Grass: In Search of Human Habitat

4. Playing God

F O U R Playing God 19 Figure 4. Mining coal, Black Mesa, Arizona. Photo by author. In 1972 near Fairfield, Texas, I got a chance to play God and some money to do it with. The drama started innocently enough. The Industrial Generating Company, a subsidiary of Texas Utilities, had started building the Big Brown Steam Electric Station several miles east of Fairfield. A sevenstory generating plant neared completion. Designed to be fueled by lignite—a low-energy version of coal to be mined nearby—it soon would generate electricity to feed into the Texas power grid that electrified homes, offices, and industries throughout the state. The U.S. National Environmental Protection Act, or NEPA, had become law two years earlier. Stimulated in part by NEPA and the growing interest in environmental protection, Big Brown’s senior environmental officer, Dick White, had commissioned pre-mining inventories of soils, landscapes, and ecosystems. What the studies found would guide restoration. I took on the task of plant and animal inventory. Dick put me up in a spanking new environmental research laboratory with residence quarters. The lab nestled beside the newly filled Lake Fairfield, the waters of which cooled the generators. The plant with its two smokestacks hogged the skyline to the north. In the years since the Texas A&M wildlife and range professors had introduced me to ecology, I’d been away to places with shorter grass and longer views. Now I was back at A&M, this time as a member of the faculty. Others showed up at the Big Brown laboratory. Elsie, a Ph.D. student from the University of Texas, moved in. She began to study the fish in Lake Fairfield, with part-time help from her husband, Alan, a theoretical physicist at the same university. In early summer a new handyman, recently graduated from Teague High School fifteen miles away, showed up. Ed Walton would mow the grounds, maintain the surroundings, and help us when needed. Ed soon showed me what I’ve seen time and again since: that advanced schooling confers no exclusive claim on common sense. One evening after a day of driving, counting birds, and measuring plants on land scheduled to be mined, I joined Elsie, Alan, and Ed in our bid to play God. Convened at the laboratory dining room table, we began to discuss reclamation. Being the first at the scene of destruction, we 20 felt a kind of omnipotence. What kind of firmament should we direct our anticipated disciples—the bulldozer operators, the grass seeders, the tree planters—to create? “Hey,” said Ed, “let’s play a game. I’ll describe three landscape options. You three tell me which one best appeals to you as a place to build a house or live in. That’ll be a good way to start our vision.” He commenced. “Number one, envision a prairie. Imagine grass stretching to the horizon on all sides—like one of those coastal bermuda pastures between here and Fairfield, but endless. Two, think about living in a grove of trees, looking out onto an expanse of grass. Three, imagine yourself in a thick woods, view restricted all around to less than a tennis-court length. Like that post–oak-hickory thicket out by the lignite haul road.” We all voted for the house in the grove, looking out on grass. Plus a little water, maybe a pond or creek. Based on that vision, we saw a Brave New World taking shape at Big Brown once machines had hauled the coal away and refilled the pits: an open savanna with scattered bushes, groves of trees, and stock-ponds with great blue herons, red-winged blackbirds, bluegills, and bullfrogs. But could we really influence what happened once the draglines and bulldozers had finished their job and moved on? As it turned out, we could. The “overburden” soils, mixed and replaced, proved as productive or more so than the original topsoils. Mixing the original hardpan, degraded by a century of careless farming, did more than fertilizer to effect improvement. Dick White intervened as our mainline to God—he had pull with the company managers. Our preferred landscape began to take shape. On occasional visits later on, I saw the miracle of landscape rejuvenation in stages. Once the coal was removed, the soil overburden replaced , and the land recontoured, revegetation commenced. The grass of...