Imagine standing at the front of a small boardroom, patiently checking your equipment and glancing through your notes one last time while you wait for everyone to arrive. You are an environmental planner and today is a big day for you. You will present the first draft of your report on a proposed highway to a group of city aldermen, an environmental advocate, and community representatives. This proposed highway is supposed to skirt the southern edge of the city limits and alleviate traffic congestion on inner-city roads, but the proposed route also crosses a few environmentally sensitive wetlands. As one of the city’s chief environmental planners, you’ve been tasked with finding a way to build the highway without threatening the local environment. 
 

As an environmental planner, you balance the economic demands of the city’s growth with the environmental concerns associated with urban expansion. When you first reviewed the preliminary route for the highway, the easiest solution to protecting the wetlands seemed to be moving the route to go around these areas. In some sections, this idea worked, so you redrew the route a little closer to the city limits. But in other sections, the wetlands were too big to go around, so now you must come up with a plan for constructing the highway through the wetlands with minimal environmental impact.
 

You start by consulting experts in the field, including wildlife biologists and wetland ecologists, for recommendations on how to move the wetlands. Perhaps by enlarging the wetlands outside of the highway, the birds and other inhabitants will nest and burrow far enough away from the road they won’t be affected by the traffic. Your plan will also include the construction of barriers to minimize the impact of noise pollution, as well as drainage maps to prevent contamination from vehicles and the road. Your report will address all these considerations and outline how the new highway can be built without threatening the sensitive environment.