Energy Metropolis: An Environmental History of Houston and the Gulf Coast (review)

This fine collection of essays, edited and assembled by two University of Houston history professors, grew out of a 2003 conference with the same title held at that university. The extensive research this publication represents covers the large geographic area that is the city of Houston and also includes the nearby region. Actually, Galveston is the only Gulf Coast representative included. That small quibble about the title aside, this is a fine compendium of scholarship well focused on a city that not only is interesting in itself as a fast-growing monolith but also provides us with cautionary tales easily applied to other urban areas. The book will also fit well as a text for urban history seminars—read either by topic, or sections, or as a whole with a focus on one city.

Especially good is the back-and-forth between the essayists. The planted loblolly forests of Diane C. Bates’s Piney Woods shrink before the approaching suburbs that freeways bring ever nearer. Martin Melosi’s essay on sanitary services fits well with Robert D. Bullard’s work on patterns of siting landfills in African-American neighborhoods, which moves nicely into Kimberly Youngblood’s section on those residents’ unsuccessful fight against one such site. And Tom Watson McKinney’s take on the very first post–World War II limited-access highway completed with federal funding—a proto-Interstate—that ran from Houston to Galveston gains more relevance when read with William C. Barnett’s comparison of those two cities’ divergent twentieth-century paths.

Lurking on every page is that shadow of what might be called the Wild West boomer spirit. Self-reliant, self-assured, and hell-bent-for-leather that no ornery regulators were going to rein in their business broncos, Houston’s business elite made their city what they wanted. Their creation evolved into a metropolis without zoning, with an unwilling municipal acquiescence to rules that necessitated spending on pollution control, and with little attention paid to infrastructure needs for the poorest residents. As power elites, first the local business people and then the representatives of the multinational corporations calling Houston home fashioned their ever-enlarging city in the image of a business-oriented producing center that only as an afterthought sought to accommodate the needs of less-affluent residents.

Houston, we learn here, was poised for growth at the end of the nineteenth century, with plans to enlarge and lengthen a bayou into a ship channel with access to the Gulf. Galveston, the area’s premier nineteenth-century port, was apparently predestined to be a dwarf Castor to Houston’s giant Pollux. Even though Galveston made a remarkable recovery after a 1900 hurricane devastated the city, Houston’s growth spurt was inevitable, coming both from its railroads and from its proximity to the new oil fields as petroleum emerged as a major commodity. Galveston still garners scant attention here: no mention is made of its innovative post-hurricane commission-council municipal government structure, a highlight of Progressive Era reform.

Only a Houstonian can know for sure, but this volume does seem to have enough local color to satisfy a resident reader. A number of the actors in the continuing environmental drama of Houston march across the pages: heroes of the antipollution movement like Walter A. Quebedeaux, the first county director of Air and Water Pollution Control; well-meaning philanthropists like Will Hogg. The Astrodome as the world’s largest air-conditioned building is well-placed in Robert S. Thompson’s study of Houston and climate control, and River Oaks assumes its proper position in the saga of Houston’s wealthiest residents’ housing choices.

This study of Houston reminds the reader that the idea of private enterprise having the right to be free of government intervention, even when the health and well-being of citizens is at stake, is a dogma dear to the...