Part II: ‘LIVING WITH WATER’ ALTERNATIVES IN THE LOWCOUNTRY

In response to these ecological and political imperatives, grassroots efforts of all kinds have emerged with alternative strategies that are often ignored or dismissed by larger, top-down citywide initiatives. While city officials repeatedly broadcast their commitment to address flooding and promote climate resilience in Charleston, their actions suggest otherwise. Development in flood-prone areas has continued largely unfettered.9 Meanwhile, large-scale, expensive, multiyear infrastructure projects are being pursued to protect against flooding in ways that often perpetuate the uneven and inequitable concentration of resources throughout Charleston.

In an attempt to fill these gaps, Community Hydrology–an emerging grassroots effort in Charleston–is focused on creating and promoting a highly localized, collaborative, community- driven watershed plan that builds upon alternative water and land use trajectories. A key component of this work involves the democratization of green stormwater infrastructure through capacity building and education around low-cost, DIY interventions for implementing naturebased solutions at a more accessible and decentralized scale. This includes things as simple as tree plantings or the use of rain barrels, as well as rain gardens, bioswales, green roofs, and vegetated buffers. Among the many goals and potential benefits of this project, Community Hydrology seeks to address historical and systemic inequities associated with racialized uneven development, resource disparities, and ecological displacement by promoting community control of stormwater infrastructure and habitat rehabilitation at the individual lot, street, neighborhood, and watershed levels.

The ethos of Community Hydrology is rooted in the hydrocommons, a radical pragmatism that promotes an ethic of care for the water bodies that define us, and that we, among other non-human life, rely upon for our continued existence. Central to this concept is the notion of stewardship. According to environmental humanities scholar Astrida Neimanis: “In a commons, attention extends beyond the human, and beyond the present. Users are not owners but custodians, and not of an individual instance or expression of water, but of its very right to flow: to gestate, to differentiate, to repeat and connect.”10

While there are many different ways one might interpret this, Community Hydrology seeks to reimagine the Lowcountry as a hydrocommons where Charleston residents are empowered to take a more active role in hydrological processes that shape their lives.

As an alternative, communitybased watershed planning initiative, Community Hydrology employs Participatory Action Research (PAR) strategies to avoid the pitfalls of traditional, top-down planning processes that often result in hierarchical, extractive approaches to public engagement in favor of a more democratic, cocreative, grassroots process. By adopting a more participatory worldview, as PAR invites us to do, opportunities emerge that challenge old behaviors of natural resource extraction and exploitation in favor of a more ecologically-minded, interdependent, generative approach that centers on cohabitation with the multitude of species and organisms that constitute the morethan-human life on Earth.

To this end, the hydrocommons provide a useful conceptual framework to re-enchant the human relationship with water by fostering communal action and stewardship at the local level in simple and straightforward ways.

Socio-economic factors also must be considered given that one of the main goals of this initiative is to address current disparities in the uneven distribution of stormwater infrastructure and flood risk throughout Charleston. If Community Hydrology were to solely implement green infrastructure in more affluent neighborhoods that are already well served by existing stormwater drainage systems, then it would reinforce inequities for lower-income communities that often experience higher rates of flooding. Furthermore, newer housing developments built upland generate higher stormwater runoff volumes that exacerbate flooding in low-lying areas. In other words, green infrastructure also has the potential to benefit areas where it isn’t directly located, which must be taken into account.

Given its limited capacity as a small, budding grassroots initiative and the lack of resources available for green infrastructure, it is important that Community Hydrology be efficient with its approach to implementation. One strategy for doing this involved the development of a geographic suitability analysis to identify and prioritize where interventions should be located based on a series of factors that reflect the specific context of existing watershed conditions and neighborhood typologies. This led Community Hydrology to partner with Robinson Design Engineers, a local engineering firm that specializes in nature-based solutions, to identify the environmental factors that are most critical to the feasibility and effectiveness of each green infrastructure intervention. Together, they looked at a number of potential indicators including soil drainage capacity (i.e. hydrologic soil group), lot size, proximity to existing stormwater infrastructure, flow path distance, FEMA flood zone, land use, land cover, elevation, and stormwater runoff volume.

These maps were used to assess potential variables under consideration for the Long Branch Watershed Geographic Suitability Analysis. Maps created by Amron Lee with shapefiles obtained from City of Charleston Open Data Portal (2022), LiDAR data (2017), and FEMA FIRM panels (2021).

Ultimately, the green infrastructure geographic suitability analysis process described here is just one component of what will be a highly iterative, collaborative, multi-step process for evaluating a variety of factors that will inform how this project moves forward. To address the environmental justice concerns discussed earlier, Community Hydrology plans to incorporate the Green Infrastructure Equity Index Framework to identify how demographic and housing characteristics should be considered to ensure a more participatory and just implementation process. Beyond suitability, the Framework asserts that “community capacity for a neighborhood to accept, plan for, promote, and maintain” green infrastructure must be accounted for in the geographic suitability analysis process.11

To this end, Community Hydrology is developing a watershed-specific inventory of resources that residents can use to make green infrastructure more accessible, feasible, and easier to maintain long term. This will also include a stakeholder analysis to identify, promote, and collaborate with existing grassroots initiatives and communitybased organizations already working in these areas. Together, this will contribute to one of the overarching goals of Community Hydrology’s work, which is to meet people where they’re at, with tools at their disposal, in ways that expand capacities, promote community autonomy and resilience, and encourage more participatory, transformative interactions with the natural environment where both humans and nonhumans alike are able to collectively thrive.

“This is not about protecting a separate “environment” but nurturing forms of life that persist through interdependent relationships: soil, water, plants, and animals are not resources to be exploited or managed but an interconnected web that people can participate in and enrich.”

Nick Montgomery

Carla Bergman, Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times

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