Climate change essay

 "What Survives" by Lacy M. Johnson, excerpts here.

As published in Emergence Magazine

A wetland park now exists east of Houston Texas where executive homes once were perched on a peninsula, which has subsumed with the aquafer's depletion. And this essay takes you through details of how it was happening.

She names the oil company responsible for pumping out the water from the aquafer to cool it's oil production, Humble Oil, which had its refinery just across the bay from this small Brownwood peninsula.

This arial view from 1944 shows that some homes were built on waterfronts, and more streets were paved.

By 1953 there's a lot more development in the area.

But Johnson reminds us of all the frequent hurricanes that hit that area of the Gulf Coast, 

"When Tropical Storm Delia hit the Texas coast in 1973, the storm sent water over the bulkheads and into the neighborhood.

In one photo of the damage, a national guardsman wades through chest-high water to approach a flooded home; in another, two men row through the subdivision in a boat. 

The same year Delia struck the Brownwood subdivision, Humble Oil merged with its partner company, Standard Oil. Beginning on January 1, 1973, the two companies would share petroleum products and a name: Exxon Company, USA.

A 1978 arial photo showing the peninsula on the left has completely disappeared, and the coastline of Brownwood has shrunk. As the water in the aquafer is pumped out for oil production, the ground above it sinks down...and here the Gulf of Mexico reclaims it's own.

"THE DEATH OF the Brownwood subdivision came in August 1983, when Alicia made landfall just southwest of Galveston as a Category 3 hurricane, putting the peninsula in the path of 100-mph winds and on the “dirty side” of the storm. A ten-and-a-half-foot storm surge rolled over the neighborhood, knocking homes off their foundations, tossing a telephone pole into the upstairs bedrooms of one home.

Two weeks after the storm, the Baytown City Council voted to permanently close the subdivision, but residents fought to return. Eventually, the city shut down services to the peninsula: no trash pickup, no water, no electricity. FEMA offered residents a buyout; about a third of residents refused it, suggesting that the federal buyout didn’t reflect the full value of their property. Several moved back into their homes, hauling their own water and using generators for electricity.

I think that's just pure Texas pride. So many thick headed stubborn people want things to stay the way they were, but don't accept what's right in front of their faces of irreversible changes. 

"For a decade, houses collapsed and decayed. People used the yards and streets as a dumping ground. It continued that way until 1994, when the federal government ordered the principal polluting parties responsible for a nearby superfund site to restore a wetland area as reparation for their environmental crimes. After an extensive survey of possible sites, they chose this peninsula and over years this place began to change. Engineers bulldozed the few structures left standing and buried the rubble in trenches next to the foundations. They created freshwater ponds and dug three sixty-foot-wide channels to supply marshes with water; they established wooded areas on the new islands and brought in native plants. Over the years, other companies who have been ordered to mitigate their environmental harms have created additional marshes, installed a pavilion and a pier. Now, there is even a butterfly garden.

Past the bend in the channel, on the mainland on the other side of the bay, towers flare at the Exxon refinery in Baytown. I remember a report a few years ago, known as the Carbon Majors report, that pinpointed the one hundred companies responsible for 70 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since 1988. Exxon was listed among the top five contributors and alone emitted at least 2 percent of total excess carbon over the past thirty-five years.

Around that time, I learned that Exxon scientists (then working for Humble Oil) had issued a report as early as 1957 that acknowledged “the enormous quantity of carbon dioxide” concentrating in the atmosphere “from the combustion of fossil fuels.” A little over a decade later, in 1968, an American Petroleum Institute study warned that burning fossil fuels would bring “significant temperature changes” by the year 2000, and that these temperature changes could be significant enough to result in “serious world-wide environmental changes.”

 Over time, refineries and area municipalities began to convert from ground water sources to surface water sources, but not completely. Subsidence remains a threat, but it isn’t by any means our only or even our most urgent one. Increasingly, we face those “serious world-wide environmental changes” scientists warned about more than fifty years ago: sea level rise, floods, erosion, more and stronger hurricanes, more and stronger floods, winter storms that plunge millions into freezing darkness for days, and threaten blackout for months—pollution, fires, droughts, extinctions.

These are just excerpts from Johnson's excellent article.  Check it out for more details.

Today's inspirational quote:

THOUSANDS OF CANDLES CAN BE LIGHTED FROM A SINGLE CANDLE, AND THE LIFE OF THE CANDLE WILL NOT BE SHORTENED. HAPPINESS NEVER DECREASES BY BEING SHARED.

THE BUDDHA