Buffalo Bayou reminds me to ask: What does protecting home look like?


** News of the world environment
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NEWSLETTER | DECEMBER 18, 2020
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** Often, the Work Gets Personal
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This is a good time of year to reflect on home. I grew up in Houston, Texas, a city right on top of a once-natural bayou system. Today, throughout the city, many of these bayous sit stagnant (when they aren’t flooding) in concrete channels that are mostly shadeless and lifeless.

But then there’s the Buffalo Bayou — by all appearances, a real, natural bayou. West of the city, near my childhood home, this bayou twists and turns through a riparian forest of sycamores, willows, and pines. Snakes and turtles sunbathe on the muddy banks. Insects swarm above the water. Bats swoop low to eat them. Once, I saw a beaver.

It’s no accident the Buffalo Bayou looks this way. In the 1960s, when the US Army Corps of Engineers started bulldozing part of its banks, a homeowner named Terry Hershey decided that she didn’t want her backyard bayou to be channeled and straightened. She made phone calls, wrote letters, and eventually testified in Washington, D.C. with an invitation from her representative in Congress — at that time, a fellow Houstonian named George H. W. Bush. The Army Corps subsequently halted its work, and today the Buffalo Bayou remains what some have called a “ribbon of life through the concrete.”

As an environmental reporter, I often explore the outer reaches of human sympathy for the natural world. Environmentalists applaud the protection of wildlife or wildernesses we may never see. But often the work gets personal. When we protect ecosystems, we find ourselves doing something much more instinctive: We are protecting places we love, our home.

That’s not the end of this story, however. It’s important to note that Hershey, a charismatic member of a largely White community, was given the support and audience not afforded to others. She deserved her successes and saved an important urban ecosystem. But whereas Hershey and I had a backyard bayou oasis, predominately Black neighborhoods across town had solid waste facilities and polluting petrochemical plants. The Buffalo Bayou reminds me to ask: What does protecting home look like, and does it look the same for all?

Austin Price
Contributing Editor, Earth Island Journal

P.S. For those who don’t know me, I’m a contributing editor for the Journal. This my first time writing in the weekly newsletter, but I’ll back here from time to time these next few months as Managing Editor Zoe Loftus-Farren is out on family leave. I look forward to meeting you again in this space.
Photo of Buffalo Bayou: LithiumAneurysm ([link removed])


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