Houston Chronicle Lisa Gray column

Source: Houston ChronicleSept.迷你倉 07--"Careful," said Katy Emde. We were hiking through the Hogg Bird Sanctuary, a little piece of virgin land off Memorial Drive that's as untamed a place as you can find inside the Houston city limits.Five minutes into the jungly brush, we'd passed more native trees than I could identify. Black willows, cherry laurels, hackberries ... was that a red bay? "There's basswood out here, too," Emde said. "That's a really rare one."Emde had pointed out tiny bright-red berries: a snailseed vine. Squish the berries, and you reveal tiny seeds coiled like snail shells. "It's one of only two plants the moonseed moth will eat," she said. She was making a point: Functional "climax" ecosystems are full of specialists. Birds need to eat certain insects; those insects need to eat certain plants. Lose a single species, and the place's whole complex system becomes shakier.She didn't say losing lots of species, all at once, would be a disaster. But that was why she and Evelyn Merz and I were hiking in this place, on this 90-degree morning. They're outdoors people: Emde is a board member of the Native Plant Society and on the conservation board of the Memorial Park Conservancy; Merz is conservation chair of the Sierra Club's Houston Regional Group. And they'd grown extremely worried that a flood-control project might wreck this piece of habitat.Emde stopped abruptly. Behind her, I couldn't tell why at first. And then I was amazed.We had arrived at that rarest of things in Houston: a cliff.Across the surprisingly steep banks Buffalo Bayou, we could see the River Oaks golf course. Looking west, the view resembled a Hudson River School painting: a layered landscape of trees and water. Far below, a tributary fed into Buffalo Bayou; the conjoined waters would eventually make their pokey way to Galveston Bay.Far below us, a long-legged white water bird gave up hunting in the shallows and flapped lazily to try its luck elsewhere. In the brown water, flickering shadows of two big fish drifted as aimlessly as birthday-party balloons."Wow," I said, looking west, reluctant to look away, reluctant to get down to business. "Of what we're looking at, which parts of the banks would be stripped and reshaped?""All of it," Merz said mournfully. "As far as we can tell, all of it.""This is really a good project," Mike Talbot, director of the Harris County Flood Control District, told me on the phone. "I swear."For the record: I believe him. From a flood-control perspective, it's a really good project.The Memorial Park Demonstration Project, as it's called, would reconfigure both banks of the mile and a half of Buffalo Bayou that winds past the River Oaks Country Club, the Hogg Bird Sanctuary, a residential neighborhood and Memorial Park's wild southern edge. The project would change the bayou's course in places, fill in an oxbow here, reinforce banks there, widen the bayou's channel, raising and lowering landmasses and generally move an enormous amount of dirt. The Harris County Flood Control District argues that the proposed measures are desperately needed to reduce erosion and improve water quality. And some environmental groups, such as the Bayou Preservation Association, agree.The issue is what's actually the best choice for the environment. Merz and Emde care about the animal habitat near the bayou and the wild quality of unengineered land. Merz is furious that the proposal is called a "restoration project": Natural bayous aren't stable. They erode their banks, and over time, they change course.Merz had emailed me a flier about a Sept. 11 open meeting sponsored by the Sierra Club and the Endangered Species Media Project. The "plan boosters," says the flier, "claim that the redesigned bayou will finally solve erosion problems for 1.5 miles because then the bayou will be stable -- the exact opposite of a natural channel! In this case, 'restoration' is not grounded in reality. It is only a marketing term. We do not need to destroy the bayou in order to restore it!"On the phone, I asked Talbot about the word "restoration.""When we call it a restoration project, we're looking at restoring the condition of the bayou itself," he said. "It's a natural stream. But it's a distressed natural stream."The Buffalo Bayou t自存倉at the Allen brothers saw when they founded the city of Houston on its banks was vastly different than the one we see today. In those days, the swampy unpaved land absorbed and filtered far more rainwater before it made its way to the bayou. And in those days, Barker and Addicks dams didn't release huge amounts of water into the bayou. Now, the bayou has to handle much higher volumes of much faster water -- sometimes for weeks on end."Sections of the channel are coming unzipped," Talbot said. "We've got severe erosion in Memorial Park, and when that sediment settles, it reduces the efficiency of the channel for carrying floodwaters."The proposed project wouldn't be in the concrete-and-straightening style of the '50s and '60s. It would be in the newer style, the one that instead of "channelizing" mimics the natural curves of a river, the style that includes planting areas in a way that allows the flood-control projects to double as parkland. I'm a fan of similar flood control projects on bayous, such as Brays or Cypress Creek, that had been channelized; the new versions function far better, both for flood control and recreation, than horrors they replaced. But would a new-style stretch of Buffalo Bayou really work better ecologically than virgin land?"We can't leave Buffalo Bayou to self-destruct," Talbot said. And then he talked about the area I'd looked at with Emde and Merz. "There's a spot on the north bank with a small tributary, where a city storm sewer feeds into the bayou. It's eroded into the Grand Canyon! It's destroying the bird habitat. What we're going to end up with, after this project, is better habitat. It'll take awhile to recover. But it'll be better."Emde and Merz don't agree. Emde worries mainly about the biodiversity: Even after years of recovery, it's hard to believe that the scraped-and-rebuilt part of the bird sanctuary would support the same number of species that it does now.The flood control district calls Meyer Park, on Spring Creek, a possible model of the way it would replant the Memorial Park project: That project, too, used native plants. But when Emde visited the park, it depressed her: Compared to the jungly ecosystem at Hogg Bird Sanctuary, the flood-control plant seemed "a barren strip." Even in the older, more-established part of the project, instead of a life-filled tangle, she found only a few native plants: some sycamore trees, a couple of box elders, a little switchgrass. Those looked lonely amid a sea of intentionally seeded Bermuda grass -- a nonnative species that actually endangers Houston ecosystems."Look at that!" she told me, outraged, showing me a picture of Meyer Park on her phone. "There's no diversity! It's not natural! It's not habitat! It's horrifying."Talbot told me that if environmentalists don't want Bermuda grass on the Memorial Park project, the flood-control district wouldn't use Bermuda grass. But that change alone doesn't get to Emde's deeper point: You can't just replant an ecosystem that's built up over thousands of years. If you scrape the land, you'll lose the complexity. The system will change radically.Merz worries a lot about the erosion of public input. In the past, she said, flood-control projects have used federal permits that required public meetings and input. But the permit for this project doesn't. Though the flood control district has reached out to stakeholders in the area -- and Emde and Merz have both attended some of those meetings -- those are mostly private groups. No large, open-to-all-comers meeting has been convened, Merz said. And one needs to be: The public has an interest, both because the bird sanctuary and park are public land and because taxpayer dollars will finance the project. She believes another approach -- a smaller-bore one that would mainly address erosion at the golf course -- would be both cheaper and more ecologically sensible.I like Mike Talbot and the flood-control district. But I think Evelyn Merz is right: The project needs more public input. Diversity of opinions and viewpoints in public projects is like diversity of species in an ecosystem. More is always better.Copyright: ___ (c)2013 the Houston Chronicle Visit the Houston Chronicle at .chron.com Distributed by MCT Information Services迷你倉新蒲崗