CityStories / City Profiles / Medium Cities / Huntsville, Alabama
Population: 158,216
- Groundwater protection
- Stormwater management
- Farmland preservation
- Official Website of the City of Huntsville, Alabama
Photo Galleries
Huntsville, Alabama
Huntsville, Alabama, may be best known for its aerospace, military and technology industries; it is home to NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, the Army's Redstone Arsenal base, and the Cummings Research Park—the second largest research park in the U.S.
The city, however, is working to ensure that industrial production not come at the price of a degraded environment. Due to the area's porous bedrock—a feature of karst geology—surface water and groundwater are highly interconnected. For a planned development in a groundwater recharge zone, Hunstville teamed up with the Tennessee Valley Authority and engineers, land planners and environmental scientists from the Center for Economic Development and Resource Stewardship (CEDARS) to design the region's largest minimal-impact industrial park. CEDARS' design minimizes stormwater runoff and facilitates groundwater recharge of the aquifer, and will serve as a model for other industrial parks. It will also preserve half of the site as farmland. Protecting open land ranks among Huntsville's top priorities—the city has around 46,000 acres of green space.
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Green Building: LEED for Neighborhood Development
The LEED for Neighborhood Development Rating System integrates the principles of smart growth, urbanism and green building into the first national system for neighborhood design. LEED certification provides independent, third-party verification that a development's location and design meet accepted high levels of environmentally responsible, sustainable development. Learn more.
Porous Paving
The EPA's National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System site provides information about applicability, siting and design criteria.
Georgia's Department of Community Affairs has a page on best practices for porous paving.
Portland, Oregon's Bureau of Environmental Service pervious paving projects page.
City of Chicago's permeable paving site with many local examples.
San Francisco Parks Trust permeable landscape page.
Environmental Health Perspectives provides a good overview in "Paving Paradise: The Peril of Impermeable Surfaces."
NRDC's report Stormwater Strategies: Community Responses to Runoff Pollution considers a variety of responses implemented across the country.
Water Conservation
US Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation: with a mission to "manage, develop, and protect water and related resources in an environmentally and economically sound manner in the interest of the American public" the bureau provides information about water levels in reservoirs throughout the West, updates on dams, powerplants and related projects and a library of water reclamation materials.
Bureau of Reclamation WaterSMART program: Information on WaterSMART grants for water and energy conservation projects, basin studies with integrated management plans and water supply reviews and details on the Landscape Conservation Cooperatives in the Southwest.
In Hot Water: Water Management Strategies to Weather the Effects of Global Warming (NRDC report)
Water Efficiency Saves Energy (NRDC report)
Las Vegas Water District conservation pages
Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNVA) conservation and rebates
Green Space: Pesticide Bans
Text of New York's Child Safe Playing Fields Act
Text of Connecticut's ban on pesticide use on school grounds
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