Joshua Robinson goes with the flow—literally and professionally. A soft-spoken, deep thinker who grew up in the Lowcountry, he brings a native’s knowledge and love of waterways to his work as an environmental hydrologist and principal engineer of Robinson Design Engineers (RDE), the firm he founded in 2008. Today, what began as a solo enterprise has expanded to a team of seven, with offices in Charleston and Hendersonville, North Carolina. “We’ve been at the right place at the right time,” says Robinson, who has worked with Friends of Gadsden Creek, consulted with the City of Charleston on flooding and the Dutch Dialogues process, and partnered with numerous institutions and property owners.
“My background in water resources and hydraulics engineering was always focused on low-impact development, or what is now called nature-based engineering for water challenges, that includes restoring salt marshes and designing and implementing features like stormwater systems and living shorelines,” he explains. “Many firms design big gray infrastructure, but our niche is forging relationships and working creatively, anticipating the growth and development that’s going to happen and integrating cost-effective, experimental solutions into our landscapes to restore streams and wetlands where we can.”
That creative approach can quite literally be hands-on, as in the Ashleyville community West of the Ashley, where RDE partnered with the DNR and the South Carolina Aquarium to restore a marsh that had died back over the years. “We worked with scientists and regulators to develop new ways to excavate tidal creeks by hand. Heavy equipment in fragile marsh ecosystems can often do more harm than good, so we brought in volunteers with hand tools to dig the creeks,” says Robinson. Now in year three of the project, the Ashleyville marsh has begun to grow back and recover after damage from heavy storms. “So many of the massive impacts on the landscape, especially here with our rice cultivation history, have been done by human hands. To turn that around and repair and restore waterways with human hands is really exciting, especially in the Ashleyville community where people’s lives have revolved around interaction with the water.”
Robinson and his team are bringing similar ingenuity to helping homeowners associations naturalize stormwater retention ponds, many of which were built on former wetlands. “There are some 20,000 stormwater ponds in South Carolina, so this is low-hanging fruit to improve water quality,” he says. And at Gadsden Creek, RDE has contributed field research, engineering analyses, and conceptual design alternatives, as well as participated in public hearings and cleanups, in support of FOGC efforts. “The Friends of Gadsden Creek work represents the heart and soul of the issues we’re trying to address,” says Robinson. “It’s a great opportunity for our community to turn the tide and adopt a new nature-based template for how to manage other creeks. To have a tidal creek with a checkered past and to just fill it and pave over it would only cause more of the problems we’re already dealing with. Coming together as a community to restore Gadsden Creek would put us on a new trajectory in how we live with water.”
Learn more: rde.us
