Excerpt
CONTAMINATION of groundwater threatens the viability of domestic, agricultural, industrial, commercial, and municipal activities. Citizens and groups concerned about existing and future contamination are demanding that their elected representatives protect groundwater quality. Yet rural local governments are less able than urban governments to address complex natural resource management issues. What is needed is a comprehensive approach for enhancing local capacity to manage groundwater. Use of such a comprehensive framework allows communities a better understanding of physical and community interrelationships and will yield more informed groundwater management decisions.
Without a comprehensive framework, decision-makers may use the most readily available solution rather than the most appropriate solution. Often, decision-makers apply traditional sclutions to an emerging problem before investigating the problem thoroughly. For instance, drilling a well in response to either population growth pressures or contaminated groundwater is an example of a single, familiar solution to two different problems. More effective, less costly, and longer term solutions may emerge after compiling a broad description of resources, resource uses, and values of resource uses. In the first example, perhaps altering resource use trends by conservation is a more feasible and consistent response to population growth pressures than drilling a new well. In …
Footnotes
E. Gaynell McGary Meij is project assistant and Charles W. Abdalla is project director, Groundwater Policy Education Project, and assistant professor, Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, 16802.
- Copyright 1990 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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