Green Theory & Praxis Journal
ISSN: 1941-0948
through engineering and urban planning discourse. These new approaches to infrastructure are promising from an environmental perspective yet fail to properly address the social and political issues that remain tied to infrastructure. This essay proposes that Harris County’s watershed system can provide us with a working map for how we might arrange forms of regional sociopolitical identity rooted in the functioning of local ecosystems in a way that might infuse the emergent green infrastructure regime with a necessary sense of justice.
Hydrological Citizenship after Hurricane Harvey …ten thousand River Commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, ‘Go here,’ or ‘go there,’ and make it obey; cannot save a shore which it has sentenced; cannot bar its path with an obstruction which it will not tear down, dance over, and laugh at. Mark Twain Within the bureaucratic administration of the Gulf Coast’s watersheds, the natural environment has historically been characterized as an externality—a mere obstacle that requires technical ingenuity to be overcome, managed, or most often, contained. Consider the case of the Atchafalaya River Basin in Louisiana (Fig. 1). The watershed is the site of a seemingly endless infrastructure project initiated in 1928 by the US Army Corps of Engineers, whose Sisyphean efforts to mitigate the effects of the ever-changing regional topography through a complex levee system have been employed to ensure the integrity of the social and economic systems composing the world’s busiest port (Reuss, 1998). While natural alterations to the environment have always acted as catalysts for changes to social and political formations, technoscientific advances in civil engineering have inverted this relationship, making social and political formations the ultimate agent of environmental change. The management of the Atchafalaya in this way thus appears a prime example of humanity’s relatively newfound role as a “geophysical force on a planetary scale” (Morton, 2016, p. 9). Industries and communities whose successes and failures have long been dictated by the unpredictable movements of the Atchafalaya and Mississippi Rivers are now themselves able to control the contours of these rivers and their watersheds (Chakrabarty, 2009). Advances in science and engineering have enabled ongoing development within fickle ecosystems like the Atchafalaya Basin, where increasingly urgent environmental vulnerabilities have been successively managed by the Army Corps of Engineers, albeit at a cost that is now in the billions of dollars. Accordingly, nonhuman ecosystems have come to be thought of as what Timothy VOLUME 13, ISSUE 1, JANUARY 2020
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