Lakeshore Living: Designing Lake Places and Communities in the Footprints of Environmental Writers

Preface

ix Preface We believe in challenging the status quo on lakeshore development. We believe in the need to rethink how we develop our lake lots, lay out our neighborhoods, and form our communities. We want to help people make beautiful places to live. This is a book for people who live on the shores or recreate on lakes, and it is for those with an interest in improving lakeshore living in a more sustainable and just manner.This book offers ways to live on the lakeshore and close to water and wetlands. It offers ideas on the creation of enduring lakeshore communities and on the principles of planning and design of lakeshore properties and neighborhoods—framed by the lives and thoughts of great environmental writers. Our challenge is to learn, and to teach our neighbors, how to handle nature gently, especially at the land–water interface. This requires theory from the fields of ecology, limnology, landscape design, landscape architecture, urban planning, economics, sociology, and philosophy . Academics package this approach into systems thinking, systems theory, or systems science; here in the context of living well along the shore of a lake we just refer to it as rich lakeshore living. We need to think of lakes and lakeshores as systems, both ecosystems and social systems. The lake is part of the landscape. It is part of our economy, and it defines our web of relationships and how we live. For a lake home property to have a positive influence on the lake and for us to be successful in realizing a full, rich lakeshore life, we need to fight the desire to seek a single-solution approach or fall for the charms of all-explaining ideology or narrative. In other words, we’ll have to distance ourselves in order to reflect and rethink. We believe this book can be part of such an endeavor. It is easy to blame someone else for the problems associated with our lakes (e.g., farmers, loggers, and nonlakeshore residents) or to attribute our reduced lake quality to something outside us (e.g., the establishment of an invasive species and state or local agency failings). We don’t like to hear that our behavior could also be a part of the problem. We must prepare. Growth of knowledge, as well as practicalities such as increasing energy costs, will force us to change, and we need to make the right changes to advance our quality of life. Societal events unfold slowly until a tipping point is reached. While there is still resilience in the system, we must reinvent our lakeshore living. Sometimes we need to go back into the past to retrieve the wisdom lost in the ever-increasing mass of information. We can create a more enduring form of lakeshore living using a mixture of good ideas on community development from the past and techniques for sustainability from today’s expanding fields of science. Factual information rather than ideology guides the pragmatist. We should discard our ideologies and unsupported beliefs. Ideology corrupts the mind and ruins communities. We should not confuse scientific skepticism with ignorance. Often we claim the first, when in truth it may be the latter. We need to be careful because the powerful exploit our ignorance. Scientific skepticism means doubting the claims that are made on something while being informed on the related facts. The open mind conducts an impartial x| Preface search of the truth. The closed mind uses a partial search of the facts to defend a preconceived position. When to apply science-derived evidence is often a central dispute within communities . Decisions can be belief-based or politically-based when they benefit a class or group of people. However, shouldn’t decisions be science-based when the consequences are critically important to everyone? Influencing complex systems, like lake communities, requires first the understanding that the lake and its community are part of a larger system. It requires understanding the parts of the system, the strength of the connections between parts, the functions of the parts, the behavior of the integrated parts, the feedback loops, and the potential leverage points of the system. For this reason we describe lake ecology, human impacts on lake systems, and traditions of regulation. We propose design solutions for lakeshore developments that are implemented within the context of the natural landscape and the built world. Our neighborhoods will always be living systems built from a mix of human materials, nonhuman abiotic elements, and living organisms. This...