by Larry McKinney, Executive Director

I was sitting in Jim Gibeaut’s lab as he and his students prepared to travel to Galveston Island to assess what Hurricane Ike had done. The preliminary photos were grim. It was like preparing to travel to a foreign country as Jim and staff were scrambling at the last minute to get tetanus shots, a necessity to work on the island, and to secure enough four-wheel-drive vehicles to accommodate all their gear and assure they could get to all the areas they needed to survey. Jim had been completing a multi-year study of “geohazards” related to the island. Geohazards is a trendy but descriptive term that describes the interactions of geological and environmental conditions as a result of some recognizable process. Hurricanes are relatively easy to recognize, especially the results. Even with all this bustle and bother, Jim and his student Anthony Reisinger had taken the time to find and align on a poster, one above the other, aerial views of Bolivar peninsula, on the northwestern margin of Galveston Bay, as it appeared just after Hurricane Carla (1961) and just after Ike (2008). While 47 years apart, they were eerily similar. I could not tell one from the other. The thought kept going through my mind. Didn’t we learn anything? The answer is that, of course, we have learned a lot, much of it displayed around the walls and in the computers in Jim’s lab. The problem is that we have not done the right thing with it.

What a terrible waste. All of us will be paying the price for years to come, some having paid the ultimate price with their lives. How do we interrupt this deadly cycle? What can we do to mitigate the next Ike, Katrina or whatever the hurricane is named? We must manage the margins of the Gulf to mitigate the sudden impacts of hurricanes and the long-term effects of climate change if we are to sustain the ecological and economic benefits so vital to our country. Ultimately, it is the political will to act for the greater good that will break this cycle. The question is what can we do to make this happen? It is not so bleak a prospect as it might appear but it is a challenge.

After more than 20 years as a resource manager for the state of Texas there are some basic principles one learns that are often hard taught. They can test your basic faith in people and discourage the best intentions. I am sure it is what creates bureaucrats and

bureaucracies where “no action means no trouble” evolved as a natural, understandable and unspoken axiom. To me the no-action option has never been one. It is probably why I stayed in trouble most of the time, but it is also why I had so much support in getting out of it.

I used to believe that if you just gave people good information they would make the right decisions. I preached it often and now think I was probably wrong. Not about people, I still think they will do the right thing if given the chance, but about the idea that all they need is information. They also need context, a framework, that they can associate with and feel comfortable acting within. That is why the HRI “model” has such appeal. Rather than isolate science from policy, it integrates them, one into the other. The HRI approach is to build a continuum, a framework or context within which to apply the knowledge we gain from science.

It is clear that both facts and frameworks have been in short supply given the conservation challenges we now face. There are times when I have despaired and walked away in disgust. What has always restored my faith and brought me back to the fray when so tested, have been the acts of commitment by one, two or a relatively small group of people that move the rest of us to act. The gift of Ed Harte was one such act but there have been others. Sometime they are politicians or other decision-makers. Yes, believe it or not, there are some really effective and committed ones out there. Most often, however, they are our neighbors or others who get the call or feel the need or just plain get mad. Whatever the reason, something moves them to action.

I have seen it on all scales, from a single mad shrimper lady successfully taking on an international corporation to one of the most powerful political figures in Texas almost single-handedly changing the direction of water policy in the state. There are common features to those successes and others, which are worth considering if we want to make a difference in and around the Gulf of Mexico.

DIRECTOR'S CORNER CONTINUED ...