Ask Your Questions About Community Environmental Issues Right Here

Last Reviewed: June 13, 2024

This page consists of a portal where you can pose questions about community environmental issues you may be facing.  I am using this term very loosely, simply to mean something about the natural resource environment that a person making neighborhood activism, city planning, or community development decisions needs to know.  The form will be toward the bottom of this introduction.

Even below that, you can see the questions that others have asked, and how these were answered on this website. 

Before I go further, we want to say that the photo above is the No Dumping version of a stormwater inlet cover.  The image of a fish is intended to remind citizens and visitors that everything that they dump into the inlet, or that travels there by way of being swept up in water, ends up in a stream.

That's just an example of many projects underway to try to educate the public about clean water.   The public education aspects of the Clean Water Act in the U.S. have forced that issue. Other natural resource protection or enhancement efforts may not have found their translators who can put scientific and engineering concepts into simple terms. 

Good city or regional planning, and therefore good community development, depends on its caretakers having an understanding of certain natural resource principles. 

These vary widely, depending on geography, geology, climate, ecosystems, land development customs, and how the legal system handles ownership of land, if indeed there is any such concept.

So it has been such a pleasure to be in the position simply to sort the items that come into the community development question page into categories, based on actual submissions. I will be glad to give some insights into your question if you can express yourself clearly-- and if I know something helpful to say!  Other site visitors can add comments or information too, but all are moderated.

If you have a question about a community environmental issue relevant to you, please take time to type it into the form below. You can be anonymous if you wish. I will look forward to answering, which creates a new web page you can point to in social media if you like. In the meantime, below the form you will see what others have asked.  You or some other liberal arts type that you know could find that you're not too clear on how some natural resource systems actually work. If that lack of clarity affects your community work, let me help.

Or it could be that your community is beginning to think about fairly complex environmental questions, such as climate change planning and participation in watershed planning. Those are sure to raise new questions and dilemmas.

Here I will give you just the nuts and bolts of what you must know to deal with the subject matter that you raise. There are no long scientific discussions; most of our answers will be general and applicable to readers in addition to yourself. Frankly, national governments and environmental organizations provide plenty of technical information and data, but much of that is not helpful to the neighborhood-scale leader who is hoping to get a handle on what can be done about a local problem.

I would like to help you get started.  When you send a question I will answer if (a) the question is understandable, (b) it does not duplicate a question and answer already on this website, and (c) I know enough to answer!  The answer appears right on this website.  Don't worry; you can be completely anonymous if you wish.

1. Making a Good Community
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2. Community Development Questions
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3. Questions about Community-Scale Environmental Issues

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