#ik the real issue is ‘no more gas in the tank’ which is just

[macchiatogf]

my first draft of my capstone is a week overdue so i’m trying the ole sleep deprivation method (i.e. no sleep til it’s done) but now it’s 3am i’ve faffed my way into getting one more page done and the harsh reality that this paper is truly not going to write itself is setting in. what the fuck gives

[sosation]

Panarchy and the Galveston Hurricane of 1900

        As with the other natural disasters that we have covered in this class, many different things came together to engender what would become to be known as The Galveston Hurricane of 1900. Nature is unpreventable. The hurricane was going to come and how things were handled before it made landfall could have been a lot better. As often happens with natural disasters, negative synergies piled up and created a disaster greater than the sum of its parts. In this paper I aim to explain how “rebuilding the familiar,” as a human condition, created problems for Galveston -- then and now, as well as demonstrate the increased complexity in the Texas coast how that leads to increased vulnerability, and to explain the concept of Panarchy and how it relates to all of this.

First, let’s start with Panarchy to use as a foundation to build the rest of this paper on.

Panarchy, as defined by Crawford Holling, famed Canadian ecologist, is an “adaptive cycle” of growth, collapse, regeneration, and growth that “embraces two opposites: growth and stability on one hand, and change and variety on the other.” (1) The example he used was the adaptive cycles of a forest ecosystem, in our example we will use coastal ecosystems. During the early part of the growth cycle, the number of species increases at a rapid pace to exploit the “available ecological niches.” Small fish, algae, turtles, plankton, birds, and sea mammals alike increase in population. As Homer-Dixon puts it, “the flows of energy, materials, and genetic information between the (coastal) organisms become steadily more numerous and more complex. If we think of the ecosystem as a network, both of the number of nodes in the network and the density of the links between the nodes rise.” (2) As time passes further into the growth phase “the mechanisms for self-regulation become highly diverse and fine tuned.” Efficiency increases and, as time passes, this “fine tuning,” increased complexity and connectivity leads to greater vulnerability to disruption. Once the system is in the later stages of growth, there are fewer niches to exploit and fewer opportunities for varieties of species to develop.  The super-connectivity achieved by this time means a shock to the system can affect many different niches simultaneously. A shock could be a forest fire, or in our case a hurricane. This inevitable systematic failure IS part of the cycle. Hurricanes are a natural part of our planet and therefore are part of this natural system. The result after collapse is that “the organisms that survive become much less dependent on specific, long-established relationships with each other. Most important, collapse also liberates the ecosystem’s enormous potential for creativity and allows for novel and unpredictable recombination of its elements.” (3) It gives the “little guys” of the system who survived, those who weren’t able to flourish in the old system, the ability to flourish under these new conditions, creating more diversity and starting the cycle over again.

The final point to this theory is that “no given adaptive cycle exists in isolation.” It’s cycles all the way down, and a healthy super-system has cycles that are on different rhythms and pacings. This means that if one cycle fails, the slower rhythm of a higher cycle would provide stability from an entire collapse. A larger systematic failure involving several or many systems will eventually regenerate but the amount of time that is necessary to reach equilibrium again is vastly longer. (For example, the Galveston coast, specifically, would be one cycle, and the regional climate pattern would be a higher cycle. As long as the climate remains stable then the coast will regrow in a normal amount of time after a hurricane resets the cycle. But if the climate changes, say, due to directional changes in the jet stream caused by melting of the polar ice caps, then the systematic failures will cascade through as many systems possible, not just being focused specifically on the Galveston coast but, perhaps, the entire Gulf Coast region and into other ecosystems and surely human systems as well.) The concept of Panarchy isn’t just exclusive to ecosystems, but all systems- be they economic, political, commercial, industrial or social.

Now let’s consider Galveston in 1900. The way the city was built and the way the geography around the city was composed, considering the bay behind (north of) the city and the gradual slope of the shoreline similar to that of Bangladesh (incredibly shallow), demonstrates a unique cross section of human systems and natural systems. The bay has its system, the coast has its and they are connected, but all of the real estate and commercial developments on the island and the coast were present as well. Before the hurricane there were bath houses built right on the beach as well as the large Beach Hotel, which had a great view but was particularly susceptible to collapse from a storm surge. There were even train trestle tracks that were built right on the water and connected to parts of the island. At the time, storm surges were not attributed to hurricanes. In fact it was Isaac Cline, the Weather Bureau representative who experienced the hurricane first hand, who was the first to say that hurricanes brought with them storm surges. After the hurricane, and the disaster it wrought, the people of Galveston raised the level of the city and built a seawall. And though these measures were better than what they had done previously in protecting them from a hurricane, which was nothing, they didn’t account for the fact that most of Galveston Bay flooded the city from the north before the storm hit. This means that the south-facing seawall would have no effect on bay waters. Even more so, they built another hotel right on the beach, again. The Galvez. Which is a beautiful hotel, I’ve stayed there numerous times when I was a kid, but for whatever reason, it was important for the people of Galveston to rebuild the familiar and put another hotel on the beach, across the street from the seawall. It is still vulnerable to another catastrophe, as is the entire city,  if the conditions align. Fortunately they haven’t yet.

But my concern for the Texas coast wouldn’t be just solely for Galveston. In the past 116 years, the systems on our coastlines have become much more complex, in large part because of human development on them. That development includes shipping infrastructure as well as oil and gas infrastructure and other types of industrial infrastructure that require a water source or a shipping channel. The city of Houston is the second largest port in the United States and it also has “one of the most important shipping points for natural gas liquids.” (4) The complexity of our age, as well as the increased efficiency, if viewed through the “Panarchy” lens, leads to increased vulnerability. Case in point, the Murphy’s Oil spill in St. Bernard Parish, LA. “Where flooding from Hurricane Katrina ruptured a storage tank, releasing more than a million gallons of oil and ruined approximately 1,800 homes.” That is just one single storage tank. In Houston, there are an estimated 4,500 storage tanks, “many of them along the ship channel. If even two percent of those tanks were to fail because of storm surge, the results would be catastrophic.” (5) This is just taking into account the complex oil and gas networks that criss-cross the bay area. The shipping channel alone accounts for the movement of hundreds of millions of tons of American product, second only to the Port of South Louisiana.(6) The trading coming in and going out of the port would be disrupted for an extended period of time and would cost the United States an estimated $100 billion in damages alone, not even accounting for the lost trade. Which is difficult to calculate. (7)

There have been some efforts, however feeble, to address the hurricane issue. However, getting the local and state governments to fund and implement these measures is another issue entirely. When Hurricane Ike struck in September of 2008, it “killed nearly 50 people in Texas alone, left thousands homeless, and was the third costliest hurricane in American history.”(8) This would be a perfect time for the state of Texas to ask for federal assistance to better prepare for hurricanes in the future. Unfortunately for everyone, two days later Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and kicked off what would become the economic crisis of 2008. After that, getting funds for “nature stuff” was out of the question, we had to save the economy. Or in other words, we had to prevent this failing system (economic) from cascading into other systems and it obviously took priority over many other things.

Despite this, two main research teams have been developing ways of dealing with the next big storm. Bill Merrell at Texas A&M Galveston has been developing the “Ike Dike,” which is a 55-mile-long “coastal spine” meant to disrupt high storm surges. It’s estimated cost is between $6 and $13 billion dollars but still doesn’t address bay flooding and could potentially create a “Lake Okeechobee effect” wherein the spine acts to keep the bay water from washing out to see and still causes massive flooding. (9) Dr. Phil Bedient at Rice University proposes building a “mid-bay gate” that could be closed to protect the channel from a storm. However there is little political will to do anything to address this problem.  Alas, as this class has taught me, a disaster must happen to really get people to react. This is all part of that Panarchy cycle. Out of a disaster come copious amounts of creative energy. Out of the destruction of Galveston came Houston. And yet, Houston did not learn the lesson from Galveston and developed in a very familiar way with little regard for the power of the sea. Due to our greater connectivity and efficiency, the speed at which we can communicate can be nearly instantaneous, and as we result we are more vulnerable and things can be brought down just as instantaneously. All of this new technology and infrastructure that has been developed over the past century just goes to make the Texas coast more vulnerable than ever.

In order for the societies on the coasts of our planet to be more sustainable, we need to, as a society and a race, be educated of our global systems and understand them to better prepare for the inevitable outcome, and to consciously delay that outcome for as long as possible. We all need to understand that hurricanes are not “disruptive,” but rather natural processes of this planet that are beneficial to coastal ecosystems. Rather than trying to live against these storms, we need to try and live with them, or simply get away from the coasts. Education is the first step. With better education, hopefully, we can all make better and more informed decisions down the road to make our societies more sustainable.    

Anthony Sosa

Dr. Christopher Morris

HIST 4388

12-12-16

 Bibliography

1.Homer-Dixon, Thomas F. The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization. Washington: Island, 2006. 226-28. Print.

2.Homer-Dixon, Thomas F. The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization. Washington: Island, 2006. 226. Print.

3.Homer-Dixon, Thomas F. The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization. Washington: Island, 2006. 228. Print.

4. Scranton, Roy. "When the Next Hurricane Hits Texas." The New York Times 7 Oct. 2016: n. pag. Print.

5. ibid.

6. ibid.

7. ibid.

8. ibid.

9. ibid.

10. Larson, Erik. Isaac’s Storm. New York: Penguin Random House, 1999. Print.