The Evolution of the Save Our Springs Alliance Movement in the Fight Over the Environment in Austin, Texas
The granola army can beat you without money.
Gary Bradley, Circle C Developer, New York Times article, 1983
Twenty years ago, on August 8th, 1992, the citizens of Austin overwhelmingly voted to enact the Save Our Springs Ordinance that ended unrestricted growth in the Barton Springs and Edwards Aquifer recharge zones and radically altered how the City of Austin regarded land development, the environment, and its own citizens. Prior to passage, the City's politics were dominated by pro-business and pro-development city councils, but in the aftermath of what began as a single-issue citizens' uprising, Austin became a 'green' city that put environmental considerations on par with those of private economic interests.
In the 1980s, war was brewing between Austinites who wanted to continue to live in a sleepy college town and the land developers who were capitalizing on the economic boom to expand the suburbs of Austin for immigrants racing to Austin's expanding high-tech businesses. The stress of increased traffic, major retail chains' displacing of local businesses, and a general assault on Austin's unique cultural landmarks created a vigorous backlash movement against any kind of development. Austinites grew tired of seeing their city's cultural resources disappear in what seemed to be a selling off of all that made Austin unique. When this development frenzy spread west of town into the environmentally sensitive headwaters of Barton Creek threatening Barton Springs along with its resident salamanders, another jewel in Austin's cultural violet crown was in danger, and the citizens would simply take no more. What began as a shallow ecology1 movement in response to the unwanted suburban development of Circle C Ranch, the Save Our Springs Alliance (SOSA) galvanized into a deep ecology2 action group by using the emotional touchstone of Barton Springs to transform a political debate of growth and development into an environmental issue that was about private profit versus common good, economic class differential, and a fight against pollution and resource depletion.
1shallow ecology is defined by Arne Naes as a fight only against pollution and resource depletion.
2deep ecology is defined by Arne Naes as a vaguely defined and less influential movement that is characterized by a more holistic understanding of humans' place in the environment
God and private property
We're trying to deal with that force, bigger than all of us, here longer than all of us, that designs something that is still mysterious to us. Well, that is the spirit of something, and it is best reflected in natural places.
Robert Redford in The Unforeseen
The project that threatened Barton Creek and popular swimming hole Barton Springs began when bankrupt former governor John Connally sold his Barton Creek property to Louisiana tycoon Jim Bob Moffett of Freeport McMoRan mining and oil company in 1989. McMoRan's crown jewel project of the time was an ore mine whose tailings severely impacted more than 11 square miles of rainforest in Grasberg, Indonesia. Moffett enlisted high-flying land developer Gary Bradley to develop Circle C Ranch in southwest Austin during the peak of the economic boom, and as front man, Bradley became the hated target of SOSA and the emerging environmentalists in Austin. In a legendary 17-hour parade of 900 angry Austinites speaking against the project, a shell-shocked city council voted unanimously to deny Brady a development permit to start an environmental movement and define a path for a landmark city ordinance whose ramifications are still being worked out in court more than two decades later. The early stage of the fight against the Circle C development was clearly a shallow ecological movement about pollution and resource depletion of a local swimming hole. What wasn't so clear, though, was that Bradley's background made it impossible for him to understand why this was an issue. Ironically, his beliefs and actions encouraged SOSA to transform their movement from one of simple resource valuation to one that had deeper and lasting social implications for the City.
Bradley grew up in a Christian household on a farm in West Texas where his belief in God and his battles with the elements shaped his view of nature. Prior to the settling of the America, production techniques and machinery of the middle ages allowed farmers to practice subsistence farming, but later improvements allowed for increased production and a rescaling of actions to now fit the capabilities of the machinery (White). The result was a shift away from operating as a part of nature to operating as an exploiter of nature. This shift in scale and focus on profits rather than subsistence put the farmer at odds with nature as a force to be overcome. Bradley recounts his own experience of farming starting in childhood.
If you haven't seen a west Texas thunderstorm, it's inspiring. Unless your crops are at risk. Cause usually the tornadoes and dust are out in front of it, and here comes the hail and the rain. I remember putting the pillows over my ears to not hear the hail cause you just want it to go away. I remember one morning - we'd already been hailed out two years in a row so we were in bad shape with the bank - and when the sun came up there was nothing left in the field ... nothing. (The Unforeseen)
Bradley was in a constant fight for his livelihood as a farmer, and it led to a catastrophic economic defeat that ultimately pushed him to move to Austin. Not only did his personal experience create a relationship of struggle with nature, so, too, did his religious beliefs.
Reacting to his confrontations with the environment as a natural theologian, he says, "nature becomes God. A God who gives great abundance at times and takes everything away." (The Unforeseen) As a farmer, Bradley is subject to the whims of an uncontrollable situation with the power of God. To him, in order to survive, he must somehow control his environment. He reads his trials as a part of a larger symbolic system which was a way for God to communicate to him, and his aspiration “was to get out of there and to get into a life … I had more control over” (The Unforeseen). As opposed to a scientific view of nature, his symbolic reading of the world was essentially an artistic view that was in line with the early Church beliefs of creation and comprehension of the world. As a land developer, Bradley saw the environment as a work of art for him to craft.
Bradley uses the creation of art as a metaphor when speaking of land developing. He speaks of the creation of a subdivision as an artistic endeavor where “roads are kind of the basic blueprint. Once you have that understanding, then you can put another layer on your canvas, of water and sewer lines. And now, it's starting to take shape” (The Unforeseen). To him, the environment has no collection of guardian spirits. He sees the land as a set of objects to be rearranged and manipulated to his own devices since as a Christian, “a tree can be no more than a physical fact” (White 1206). Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects “rightful mastery over nature” (White 1206). Bradley is in charge and needs only the help of God to provide the one thing he cannot. “What I've said on more than one occasion is that as a developer, when I'm at my best, all I need is water. I can't make water. That's something that's gotta be there. It's a God thing; it's life blood” (The Unforeseen). Bradley sees the land as a blank canvas on which to create a profit – a profit based on the rights of private land ownership that would be challenged by a group trying to protect God's water.
Class warfare
Bradley's religiously inspired beliefs were right in line with traditional Texas land owners' thoughts on private property, and private property rights came to the fore during the 1994 gubernatorial campaign between Ann Richards and upstart George W. Bush whom Bradley supported. Bush's stance was summed up by then county official Carol Keeton Rylander in a campaign speech saying, “people are at the top of the list, and bugs and birds are at the bottom of the list.” A sign in the crowd says, “I'm a person, not a biological resource. I have private property rights” (The Unforseen). The fight for a clean swimming hole had now become about the prioritization of people and nature and, in turn, forced the SOSA activists to deepen their own philosophical stance and adjust the issues of the movement to include more compelling arguments for not developing environmentally sensitive lands. The Bush campaign had turned the possible pollution of a local swimming hole into a new statewide frame of reference. It was now a class struggle between rich land owners and the average citizen.
With the private property debate, SOSA was now in a position to make their case against uncontrolled development an appealing issue for a larger part of the Austin populace. No longer was the fight about the possible disruption of a park amenity for a small group of people. Now it was about deciding whether a few land owners would be allowed to exploit the environment as a resource for their private benefit, or would the environment be managed for the common good of the entire City and region.
SOSA adopted an anti-class posture indicative of a deep ecological movement (Naes 152) by playing up environmental exploitation by the few that suppresses the rights of the many. The private property issue highlighted the difference between those who paid a $22,100 initiation fee at Barton Creek Country Club and the average citizen's $1.50 spent for an afternoon of swimming in Barton Springs. Newspaper columnist Daryl Slusher conjured that Bradley's development would be willful contamination of Barton Springs "so a few thousand people can live, shop, and play golf upstream" (Clark-Madison). At this time, the pro-development city council approved the development plan for Circle C, and “the Barton Springs debate became a class war” (Clark-Madison). Both sides happily participated using similar arguments against one another.
For the SOSA camp, it was a simple case of playing an economic disparity card to entice support from the populace, but from the pro-development side, an alternative economic factor was now put into play that broadened the debate while twisting SOSA's elitist argument. Bradley and followers began to use the lack of jobs and growth in Austin as a wedge into working class supporters in what Ingersoll refers to as a “Faustian subplot” (Ingersoll 127). Bradley's message became one of economic destruction and environmental racism in an argument for the welfare of humanity. He suggested that SOSA's acts would leave the Eastside working class neighborhoods devastated as the rights of animals and creeks were taking away working people's rights to construction jobs, while at the same time ignoring more severe environmental threats on the Eastside. Bradley even began funding a shadow organization headed by minority business leaders called Save Our Neighborhoods to try to spread the message that SOS stood for 'segregate our society.' Class warfare had turned racial by extending the scope of the social construction of the environment from a straightforward shallow ecological scuffle. The final element of SOSA's deep ecological movement was to return to the original fight against pollution and resource depletion, but now they would use the salamander as a poster child for leverage in the larger social battlefield.
Battle for Austin's soul
SOSA developed a 'salamander in the cave' strategy (a variation of a canary in the coalmine) by using Jean-Jacques Rousseau's mid-eighteenth century metaphysical role of nature's being the ultimate measure of what is right in the world. Once water quality became SOSA's tool of choice, Barton Springs, as the most obvious barometer of water quality, became a different kind of symbol, not an index but a metaphor. In this moment, nature in the form of the salamander in water became a measure of what was right (or wrong) with Austin as a whole. The health of the salamander was elevated above its actual standing in the ecosystem to a symbol for the very soul of the Austin itself. Now SOSA could make the battle personal between the soul of the city and the bad guys from the outside.
As Lynas in The God Species posits, 'nature' has intrinsic moral value and a 'right' to be protected from our ambitions. In this case the ambitions were originating from rich out-of-towners attempting a scheme to individually profit from killing the salamander and Barton Springs, and, by extension, the entire City of Austin in some sort of epic western confrontation between the black hats and the white hats. This brought the SOSA movement back to where it began and back to Bradley's Achilles' heel as a developer. It was once again a fight about the availability of God's water, which Bradley always knew he could not control.
Water was the silver bullet for SOSA, and in one shot they were able to change the entire relationship of land developer to environment. The battle was now a matter of health of an ecosystem of which the city was now thought to be an equal part. Citizens easily understood that thousands of people get their drinking water from the Barton Springs section of the aquifer and that dirty water made people sick. More significantly, though, once water quality became the metric that measured Austin's health, it became a tool to limit growth, which was a root concern of many of Austinites already, and once it transcended to metaphor, it was unstoppable in the larger issue of growth.
Water quality provided excellent political cover for limiting growth which was important as the previous limited growth movement had failed, and even referring to it had become taboo because of the strength of private property rights sentiment in Texas. Now that the health of Austin was measured by the quality of its water, it was no longer enough to keep the water in Barton Springs clean, now it had to be as pure as citizens envisioned the soul of Austin. Thus, instead of saving Barton Springs by saving Austin from unchecked growth, SOSA would save Austin from unchecked growth by saving Barton Springs. The battle lines were moved from limiting damage of the springs to creating an entirely new, socially constructed view of an embodied personification of nature in Austin. What resulted was a redefinition of Austin's relationship to the environment based on the social construction of nature performed throughout the process of constructing the SOS Ordinance.
Conclusion
In bringing the fight full circle, SOSA transformed itself from a single issue shallow ecological movement into a fully-fledged deep ecological movement that crystallized Austin's relationship to the environment in the Save Our Springs Ordinance. In conjunction, SOSA also became the mechanism that generated Austin's socially constructed view of the environment. That construction would fit into Latour's Actor-Network Theory (ANT) of embodied practice that Demeritt describes as being a “heterogeneously assembled actor network of human and non-human entities.” Contrary to Latour's view of 'Nature', however, the fight over the salamander and the Barton Springs watershed united the natural and social realms of Austin through political action.
As suggested by Demeritt, ANT formulations of nature's constructions are “less politically self-confident” (Demeritt 776) than other proponents of social constructivism, and ANT appears not to apply completely when looking at the events surrounding land development in the Barton Springs / Edwards Aquifer recharge zones. ANT can, however, be used as an overall approach since the process of battling over water quality and private property rights resulted in a redefinition of nature itself for the City of Austin. What was natural and worth protecting became politicized, considered and recreated in a network of change that included blind fauna and bodies of water as main actors. Looking at the process through Latour's filter is helpful in tracing SOSA's transformation and the creation of the SOS Ordinance.
The salamander, Barton Springs and the other actors participated in a process that could be characterized by Latour's two forms of power and four requirements of a collectives process of exploration (and definition) of the common view of the value and rights of the environmental world in Austin. From the first of Latour's requirements, 'Power to Take Into Account Perplexity' occurred as the definitions of the battle evolved and expanded in scope and complexity throughout the conflict. As these complexities emerged and SOSA moved towards being a deeply defined ecological movement, the second requirement, 'consultation', emerged as a larger body of actors was defined and included in the process. 'The Power to Rank and Arrange' presents hierarchization in the process when the priority of humans' property rights and nature came into conflict. Resolution in the creation of the SOS Ordinance brought the process to the 'institution' requirement as a standard of agreement of how to view the environment in Austin. The SOS Ordinance is in effect today, but the outcomes of it may be opposite of what was intended.
The SOS Ordinance attempts to employ ecological egalitarianism towards lessening the impact of development in the Barton Springs / Edwards Aquifer recharge zones by requiring less crowded inhabitation of the land. It was thought that with less impervious cover, the runoff of rainwater would be minimized and water could recharge the aquifer. What may have happened instead is that the ordinance, by encouraging sprawl, will effectively increase impervious cover over the entire sensitive area and cross the threshold where rain water will be effective in recharging the aquifer. The sprawl also encourages an increase in wells' drawing water out of the aquifer that erases any benefit the reduced impervious cover may have. The only truly effective method for ensuring a recharging condition is to leave the land undeveloped in nature preserves, which is again challenging our notion of the natural environment. It may be that we have left Plato's cave, but how long will we continue to see the afterimage of a soon-to-be extinct salamander before we realize that the cave belongs to the salamander, and we are our own puppeteers?
References
Demeritt, David, “What is ‘Social Construction of Nature.’ A topology and sympathetic critique,” in Progress in Human Geography 26(6): 767-790.
Dunn, Laura, director, The Unforseen, 2007.
Ingersoll, Richard, “Second Nature: On the Social Bond of Ecology and Architecture,” in Reconstructing Architecture: Critical Discourses and Social Practices, Tom Dutton and Lian Hurst Mann, Eds., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, pp. 119-157.
Latour, Bruno, Politics of Nature, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.Lynas, Mark, God Species, Fourth Estate, 2011.
Clark-Madison, Mike, “Did SOS Matter?: Has the movement for clean water and democracy fulfilled its promise?” Austin Chronicle, Fri., Aug. 9, 2002. http://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2002-08-09/99629/, retrieved November 10, 2012.
Naess, Arne, “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movements: A Summary,” in Deep Ecology for the 21st Century: Readings on the Philosophy and Practice of the New Environmentalism, George Sessions, Ed., Boston, MA: Shambala, 1995, pp. 141-150.
Smith, Amy, Fri., Aug. 3, 2012, “The SOS Ordinance Turns 20: Remembrances of an election that changed Austin's political environment”, http://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2012-08-03/the-sos-ordinance-turns-20/, retrieved November 6, 2012.
White, Lynn Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” in Science, Vol. 155, No. 3767, 10 March 1967: pp. 1203-1207.
“Now”, Public Broadcasting System, transcript June 15, 2007, http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/324/transcript.html, retrieved November 8, 2012.
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