Wade Lagoon at the Cleveland Museum of Art is an iconic and beloved landmark in Cleveland's University Circle neighborhood. It also happens to be a man-made body of water along Doan Brook, downstream of the Shaker Lakes. (The lagoon used to be connected to the brook but no longer is; part of a nearly mile-long underground culverted section of brook runs past the lagoon.) That humans, generally speaking, are more drawn to lakes than to brooks seems like an obvious fact of human nature, and one that's important to consider when deciding on plans for the future of the Shaker Lakes. I've been frustrated, then, by how some people continue to be in denial about this fact. (Example: in response to statements about the health benefits of access to blue space, or of how proximity to water features makes homes more desirable, I've seen lake removal advocates state that there will still be water where the lakes were, as if this is some amazingly clever point.) Unfortunately, the...
In 2019, Cuyahoga County issued an update to a 2013 Urban Tree Canopy Assessment. The update found that, "despite concerted efforts in many local communities to increase tree canopy," over the years 2011-2017 the county's tree canopy had suffered further decline from 37.0% to 34.7% of total land area. A supplement to the update, prepared by a forester with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, included this interesting statement: "A healthy 50-year-old sugar maple will sequester 120 times the annual amount of carbon of a 10-year-old tree. Tree crowns start to have an impact on cooling as they begin to fill out, between 15 and 20 years of age. Therefore, planting trees will not change canopy cover benefits for two to three decades. Consequently, a tree planted in 2020 will have little or no impact on the canopy until 2040 or 2050." Remember that as you read the rest of this post. The revelation that the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District (NEORSD) "...