Hundting Season

I am the director of the Planning & Design Studio in Chattanooga, Tenn. We are a division of the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Regional Planning Agency, but the design studio focuses on downtown and riverfront redevelopment.

The biggest environmental issue facing this country is the way we're building our cities -- suburban sprawl. I taught a Regional Environmental Management course at our university this fall and told my students that if they wanted to save the wetlands, the rivers, and the old-growth forests they had to understand and be able to impact human settlement patterns.

We have lots of meetings. And I answer questions from anyone and everyone who is doing anything downtown.

I started my college career studying architecture. While I find it to be an invaluable background to have now, during college I felt something was missing. I was designing buildings that had nothing to do with the context in which they were located. After the first day in a required urban-planning course, I realized that planning was where I could put the buildings and the spaces around them together.

I realized in answering this question that I get about one email per minute each day. It's insane.

People who are just trying to get around all the development rules so they can do shoddy work and make a quick buck with no concern for the public good or the environment.

Developers are sometimes thought of as the bad guys (paving over paradise), but I find the ones we work with downtown to be pretty amenable to environmental concerns.

I'm from Chattanooga.

Five hundred people attended a recent public presentation of our just-completed Downtown Plan. It was a 7 a.m. presentation, and it was raining. We were overwhelmed at the great turnout.

Clear-cutting every tree in a new subdivision and then naming the subdivision something like Forest Acres or The Orchard.

I think political change can sometimes happen faster than widespread cultural change. Elected officials tend to operate on two- to four-year time frames, so if you can find a champion and get your message out there effectively, political change can have expedient results.

A Time-Life publication about great buildings of the world.

Macaroni and cheese. It's my comfort food.

That's a tough choice. I truly love some of our national treasures like the Grand Canyon and Yosemite, but if I had to pick one favorite ecosystem it would probably be some of the mountain streams in the Tennessee/North Carolina area. We have some beautiful and diverse ecosystems right in our back yard.

Tying environmental issues to inner-city issues is a real plus. Once again, we need to recognize that saving rural natural areas is directly related to how we build and expand our cities. Only if we do a better job of growing inward, rather than sprawling outward, can we ultimately preserve and protect our natural resources.

Get everyone to ride the bus, walk, or ride a bike to work or school at least one day in the next year. Once a year doesn't sound like much, but that would be a really big deal to some people.

Star Trek: The Next Generation. I'm a bit of a trekkie.

Buy a bus pass.