en, conservation becomes
part of the communities’ strategies to move
forward.
What were the thought process and
strategy for the Great Rivers Greenway
District’s efforts in urban stream habitat
improvement in St. Louis? What were the
challenges?
e larger initiative came out of a 2010
regional planning effort. e commu-
nity told Great Rivers Greenway District
(GRG) through surveys that we needed to
go beyond just building greenways, and
that we should put more care into the local
streams and watersheds. e idea of GRG
being involved with clean water was part of
its founding in 2000.
e old model was to build the green-
ways working with communities and then
let the communities take care of them. Our
new aim was to improve and restore the
natural conditions around which the green-
ways were built, and to be more involved in
working with the communities to maintain
them. We also focused heavily on promo-
tion and public engagement; there was
a strong marketing effort to educate the
public on the value of conserving and using
greenways.
Many of the greenway corridors are situ-
ated on previously developed urban land,
some being brownfields.
Many of the streams have been impacted
by development, and there was a challenge
in securing funding for urban streams as a
good deal of the past funding tended to be
focused on streams in more rural areas.
As a regional entity, we coordinated
efforts across jurisdictions in the region to
develop an integrated process to provide the
best greenways possible, while doing the
best for the land they were on. ere are 96
different municipalities in St. Louis County
alone, so coordination in and of itself was
also a big challenge.
We started pilot projects that brought
a lot of people to the table. It was an effort
to bring the entire community together
rather than go it alone to tackle what can
be complex problems when dealing with
corridor acquisition, urban streams and
conservation.
What are some examples of these
collaborative efforts?
For one greenway that’s actually going into
construction next year, we pulled a group
together to look at several streams to assess
the current conditions and, where possible,
implement smart restoration strategies.
We launched a pilot project in which
GRG would simultaneously develop the
greenway while working with our partners
and funders to do stream restoration, such
as bank restructuring and grade control
to add a riffle-pool structure back into the
stream.
When streams are healthy, they have
a stair-step structure that drops to a riffle
pool. e features are really important habi-
tats for all types of aquatic life. One prob-
lem with urban streams is that you have so
many impervious surfaces such as parking
lots and pavement. e stream morphology
is too small to handle the volume and veloc-
ity of water running off from these surfaces,
so the streams become scoured out and
banks get undercut. e banks and grading
are highly impacted; the drop structure isn’t
there.
Grade control allows us to put some of
the structure back in place.
ere also are collaborations at the basic
level. For example, Ameren, a local utili-
ties company, worked with GRG to clear
some of the greenways of invasive species
to maintain vegetation under their power
lines. en we were able to go in and plant
native species.
What impact of the GRG work have you
seen so far?
e conservation and community strategy
changed how the GRG is working internal-
ly and how it thinks about itself and green-
way development. e greenway planning
and project management side has became
fully integrated into the conservation and
community side. A more comprehensive
MICHAEL KILFOY, STUDIO X, MAPLEWOOD, MO
rails
to
trails
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