EcoCity Cleveland, an organization devoted to helping all of us be more thoughtful about how we inhabit the lands we live on, has been the principal leader in getting all of us to think of ourselves as residents of a bioregion.

The staff at Ecocity Cleveland defines bioregion as a geographic area of interconnected natural systems and their characteristic watersheds, landforms, species and human cultures. They spell it out further on their website.

If we are interested in building green in this bioregion, we need to be more and more aware of how what we do affects this area. Each living space we create changes the face of the bioregion:

• we actually reduce the green space of our bioregion.
• the hard surfaces we create stop water from penetrating the soil.
• black roofs and asphalt streets absorb the heat of the sun and change the temperatures in our cities.
• we need to find a way to get water and remove waste and this taking and removing has consequences for our environment; some sewage makes it into our rivers, streams and Lake Erie on a daily basis.
• we need to deal with the waste we create from building and living in our structures, so we have created landfills that are polluting our water and are gradually consuming terrain to do so.
• pesticides used on our lawns impacts our water supply, wildlife and our own health.

Do no harm

As we think about building green, there should be one dominant thought in our minds: how can we build so that we do no harm to ourselves, to our neighbors and to our bioregion.