Houston and Nature

We face serious danger from Houston hurricane. I'm not talking about just any old storm, but one that originates in the Gulf of Mexico, rides up the Houston Ship Channel and destroys our petrochemical complex. Several thousand tanks filled with toxic substances might buckle and spill their contents into the environment. This would poison our area for decades to come.

Let's prevent that.

Terence O'Rourke of the Harris County Attorney explains the threat, why we have no protection in place and what we can do to get us to safety.

Resources:

• One-pager by the University of Boulder, Colorado, presenting the problem.

• The Ike Dike, presented by Texas A&M University.

• Video explainer of Galveston Bay Park.

• Brochure of Galveston Bay Park by the architecture firm Rogers Partners.

A hundred years ago, you could see the Attwater's Prairie Chicken all across the Texas Gulf Coast. And on mornings during spring mating season, you'd hear thousands of males call out for females. The soundscape they wove was quintessentially Texan – you just couldn't find it anywhere else.

Today fewer than two hundred prairie chickens are left, and saving the species from extinction is an uphill battle. But John Magera, who manages the Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge, is ready to fight. Hear him tell me about his motivations, his admiration for the men and women who started the captive breeding program, and the preciousness of this vulnerable bird.

The honeybee is an amazing little creature. It provides us with essential goods and services - honey, wax, and pollination - and is even more social than we humans are.

Curious to find out how a honeybee society runs itself, I reached out to Carlisle Vandervoort, a movie producer and beekeeper from Houston's Heights neighborhood. Carlisle told me about the delights of beekeeping, mile-high drone comets, queen bee servitude, and the profound gratitude these small insects inspire.

Glance at the Texas prairie, and all you see is grass and weeds. Look again, and you begin to appreciate the opportunity it holds for all of us: New income streams from carbon storage for ranchers and a slow-down in global warming for the rest of us. It's win-win all around, courtesy of the circular economy.

To find out how it works, I spoke with environmental lawyer Jim Blackburn of Rice University's Baker Institute. He describes the risks we currently face, the new economic model that may help us, and the central role the Texas prairie plays in all of this.

Greater Houston is one of the largest metropolitan areas in the United States and growing.

To give us a sense of the challenges this poses to the Houston environmental movement, I invited Jaime Gonzállez, the Houston Healthy Cities Program Director at the Nature Conservancy in Texas.

We'll discuss how the coronavirus may impact our attitude towards nature, what Houston's environmental community looks like and how it differs from other cities, what influence philanthropic organizations have had, and how the environmental community might match our region's growing ethnic diversity.