Leveraging Lake Erie
David Beach Interview TranscriptParticipants:
David Beach
Director, EcoCity Cleveland
Joe Frolik
Associate Editor, The Plain DealerJoe Frolik: You were one of the first people I have ever heard to use the term bio region. Can you talk a little bit about what that means and what that suggests about sort of what our obligations and maybe some of our potentials are here in Northeast Ohio?
David Beach: When you think about a bio region it’s a different way of thinking about where you live, your home territory and thinking about it no so much as where you live in a city or a town because those are artificial boundaries that humans have drawn on the landscape but to look at what is really there. The watersheds, the rivers, the air, the plants, the eco systems and when you do that you are better able to take responsibility for taking care of those places because it’s the natural systems that sustain life in any place and that really has to be in our minds when we think about how we are going to live here over the long term.
Joe Frolik: How do we, one of the things we are trying to show with this interviews are the assets of the region. When we have trillions of gallons of water out here at a time when lots of parts of the world even parts of this country water is a growing issue even a conflict point in places. How do we use that asset that we have or potential asset to make it a strategic advantage but also to preserve it and use it in a proper way?
David Beach: Well I think that the care of water is going to be a defining principal throughout the world over the next century. Water is the limiting factor of development throughout the world more so than oil even and the fact that we are on the Great Lakes the world’s largest concentrated supply of fresh water is a tremendous advantage. Not only because we have the water to use, but because it creates a place that is unique and special so I like to think of ourselves as making a transition from thinking of Northeast Ohio as being in the old rustbelt to thinking about Northeast Ohio as being on the water belt. Water can be the defining principal that we think about how we live here in Northeast Ohio. How we live with water, how we care about water, I like to think about water as being even on a deeper level of our consciousness. It can define how we life in this place.
Joe Frolik: Are there places that, you talk about the water belt, are there other cities on the Great Lakes that you think have done or you think are a little bit ahead of us in terms of thinking about how they use the water asset both as a defining feature and maybe as an economic asset?
David Beach: There are certainly cities that have done a great job in at least relating to their lake and of course Chicago, Toronto cities like that come to mind. That’s an asset in terms of place making. How they use the lake to create a great place for people and they’ve broken out, in a way, of the old industrial age about how you treat your natural resources as commodities to consume or as a convenient place to dump your waste. That’s how we have treated Lake Erie through the industrial era as Cleveland grew up and I think the world is transforming now so that that is no loner acceptable. So communities that learn to live in greater harmony with their natural resources, take care of them and enhance them are the ones that are going to thrive and prosper in the 21st century. Our lake of course is our greatest natural resource and we need to learn how to embrace the lake, learn how to use it as an emblem in a way as our brand as a community and we’ve turned our back on it for so long it is going to be a big adjustment for Cleveland.
Joe Frolik: Are there things that we’ve done so far that you think maybe are best practices or early steps towards that embracing of the lake that you’d like to see or think we need to do?
David Beach: Well I think you’ve got to give the city of Cleveland some credit for starting their lakefront planning process. That’s taking a long-term comprehensive look at how we can reorient ourselves towards the water. It’s long overdue and it’s going to be a difficult adjustment. A lot of bad habits are going to have to be broken. Some people are going to have to change the way they have been doing business for so many years so that we can embrace our waterfront, improve our public access, create continuous public access along the water and we have to redefine how we relate to this waterfront. The same process is going to have to be undertaken along the riverfront. We’re blessed with the two waterfronts. The lakefront and the riverfront and they should join at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River. That should be ground zero in a positive sense that the best place in Northeast Ohio where everything comes together. So as we plan to do that people have to be a little patient, you know, these are long term transitions but I think a lot of the better thinking is starting to surface as we talk about these issues.
Joe Frolik: Yeah, you’ve been very involved I know with the waterfront planning process even did some of the work that sort of predated or set the stage for it. How do we, can you see it as possible to balance the various interests, I mean there are certainly some people who would use this often as a commercial place. We are on the deck of an ore boat that was certainly part of the commercial use, the ports right by us and then there are other people who would like to see just open space, green space, do you think it possible and what would be sort of the balance be you’d like to see of use along the waterfront?
David Beach: Every city is going to strike a different balance on that. I think one of the...
Joe Frolik: David you were very involved in the lakefront planning process and even through EcoCity studies that sort of laid the ground work if you will for what’s been done for the last couple of years. As people look at how to use the lake, I mean obviously there are a lot of competing interests. We are standing on an ore boat, we are right by the port, sort of the leftovers from the industrial era and the commercialization of the lake. There’s other people who’d like to see the lake as an open green space. How do you go about balancing, one, do you think it’s possible to balance those competing interests and what’s sort of is the balance that you think is reasonable that we can strike as we look ahead?
David Beach: It’s going to take a lot of discussion. It’s going to take a lot of hard work and it’s going to take a lot of creativity to figure out how to work around a lot of those very difficult issues. I think the industry and the Flats on the waterfront needs to understand that they have gone through a tremendous transition. We are not the industrial economy that we once were. Our port isn’t handling the same kind of cargo that it used to. So they need to be willing to adjust and adapt and maybe downsize where that’s appropriate. On the other hand, those kinds of uses, the piles of stone, the ore boats going up and down the river, those are the things that add the character, the romance to this waterfront and help to distinguish it from other waterfronts around the world. We don’t want to lose that. That industrial character as much as possible needs to be retained and that means that the other public uses for recreation need to figure out how to work around in a safe way those industrial uses.
I think if we can work it out, we are going to have one of the best waterfronts in the world. It’s going to be just so cool that we can combine all of those uses. I’ve been on tours with other people from out of town in our flats and people from around the world are just knocked out by how great our flats are, by the way that it’s at a narrow valley with intensive development on valley ridges with all of those bridges going over and we’ve more bridges and different kinds of bridges than just about any other city in the world. Just an incredible space to be in and if we can figure out a way to get more people down to enjoy that while allowing the industry and the bridges and the shipping to continue, it will be a special place that no other city in the world will be able to duplicate. And that’s what will make us great. And we don’t want to be just like any other place to have a generic waterfront with generic attractions. We want to have a real Cleveland waterfront that speaks to the character of this place and to the people that live here. So I guess that’s the challenge and I think we are up to it.
Joe Frolik: You just used two words that were very interesting. You talked about character and place. Talk about, at one point we started to talk about Cleveland as the great location and location being why we sprung up here. Because we had where the lake and the river came together, in terms of what’s going to make cities great in the 21st century, how is that changing perhaps the role of place or is there a different concept than we are used to thinking about?
David Beach: Yeah, in Greater Cleveland always had this motto that we’re the best location in the nation as a place to bring manufacturing goods and ship to markets. But you have to question whether that’s as true today as it was 20-30-40 years ago. So much of the economy today is the knowledge economy increasingly so where people are working on computers and they can be anywhere. They could be on a mountainside somewhere, they don’t have to be where the iron ore came together just to make steel. So maybe location doesn’t mean quite as much in today’s economy, and by location we mean a place in relation to other places and how they relate to each other.
A place, the intrinsic character and quality of a place is perhaps more important today than it ever has been because every city is competing for those knowledge workers, the highly educated workforce that are going to lead the transition to a different kind of economy and again they can live anywhere and they are going to go to the cool places. The cities that have great urban neighborhoods, the cities that have access to nature, great waterfronts, those are the attributes that are going to attract those kind of highly educated people. So place matters a great deal today but maybe location doesn’t matter as much. Interesting distinction I think we are starting to understand.
Joe Frolik: Yeah and water seems to be a very important part of that place. I mean there are cities that don’ t have, like Bob Farley from Team Neo talking about his experience in Fort Worth where they essentially created a lake in town so that they could design some corporate campuses for Tandy and a couple of other major firms to enhance their quality of life if you will in downtown Fort Worth.
David Beach: Water is this magical substance. You know if you look at any world religion and water is part of all the rituals, people respond to water, you can look at your body, it’s about 70% water. It may feel pretty firm and solid but it’s mostly water. So people have this innate response, I think an attraction to water and the more you can get people to water, the more attractive your place is going to be. I often joke with people that is you live in Greater Cleveland, you are drinking Lake Erie which means you are the lake. I mean 70% of your body comes from Lake Erie. Lake Erie is going through ever cell of your body everyday. So you have a more intimate relationship with the lake than with any one or with any other thing. So I think people are drawn to that and that they feel that and it’s really part of us.
Joe Frolik: Now there probably was a time when the thought that most of you is Lake Erie would have been pretty frightening to some folks. I think we have made progress in the last 30 years in terms of cleaning up the lake and the river and you have been intimately involved in those issues. Have we made significant progress and are we where we need to be and so what are the next steps in that sort of stewardship role of the asset?
David Beach: That’s one of our great success stories in Greater Cleveland and Northeast Ohio is how over the past 30 years and this is an environmental cleanup success story, the result of the Clean Water Act which passed in the early 1970’s. For the past 30 years or so we have been investing in clean water infrastructure. Water treatment plants, a lot of pipes underground that people don’t even see to convey sewage and also our industry has invested hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up its act in terms of water quality. Billions of dollars of investment and I think largely very well spent so that now we have a lake that is clean enough, a river that is clean enough for people to come back to and use as an amenity that will then attract more people here to Northeast Ohio. So that’s laid the groundwork, that investment in clean water has been a crucial first step in making this a higher quality place.
Joe Frolik: Are there more things we still need to do to make it cleaner yet and what will that involve in terms of investment?
David Beach: Well the next step is actually more difficult. People in water quality make a distinction between point sources and non-point sources in water pollution. The point sources is the stuff that comes out of a pipe from a factory or a waste water treatment plant. The non-point sources are out of the urban runoff, when if rains the water rushes off the streets and parking lots and carries all the pollutants from cars and everything else that are on our streets and in our parking lots. All that stuff goes into a storm sewer and gets washed right into our waterways and out into the lake without any water treatment. Dealing with that, those non-point source water pollution problems, that’s the next frontier of water quality cleanup. It’s going to be very difficult to clean up and it gets at land use issues.
Land use is the water quality problem of the future and that gets at how we design our cities, our impervious surfaces that allow water to drain off and it gets into how we are designing our metropolitan region. How we are sprawling out as a region, how we are paving over more and more of our natural areas around the region, destroying wetlands, the places that soak up water, filter it naturally, provides all those ecological functions that nature provides to us. We are destroying those and we’re increasing our costs for engineering solutions, you know, waste water plants and sewer systems and that’s a huge cost on society. So one of our big ecological design challenges as we grow as a region is to figure out how we can build our communities without harming water quality. We are doing a lousy job right now but that’s what we need to work on. It gets at the fact that we need instead of sprawling outwards so much as a metropolitan region, taking the city and moving it outwards in new communities, we need to figure out how to reinvest in our urban core where we already have sewer systems and impervious surfaces, protect our countryside and things like that are going to be the big issues. Its regional land use planning that is our water quality challenge of the future.
Joe Frolik: Does the expertise that’s been developed over these 30 years, is that perhaps the basis of, maybe it’s already even here, as an economic cluster in industry we don’t recognize but is potential the base to do something more in the future?
David Beach: But if you think of the care of water as being the defining force in the next century around the world, we have a success story here. Maybe we can teach the world how to take care of fresh water resources, how to care for water, how to treat it, how to restore aquatic eco systems. We have a success story here and I think like to see whole industries developed in Northeast Ohio to capitalize on that. That could be a real competitive advantage for us. Why are we brining people from around the world to conferences, sustainability conference in Cleveland that teach people how to deal with fresh water? We could be doing that.
Joe Frolik: Do we need to drive or is that something that would come from, should we look to the universities or the private corporate sectors, How do we create the dynamic to do it?
David Beach: Part of this new approach is that it’s not going to be a top-down, one kind of organization thing. You know we have much more of a net worked economy and so it’s appropriate that we think about how to reorganize North East Ohio we have some very smart people like Ed Morrison who runs the Regional Economic Issues at the Weatherhead School at Case, we’re talking about how to do a networked organizational model for our new economy. So I think it’s going to b a lot of organizations working in partnerships, collaboratives in thinking about how to do this. We do have a lot of talent here. Maybe it needs to be organized a little differently but I think there are a lot of smart people talking about that here. I think we are going to see it happen over the next couple of years.
Joe Frolik: Do you see the beginnings of other movement in that regards because I think there are things like the Cleartech Initiative and there does seem to be, you mentioned REI, Team Neo has expressed some interest, the Greater Cleveland Partnership and grass roots groups like HQ Ohio?
David Beach: A lot of them aren’t quite there yet in thinking about how to do things in a network way and also no everyone has a deep appreciation of sustainability. That’s a big buzz word now and it does incorporate a lot of ways of thinking that we need to adapt and other cities around the world are starting to do that. By thinking in terms of a framework of sustainability, it means having a long term vision about how you live in this place, take care of it with a determination that hey, we’re not going to cut and run. We are not going to destroy this place and then move the next exit down the freeway and then develop there. We’re going to be here for the long term, the next 100, 200, 300 years, like European cities and that kind of attitude. We’re going to learn how to live here. So that a way of thinking in terms of sustainability. It means thinking in terms of whole systems and again that’s another buzz word but it means thinking about how to fix multiple problems with maybe one solution.
So for example there is going to be a big poverty summit later on next week, at the time this is being taped, and people need to think about poverty not just in what Cleveland needs to do but it’s a regional problem, a lot of things have to go into it. A lot of poverty is you are taking opportunity away from central city residents and moving that opportunity to new suburbs out on the edge highway system. So it’s a regional land use transportation issue that maybe is the cause of poverty in many cases within the region. So thinking in whole systems is going to be a critical thing to do in the coming century and so the more we can start thinking in those larger terms the better off we are going to be.
Joe Frolik: One other thing I wanted to ask you about was that you have also talked about how to market Cleveland and the region. I heard you talk about us as a green city on a blue lake. Can you expand on what you mean by that and if we raised that as sort of the defining concept what that would mean on how we would do things and how we would
David Beach: Just imagine if people around the world their imagine of Cleveland was the green city on a blue lake and the images that conjures up, the kind of progressive economy that we would have if we lived according to those principals. It could really transform us and move us in a very positive direction I think. So I think it has to be more than just a marketing slogan, it has to be more than a brand. It has to be something deep within us that we are organizing ourselves according to principals that protect water, that think of ourselves as a green city that gets into how we build our buildings, using green building principals. It gets into how we plan our land use and transportation as a metropolitan region. A lot will go into that but if we can do that I think our livability will be greatly enhanced. Our young people will have a sense that this is a cool place, great things are going on here, this is a place I want to build a future because it’s an exciting future. Then we will be retaining the young people that we are losing today.
Joe Frolik: Well great, thank you for coming out here today and sharing you thoughts. It’s very interesting. Thanks.