The Solace of Green Spaces

Irises at Armand Bayou Nature Center

Our lives have been upended with Tom's diagnosis of cancer. The clinical trial he participates in requires travel, and we are also working to settle an estate of Tom's aunt. 

Just a few days ago, Tom asked, "Are we going to have a garden this year?" Gardening has long been our shared hobby, from the very first years of our marriage when we had a gardening plot on Texas A&M University property as undergraduates and graduate students. There is solace in growing things, in being reminded year after year of the magic of a dry seed becoming a living plant. Gardening is hope.

We may not have a garden this year beyond my herb garden and the plants that flourish in our sunroom. And so we seek other green spaces for solace.

On a recent visit with our son in Texas, we checked out Armand Bayou Nature Center, near where our son lives and works. It was a lovely cool spring day, the second best kind of day in Texas to me, the first being a lovely cool, clear day in October or November. We started out taking the boardwalk, admiring Louisiana irises blooming on the edges of ponds and spotting alligators and many turtles. At the Interpretive Center we spent about 30 minutes talking about invasive species with a young woman with a display chart. Then we headed out to some of the trails. We walked part of the Ladybird Trail in order to meet up with the Prairie Interpretive Trail. Tom, whose master's degree is in native grasses and his Ph.D in forestry, wanted to see up close the restoration efforts of one of the last remaining stands of Texas tallgrass prairie.

One of the educational plaques on the Prairie Interpretive Trail included a photo of bison. "Did buffalo live in this area of Texas?" I asked Tom. He answered yes, and I tried to imagine herds of 1000s of buffalo foraging in an area that now is mostly home to petrochemical plants.

Later, on the Discovery Trail that led us through the restored Martyn Farm, we stopped to look at the two live bison there on display. They seemed as calm as cows, and it took some effort to imagine the long-gone time when millions of these animals thundered across the great plains of America.

Tallgrass Prairie Restoration Project, Armand Bayou Nature Center

At 2500 acres, the Armand Bayou Nature Center is the largest urban wilderness in the United States, according to its website, and its peaceful retreat is a balm in this part of Texas. Just that morning a fire had broken out at a nearby waterfront tank farm. Tom and I had spied the smoke from the Fred Hartman Bridge as we drove to our son's home. As the days went by, the fire increased, and a heavy cloud of smoke hung over Deer Park and much of the surrounding Houston area. Although at first the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality assured local citizens that they had nothing to fear from the fire, the organization later had to warn people that hazardous levels of benzene were detected in the air, and people were cautioned to shelter in place. Toby Baker, executive director of TCEQ, compared the environmental devastation of that fire to Hurricane Harvey:

Baker, who noted there is still a significant amount of those substances on site, rattled off a variety of stunning figures to demonstrate the breadth of response to an incident he said is the most serious he's seen since Hurricane Harvey: Nearly 184,000 barrels of contaminated water collected, an estimated 100,000 barrels of petrochemical product spilled, hundreds of response boats and nearly 2,000 response personnel on the scene.  (Kiah Collier, "Texas Environmental Chief: There's Still a Fire Risk at Deer Park Facility," The Texas Tribune, 4 April 2019)

 At a time when the Trump administration is rolling back many environmental regulations, it's even more important for citizens to support places such as Armand Bayou Nature Center and to demand that the government strictly enforce the regulations that keep our air and water safe and clean. I thought of this as I watched that dark cloud grow to the north of Armand Bayou Nature Center. Just a shift of the wind, and that cloud would be above us at the Center, with cancer-causing benzene filling our lungs. 

And so we ended our walk at Armand Bayou Nature Center, a study in contrasts: the good work of people trying to salvage green spaces in a steadily growing urban area and working to save the environment versus the toxic stew from a company that had been notified and sued several times in the past for its lax environmental controls.

Father and Son

Police State?

Yes, I begin this post with a question mark, but a number of news stories over the past few months have made me wonder if I should follow such a phrase with an exclamation mark. The Occupy Wall Street movement has certainly brought the police force out in numbers in cities around our country. Yes, in Oakland, CA, a few fringe folks in a recent peaceful demonstration turned more violent, but the OWS movement is committed to peace. So why did the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security personnel infiltrate the Nashville, Tennessee OWS? 

Nashville's The Tenneseean obtained e-mails that reveal that State Highway Patrol troopers were taken off their highway duty to infiltrate Nashville's OWS. And one policeman revealed his own attitude in one of those e-mails: “If they start camping, I’m confident that a public health issue will soon develop...Then the Health Dept. can shut it down and we all look like the good guys.”

One Occupy Nashville protester wonders:  "My question in response would be : ‘Why are they messing with such a peaceful protest in such a warlike manner. Why declare war on peace?'"

This is what I think is the answer to that question: Too often it seems that the police have a pre-existing bias against groups that assemble to protest peacefully, especially if those groups are full of young people or minorities. And that attitude has been aided and abetted by Homeland Security. Ever since 9/11, police departments around the country have been highly weaponized, and I think this encourages a certain mindset--a tendency to use excess force in dealing with ordinary situations, of seeing the public as "them," even when the "them" is not much of a threat.

Just recently, a sheriff's office in Conroe, Texas, obtained an unmanned Shadowhawk helicopter that could carry a weapons payload. Yes, that's right--an unmanned drone with the potential to carry weapons. Why does Conroe, Texas, need an unmanned, weaponized drone? Nearby Cut-and-Shoot isn't that much of a threat, is it?

The drone can also look into people's backyards and has infrared capabilities to see into homes.

Police might have the best intentions, but even the best intentions can deteriorate into untenable consequences that challenge our civil rights--or worse.

Updates

• "But many law enforcement experts said Thursday that the officers' tactics appeared to be a severe overreaction." (Berkeley)-- "UC cops' use of batons on Occupy camp questioned," Will Kane, Demian Bulwa,  SF Gate, San Francisco Chronicle, 11 November 2011.

• "Portland Pepper Spray Incident Generates Iconic Occupy Photo," Las Angeles Times, 18 November 2011.

• "Pepper-Spray Brutality at UC Davis," posted on James Fallows' blog at The Atlantic,  19 November 2011.

• "#OccupyMissoula--Police Dropping Off Drunken, Hostile People," posted on Plutocracy Files 19 November 2011.  (h/t David Crisp)

• "How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police," Arthur Rizer and Joseph Hartman, The Atlantic 7 November 2011. (h/t James Fallows)

• "Turning Patrolmen into Soldiers: How did we let this happen?," posted on James Fallows' blog at The Atlantic, 21 November 2011.

Texas Justice II

Scott Horton, international law and human rights lawyer who blogs for Harper's has a recent post in which he notes the heavily Republican-weighted federal judiciary. Of the 678 judges, he writes, about two-thirds of them are Republican, and two-thirds of those Republican judges were appointed by George W. Bush. These appointed judges tend to be the most politically ideological. Horton highlights one particular judge from Texas, Sharon Keller, "the senior judge of the state’s court of criminal appeals." Keller was elected when George Bush was elected, and she has proven to be extremely conservative, a "hanging judge." Most troubling is her handling of the case of a mentally retarded man incarcerated for rape and murder. Even though recent DNA tests indicated that the semen in the victim was not Roy Criner's, Keller refused to allow the man a new trial. However, public outrage over her judgment was so wide-spread that President Bush pardoned Criner. Now Keller is being investigated for other abusive conduct.

As Horton points out, it's unusual for federal judges to be held accountable in such ethical breaches. Recently, the Supreme Court deliberated on a case that focused on campaign contributions and the impartiality of judges: Should judges step aside from a case when it involves a supporter who contributed large amounts of money to that judge's campaign? The case involves a judge in West Virginia who received a contribution of $3 million from a supporter who was later a party in a lawsuit over which the judge presided.

According to a study by political scientists Chris Bonneau of the University of Pittsburgh and Damon Cann of Utah State University, "campaign contributions appear to affect the outcome of cases in states where judges are elected in partisan contests." Which states did the professors study? Michigan and......Texas. Because the study focuses only on these two states, the study is small, but Cann and Bonneau are planning a larger study that will draw information from ten states.

Just something to think about........

Texas Justice

In 1986, Timothy Cole, a student at Texas Tech in Lubbock, was convicted of raping another student at the university, even though:

• his friends provided an alibi for him,
• he was an asthmatic and a non-smoker, but the rapist was a chain smoker
• and the only evidence was the victim's identification of him from a "poorly constructed photo lineup."

The rapist left behind a fingerprint on a cigarette lighter at the scene of the crime, but Lubbock police destroyed that evidence. Timothy Cole refused the prosecution's offer of probation if he confessed; he told his mother that he would rather be imprisoned for something he hadn't done than live free, labelled unjustly as a sexual offender.

In 1995, the real rapist, a man imprisoned for other similar crimes, wrote letters to Lubbock officials and judge Jim Bob Darnell, an assistant district attorney who prosecuted Cole in 1986. Now that the statute of limitations was up, Jerry Wayne Johnson confessed to the crime--but neither Lubbock officials nor Darnell responded to the letters. Over ten years later Jerry Wayne Johnson's continued letter writing confessions caught the attention of Jeff Blackburn and the Innocence Project of Texas. The Innocence Project brought the case to the attention of the Lubbock courts, which refused the Project's request for an inquiry, even though DNA testing proved Cole's innocence. So The Innocence Project took the case to Austin. Finally, Timothy Brian Cole received justice--but Timothy Brian Cole had died in prison in 1999, of an asthmatic attack.

On February 5, 2009:

Travis Co. District Judge Charlie Baird formally exonerated Cole – setting free, at least, his name and reputation. According to the Innocence Project of Texas, it is the first posthumous exoneration in Texas history. "Cole's Posthumous Exoneration is First for Texas," Jordan Smith, The Austin Chronicle, February 13, 2009.

According to NPR,

So far this decade, 34 men in Texas, most of them black, have been exonerated by modern DNA testing. They spent 10, 15, 20, even 27 years wrongly imprisoned for rape before being released. "Family of Man Cleared by DNA Still Seeks Justice," Wade Goodwyn, Morning Edition, February 5, 2009.

I look at the picture of that handsome young man and wonder how many other young men have suffered such Texas justice. See some of them here, at the Innocence Project of Texas website.