EWN - Engineering With Nature

By: USACE and Story Studio Network
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  • Summary

  • For more than 10 years, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been working on an initiative called Engineering With Nature that uses natural processes and systems to deliver a broad range of economic, environmental, and social benefits. EWN, as it is called, is developing and implementing nature-based solutions for infrastructure, engineering, and water projects.

    EWN brings together a growing international community of scientists, engineers, and researchers, from all kinds of disciplines to collaborate on how best to harness the power of nature to innovate, solve problems, and create sustainable solutions.

    This podcast tells their stories.

    It’s a show about innovation and collaboration. It is about combining natural and engineering systems. And it is about amazing results for infrastructure, the environment, and communities. Scientists and experts will talk about how they are transforming traditional approaches to infrastructure challenges across the US and around the world by applying the principles and practices of EWN.

    Sarah Thorne of Decision Partners has been working with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on the EWN initiative for the past decade, and, through this podcast, will share stories of the people, their unique collaborations, and a broad range of projects that exemplify the principles and practices of EWN.
    We hope you’ll listen to the show and be inspired!
    Copyright USACE
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Political Science Biological Sciences Earth Sciences
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Episodes
  • Creative Applications of NBS to Protect and Preserve National Parks

    Creative Applications of NBS to Protect and Preserve National Parks
    Oct 22 2024
    In Season 8, Episode 3, host Sarah Thorne and Amanda Tritinger, Deputy National Lead of the Engineering With Nature (EWN) Program, US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), are joined by Brian Davis, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia (UVA), and Cathy Johnson, Coastal Ecologist, Northeast Region, National Park Service (NPS). Along with their colleagues and collaborators, Brian and Cathy are working with nature and incorporating innovative nature-based solutions (NBS) to combat the significant effects of climate change on three coastal national parks at high risk for extreme storms and rising sea levels.

    Brian is passionate about the opportunity that NBS provides to protect natural resources, while also designing for people—protecting the things we value and the way we use public spaces. “Traditionally a lot of design practices saw those two things as separate. One of the amazing things that’s happening through landscape architecture and EWN and NBS is to unify those things.

    Cathy is passionate about the NPS’s dual mandate of conserving natural resources and preserving cultural resources. “I feel so lucky to work here to preserve values of the NPS for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations.” Cathy notes that NPS’s challenging mandate is made all the more difficult by climate change and its broad scale impacts, especially along the coast.

    About three years ago, Brian and Cathy formed the Preserving Coastal Parklands Team. The idea was to bring together designers and scientists, as well as engineers and other subject matter experts that could work with NPS in these different contexts and develop new nature-based solutions. Brian and Cathy describe projects that they worked on located at the Colonial National Historical Park, Assateague Island National Seashore, and the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historic Park.

    Asked what they have learned from their experience, both Brian and Cathy note the value of collaboration. “One of the key lessons that we took away” Brian says, “was the value of being able to work with and listen to the people that are managing the landscape—especially the Park staff, but it also other special interest groups, people that go out there for particular reasons, or have some stake in the future of the place and some ideas about it.”

    Amanda reflects on how these examples of NBS can be used by others: “What you and your team are building is a framework for how to approach these issues to achieve the compromise of these multiple needs and multiple benefits. You are creating a framework that ideally could be picked up by others in similar situations.”

    When asked for their calls to action to listeners, Cathy encouraged people to “Visit your parks and the other natural places around you to better understand what’s at risk from climate change and talk to other folks about it.” Brian’s call to action is one of optimism: “Sometimes, especially studying climate change, the scale of the problem can seem daunting. But just being out in these landscapes—meeting the people that work in them and visit them—leads to ideas about preserving those values and understanding better what’s possible in the future. That fills me with optimism.”

    For more information and resource links, please visit the EWN Podcast page on the EWN website at https://www.engineeringwithnature.org/
    • Amanda Tritinger at LinkedIn
    • Brian Davis at UVA
    • Cathy Johnson at ResearchGate
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    57 mins
  • Exploring Dr. Chris Lemon’s Nonlinear Exploration of the Nexus of Climate Change and Health

    Exploring Dr. Chris Lemon’s Nonlinear Exploration of the Nexus of Climate Change and Health
    Oct 8 2024
    In Season 8, Episode 2, host Sarah Thorne and Jeff King, National Lead of the Engineering With Nature (EWN) Program, USACE, welcome back Dr. Christopher Lemon, a physician and Assistant Professor, Department of Emergency Medicine at Johns Hopkins Medicine; Faculty Codirector of Clinical Programs with the Institute for Planetary Health; and Fellow with the Bloomberg American Health Initiative at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. In Episode 1, we talked with Chris about his journey to becoming a medical doctor and an expert and thought leader in the emerging field of planetary health. In this episode, we focus on Chris’s association with the Planetary Health Alliance (PHA) and how he and PHA are helping people understand and adapt to the changing conditions posed by climate change and encouraging people to take action.

    As an emergency physician, Chris is attuned to the need to take action. Noting the impacts of climate change—extreme heat, weather, drought, flooding, and disease—Chris contends that all these complicated situations boil down to the fact that Humanity is a part of this planet and that we will all be affected, “If you care about yourself, if you care about the health of your family and your loved ones, you need to act now because there is no question everyone is going to be impacted by climate change.”

    Citing The 2023 Report of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, he describes troubling trends such as heat-related deaths of adults over 65 rising by over 80% percent since the 1990s; increased frequency of heat waves and droughts in recent decades, associated with roughly 127 million more people experiencing moderate to severe food insecurity; and new locations now suitable for the transmission of deadly infections. “These impacts could be an early sign of the future that we have in store. I think we’re facing a scenario where things could be potentially catastrophic, and that also means to our health.”

    Much of Chris’s efforts in this area is through his association with the PHA, a consortium of more than 450 universities, nongovernment organizations, research institutes, and government entities from more than 75 countries around the world. Launched in 2015, Chris defines Planetary health as “a solutions-oriented transdisciplinary field and social movement focused on analyzing and addressing the impacts of human disruptions on Earth’s natural systems and how that will eventually impact human health, as well as all life on Earth.” Essential to planetary health is the understanding that it’s not just climate change, it’s ‘everything change,’ encompassing the other ways our natural systems are destabilizing due to human influence, such as biodiversity loss, pollution, land use change, water scarcity, nutrient overloading, and marine degradation.

    Looking to the future, Chris is excited about the growing movement toward planetary health. His call to action is for listeners go to the PHA website and become a part of the growing community. “This is not a website where you join and it’s just an email that comes out every so often. This alliance is a decentralized community for all stakeholders. We would love to interact and engage with you where you stand. I bet you have a superpower and an expertise that we need in the global community right now.”

    For more information and resource links, please visit the EWN Podcast page on the EWN website at https://www.engineeringwithnature.org/
    • Jeff King at LinkedIn
    • Christopher Lemon at LinkedIn
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    36 mins
  • Exploring Dr. Chris Lemon’s Nonlinear Exploration of the Nexus of Climate Change and Health

    Exploring Dr. Chris Lemon’s Nonlinear Exploration of the Nexus of Climate Change and Health
    Sep 24 2024
    After another summer of sweltering heat, extreme flooding, and in several places, unprecedented forest fires, we're thinking even more about climate change and about the nexus of climate change and health. In S8 E1, host Sarah Thorne and Jeff King, National Lead of the Engineering With Nature (EWN) Program, US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), are joined by Dr. Christopher Lemon, a physician and Asst. Professor, Dept. of Emergency Medicine at Johns Hopkins Medicine; Faculty Co-Director of Clinical Programs with the JH Institute for Planetary Health; and Fellow with the Bloomberg American Health Initiative at the JH Bloomberg School of Public Health. Experts project that over 3 billion people are already vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Chris is using what he calls his “superpowers” to assess how climate change is affecting people's health around the world and take action. He's passionate about making a difference in his community and across the planet.

    Chris and Jeff met at a conference at the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Conservation Training Center where Chris gave a presentation on Climate Change and Global Health. For Chris, the conference was an opportunity to get in front of an audience with different backgrounds but a common interest. “We started to pick up on the mental or physical health implications of some of the EWN projects at military installations. Pretty quickly it became this great synergy of how I bring certain things to the table as part of these complex solutions.” Jeff agrees and notes the magnitude of the opportunity. “These military installations are a wonderful opportunity – across 25 million acres of land – to do something positive for the employees at the installations, the military personnel, and the communities adjacent to military installations. They all can benefit from this interaction with nature.”

    Chris compares his experiences in healthcare, particularly with COVID, to the coming challenges he sees with climate change and discusses the alignment of healthcare with EWN. In both, the “traditional” approach has often been to try to control nature to an ever-increasing degree. “Right now, US healthcare contributes roughly 8.5 percent of US emissions. So, we are ‘doing no harm’ with the goal of making people healthy; and yet, ironically, because we're not working within the constructs of nature anymore, we're actually making people unhealthy.” It is this more macro view of climate change and public health that Chris is trying to address at the Institute for Planetary Health. “It focuses on analyzing and addressing the impacts of human disruptions on Earth's natural systems. But importantly, those disruptions have impacts on human health and all life on Earth. We are bringing that into the center of the conversation.

    Chris’s story resonates with Jeff and what he is seeing and striving for in the EWN community: “Chris, I admire the energy and enthusiasm with which you approach the challenge of planetary health. It's quite evident that you have so much knowledge to share, as well as the energy to make change a reality.” Jeff and Sarah invited Chris back to talk more about the important work being done by the Planetary Health Alliance, a growing consortium of over 450 universities, NGOs, research institutes, and government entities who are committed to understanding and addressing the impacts of global environmental change on human health and wellbeing. Our conversation with Chris continues in Episode 2 on October 9. We hope you enjoy these special episodes!

    For more information and resource links, please visit the EWN Podcast page on the EWN website at https://www.engineeringwithnature.org/
    • Jeff King at LinkedIn
    • Christopher Lemon at LinkedIn
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    28 mins

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