First and foremost, the Carrboro Linear Parks Project is NOT a Town of Carrboro project.
It is a project pushed forward by NEXT NC, a political PAC associated with Triangle Blog Blog, along with the Democratic Socialists of America who seek to end our present form of governance and have a second constitutional convention, moving us to state control of all private endeavors.
NEXT sees its Carrboro Linear Parks Project as part of its new urbanist ideology.
Secondly, as a town citizen, I see this current effort to build linear parks as a result of our town being left with land unsuitable for building by developers. Such areas include floodplains and riparian areas that surround creeks, streams, and rivers.
I object on many levels to the phrase “Linear Parks.”
Creeks, streams, and rivers, along with their riparian areas, aren’t linear. They curve, they drop, they roll. They are the epitome of change, welded into our consciousness in profound ways.
As it is, we don’t have enough open space to allow people to interact with nature. With the climate crisis, moreover, nature is changing. Extreme weather events are already here. We need to leave nature alone or else restore what we have with truly soft green infrastructure, the kind that nature provided in the first place, to create more resilient communities. This is how we will absorb the energy of Cat 5 storms. This is how we will abide
One of the oldest phrases in Western Civilization is Heraclitus’ quote: “No human ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and they are not the same human.”
I could give you thousands of other examples. Suffice it to say, we seek non-linear environments, ones not built by humans, ones without straight lines and borders, ones that don’t restrict our conscious thought and our intuition, ones that allow us to go forward.
We can change because nature changes.
We are at our best when we seek to partner with nature, not when we try to tame it as when we slap our engineering selves on our back and tell ourselves what grand calculations that we have been able to achieve by altering nature dramatically!
Rob Crook is a long-time forester and expert on urban forests. He has served on Carrboro’s Environmental Advisory Board and its Greenway Commission. He believes we can have a better vision for our future than deciding to pave over all the riparian zones along our creeks.
Carbon in the air harms us. Nature can pull carbon out of the air and sink it underground and underwater. That makes it a powerful climate stabilizer. Carrboro has a powerful partner to make our town more resilient in the face of a climate getting hotter each year. That partner is the Bolin Forest composted of over 400 acres west of Seawell School Road.
Consider this:
Living ecosystems such as tropical forests store more than 100 gigatons of carbon that, once lost, can’t be recovered in time to reduce warming in the next decade.
Conserving and restoring our natural areas can provide more than 20% of the greenhouse gas emissions reductions we need to stabilize our climate by 2030.
Bolin Forest makes our air cleaner. by absorbing 9,276 metric tons in Carrboro alone.
Bolin Creek in Carrboro has many places where the riparian vegetated edge of the creek is intact. This zone is vital to our wildlife. When you remove that riparian buffer, the nature of the creek changes. The Barred Owls in the photo are a mated pair who have raised many owlets in the past years. This year they successfully fledged two healthy owlets. The nest was located within that riparian border of trees, and surrounded by low vegetation. The nest itself was only ten yards from the creek itself. If that riparian is removed, the Owls won’t die. They are married to the territory, but they will have a smaller area to hunt for snakes and amphibians. There will be less available food sources.
When the owls have less food readily available, the female may not have the stores necessary to produce eggs, so in response, she might produce one egg in the next year. This applies to all wildlife in the riparian zone. Summer nesting Hooded Warblers rely on that border for nesting sites, and these tiny warblers consume thousands of caterpillars and invertebrates to feed their nestlings.
{Carrboro’s proposal to put pavement next to the creek will reduce habitat.} If habitat is reduced, there are fewer territories for the warblers, and less to eat within that territory. Habitat destruction has a slow effect on all wildlife, from the top predators on down the food chain to our creek invertebrates. Fewer fish in pavement heated water (depleted of oxygen), means fewer snakes to feed the owls, and on it goes, in a cascade that reduces the wildlife in an area that was formally rich in wildlife.
The bottom line is that if we eliminate stream buffers, we lose important bird species. No buffers, no birds.
The Carrboro Council proposes to put a 10 foot wide cement structure with additional clearing on each side, totaling 30 feet of grading to meet DOT standards. While it sounds appealing to recreational bicyclists to ride next to a creek, the conditions found in the upper Bolin Creek watershed would mean this project (clearing plus cement structures) would wipe out long swaths of trees and vegetation in the riparian buffer along Bolin Creek. Unlike the lower watershed, much of the upper Bolin Creek watershed north of Estes Drive Extension is located in a narrow valley, and the gravity sewer line is very close to the creek. OWASA would require additional grading to prepare the pavement for OWASA service trucks, further impairing a valuable riparian ecosystem.
No credible, accepted environmental science supports paving in a riparian buffer. The reason comes down to what a riparian buffer is and what it does: https://youtu.be/KIhZEfMGTxI
Riparian buffers provide multiple benefits for adaptation to climate change like microclimate creation, flood and drought mitigation. Moreover, by providing a biodiversity corridor and improving local water quality through their filtration capacity for nutrients and pollutants, riparian buffers are important features to maintain.
Additionally, perennial vegetation such as trees are particularly beneficial for long-term atmospheric carbon sequestration, also making riparian buffers a potential tool to further progress towards climate change mitigation.
The NC Gap Analysis Project has identified much of the Bolin Creek riparian corridor as a priority wildlife habitat (please see North Carolina State University, North Carolina Gap Analysis Project, last updated 2019)
Stormwater management in the Bolin Creek watershed will continue to be an issue now and in the future as rain events increase in duration and intensity. An increasingly urbanized town has led to more impervious surfaces causing more rapid run-off and dramatic changes in creek levels typical of many urban stressed streams. Addressing this issue through best practices, such as revegetating buffers along Bolin Creek is the natural way to allow water to be absorbed into the ground.
The upper Bolin Creek watershed was designated an environmentally important, fragile area. See details here.EPA has designated Bolin Creek an impaired stream on the 404 d list. The solution is more vegetation not pavement.
The Town of Carrboro is on record, both through its policy assertions and its actions, in support of restoring the health of Bolin Creek.Carrboro currently is partnering with Friends of Bolin Creek on a 319 grant that is meant to address stormwater issues in nearby Bolin Forest Phase 2 and Forest Court neighborhoods.
The Town has received several earlier federal 319 grants for such restoration as well and has involved Friends of Bolin Creek as a partner in terms of financial support, volunteer support, and scientific credibility. Earlier efforts from 2009 and 2009 can be found in the Dry Gulch Final Report, the McDougle Final Report, and the Pacifica Final Report. Here is one example of a study commissioned by Carrboro and Chapel Hill that resulted in watershed wide recommendations that will improve the health of Boln Creek
2012 Bolin Creek Situation Assessment (WECO 2012): This study was initiated by NC DENR and the Towns of Carrboro and Chapel Hill. Professional facilitators interviewed up to a 100 participants. The Executive Summary is over 40 pages, most of it transcripts of interviews with participants. The BCWRT subcontracted part of a current EPA grant to Watershed Education for Communities and Officials (WECO), a NC Cooperative Extension program, to conduct a situation assessment in the Bolin Creek watershed. The purpose was to better understand the interests of watershed stakeholders and organizations, to identify opportunities to engage stakeholders in Bolin Creek restoration while meeting multiple interests, and to determine how stakeholders would like to participate in restoration efforts.
Key recommendations of WECO Assessment:
Create a multi organizational collaborative watershed initiative
Examine how to more holistically plan and manage water resources
Increase community outreach and engagement on the Carolina North Forest Stewardship Plan
Investigate how to raise fund for water quality protection through a stormwater utility or other mean
Convene a facilitated search for bike per routes while protecting Bolin Creek’s riparian corridor
