Parker: As goes Texas, there goes the United States
With a new demographic majority emerging, the nation looks to our state as a barometer for dealing with rapid social and climate change.
Published 2:39 pm, Saturday, November 1, 2014
So, Rick Perry prayed. He asked Texans to pray. He called for seven days of prayer as the drought tightened its death grip in 2011: "I think it's time for us to just hand it to God, and say, 'God: You're going to have to fix this.'" He petitioned Washington for federal financial help, too. Then he made sure that prayers were not just private but conveniently public as he appeared and dutifully prayed before 30,000 evangelical Christians at Houston's Reliant Stadium - right before he announced his candidacy for president, of course. But those relentless blue skies, without a drop of rain in them, made one thing clear.
God wasn't listening to Rick Perry. Of course, the forces of nature are the work of God or fate or just mere coincidence, whichever you choose to believe. Drought in Texas and the rest of the Southwest was not merely an historic natural phenomenon, driven by events on the other side of the world and the equator, it was an entrenched prehistoric phenomenon. But man can make the impacts of natural events worse for himself. Increasing thirst, essentially, was a manmade event just like famine; crops may fail but rising populations, fuel prices, war and failure to plan - all the handiwork of man, not God - are what spawn the resultant human misery.
Perry seemed to have forgotten that his predecessor in the 1950s, Allan Shivers, a conservative Democratic governor took action. He rallied the Texas congressional delegation - as well as cattlemen across the Southwest and other Southwestern governors - to fight the Republican Eisenhower administration over its paltry drought relief during that historic drought. While Shivers was the leader in the fight, it was Senate Minority Leader Lyndon Johnson who put it best: The administration's offer "was just enough to liquidate the remaining assets and [buy] a coach-class ticket out of town."
At the time, Texas had responded in the manner befitting that era of massive engineering solutions to human problems by erecting a network of giant dams to store more freshwater, more reservoirs across a landscape that was home to no natural lakes, beyond a few ancient ones in East Texas. The public works projects of the Great Depression had strung the first dams across the big rivers, like the Colorado, mainly to halt flooding and bring electricity to the Hill Country for the first time. When the drought finally broke in 1957, after 10 merciless years, Texas proceeded to build more dams at nearly breakneck speed. Politicians practically threw money at engineers.
Between 1957 and 1960 alone crews built 69 more dams, including Longhorn Dam where cattle used to ford the Colorado on the old Chisholm Trail. In 1960, the river backed up gracefully into what is now known as Lady Bird Lake in downtown Austin, joining the impoundments upriver that formed the Highland Lakes. Two lakes alone - Travis and Buchanan - held 2 million acre-feet of water, the drinking water of the whole region as well as water for farmers downstream, as much water as all of Southern California consumes annually now. But as the hot, dry years set in and the population exploded, the lakes held alarmingly less. Over 1.6 million acre-feet of water plummeted to less than 1 million in the first several months of 2011.
The drought was most certainly not Rick Perry's doing. He could no more make it rain water than create jobs, as it would turn out. But the blame for the failure to prepare for it after years of warnings from nature and data from scientists could be laid squarely on the doorstep of the governor's mansion, most certainly, along with a myopic Republican legislature better at pinching pennies and grandstanding than anticipating change and challenge. Public schools and universities busted at the seams. A new majority was emerging without a clear path to attaining and maintaining themselves in a productive middle class. Roads were being built but too few and too late.
It was becoming increasingly clear that 20 years of Republican rule was running its course in its ability to solve practical problems which, after all, is the very business of governing, if not politics. An iron-fisted Republican grip on power was now turning into a period of decadence in which politicians, like Perry, routinely brandished themes meant to stir up the arch-conservative base but that never became meaningful policy. Republican politics and policy was increasingly just for show, just a circus. But this showy inaction threatened real consequence. Failing to deal with climate change and social change could well forfeit the fruits of the promising boom years, all for short-term electoral gain. This all went unnoticed by the national political press, of course, which was more impressed with Perry's cowboy boots, his hair, his pistol, his rootin', tootin' dalliance with secession, and his nearly allergic aversion to the government actually doing anything.
To most of the rest of the country, Texas has historically been a slice of the country that has sparked controversy, bred presidents and fomented turmoil from the American Civil War to George W. Bush. But that Texas is changing - and it will change America itself. In Lone Star Nation, Richard Parker examines the evolving landscape that is densely urban, overwhelmingly Hispanic, exceedingly powerful in the global economy and increasingly liberal. This Texas will have to ensure upward mobility, reinvigorate democratic rights and confront climate change - just to continue its historic economic boom. Because of its rapid rate of change, Texas is poised to act as a barometer for the rest of the country, as the state is the first to confront changes - ranging from political and economic to even issues of climate change, given Texas's shortage of water - before they're felt in the rest of the country.
In this section of Lone Star Nation, Parker reveals the environmental changes that have had an impact in Texas - most particularly, the unprecedented drought of 2011 and what that had to do with Rick Perry's presidential aspirations.