Bullock Texas State History Museum by Ted Lee Eubanks
The man for whom history is bunk is almost invariably as obtuse to the future as he is blind to the past…J. Frank Dobie
Austin began with Shoal Creek sitting on the sidelines. Edwin Waller adopted Shoal Creek as the western edge of the new city, and his to-be namesake as the eastern boundary. Congress Avenue became the centerline.
No longer. Austin is upside down, inside out. The city sprawls past these edges into the white-rocked and cedar-treed hinterlands. Shoal Creek neighborhoods like Old Enfield and Pemberton Heights, renewed and revitalized, eject thousands of motorists each morning to wend their ways to downtown employment.
Yet Shoal Creek pumps life in more than one direction. Shoal Creek people connect to the city through the creek, but the life of the city flows north as well. One can peer north from the mouth of Shoal Creek to the central business district, state government, the University of Texas, the Pickle Research Campus, and out to the Domain. Once an extremity, Shoal Creek is now a vital organ.
Shoal Creek is not alone in its transformation. The Colorado River, now Lady Bird Lake, and Waller Creek are evolving as well. Shoal Creek is the only one of the three to retain enough of its original form and character, however, to serve as the standard bearer for the city’s heritage.
Heritage is a squishy word, easy to mold, easy to tape to the refrigerator door. There is an element of heritage in art, in food, in architecture. Eeyore’s birthday is heritage. Wooldridge Square is heritage. Rosewood is heritage. The 1887 West 6th Street Bridge is heritage. The Bullock Texas State History Museum houses some of Austin’s heritage. SXSW is becoming heritage.
Mouth of Shoal Creek by Ted Lee Eubanks
Heritage is more than history, though. Heritage is patrimony. Heritage is legacy. Heritage is birthright. Heritage is that which previous generations left behind, consciously or unconsciously, that gives meaning to the places we live, as well as to how we live.
America is a new country, and Austin is a new city. Institutions and traditions that are well established in many of America’s older cities are either absent or in their nascence here. For example, the tradition of investing in the city through philanthropy is a new-born in Austin.
Consider Chicago, another one of America’s post-colonial metropolises. Our two cities are similar in age. Chicago was founded in 1833, and Austin in 1839. Our trajectories quickly diverged. Austin grew to 34,876 inhabitants by 1920. In the same period of time Chicago exploded to nearly 3 million (2,701,705). According to the Texas State Historical Association, “in 1905 Austin had few sanitary sewers, virtually no public parks or playgrounds, and only one paved street.” Only four years later (1909), Chicago would adopt the Burnham Plan, setting the stage for “new and widened streets, parks, new railroad and harbor facilities, and civic buildings.”
While Chicago raced forward at breakneck speed, Austin idled. While cities such as Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia were investing in great buildings and great spaces (Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia, one of the nation’s first urban renewal projects, began in 1907), Austin remained hard-scrabbled. The election to finally settle the establishment of Austin as the state capital did not take place until 1872, 30 years after the founding of the city for that expressed purpose. The new University of Texas did not hold its first classes until 1883, and the Texas state government did not occupy the new capitol building until 1888.
Austin’s “great leap forward,” ironically, is the Great Depression. Austin is the city built by the New Deal. Initiatives such as the CCC, PWA, and WPA funded many of Austin’s icons. Zilker Park, Deep Eddy, the Lamar Bridge over Lady Bird Lake, the dams on the Colorado River, including Tom Miller, Lamar Boulevard, many of the bridges over Waller and Shoal creeks, House Park, the UT Tower and Hogg Auditorium, Emma Long Metropolitan Park; all were federal relief and stimulus projects brought to Texas by strong local officials such as Mayor Tom Miller and powerful Texas congressional leaders such as John Nance Garner, Lyndon Johnson, and James P. “Buck” Buchanan. These projects did not come from a generous philanthropic community. Much of this infrastructure came from the beneficent federal government.
Even in 1964, the year the nation elected sometimes Austinite Lyndon Johnson president by landslide, Austin’s population had only grown to a little over 200,000. By 1964, Austin had a growth rate of 1.5% and a population 1% of Chicago’s.
Within 50 years, however, the pattern had dramatically changed. The Armadillo World Headquarters had set the stage for Dell Computers. By 2013, Austin topped 875,000, and Chicago hemorrhaged population (in fact, Chicago is smaller today than in 1920). One of the great cities of the twentieth century, Chicago, is moving aside for Austin, a city from the twenty-first.
West 3rd RR Trestle by Ted Lee Eubanks
Chicago shaped its future and its legacy in 1909 with the Burnham Plan. The Burnham Plan carried Chicago for a century. Austin has yet to choose. We have no vision, no plan, and whatever legacy we are leaving is being written for us by outside consultants. A city of emigrants is a city without its own past, its own heritage. We have chosen to import one instead.
I suspect that one of the visions being imported is from Chicago. Some of those leaving Chicago come here. They bring their tastes and cultures with them. With every arrival Austin changes ever so slightly from what it has been to what it may be. Some who come are here to earn the most and to invest the least. Yet there are others for whom Austin is now home, not only a destination but a destiny as well.
Yet consider the possibilities. Austin isn’t hamstrung with preconceptions of what a city should or should not be. Austin can draw upon its native traditions, as well as those of the people who have chosen to emigrate here. This amalgamation may well combine into an entirely novel heritage that guides (and profits) future generations of Austinites. Austin is poised to become one of the great twenty-first century American cities. much like twentieth century Chicago and nineteenth century Philadelphia.
At these crucial moments great cities find the will to trap opportunity and harness it for the betterment of all. Shoal Creek offers the opportunity for us to show how this should be done. These opportunities demand grand plans to accompany grand aspirations. Grand plans dance between the impositions of the past and the insensitivities of the future. At this moment, Austin has no grand plans, no path to walk. Yet the opportunity for greatness remains, waiting on an inspired few to stir men’s blood.
Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood…Daniel Burnham
My youthful reading naturally gravitated to history. In fact, I cannot remember when I didn’t have three of four history books in some stage of completion. Now, armed with a Kindle and an iPad, my consumption has eclipsed what is possible ingesting only words on paper. I am awash in digital history.
My preferences are for world periods that I know little about, and for American conservation history. At the moment I am reading Reston’s Defenders of the Faith. Are you curious about the origins of conflicts between the Christian and Islamic world, between Charles V and Suleyman the Magnificent? Reston is an encyclopedic source. As for American conservation history, I rarely leave the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Roosevelt, Dock, Pinchot, Bird, Rothrock, McFarland, and Lacey inevitably suck me into their vortex.
Recently I have been exploring place as a way that we Americans consider ourselves, in fact, define ourselves. A song that captures that notion for me is America the Beautiful. Consider the first stanza. What could be more evocative of place?
O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
Amber waves of grain, eastern Colorado
I decided to look closer at the origins of this seminal piece of American patriotic composition. Not surprisingly, I found myself back in this frenetic high-period of American progressive politics. At the outset I knew very little about Katherine Lee Bates, the lyricist, professor, social activist, and poet whose words are memorialized in the song. Bates spent her life teaching at Wellesley College, and in addition to her teaching she wrote children’s books, travel books, and poems. Only one of her poems is famous, but, in her case, one is enough. Here are notes that she wrote about her first thoughts about this poem:
One day some of the other teachers and I decided to go on a trip to 14,000-foot Pikes Peak. We hired a prairie wagon. Near the top we had to leave the wagon and go the rest of the way on mules. I was very tired. But when I saw the view, I felt great joy. All the wonder of America seemed displayed there, with the sea-like expanse.
Purple mountains majesty, Pike's Peak
Bates would continue to craft the poem, first published in 1895, for another eighteen years. In 1910 Bates lyrics were combined with the music of Samuel A. Ward as America the Beautiful. The music began life as Ward’s hymn Materna. Ward would never meet Bates, and he died in 1903. Ward never heard America the Beautiful, his music or not. Bates is a different matter.
As I have continued to read about Bates, there are aspects of her life that are surprisingly contemporary. Bates is often described as an ardent feminist (although at that time I suspect suffragette to be more likely.) In addition, although the details of their relationship are sketchy, Katherine Lee Bates spent most of her adult life as the partner of another woman in a “Boston marriage.” While on staff at Wellesley she met Katharine Coman and began a relationship that lasted for 25 years. Most historians have described the relationship as a “romantic friendship,” but there is no doubt that they enjoyed an intensely loving partnership that lasted until Coman died of breast cancer.
Let this soak in for a moment. The author of America the Beautiful, considered by many to be the most stirring anthemic affirmation of our nation, one of the few that most Americans can sing at the drop of a hat, came from the poetry of an educated, progressive, liberated woman who spent her life in a loving relationship with someone of the same sex.
Although I said that most Americans can sing the anthem at the drop of a hat, few make it past the first verse. Sad. Bates wrote her poem at the height of the progressive movement. Here are the second and third verses, as germane and cutting now as then.
O beautiful for pilgrim feet
Whose stern, impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!
O beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife.
Who more than self the country loved
And mercy more than life!
America! America!
May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness
And every gain divine!
Katherine Lee Bates found her passion for this country as she traveled west across the Great Plains to the Rocky Mountains. Her love of country is rooted in a love of American places. Roosevelt’s passions for America were similarly kindled by the landscape, by the wildlife, by the place.
Scott's Bluff, Nebraska
We have fallen heirs to the most glorious heritage a people ever received, and each one must do his part if we wish to show that the nation is worthy of its good fortune…Theodore Roosevelt
Who would have the temerity to question Roosevelt’s love of country? Who would challenge the patriotism of the amazing woman who authored America the Beautiful? Can you imagine telling either to “love it or leave it?” Yet, in these polarized times, a time when fair and balanced are neither, these are precisely the charges they would suffer. Consider how this statement from Roosevelt would be treated by some in the press today:
To waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed…Theodore Roosevelt
Or, what about this quote from Gifford Pinchot?
The earth and its resources belong of right to its people…Gifford Pinchot
Little Missouri River, North Dakota Badlands
How would the words of these two stalwart Republicans be welcomed today? The judges may have changed, but not the principles of the ones being judged. There is a well-worn trail for us to follow, one blazed by these unequaled men and women of the past. The country may at times feel lost, but never should we. A life in conservation embraces a love of nation, a love of neighbor, a love of the wilds, a love of place. As our poet wrote,
O beautiful for heroes prov’d
In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved,
And mercy more than life.
Thank you, Katherine Lee Bates, for your wonderful song and beautiful life.
Here is Ray Charles’ live rendition of this soul-stripping, heart-charging song. Note that he begins with the third verse, not by accident. If this doesn’t drip with irony, with raw passion, you have no pulse.
The doves are power cooing the windows out of their frames. How did doves and lost love become synonymous? The only sadness I feel is for lost sleep. The main chorus consists of white-winged and Eurasian collared-doves. Both are immigrants. White-wings were limited in my childhood to a few scattered through oaks around the court house. Collared doves were unknown. Now both blanket the city, and I often see droves lined shoulder-to-shoulder, wingtip-to-wingtip, along the telephone wires. This morning the crowds have apparently chosen my yard for their caroling. Cucurrucucú, paloma, ya no le llores.
Within this cooing cacophony I detect the slight, almost apologetically soft flutes of the Inca dove. The Inca is also an immigrant, arriving on the island in the 1950s. The Inca survives around the edges, avoiding being bounced by the brutes. I rarely see more than a few together, quietly sifting for seeds through the scalped grass at the Ursuline Convent. The only loser to the recent immigrants is the native mourning dove. Mourning doves have been forced from many Texas urban centers out to the hinterlands.
These changes have taken place over the brevity of one lifetime – mine. I wonder how many people noticed. Perhaps the incessant noise of urban life, the auditory trash, inures us to the coming and going of nature. Our senses are cauterized, and that which we should miss never exists in the first place. Who can hear the pleadings of an amorous dove through ear buds?
Recently I drove to Rockport for a lunch meeting, and once finished curved north along the Texas Coastal Bend before returning home. Time spent along the Texas coast will leave you with two distinct impressions. First, the Texas coast is chock-a-block with birds, particularly doves. Nowhere can they be escaped. Second, also inescapable is the debris and detritus of humanity. Only in protected areas (refuges, private ranches, sanctuaries) and in a few caring towns can you avoid the abandoned double wides, scoured industrial sites, belching refineries and factories, and the tattered, sclerotic communities that define the coast. Yes, we share some of our trashiness with others around the Gulf of Mexico. The truth is inescapable – we are awash in visual and auditory trash. Humans and garbage walk hand in hand along this beach.
I confess; I am an Aldo Leopold aficionado. In college I found his writing tiring, even depressing. Now, at age 60, I hang on his every word. Here is Aldo’s take on the human existence:
One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.
Mourning DoveAs birders, as nature watchers, we are, at least at a rudimentary level, ecologists. Perhaps our ecological interests are bottle necked (identifying birds), but I cannot imagine a sentient birder who cannot see both bush and bird. Our experiences with birds and nature should offer us a unique perspective to share with our fellow citizens currently walled off from nature.
Few of us care enough to make the effort. Birding is a game, a pastime through which we relax and escape. We are fortunate, for numbers of birds readily adapt to highly altered landscapes and our disinterest. We look for crows at dumps (aka landfills), waterfowl in settling ponds, pelagics from rip-rap jetties, and shorebirds on tidal flats created by these jetties. Most of us bird in damaged landscapes; few us of have ready access to “wilderness.”
But a park and a trash heap are different. A park is modified, but in a way that most of us find pleasing. Trash is an affront to the senses, yet people, like birds, seem to adapt to a degraded circumstance. Why?
I know the standard arguments – ignorance and poverty. But I have traveled to places where the poor did not live in squalor, where people took pride in the very little that they had scraped together in this life. Along the Texas coast, between these spellbinding protected lands, I see little pride. What I see are heaps of trash.
My family fled to Texas from hard-scrabble Mississippi immediately following the Civil War. I love my state as much as anyone, and from that attachment comes my anger and disgust. Perhaps we in conservation have spent so much time fighting for protected places that we overlooked what surrounds them. Shouldn’t conservation bleed into communities as well?
Nabokov said:
I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute.
I hope that no one is born a brute, but I do see many (or evidence of many) who have forsaken art and beauty. Enter birding. Birds, to me, are art more than biology. If we hope to touch the insensate masses, we must use poetry and song as much as prose and science. This is the reason that so many Americans still struggle with global climate change, and, in many cases, are aggressive deniers. With all of our proof, all of our science, we have failed to give the common man the slightest reason to care.
Birds see a world at risk where our crude actions, our trash, spoils even the most rudimentary existence. But birds cannot speak for themselves. We must be their voice to testify. It is not enough to only see, to only watch.
Painted BuntingHow does one come to a life with birds?
Are there sentient peoples that have walked this planet and not known them? Not the Inuit, with streams of murres, guillemots, and puffins cascading across their arctic landscape. Certainly not the ancient Egyptians, who balanced their deification of the cat with heiroglyphical cranes, geese, and falcons. There are prehistoric stone sculptures of echidnas from New Guinea, quetzals from the ruins at Chichen Itza, and sea eagles atop Alaskan totems. To breathe, to open one’s eyes and ears each morning, is to know birds.
I came to birds with, but not through, my parents. My father hunted birds (he would later abandon his shotgun for binoculars), and I often accompanied him on late summer dove hunts in rural central Texas. I suspect that my life with birds began at a much earlier age, though, and stemmed from a fascination with birds as accessible expressions of life.
I point to my mother’s archives as evidence. She neatly squirreled away most of my kindergarten drawings, elementary grade report cards, baseball team photos, and prom invitations, and passed these family heirlooms my way late in life. Rummaging through these “treasures” I found a number of my construction paper drawings in which birds are clearly and recognizably rendered. In one there is an obvious northern cardinal, tinted with a fiery color only found in a Crayola box. Given my age at that time (four or five) I can only guess that my life with birds began as childhood curiosity, one that eventually flowered into a passion that would eventually transcend science, recreation, or reason.
At the University of Houston I majored in journalism. Although I matriculated high school in the late 1960s, Woodward and Bernstein were only peripheral or distant inspirations. My heroes were Roger Tory Peterson, Elliot Porter, and Louis Agassiz Fuertes. Journalism (particularly photojournalism) swelled my interest in photography both as art and as information. With birds as a subject, I could now explore ways in which the photographed bird might advance beyond “documentation.” For a birder, the photographed bird is proof that it existed. With proof a birder “scores.” I wanted to do more with my photography, to show birds as I perceived them metaphysically. I wanted to show birds as individuals, not as species or specimens. I wanted to capture life on film.
My studies exposed me to more than photography’s immediate possibilities; I also learned of its past. From Henri Cartier-Bresson’s The Galveston That Was to George Hurrell’s Jean Harlow and Jane Russell, I began to grasp that the photographic process was far more complex and demanding than “point-and-shoot.” I learned of photography’s discipline and rigor, of the basic principles of composition, of the power of the well-placed highlight. I studied Cartier-Bresson’s talent for blending into the background, the street, enabling him to closely approach his subjects and capture what he described as “the instant sketch” with only a rangefinder Leica camera and a 50 mm lens. For a time I practiced by photographing birds only in black-and-white, subordinating the seductive power of their dramatic colors to the subtle art of shadow and light.
My early results were desultory, photos taken as through another’s camera. I photographed hoping to recreate pictures I had seen before. With time, though, I developed a perspective, an eye. My wife, Virginia, helped me understand the concepts of expression and impression and the photographer’s obligation to allow each picture to live up to its emotional (not just documentary) potential. Through her I began to understand that the lens has the power to reshape and redefine reality, to peel away artifice and allow the emotional essence of each subject to show through the clutter and disorder that surrounds them.
With Faces of Flight I focused the eye of the camera on one essential truth – the universal appeal of birds. These are intended as glamour shots, intimate portraits that display each individual bird in the most intricate detail, each feather precisely mapped. Each individual portrait stands alone, evidence that this particular bird and I shared a precious moment and space on this planet. All were captured in and released back to their native habitats without harm. The photographs only record a brief second in time, an “instant sketch,” and reflect only a short interlude in what I hope were otherwise long and fecund lives.
Only late in life, though, have I developed an additional understanding of these birds and their photographs. I began as a birder, evolved to being a naturalist, and only now, with six decades under my belt (and the scars to prove it), am I trying to see beyond the evident and the puerile. Through a life with birds I have come to a better understanding of my life with my fellow man. My essays are a pilgrimage, a solemn journey to a distant corner of the psyche where I might glance back at who I am.
Pablo Neruda, in “The Poet Says Good-Bye to the Birds,” wrote of himself as
…A people’s poet, provincial and birder/ I’ve wandered the world in search of life/bird by bird I’ve come to know the earth…
Picture by picture, essay by essay, I have come to know Neruda’s earth as well.
Ted Eubanks
18 Oct 2010
For those interested in seeing the exhibit, I have load the images as well as the interpretive panels and poster we designed here for your enjoyment. The original is now in the hands of Karla Klay of Artist Boat, and I hope that she will use the exhibit to help raise funds for her wonderful organization.
TLE in RKAI lie between the dead and the living, my eyes barely cracked, my skin licked by a million tiny molecules of dank, sour air. The neighbor’s blue tick is baying at an imaginary foe, and a chainsaw is slicing the remaining silence to remind me that no one sleeps in on Sunday. As I struggle to the coffee shop my path is blocked by police escorting the dozen UCLA charter buses back to the airport and the land of milk and honey sans offshore drilling. Edward Abbey said that “there is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.”
Skimming Huffpost on my IPad, I notice the story that Delaware Republican Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell has called evolution “a myth” and backed up her claim with the question: if evolution is real, “why aren’t monkeys still evolving into humans?” While isolated in Iceland last week [a grand place to get away; nothing is distracting in Reykjavik], away from the yapping heads, I thought about how partisanship in the U.S., while hardly new, has once again returned to its roots – base ignorance. Nothing motivates voters more than blind hate and mindless fury. I cannot imagine people more blind and mindless than those moved to passion at this moment like O’Donnell.
I have yet to hear a single word from the Tea Party or their kind that resonates with me. To be honest, I cannot imagine why anyone would want to expose such silliness in public. For the Western world the Age of Enlightenment centered on the 18th Century. What is forgotten is that the time preceding the Enlightenment, the Dark Ages, was a self-imposed devolution and backwardness. The Roman and Greek classical ages were temporarily lost not through a force of nature but through the force of human ignorance and religious myopia and corruption. The classics were restored to the West through the benevolence and enlightenment of Islam. I wonder who has our back now (forget Islam, by the way).
A multi-party system of government gives rise to partisanship, a natural outcome of competing ideologies vying for power. But what happens when the parties share a basic ideology? Rather than competing over grand ideas, the parties must battle over minutia. Grand philosophical debate is reduced to petty partisanship and ad hominum attacks. Welcome to our time, the age of microscopic people espousing nano ideas. Change in our age is not about transformation; change in our age is no more meaningful than a change of clothes or sheets.
Conservation has become distinctly partisan as well. Most environmentalists like me are liberal Democrats. Republicans oppose us not because of our ideas but because of our ideology. We embed conservation into a liberal social agenda, and support the party (the Democrats) who are more aligned with liberalism as a whole.
The result is that the Democratic Party presumes that our support will be freely given rather than earned. The partisan alignment of the environmental movement guarantees that the Democrats will ignore us while the Republicans will oppose us. We have convinced ourselves that the Democrat’s passive acknowledgement of environmental issues is better than outright Republican opposition. As a result Democrats are rarely blamed and Republicans rarely credited.
Home in IcelandI offer this as background to the topic of the moment – the British Petroleum blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. Administrations are judged by how they respond to acute challenges. Successes are celebrated for all ages; failures are never forgotten. America spent two years in the lead up to WW II, but Pearl Harbor is all that is remembered of the early rounds. The Bush administration will forever be haunted by Katrina, and Carter by Iran. The BP fiasco will be seen as President Obama’s day of reckoning, and, to date, I have found him lacking. I suspect that history will as well.
The Deepwater Horizon gusher is an act of man and therefore unlike Katrina, a natural phenomemon or act of God. The federal government had oversight responsibilities of the well from the outset. In this both administrations failed. The MMS cozied up to the industry it regulated in both the Bush and Obama years, and the USFWS permitted the well without an EIS during the Obama administration. Unlike Katrina, the Deepwater Horizon could have been prevented, and in this both administrations were negligent. With that said, we supported Obama because he promised change, not continuation of the disastrous policies and practices of the past. Blaming Bush for BP is as meaningless as blaming Clinton for 9/11. All Americans want to know is who’s on watch.
Where Katrina and BP are alike is in the political responses to the disasters. Simply go back and review press releases from both administrations during the early days of these events. I understand the fog of war, but why are the estimates of negative impacts always low balled? Why do administrations, no matter the party, always grossly understate the obvious knowing full well that the truth will eventually out? The Bush administration estimated that the war in Iraq would cost $50 billion to $60 billion; now the total cost is in the trillions. President Bush praised FEMA in the early aftermath of Katrina (“Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job”), and the final estimates of oil gushing into the Gulf exceeded early Obama administration numbers by orders of magnitude. How should we, the public, respond to such obvious errors or obfuscations? Oops?
Exactly what has the Obama administration accomplished for the environment that should earn our unquestioning support? Despite a clear majority in Congress, the administration failed to advance cap-and-trade. The America’s Great Outdoors initiative is palliative care (like the Last Child in the Woods campaign), long on meetings and talk but short on substantive change. As Frank Rich said during the early days of the BP gusher,
Obama was elected as a progressive antidote to this discredited brand of governance. Of all the president’s stated goals, none may be more sweeping than his desire to prove that government is not always a hapless and intrusive bureaucratic assault on taxpayers’ patience and pocketbooks, but a potential force for good.
I still believe in government as a potential force for good. I still believe that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. But I also believe, as did Jefferson, that “all tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.”
Early this summer I wrote an article about the environmental movement’s abdication of advocacy. An aspect of this surrender is the partisan alignment of the movement today. Advocacy should be focused on the issues and the cause, not on any particular party or power. For example, Martin Luther King found it necessary to split with President Johnson over the war in Viet Nam in his Beyond Viet Nam speech. This critical shift, while consistent with his cause, led to him to be ostricized by many who had previously supported him. President Theodore Roosevelt battled with his own Republican party over his progressive agenda, particularly conservation and public lands. No matter how vilified or disputed, they remained true to their beliefs and the causes.
The Gulf gusher has been a moment in time that begged for clear, unambiguous leadership and action. When Harry Truman faced a railroad strike that would have crippled the country, he responded by threatening to draft all railroad workers into the Army. Theodore Roosevelt used John Lacey’s new Antiquities Act to circumvent a recalcitrant congress and protect millions of acres of America’s heritage. Franklin Roosevelt closed the banks for a “bank holiday” to stop the hemorrhage that threatened to bleed the country even deeper into the Great Depression.
The BP disaster has been Barrack Obama’s defining test, that one event in time when a presidency is made or broken. Only at these critical moments can a president step outside of his or her political skin and lead the nation as an individual, a fellow American. The country forgave Roosevelt’s being caught off guard at Pearl Harbor because he and the nation he led ultimately won the war. Roosevelt honed in on the prize (victory) and swept away the conventions and structures of the past that kept him from that goal. In the Gulf this president has continued with the shopworn policies and agencies of the past, and has offered little in the way of a grand idea for the Gulf restoration beyond platitudes and promises.
Conservation and the environmental movement (not necessarily the same) should embrace a return to the nonpartisan advocacy of the past. Let me be clear – there are two forms of nonpartisanship. The first is to avoid all forms of advocacy, as seen with groups such as the Nature Conservancy. The polar opposite is an advocacy that believes that all should be held accountable, and that the basic tenants and beliefs of conservation must transcend (rather than ignore) the politics of the day. I care little for the former, but the latter is the advocacy that I embrace and promote.
Let’s return to the Gulf. Here the Obama administration has done little more than promulgate the mistakes and inefficiencies of the agencies and allies that he inherited. Where is the change promised just two years ago? Where is the bold, daring leadership that challenges the country to rise to this occasion, to be its best? The Gulf has been an America colony since the end of the Civil War. Wealth is extracted, with little returned. Isn’t the restoration of the Gulf and its people worthy of this president’s interest and investment?
Here is where I would begin. No one disputes that a lot of oil lies untapped under the rocky floors of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans off the U.S. coasts. Yet drilling in these areas has been banned by Congress since 1982. Recently six U.S. senators from the states along the West Coast including Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein jointly introduced legislation to ban all future drilling along the Pacific shoreline. Notice that drilling rigs in the Gulf stop at the Florida Panhandle. Drilling is banned offshore of Florida as well. Why? Why are Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, along with Alaska, bearing the weight of coastal oil and gas production and refining in the U.S.? And if the Gulf is being sacrificed so that others in the U.S. can drive in their SUVs to their oil-free beaches or ship their crops to foreign markets, shouldn’t the impacts to the Gulf be mitigated for with revenues from these economic activities? Shouldn’t the federal government be investing these revenues back into the Gulf states to build local capacity, expertise, and the research necessary to respond to future spills and future dead zones? Shouldn’t national environmental organizations be aiding local groups and institutions in developing the financial and human resources that would aid this capacity building, rather than sucking even more funding from the Gulf to New York and Washington?
Gulf of Mexico Oil Production
To date reinvestment has not been the trend. Washington-based Defenders of Wildlife has received a $216,625 noncompetitive contract from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for a seabird survey in the Gulf. Manomet, based in Plymouth MA, has received a similar grant to survey shorebirds. Bird cleaning funds have gone to three out-of-area firms. Local universities have been unused, and volunteers have been kept on the sidelines. The issue is not whether or not Defenders and Manomet are well-meaning, worthwhile organizations (they are). My concern is how Gulf environmental interests, as limited as they are, have been effectively locked out by those who should have their best interests at heart.
Did the USFWS believe that Defenders is better qualified to count seabirds than Van Remsen’s LSU, Frank Moore’s Southern Mississippi, Texas A&M, or the Gulf Coast Bird Observatory? Is Manomet more familiar with the shorebirds and their habitats along the Gulf than local birders and scientists that have been surveying shorebirds here for decades? Why aren’t the national environmental organizations insisting on local involvement in the NRDA and environmental assessments, or are they too busy trying to snatch their own slice of the pie?
For those along the Gulf, the refrain is familiar. Funds dedicated to those with the least often end up in the hands of those with the most. For example, five years after the passage of the Gulf Opportunity Zone Act of 2005, more of the tax-free benefits from the Katrina disaster have gone to the Louisiana’s powerful oil industry than to development in hard-hit areas. According to Newsweek,
New Orleans has so far received a total of $55 million in bonds shared between eight projects—or less than 1 percent of the more than $5.9 billion issued statewide. None of the bonds issued for New Orleans projects went to development in hard-hit and still-struggling areas like the Lower Ninth Ward.
Instead, the federal largesse has been poured into oil companies operating far from New Orleans. Since Congress’s unanimous approval of the GO Zone Act, Louisiana officials have issued nearly $1.7 billion in tax-free bonds—about one third of the total issued—for projects that contribute to the production of oil.
I blame the Democrats for continuing with the bankrupt policies and strategies of the past and their continued reliance on organizations and institutions that haven’t conjured a new idea since the 1970s. I blame the Republicans for equating environmentalism with socialism (although I admit that both have relied on strong central government and coercion rather than consent), and for their mindless opposition to our issues no matter the stakes. I especially blame rational members of both parties for not stepping outside of party ideology and allowing themselves to intelligently consider the conservation challenges of our time. As Huey Long said,
The only difference I ever found between the Democratic leadership and the Republican leadership is that one of them is skinning you from the ankle up and the other, from the neck down.
Finally, I blame many in the conservation movement for divesting themselves of an honorably passionate past in the quest for political aggrandizement and financial reward. The Gulf gusher can still serve as a catalyst for change within the conservation and environmental communities. Good can be salvaged even from the wreckage of the Gulf. As I said earlier, there is nothing that I find agreeable in the Tea Party, with one significant exception. At least the Tea Partiers know when to be angry. They are often furious at the wrong people about the wrong issues, but at least they show up. Anger is a potent catalyst, and the time has passed for us to kindle that fire.
[Let me add a comment about the Tea Party. The degree to which the Tea Party is viewed favorably is a measure of how disenfranchised people feel at this moment. The fact that much of the economic and social malaise can be dated to the Bush administration is irrelevant. We elected Obama as a force for change, not to enforce a status quo. The Democrats will be spanked in November, and we will see if this president learns his lessons and salvages his legacy in the last two years of his first term. At this moment, he has only himself and his fellow Democrats to blame.]
We should begin by stripping ourselves of rote partisanship and start embracing an advocacy that towers above politics. Political leaders are not preordained to failure or success. Change is always possible. The advocate’s responsibility is to point out failures, no matter one’s political affiliation, and to suggest measures that may succeed. Spare us the platitudes. With measurable, tangible results will come our support, and not before.
