August 1, 2002

• Long, rambly, aimless ‘blog follows. Watch now as I go through the process of developing an opinion on these matters…
  
  
  

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  Today I heard a man on KPFT, talking about the ecological, political, and spiritual bankruptcy of the Houston-area Gulf coast. I was in the car, and I drove around for an extra hour to listen to this guy. I have to find out who he was.
  
  I have a sense of defeat. Yesterday I went to the Edith L. Moore Audobon site, and hung out at their headquarters to cool off. It’s an air-conditioned building. I picked up a number of brochures from there, all about the various Audobon sites, including a new Bolivar acquisition, and information on how to volunteer.
  
  This was all after walking through the site, noting the erosion problems and their solutions, most of which involve just letting the creek erode away. It’s really sad to me, because they aren’t raising a ruckus about what has been done to the creek upstream.
  
  But I feel defeated. That’s one fo the reasons I left this town; the political and economic machine is so huge, there seems to be no hope of changing things for the better. Coming here is like a sword through the heart. I left because no one seemed to care, so why should I?
  
  I moved eventually to Seattle, WA, where activism is a fashion accessory. If you haven’t been maced by police or beaten up by loggers, you at least have to spew the rhetoric. And that’s OK with me; better a million faux activists than no real ones. Political pressure is better, at least, than no direct action.
  
  Houston doesn’t even have the political pressure. Or, more accurately, the political pressure has more to do with big money and good old boys than it does with the public and/or environmental good.
  
  Last night, I drove all the way around Houston on the almost-completed beltway 8. Most of it is tollway. The round trip ate up $8 in tolls. It’s about 60 miles long. It took me an hour at just above the 55 mph speed limit.
  
  Think of your city. Now draw a 60-mile long circle around it. If you were to travel along that circle, what would you find?
  
  I found three things: Suburban dwelling developments, with their attendant shopping complexes and concrete infrastructure. I found the foulest industrial development in the country, along the ship channel. And I found wetlands, undeveloped other than the road I was driving along.
  
  This third item is what troubles me most. Just as logging roads in the Pacific northwest bring loggers to clear cut the trees, the road I was driving exists to bring in more development, to ‘clear cut’ the wetlands.
  
  One can argue that the chemical plants are an important enough part of the local economy, and to the economy of the world, that we can just write off the Galveston bay as the place we destroy so that other economies can flourish. I mean, when you go camping, you dig a hole to shit in, and everybody knows not to go there unless they need to shit. I find this argument easy to make because, as I mentioned, I’ve written Houston off in my own mind. This makes me, in some degree, complicit with the attitudes here.
  
  Be that as it may, however, these roads through the phantoms of future suburbs amount to planning for the worst. They speak of no political will to limit growth, to proceed through wisdom rather than profit potential. Houston belongs to powerful people with lots of money, and they don’t care if your quality of life goes up or down. They only want to make a buck off you. That’s what these empty roads say to me.
  
  And it makes me mad. It infuriates me. This city has horrible floods every couple of years, and each time those with the political power blame God. They say God is to blame for all your flooding troubles. The reason you’re out of house and home is that God has frowned upon you. They know full well, however, that God has nothing to do with it; poor design has everything to do with it.
  
  This city grew to unsustainable size decades ago. Everyone knows it but no one wants to address it. It’s like being on the sinking Titanic, arguing with the captain for a refund. The area is supposed to flood; it’s a watershed built of mud and wetlands. It will flood. Blithely creating huge suburbs in a flood plain is folly, if you don’t want those areas to flood.
  
  Which brings me back to this guy I heard on KPFT. Imagine if you will, a political system where the most effective means of reducing flood damage is rejected because it’s too cheap. That is, contractors can’t make a lot of money off building levees. You pile some dirt, and the levee is built. End of story. Where’s the profit in that?
  
  The west side of Houston is protected (to some degree) from flooding by the Addicks reservoir. It’s a huge levee that stretches 60-70 miles around the northwest quadrant of the city. It has made possible the development of an area that would otherwise be too risky to develop, because of flooding. Of course, rain doesn’t only fall on the upstream side of the thing, so other problems are created downstream of the developments.

  • 4:19 pm
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