A Community Runs Through It: 30 Years of Collaboration in the St. Louis River Estuary
Citation:
Bolgrien, Dave, J. Lindgren, M. MacGregor, AND K. Williams. A Community Runs Through It: 30 Years of Collaboration in the St. Louis River Estuary. St. Louis River Summit, Superior, WI, March 14 - 15, 2017.
Impact/Purpose:
This presentation reviews the lessons learned from 30 years of public participation in the clean-up of the St Louis River Area of Concern. Goals of sediment remediation, ecosystem restoration, and community revitalization projects have incorporated the needs of estuary users and adjacent communities. This cooperative model has greatly contributed to successful and on-going projects
Description:
When participants in the 2016 St Louis River Summit identified their roles and described their interactions with the estuary on the 50-year timeline, they were illustrating the community that built and is now implementing the Remedial Action Plan. From its inception, the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement required that AOCs be collaborations between technical experts on remediation and restoration and the concerned public. Together, experts and the public form the community that runs through each AOC. Without such a community there is no way to gauge the success of BUI removal or AOC delisting in terms of associated social and health benefits. Community interactions are necessary in all stages of the journey to delisting to foster agreements, resolve conflicts, and to mobilize resources necessary to solve pressing environmental challenges. A social network analysis of the timeline responses was used to describe interactions of the community that runs through the SLRE. Self-identified managers and scientists were less likely than citizens and educators to form social networks. When social networks were present they typically included recreation as a major node. This suggests that while interactions among community members and the resource were diverse and widely distributed, a segment of the community remained professionally cloistered. These people clearly make important contributions to the science or management of the estuary, but constrain their further interactions. This may represent some dis-investment in community interactions in the RAP implementation phase compared to RAP formulation phase. Managers are well-advised to sustain, and, if necessary re-engage, the collaborative framework as our work moves forward from today’s RAP implementation to tomorrow’s management of a restored estuary. The St Louis River Estuary is a unique landscape made more so by the tradition and practice of community engagement.