Posted on

Impervious surfaces

Include our brains. This report about Houston from last year outlines how unchecked development remains a priority in the famously un-zoned city, creating short-term economic gains for some while increasing flood risks for everyone:

The area’s history is punctuated by such major back-to-back storms, but many residents say they are becoming more frequent and severe, and scientists agree.

“More people die here than anywhere else from floods,” said Sam Brody, a Texas A&M University at Galveston researcher who specializes in natural hazards mitigation. “More property per capita is lost here. And the problem’s getting worse.”

Why?

Scientists, other experts and federal officials say Houston’s explosive growth is largely to blame. As millions have flocked to the metropolitan area in recent decades, local officials have largely snubbed stricter building regulations, allowing developers to pave over crucial acres of prairie land that once absorbed huge amounts of rainwater. That has led to an excess of floodwater during storms that chokes the city’s vast bayou network, drainage systems and two huge federally owned reservoirs, endangering many nearby homes — including Virginia Hammond’s.

We must learn to do better, but long-term thinking tends to challenge us more than anything.

Posted on

Origins of the Distrust

It can be argued that the seeds of the distrust we have for government, and especially government commissions, were purchased on this day, 50 years ago. There were watered by the Warren Commission as it tried to not explain just what had happened to a popular, sitting U.S. President in broad daylight. And by the time we arrived at Watergate and the Church Commission, those lusty seeds were in full bloom. Pierce:

One argument with which I have no patience is that the distrust of the Warren Commission, a distrust that has remained remarkably consistent for five decades, is based in our disbelief that a great leader could be gunned down by an ordinary schmoe with a cheap rifle. This. we are told, is too much for our delicate sensibilities to handle. This is arrant, infantilizing nonsense. At the time of his death, John Kennedy had a national security establishment that was a writhing ball of snakes. (Not for nothing did he insist that his White House cooperate with the filming of Seven Days In May.) There were the ongoing plots against Castro in which his brother was intimately involved. There is a contemporary memo for something called Operation Northwoods that called for what we would now call “false flag” operations within the United States, including blowing up John Glenn on the launching pad in Florida, that could be blamed on Cuba and used as a pretext to invade. You can see a copy of it in the John F. Kennedy Library. Since then, we have seen Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra. Richard Nixon sabotaged the Paris Peace Talks to help him get elected, and Ronald Reagan’s people may have done the same thing with the release of the hostages in Iran. Don’t tell this generation that we don’t believe the Warren Commission out of some mushy, mythical notion of proportionality. There is no proportionality to the deceptions involved in official murder. We’ve read enough Graham Greene to know that. We watched enough happen on the television. We can see a church by daylight.

An author friend wrote a book about the Kennedy assassination, and just a few of our conversations convinced me that it was a conspiracy without end – one for which it is even difficult to find the beginning. And it still hangs there, as we do, bound by its purposeful mysteries, unable to move forward in many ways because of them. We are a resilient country with a odd penchant for renewable Original Sin.

Posted on

Every Man is aware

On the 99th anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, an excerpt from Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front:

We wake up in the middle of the night. The earth booms. Heavy fire is falling on us. We crouch into corners. We distinguish shells of every calibre.

Each man lays hold of his things and looks again every minute to reassure himself that they are still there. The dug-out heaves, the night roars and flashes. We look at each other in the momentary flashes of light, and with pale faces and pressed lips shake our heads.

Every man is aware of the heavy shells tearing down the parapet, rooting up the embankment and demolishing the upper layers of concrete. When a shell lands in the trench we note bow the hollow, furious blast is like a blow from the paw of a raging beast of prey. Already by morning a few of the recruits are green and vomiting. They are too inexperienced….

The bombardment does not diminish. It is falling in the rear too. As far as one can see spout fountains of mud and iron. A wide belt is being raked.

The attack does not come, but the bombardment continues. We are gradually benumbed. Hardly a man speaks. We cannot make ourselves understood.

Our trench is almost gone. At many places it is only eighteen inches high, it is broken by holes, and craters, and mountains of earth. A shell lands square in front of our post. At once it is dark. We are buried and must dig ourselves out….

Towards morning, while it is still dark, there is some excitement. Through the entrance rushes in a swarm of fleeing rats that try to storm the walls. Torches light up the confusion. Everyone yells and curses and slaughters. The madness and despair of many hours unloads itself in this outburst. Faces are distorted, arms strike out, the beasts scream; we just stop in time to avoid attacking one another….

Suddenly it howls and flashes terrifically, the dug-out cracks in all its joints under a direct hit, fortunately only a light one that the concrete blocks are able to withstand. It rings metallically, the walls reel, rifles, helmets, earth, mud, and dust fly everywhere. Sulphur fumes pour in.

If we were in one of those light dug-outs that they have been building lately instead of this deeper one, none of us would be alive.

But the effect is bad enough even so. The recruit starts to rave again and two others follow suit. One jumps up and rushes out, we have trouble with the other two. I start after the one who escapes and wonder whether to shoot him in the leg-then it shrieks again, I fling myself down and when I stand up the wall of the trench is plastered with smoking splinters, lumps of flesh, and bits of uniform. I scramble back.

The first recruit seems actually to have gone insane. He butts his head against the wall like a goat. We must try to-night to take him to the rear. Meanwhile we bind him, but in such a way that in case of attack he can be released at once….

Suddenly the nearer explosions cease. The shelling continues but it has lifted and falls behind us, our trench is free. We seize the hand-grenades, pitch them out in front of the dug-out and jump after them. The bombardment has stopped and a heavy barrage now falls behind us. The attack has come.