One Maryland: Smart, Green, and Growing
December 3, 2008
[As Prepared]
We are in the midst of very difficult and challenging times, not only here in our own State, but throughout our country and throughout our world.
Arnold Toynbee, a great historian, posited that humankind “progresses in response to adversity.” In ways both large and small, this has been the common story of our great Revolutionary history. As Marylanders, we’ve always responded to adversity by choosing to step-up and to lead; to set an example for other States to rally around, and to demonstrate through our own choices and our own actions that the best days in life are not always the easiest days.
Despite the economic challenges we are facing, I continue to believe in progress,… I believe in the making and creating of progress; and, I believe that progress comes from what Robert Kennedy called "the rational application of human effort to human problems."
Without a doubt, one of the most urgent and pressing of those human problems is how and whether we can long survive as a species on this finite globe of land and water that is becoming increasingly hotter, increasingly more crowded, and increasingly more polluted and depleted because of human choices.
You see, God gives us not only the intellect and imagination to harness nature but the intellect and compassion to protect and conserve it. He also gives us the free will to choose -- as individuals and as a community -- whether we care for nature or whether we utterly consume and destroy her without regard for future generations.
As we make these choices together, God has brought us to our own cutting edge of history – a time in the human experience when the unity of technology, creativity and imagination now allow us to rewrite our own destiny, parcel-by-parcel, neighborhood-by-neighborhood, and yes – neighbor-by-neighbor,…
To heal our ecosystem by mapping and pinpointing every plot of land, every square mile, every peak and valley, field and stream, farm and forest – all of the otherwise disparate places and actions that, coordinated together, are critical to sustaining Maryland’s quality of life – my children and yours, and future generations still unborn.
Announcing the GreenPrint
It is from our willingness to apply these new rational human efforts to the cause of sustainability – and from our shared preference for a greener future for our State, our planet, and our posterity – that we are here this afternoon to announce the launch of our GreenPrint, and the expansion of our Program Open Space and Rural Legacy initiatives.
Some four hundred years after Captain John Smith drew the first map of the Chesapeake Bay, today we’re launching a Statewide “iMap,” a “GreenPrint” of Maryland every bit as revolutionary in our own time as Smith’s map was in his,… and carrying with it the same potential to unlock the doors of possibility for future generations.
We are literally mapping every parcel and plot of land in our State, creating one Statewide basemap for One Maryland that will be available to our partners both inside and outside of government, including our most important partners of all: the citizens of Maryland, who will have access via the internet.
This GreenPrint is at the center of a new initiative we call “Maryland: Smart, Green, & Growing,” designed to help awaken in ourselves and our neighbors a renewed sense that we can choose a more sustainable future through the decisions we make in our own here and now.
It’s part of our overall strategy to promote sustainability, one of three “S’s” – along with security integration and the skills of our workforce – that we’re implementing across our State government to get all our trains running on the same gauge of track.
GreenPrint combines cutting edge technology with the timeless principles we’re applying via StateStat and BayStat to the pursuit of progress: setting goals, measuring performance, and applying rational human efforts to the challenges which flow from the tremendous growth projected for our State, and from our sense of responsibility to future generations.
In these difficult economic times, many of our counterparts in other states would love to have the challenge of dealing with massive growth. While other governors wake up every day, sip their morning coffee, open their newspapers, and read about jobs and opportunity leaving their states, here in Maryland we’re anticipating a population expansion of more than a million people.
At present, a full 21% of our State is already developed, while 21% is protected. This means that our future will be defined by the choices we make for the 58% of remaining lands which could go either way. GreenPrint is designed to help guide us through making the right decisions with this land – a departure from our recent history when, quite frankly, we haven’t always made the best choices. Case in point: for the past thirty years, we’ve allowed land consumption to grow by 100% at a time when our population grew by only 30%.
To prevent us from repeating the mistakes of our recent past, we’re using GreenPrint to help us make the choices about our open space which will allow us to maintain a protected network of the wetlands, woodlands, wildlife, farms, forests and public spaces which are essential to the health of our ecosystem and the character of our State.
We used a similar approach in the City of Baltimore to determine which vacant properties should be the highest priority for purchase and/or demolition at a time when decades of population loss had left us with 15,000 vacant properties. Strategically mapping and targeting our efforts allowed us to identify which properties were most important to the health and character of our City.
In much the same way, through GreenPrint we are able to map high priority conservation targets based on defensible ecological criteria, with each potential acquisition scored and rated for its ecological value, so we can use our precious conservation dollars where they are needed most, and where they will have the greatest effect. In addition, it allows us to track the outputs from our existing programs, and to share real-time statistical information with our partners both inside and outside of government.
And GreenPrint, which can be accessed online, allows us to better engage our citizen partners, as users can see where they live in relation to protected lands, track their State government’s progress in protecting these lands, and interactively identify how their own land fits into the bigger picture of our smart, green, and growing future.
This is a priority for us because we believe that progress is only possible with the participation and engagement of those who hold what Justice Louis Brandeis called the most important political office: that of private citizen.
This is the impetus behind initiatives like Marylanders Grow Oysters – for which we have 168 citizens growing oysters in 811 cages along the Tred Avon River – and Marylanders Grow Trees, where we’re asking our fellow citizens to plant 50,000 trees by 2010. For this initiative, we’re setting up an interactive website where citizens can register the trees they plant, calculate their benefits. When it’s completed this spring, any Marylander will be able to view their trees on an interactive, “Google”-like map, while we track our Statewide progress through BayStat.
Land Purchase and Rural Legacy Announcements
Our goals for GreenPrint are not some pie-in-the-sky daydream that we can afford to pass off to the next generation. They require our immediate attention, which is why today we are announcing our intention to bring to the Board of Public Works a request to protect 9,242 acres of some of our most ecologically and historically significant lands through Program Open Space.
In the past two years, we’ve been able to protect 8,175 acres, a substantial increase over the 2,461 acres protected during the comparable period in the previous administration. Today we are more than doubling our progress to more than 17,000 preserved acres. These lands span four Maryland counties – including areas experiencing unprecedented growth – containing nearly 20 miles of shoreline along the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay, and thousands of acres of forest land.
In addition, we’re proposing $13.5 million in new Rural Legacy Grants, with nearly half these grants falling in targeted ecological areas. These lands buffer the Chesapeake and its tributaries from pollution, helping local communities preserve their heritage and character, supporting our farming, forestry, and tourism economies, and preserving critical habitat for native plant and wildlife species.
Conclusion
Our founding fathers wrote of “securing the blessings of liberty” not only for themselves, but for their posterity,… an idea echoed by Teddy Roosevelt, one of our nation’s original conservationists, when he said in his own time that: “Our duty to the whole, including the unborn generations, bids us restrain an unprincipled present-day minority from wasting the heritage of these unborn generations.”
None of us want the day to come when we have to tell our children and grandchildren that “once upon a time we were able to fish in Maryland’s waters” or that “once there were forests here, filled with wildlife.” And so we are choosing once again to respond to adversity with progress; to affirm our duty to ourselves, to our children, and to the heritage of unborn generations.
Working together, we’ve chosen to create the Chesapeake 2010 Trust Fund and to make difficult decisions to protect our blue crab, terrapin, and yellow perch populations. Together we’ve chosen to restore our Office of Smart Growth, to create our Climate Change Commission, to pass landmark Clean Cars legislation and to update our Critical Areas Laws for the first time in a quarter century.
Although there is much more work to be done, we’re committed to continuing our progress together as One Maryland, united in our preference for a more sustainable future. One Maryland: smart, green, and growing.
[ View GreenPrint - Read related press release ]
