Encroachment in Our Parks: The Problems, Dangers and Solutions

Full disclosure, the author is a member of The Going Green Club, an organization that is discussed in this piece.

The parks, forests and clean drinking water in Fairfax County are under attack from something called “encroachment.”

In response, the county’s park system created the Parkland Encroachment Education Project in early 2017. This project calls on students to raise awareness about the damage that encroachment causes, and to monitor and prevent it in their communities. Volunteer organizations such as the Lake Braddock Going Green Club are getting involved with the effort as well.

“Encroachment happens when someone uses someone else’s land as if it was their own,” said Kim Schauer, the naturalist leading the project. “In our case, encroachment is the unauthorized and illegal use of publicly owned parkland. There are very few, if any, parks that are not affected by some kind of encroachment.”

The Fairfax County Park Authority’s (FCPA) website states that people can encroach by “building structures, mowing to extend yards past property lines, dumping yard waste and garbage, or blazing new trails.”

Encroachment destroys the natural forest, which “threatens the source of our drinking water supply,” Schauer said. She explains that removing trees or mowing to prevent new trees reduces the land’s ability to absorb runoff, meaning that more pollutants from roads and yards are being washed into the local streams from which Fairfax County draws its water.

Besides the harmful effects that encroachment has on the environment, it is also unfair because “encroachers are stealing land for their own use without owning or paying taxes on it and taking away the ecosystem services provided by undisturbed land,” Schauer said. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation has calculated that every acre of untouched forest can provide up to $77,000 in annual benefits to the local community.

According to Schauer, although they have been aware of park encroachments for years, “the Park Authority does not have the resources to tackle the problem” because they are only allotted about .6% of the county’s annual budget.

This is why the park system has turned to students for assistance.

“Students have the power to make a huge difference, just by spreading the word in their communities,” Schauer said. “Most homeowners don’t even know they are doing anything harmful when they mow into the park or dump yard waste in the woods. Once they know, they stop, and everyone benefits.”

As part of their plan to inform the public, Schauer and the Park Authority have submitted a grant proposal called “Watch the Green Grow” to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF).

The proposal asks for $50,000 to conduct “social marketing” in the community by encouraging people to focus on the positive things that they can do to cause change for the environment, instead of the negative things that their neighbors are doing. “The hope is that social norms will change,” Schauer said.

According to their proposal, FCPA plans to partner with nearby businesses and nonprofits to support homeowners who volunteer to be stewardship role models in their neighborhoods and to empower people to take action to improve their watershed. Schauer would also like to work with an NFWF associate company to host a community “Green Fair.”

In addition to getting new business partners involved, FCPA wants to get the public school system and neighborhood homeowners associations (HOAs) on board with their educational mission. If the grant is approved, it will give the county resources to visit elementary school classrooms and attend HOA meetings to teach environmental stewardship, encourage anti-encroachment actions and hold gardening workshops.

“I think it is great idea to get people involved with their local environment and to teach them about the natural world,” Bob Brickner, a Fairfax County resident, said.

Grant funding would also allow the Park Authority to create a crowdsourcing app where anyone can post the environmentally positive things that they have done in their yards. Every time that someone posts, a green dot will appear on a map, and users can literally “watch the green grow” as the number of green dots increases. Schauer hopes that this will create a form of positive reinforcement and sense of instant gratification for people who are trying be more eco-friendly.

This app isn’t live because, even if approved, the grant won’t go into effect until August 2018, but in the meantime, FCPA has created a website to educate the community. Their new site, called “Find Your Borders: Avoid Park Encroachment” utilizes Mobile GIS technology to allow anyone with a Fairfax County address to see a satellite image of their home overlaid with park boundaries and property lines for the entire county.

By using this tool, it is possible to see if people have encroached outside of their property lines onto parkland. Schauer encourages kids to share this app with their friends, parents and neighbors to tell them about the impacts of park encroachment such as erosion, habitat destruction and increased flooding.

There are also some eco-friendly organizations already contributing to the Park Authority’s environmental preservation efforts that kids can get involved with. For example, the Lake Braddock Going Green Club is planning to implement a school-wide project this spring that involves placing deep-rooted native plants around the school’s stormwater retention pond.

“This will decrease the future impact of erosion at our school,” club sponsor Jane Gordon said. Less runoff will be allowed to flow into local streams, meaning that fewer pollutants will be swept into the county’s water.

According to Schauer, this will not only make the local water quality better, but it will also improve the health of watersheds downstream and protect the Chesapeake Bay, North America’s largest estuary and one of the world’s most productive bodies of water.

Right now, however, Schauer believes that the county’s best hope of resolving environmental issues like encroachment and erosion is “to ignite the passion of students to support the cause and strengthen our ability to change public opinion.”