An Example of Resilience Thinking
The project I told you about in May of 2012 was to develop a process to solve a complex problem involving a natural system of the restored Cuyahoga River, the Cleveland Cuyahoga County Port Authority’s responsibility for managing the disposal of sediment dredged from the river, and the community’s obligation to pay the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for dredging the material in the first place plus building more combined disposal facilities (CDFs) to store it – a cost of tens of millions of dollars. The Port saw an opportunity to put these problems together into one solution process, since each stakeholder was somehow connected to the sediment. To solve all their problems at once would mean that the River would stay healthy, the Port would manage the disposal well and the community would pay less or have more benefit. The Port began investigating options related to harvesting sediment from the moving water upstream from the ship channel. The idea was that if the sedimen