Before the Master Plan - Restorative Redevelopment of Devastated Ecocultural Landscapes - page 29

how should it be changed? I surely don't know that. I'm going to try and figure out
who is going to need to make what decisions and when.
It is important to realize that the second time through, you are asking the ques-
tions in the reverse direction in order to design the method of the study itself. (6)
Who needs to know what to make a decision, and what decisions are they going to
make? (5) That is why you have to have impact models, and that is why you need
process models. (4) And what changes are we going to propose and simulate? (3)
And why make a change if things are working well? But we, in this case, know
they're not necessarily working well. (2) And to do that, you need to understand the
processes. (1) And to understand the processes, you need data. And only then, after
you go though the framework in this direction, do you know what data you need to
try to obtain.
And then you have to do the study: you get the data, you organize the models,
you evaluate, you propose lots of changes, you compare them, and you present
them for decision. And three things can happen. People can say “yes,” “no,” or
“maybe.” If they say “no,” it might be because you need better data or more data.
It might be because the evaluations are wrong. It might be because there are other
changes that people want to propose. It might be because you might be able to miti-
gate or alter the impact. And it might be that you need to educate decision mak-
ers, or they need to educate you (which is more likely). It may be that the answer
is “yes” and you've been lucky: you hit the nail on the head, as is said. And then
you've got the problem of implementation. And you do the things you're supposed
to do. And time moves forward, and the next generation will revisit the issue, and
your changes and decisions will then be their data. The third thing that can happen
is the answer “maybe.” Maybe you are asking this question at the wrong scale, in
which case you start the process over again. You ask the same questions, but the
data are different and the models are different. You also have to realize that you're
here, in a simultaneous matrix of scale and time. You're working at a regional
scale, while somebody's working on their own little farm, and Turkey and Iraq are
trying to figure out where the water is going to come from. This surely isn't the first
plan for the marsh area. And somebody is surely going to do it again in the future.
This is the framework.
I want to finish with a very quick overview of about thirty additional difficult
overarching questions that have to be muddled through in regional land use plan-
ning. Who should participate and how? Regional experts, local residents, outsiders?
What is the purpose? Scientific advancement or public action? What is the trade-off
between faster study results and action versus possibly better research but later deci-
sions? Could we solve the problem of a master plan by getting ten people around the
table in one day? And would we be 70 percent right? And is it worth waiting three
years and spending $20 million to be 90 percent right? That is a very serious ques-
tion. Will the study product be a single effort, meaning a master plan? Or a continu-
ing decision support process? What is the appropriate cost? How much time, money,
and basic research are really needed?
Here are the questions asked on the framework's first pass: