“Ph.D. programs have fostered a culture that glorifies arcane intelligibility while disdaining impact and audience.“ One of my pet peeves.

As in, why on earth is stormwater management encased in arcane language.

Water runs off waterproof stuff, eventually to the ocean.

Water soaks into water absorbing stuff eventually into well water.

Trees, bushes and long grasses direct water into the ground.

Concrete, asphalt and short grass over compacted soil direct water to storm drains, streams and eventually the ocean.

If you want drinking water you need as much trees, bushes and long grass as possible.

Parking lots can be surfaced with water absorbing asphalt & concrete or water-resistant asphalt & concrete.

If you build too many waterproof surfaces you get small stream flooding downstream. As in Downingtown, PA.

I was "The stormwater guy" on the City of Coatesville Planning Commission. The architectural engineers couldn't understand stormwater management. They knew the regs. but didn't understand them.

That's ENGINEERS that don't understand stormwater management.

How on earth are elected municipal officials supposed to understand and explain stormwater management while they listen to constituents complaining that there isn't short mowed grass to the stream bank edge?

Stormwater management is not astrophysics but it reads like astrophysics.

READ:

"Professors, We Need You!

 Nicholas Kristof

 The New York Times

SOME of the smartest thinkers on problems at home and around the world are university professors, but most of them just don't matter in today’s great debates.

The most stinging dismissal of a point is to say: “That’s academic.” In other words, to be a scholar is, often, to be irrelevant.

One reason is the anti-intellectualism in American life, the kind that led Rick Santorum to scold President Obama as “a snob” for wanting more kids to go to college, or that led congressional Republicans to denounce spending on social science research. Yet it’s not just that America has marginalized some of its sharpest minds. They have also marginalized themselves.

'All the disciplines have become more and more specialized and more and more quantitative, making them less and less accessible to the general public,' notes Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton and now the president of the New America Foundation."

MORE AT:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/opinion/sunday/kristof-professors-we-need-you.html?_r=0