There has to be a middle ground that isn’t on a cul-de-sac

When I ponder what is taught these days at the University of Texas School of Architecture as regards rural, semi-rural and suburban development, I get a queasy feeling that there is a culture war going on that few of us are aware of.

The urban design paradigm being taught, at least at UT, is heavily weighted toward the concept of the “compact city” and follows the dictates of thinkers who favor a literal “culture of congestion” as the solution to our land use and energy consumption problems related to urban sprawl.

This might be a great idea for those who want to live in a city environment, but it rings hollow for people like me who have consciously fled the big city for a quieter, less-congested lifestyle in rural Hays County, Texas.

Urban designers and architects are busily concocting new ways for 300 million-plus Americans to live peacefully in this land of ours and Texas is growing so fast that we can barely keep up with the changes. Not everyone can or would want to live in these compact cities, but they do provide an excellent solution for many to the urban sprawl dilemma.

Making the cities more compact would take a lot of pressure off the land surrounding the cities and many people would benefit and enjoy living in these vibrant and culturally-rich city centers.

But not me.

Therein lies the rub, and that is people like me. And if you are reading this in a local Hill Country newspaper, maybe you, too. We just do not wish to live in the big city.

Either we never lived in the city or we left for good reason and our life goal does not include that lovely, impressive and most certainly comfortable and convenient high-rise down near Whole Foods with the great view of the Capitol from your bedroom and where you can watch the fireworks display at Auditorium Shores from your couch.

There has to be a way to retain our sanity, our water, our lifestyle, our open lands and still have a healthy economy and a healthy natural environment.

It is obvious that the land between cities cannot be turned into one vast suburban landscape, but there has to be a middle ground between either being a farmer and a city slicker.

The suburban marketing strategy, bolstered after the Second World War by government policies that made borrowing money from the FHA fairly simple, has proven to be an unsustainable land use and housing model when it became apparent that gasoline is not infinite.

Driving into the big city from the countryside or the ‘burbs to work has become a financial problem in terms of actual gas use, but also if you take into account the cost of roads and the detrimental effects on personal and environmental health caused by air pollution.

Most striking for me is the time it takes out of your day to make these commutes. Living far away from work and all our retail centers is not something we can do forever and maintain our quality of life.

Constantly converting farms, ranches and undeveloped open spaces into more subdivisions is no way to preserve local agriculture or replenish aquifers with rainfall. We need open land that has a filtered connection to the underground water sources to keep our aquifers healthy.

Without large expanses of native grasses, trees and permeable soil our rainfall is unlikely to find its way underground or if it does, it gets there too fast, still carrying contaminants from urban runoff.

There has to be a better way to enjoy the countryside without killing the goose that laid the golden egg.

One option is to encourage low-impact businesses to locate in our Hill Country communities, providing jobs and a tax base for our smaller towns and allowing people a shorter commute to work.

When local governments offer tax incentives to lure chain stores that offer only minimum wage jobs, they are not doing the local people or the local economy any favors. Our citizens need real, living-wage jobs where the money comes into our communities, not ones where the money generated is both inadequate to live on but also where most of the profits leave the community almost immediately.

Local shuttle bus systems could get people to and from work places and town centers, making the use of your car for short trips unnecessary.

The money saved on building new roads would be an obvious funding source for local public transportation systems, whether operated by public agencies or by private companies whose start-up costs might be subsidized by city councils and county officials who saw this as a benefit to all concerned and a way to save taxpayer money in the long run.

Many of our local economies could become essentially self-sustaining if we brought in jobs with real wages that produced something people outside our area might want to buy or use, promoted local agriculture, made sure that the money made here stayed here and made it possible to access most of our essential goods and services within a reasonable radius of our houses.

We could make it possible to go into Austin only on special occasions, save money on gas, save our hillsides from becoming highways and have more time to spend doing all the things we moved out here to do.

We need to make some changes in how we live and work, what and how much we drive and how and where we build our homes and businesses.

What is stopping us? Is it us?

Susan Cook

11 October 2009

The Greening of Dripping Springs: Community vs. Self-Interests

Community: according to the Oxford American Dictionary, “the people of a district considered collectively, in the context of social values and responsibilities; a feeling of fellowship with others as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests and goals.”

Whether Dripping Springs could be considered a “community” is seriously in question.

After watching the greedy, selfish, arrogant antics of a number of our locals regarding what they considered to be appropriate uses of water in this historic drought almost brought me to tears during the regular meeting of the Hays Trinity Groundwater Conservation District on September 17, 2009 at the Dripping Springs City Hall.

If we are to survive as a community that can live on its own water supplies, we are going to have to make some serious changes to what is considered a good use of our water.

Howard Ranch, that charming little upscale housing project there on the south side of town at 150 and RR 12, apparently now using more than 40 acre/feet of water per year just to irrigate their lawns and gardens wants to now pump over 400 acre/feet per year so they can add another 100 or so homes, plus a small commercial district on that same location.

At present, only 15 families live in Howard Ranch, but they are already using about 2400 gallons per day per household. This stands in stark contrast to the typical household that uses about 200-300 gallons per day and those of us trying very hard to use much less, considering this is a finite resource and the weather lately is doing little to help us recharge our stores.

After doing their own calculations of how much water a typical house really needs (using TCEQ guidelines), the HTGCD counter-offered them a permit to pump 11 acre/feet per year. They were not amused and their attorney accused the Board of discriminating against them. For what? For trying to recreate Houston on the outskirts of disastrously dry Dripping Springs in the midst of a drought?

Do you have any idea how much water 40 acre/feet is? Well, let me tell you folks, this is a lot of water for just 15 households and the developer is proposing to increase that amount ten times over.

One acre/foot is essentially the amount of water it would take to fill a football field to a depth of one foot or 325,851 gallons. Multiply this by forty and that is over THIRTEEN MILLION GALLONS of water these fifteen families used last year.

This is being pumped directly out of the same aquifer we all keep hearing is running dry all over the area, but these fine citizens want to continue to pump these massive amounts out of our shared resource because, in the words of one resident, “My family benefits. My “landscape package” requires it.”

Well, excuse me, Mister, but your landscape “package” can kiss my brown lawn a howdy do.

To make matters worse, all of this is being used solely on landscaping. These people are using LCRA water for their interior household needs. I guess our groundwater isn’t good enough for them to drink. Well, it is sure good enough for me and my family to drink, assuming there is enough left when these community members are finished watering their lawns with it.

Do I sound angry? Well, you bet I am. This is simply outrageous.

This is the kind of thing that is making our local water resources endangered and insecure. This is the very definition of unsustainable development and this is sadly the tip of the iceberg. This is not the only development of its kind in this area and more are being proposed.

This is a present that cannot continue into the future.

We are in the worst drought of our lifetimes, with no end in sight, and there are some developers and citizens going about their business as if nothing were wrong with the rainfall levels, as if there were not wells going dry and as if thousands of their neighbors were not voluntarily cutting back on their water usage to make sure there was enough to go around.

Is this what people are thinking when they move to the Hill Country: “Hey, let’s re-locate to a relatively rural area that we know is dry in most summers and try to turn parts of it into Houston or Miami”? That this is accomplished by mining our groundwater supplies for their and their family’s benefit to the absolute detriment of everyone else in the community is an enormous insult to the concept of “community”.

This just isn’t neighborly behavior.

Is this a good idea and should this be allowed to continue unabated?

I do not think so and we need to have a good talk amongst ourselves as to just what is considered “beneficial use” and what is obviously ill-considered, wasteful, selfish and so short-sighted as to be downright stupid.

Doesn’t the City of Dripping Springs have any landscaping ordinances that might have alleviated this situation by requiring only drought-tolerant landscape designs or some sort of regulatory oversight into what gets planted over our aquifer? Who allowed this development and all those other lush, green suburban developments to be built in the first place, knowing all along how much water these acres of grass and tropical plants were going to use?

Do people need to take a water education class before being allowed to buy property over our aquifer? Does somebody need to school these folks on the realities of living in the Texas Hill Country?

No matter how bad some people want for this area to look like Houston, it just isn’t.

You know, that nice big road that cuts through Drippin’, Highway 290 West? Well, if you just get on it and travel east a ways, you will be in Houston in no time at all, where it rains a lot and where people still love you for your vast swaths of green grass and thirsty plants. People in Houston will not drive past your lush, green lawn and wonder whether that lawn is green at the expense of their being able turn on their tap and have water come out.

This isn’t the Wild West anymore.

You cannot move here and live out some self-centered dream of doing whatever you want to with your property, your family and OUR water, with no consideration whatsoever to the fact that your dream may quickly turn into someone else’s nightmare.

This is supposed to be a community. We need to pay attention or we will become, maybe already are, just a bunch of yahoos living in close proximity with no common interests whatsoever.

Goodbye “community”, say hello to “every-man-for-himself”.

Susan Cook

18 September 2009

“If we do not change direction, we will end up where we are headed." -Chinese proverb

Imagine There’s No Water: musings on sustainable gardening

Let’s imagine for a moment that it is not raining very often, it is 100 degrees or more every afternoon and that some of our neighbor’s wells are going dry. Imagine that our creeks look like gravel pits, our favorite swimming holes are covered in algae, our flower beds seem very demanding and our lawns are getting decidedly crispy.

Just imagine.

We are experiencing an epic drought and in the midst of all the talk about cutting back on our use of water is the threat of having our landscapes become unrecognizable brownscapes. Those of us who still have water are hydrating our land in spite of the wisdom of conservation because we don’t want our grass or gardens to disappear before El Niño gets here.

We humans sometimes fail to see alternatives. We do what we have always done even in the face of evidence that a new way of doing things is way overdue. Like in other times of change or challenge, what we need during these dry days is a bit more Imagination.

Too many of us still harbor assumptions and preferences about what constitutes a “good-looking lawn” that became popular in wetter times and climes. It is time to replace these with different styles and techniques that actually work in our area and do not overburden our decreasing water resources.

How about xeriscaping?

Xeriscaping is not just gravel and cactus. There are countless ways to design and maintain attractive and durable gardens on your property that do not depend upon thirsty plant species. You can even keep a small lawn, but let that Bermuda take over in the sunny part where it always wants to anyway and if you don’t have kids at home who need a soccer field or dogs who like a nice patch of grass whereupon to poop, it is high time to think about cutting down on grass rather than cutting it.

This summer is the perfect time to reconsider the Big Green Lawn Look and allow some new notions to creep into your consciousness.

Less lawn (or no formal lawn) can make you happier in many ways: You use less water, you use less fertilizer (or none at all), you have to mow and edge less square footage and you can replace it with something a lot prettier to look at and more useful than just plain ol’ grass. Play your cards right and you can skip getting the mower fixed next time it breaks down, unless you just like using your old rider as an adult go-cart. We know who you are.

In addition to cutting down on the actual area you keep as a manicured lawn, you will want to use a species of grass that doesn’t need much water or fertilizer. Bermuda is a great grass and we all know how well it adapts to growing wherever it is you do not want it. Buffalo grass is another wonderful native grass that needs little or no water and you can even skip mowing it most weeks since it grows slow and never really gets very tall. I have heard that the best way to grow a lawn in Texas is to haul in some nice pea gravel to a spot where you envision a parking space or driveway. Spend all day spreading out the gravel for your driveway, turn your back for one minute and you have a lawn.

I know, I know, you grew up on St. Augustine and just consider it the ideal lawn grass, but that was another time and likely another place and it is time to rethink this one, folks. St. Augustine is a big water-guzzler and if you are going to grow a crop that needs this much water, you might as well just put in a vineyard or grow tomatoes and strawberries. At least this way, you could qualify for that ag exemption.

When you have finally convinced yourself that you don’t want to have to take care of that Big Green Lawn Look anymore, this is where is all gets really interesting. You can have lovely stone or gravel paths that wind through your property, past your lantanas, alongside your rosemary, all the way up to that stunning flowerbed full of periwinkles, skullcap, blue sage and verbena. Mix in some tomatoes, herbs, squash, peppers and eggplant and you can hang out next to tomorrow night’s dinner and sip ice tea.

Your garden will have shady spots under your trees where you have placed a nice bench near the birdbath and over there is that spot where you have planted all kinds of native perennials the butterflies just cannot seem to leave alone. The frogs have moved in and the lizards are running away from your cats. Your dog is sitting at your feet. He doesn’t care. Welcome to your own domestic paradise.

If this doesn’t sound familiar, then it is time to start imagining a way out of the Big Lawn Look and into a new world of xeriscape gardening. Instead of just having a big ol’ sea of grass that takes up time, water and space, you can create outdoor rooms that will delight your senses, your budget and save the world all at the same time.

Just use your Imagination.

susan cook

28 July 2009

Deer Me, Would You Please Slow Down?

"Slow" has been my watchword for a while now, even before I myself moved so very slowly. I just stopped being in a hurry some years ago. Ask any of my friends.

I tend to do everything slowly, except eat, talk and jump to conclusions. Maybe it is
just my particular neurological bent, but my internal speedometer is set slower than
yours. I haven’t had a speeding ticket since the early 70’s and I’ve never had a wreck
in my life (knock on wood), so there are distinct advantages.

When I moved out to the countryside to live, I just assumed (always a tricky
proposition) that life out here would be slower and that was very attractive to me.
In many ways life is slower out here in the hills, but the roads sure aren’t. If
anything, driving on our country lanes is more dangerous than driving on a highway.
Not only are people going really fast up those hills and around those corners, but
then suddenly there’s Bambi in your headlights, either right smack dab in the
middle of the road or poised to leap out at a moment’s notice.

Where ARE you people headed in such a hurry?

Drivers out here appear to be training for NASCAR. Even this time of the year when
the deer are plentiful and when your chances of hitting one are pretty good, people
do not slow down. The first car in a line is apparently supposed to act like a
snowplow for the ones behind it. Ever stop to wonder what would happen if the car
you are driving so close behind actually DID hit a deer? Would you be able to keep
from plowing into them next?

Our country lanes are truly raceways. The drivers are in a big hurry, they get angry
when they are forced to slow down by drivers like me who, at least in the nighttime
have slowed so as not to encounter that deer at 60 mph. They flash their brights at
me and honk and get up real close to my back bumper, often so close I can no longer
see them. When they finally do pass me, either legally or illegally, I sometimes get a
clear view of their middle fingers hoisted in my general direction.

Real neighborly, y’all.

And I must say, the local constabulary doesn’t seem all that interested in slowing
down the pace. The cops are the fastest ones on the road. If there is anyone who
seems always to be in a huge hurry, it will be a car with a bank of lights on top of it. I
am inclined to believe that these cars are not always on their way to an emergency.
I mean, if you are headed some place really important, turn those lights on and that
will be a lot more convincing. I am pretty sure some people become peace officers
just so they can drive faster than anyone else and never again get a speeding ticket.

Our roads out here have few actual passing lanes and are rarely striped to allow
passing, either. Too winding, too hilly, too narrow or is it just too much trouble to
design our roads with the variable velocities of vehicles in mind? I sometimes
think it is simply a nefarious plot by TxDot and their buddies in the road industry to
make people clamor for bigger roads because seems to me there are plenty of places
that could be made perfectly safe passing zones, but they aren’t.

Not having enough places to pass slower cars seems to me a major oversight when
designing a country road. There are some people who want to drive more slowly
and our back roads have trucks hauling hay, rocks and livestock. Many of our older
neighbors drive slowly so they can preserve their mobility and still be safe on the
road. Other folks are just in a hurry. Surely, our roadways can be better designed to
accommodate this diversity.

Our part of the world has so much beautiful scenery, but at the speed my fellows are
traveling, I doubt they are taking much time to enjoy it. If there is a race to the finish
line I don’t know about, please let me know which of you people ends up the winner.

Maybe there is a trophy.

I think I started driving slower, and more deliberately, during that time of my life
when I was a bus driver. I begin to take driving very seriously because I had the
lives of countless passengers as my responsibility. It was no longer just me and
whoever was in my car, I sometimes had 60 people at one time hurdling through
space with me and my actions, my reflexes and my ability to make good decisions
was the only thing between them and disaster.

Driving became for me like a dance. We drivers whirled and twirled on that ribbon
of asphalt and concrete, our tons of steel dipping and gliding past one another
without touching, never touching, often close, but never touching. That was the
dance. Pounce ahead, let that one pass, speed up to go around, slow down to make
the next maneuver. Just don’t ever touch and do not ever break the rhythm of the
road.

There is no winner in a dance.

Maybe slowing down is not a problem at all, but an answer to all our problems.
Maybe our lack of passing zones and the presence of that hay truck up ahead could
be turned into an opportunity to rethink your velocity, maybe turn down your inner
speedometer a notch.

Slow down and save. Save gasoline, save on car repairs, save the lives of deer and
humans and raccoons and skunks and dogs and cats and even the buzzards
munching on previous roadkill. Slow down and save millions of taxpayer dollars by
not having to build newer and bigger roads. Slow down and save your peace of
mind and mine.

So, if you see me on our back roads in my Jeep with the peace sign on the back going only 50 some night when you are hopped up on urban angst and really want to go 70, don’t bother flashing your brights or honking at me, it doesn’t work.

There is no way I am speeding up just because you are in a hurry.

We still have to share this road, and I am ahead of you.

So, how about it? Slow down and enjoy the ride.

Susan Cook
8 December 2009

Not Exactly the Land of Milk and Honey

Our Texas Hill Country lifestyle: dark quiet night skies filled with stars, the privacy of having some space between you and your neighbors, less worry about crime and air pollution and just a slower pace all the way around.

These are some of the reasons people have moved here for generations and stayed to raise families, start businesses and hunker down for the long haul. People who move here often do so at the expense of making as much money as one might be able to in the Big City. Folks just decide the trade-off is worth the trouble or they leave and return to the hustle-bustle of Gotham.

These days, I really wonder why the realtors and bankers are still encouraging folks to move to our parched part of the world since, unless we face our water crisis and solve some serious water-related problems very soon, many of these investments will not be worth much. I wish there was more honesty about the serious nature of our current water crisis in the real estate world, but I guess that is the nature of the beast.

Build It, They Will Come, Sell It Quick and Run off with the Money Before the Buyer Realizes What They Bought? I sure hope this isn’t how anyone thinks, but if you look at the activity along our local highways, all the signs for the different subdivisions, well, somebody may not be telling their customers the whole story of just where they are trying to talk them into moving.

I was pondering the other day why so many people move to this area when it can be really difficult to find a job out here and when you have to travel pretty far to buy groceries or clothing or just the right hinge for your screen door. I was wondering why this land attracts people in ways that the more fertile, water-rich land east of here seems not to and I have not come up with any universal reasons, but a friend remarked to me that people have done this around here for a long time.

The relatively-recent European settlers whose descendants came to dominate this territory thought that this was going to be prime farm and ranch land and yet found they were in a land plagued by alternating droughts and floods, torrid summers, unpredictably chilly winters and then, just when you thought Spring was finally here, along with warmer weather, came hordes of grasshoppers to devour your crops and your rose garden and work your last good nerve. The Texas Hill Country is not exactly The Land of Milk and Honey.

My friend said that people often live in places that are not exactly the smartest places to live, like on the slopes of active volcanoes, near the sea or along rivers that routinely become treacherous. Why do Californians continue to live where they are one mudslide away from being a downhill disaster and why do people rebuild along the Guadalupe over and over again, knowing that another devastating flood is only a few years away?

Our land is, in the words of my friend, “deceptive in some way”, luring people to settle where water resources are not reliable and where the soil, rather than being fertile and plentiful is only skin deep, a black or red scratch atop yet another limestone outcropping.

I ponder all this things anew these days as we face yet another devastating drought. All around me people are talking water. We talk about how to plan for the future with legislation about how groundwater can or cannot be used here, we talk about new subdivision regulations that would mandate that new wells cannot be punched into the aquifer unless you have enough land around that will allow rainwater to replenish what you and your family have pumped out.

We talk about granting our local governmental bodies the authority to use scientific research to limit growth over the aquifer and we see sharp contrasts between what developers and large landowners who would maybe someday like to become developers want and what the average landowner or resident of this area would like to see allowed.

We talk about common sense and we talk about self-restraint. We talk about sustainability and we talk about an uncertain future for our children, for our economy, for our Earth.

I hear more questions than answers, but what I do hear and see is a growing consensus among people here that Business as Usual is Not an Option and that we all need to come together and make the necessary changes in our behavior that just might save us all from living in a desert community.

I hear people talk about rainwater harvesting and it seems to me that is pretty good sense. I hear people talk about transitioning from those large swaths of St. Augustine grass to maybe smaller lawns and perhaps allow those lawns to become Bermuda or Buffalo grass. I hear all these things and I read about ways these changes can happen among us, but paradigms do not shift quickly without swift kicks, not usually, and I hope we do not wait for that.

Right now, today, our Hays County Commissioners Court is working out the final touches on a years-long endeavor to upgrade our subdivision regulations to bring more innovative design details to bear on future development, but these regulations as regards our water do not go far enough and unless we encourage our local leaders to enshrine some real teeth into these regulations, this water crisis will not be averted.

Our land will become increasingly parched and uninhabitable. Our floods will get worse, too, because barren land exacerbates destructive run-off.

Our homes and our investments could very well become worth a lot less to us and to the bank if we do not make sure, very sure, that good thinking and good scientific information are welded together in our laws and in our personal behavior.

This is our time to act, to make good choices for ourselves and for our community.

How about it?

susan cook

27 july 2009

The Green Muse goes back to school

“Back to school” has never meant so much to me as now, in my near-dotage, the oldest student in any of my graduate architecture classes at the University of Texas at Austin, the one with the cane and the gray hair, the one with trifocals and an awful lot of irrelevant knowledge that I must constantly neglect to share with my fellow students for fear of having to once again watch their eyes roll back in their heads.

I am studying about how towns are built and how they can expand without self-destructing, how water resources are protected and allocated, learning new ways to build houses and neighborhoods that use less water and less energy all while creating less of an impact on the land.

The trick, of course, is how to convey this information to those who build new homes and neighborhoods, to the banks that finance these ventures, to the people who would live in them and must demand better homes, better appliances, better water systems, cleaner cars and better laws that will enable all these dreams to come true.

Yesterday, we learned about how the plan is to use our plug-in hybrid vehicles to store and then transmit to the common grid our solar-collected energy off our roofs. I learned that there are something called “T-codes” and these are gradations of proximity from the center of Austin where a household is expected to be more energy self-sufficient the further away it is from the town center.

I learned about plans to make cities completely walkable and to have vast stretches of a community where you do not need a car to get to the grocery store, to school, to work, to wherever you need for goods and services.

What is missing in many of these discussions is how difficult it is to change hearts and minds.

I know the impulse to recycle has been made almost an obsession with a lot of us in a few short years and watched as a kid as the practice of tossing trash out of one’s car went from commonplace to verboten almost overnight, thanks in no small part to Ladybird Johnson’s successful campaign to beautify America’s roadways and waterways.

“Plant a tree, a bush or a shrub”, was the call from the First Lady from Texas and it worked. Not only did we get less trash on our highways, but downtown Austin’s waterway jewel, now named for Ladybird, Town Lake, went from an overlooked riverside to a stellar recreational destination, protected forever now from private development and degradation.

People will sometimes say that “State Ways Can’t Change Folk Ways”, but I find this not to be the case. I watched as black Americans made huge strides to overcome our national legacy of discrimination, I watched as women took their rightful place alongside men in business and society. I have watched as people are time and again made aware of societal injustices or unwise practices and have changed them.

Now I want to watch as we shift our paradigm again.

I want to see Americans rise to the call of our time. I want to see Americans realize we are in an age that will make or break the ability to stop human-generated contributions to global warming.

I want to see us, as a people, alter our lifestyles and shopping trends to both recycle and to buy recycled goods, buy hybrid cars that we can run off of our solar panels.

I want to see builders build our houses where they are insulated and oriented to the sun in ways that reduce the need for heating and cooling and where our roofs collect both sunlight for electricity and rainwater for our households and our gardens.

I want to see Americans stop wasting our precious and dwindling water resources on swaths of non-native grasses and plants that would suck our aquifers dry just to recreate landscapes from other times and other places.

I want to see us make sustainable agriculture our goal, eating organic food grown closer to home, shortening the supply lines between producer and consumer.

I want to see those of us who can, and who want to, live closer to our jobs and schools or work from our homes, saving energy and time.

None of this can happen without our leaders, though, the ones who direct new ways to build our towns and who make it possible through legislation to promote alternative energy and water conservation as a concrete and achievable priority, not something exotic or too expensive to consider.

This is the time. This is our time.

This is the generation that will make it or break it for good.

We have changed before, we will change again and whether we will direct those changes and ride the crest of the wave or be tossed about beneath it is up to us.

I am sure it will be more fun to ride that wave.

susan cook

11 september 2009

Grapes of Wrath Redux

Water into Wine. Really?

When I hear some of our local officials and business leaders here in Hays County, Texas speak admiringly of “agro-tourism” in Hays County, I have a tendency to cringe, and for some reason, my mouth gets a little dry.

Methinks somebody smells money where I detect only the arid odor of drought tinged with a slight aroma of greed and short-sightedness. Are we talking about luring people to our part of the world so they can book a luxury suite at the Salt Lick Lodge and Massage Parlor or eat at Mandola's and look out the window and gaze at lush vineyards watered with our groundwater?

Really?

Are we talking about pulling a Water Into Wine Miracle right here in the Texas Hill Country? Perhaps somebody spotted the image of a wine bottle on a local tortilla and took it too seriously. Makes you think perhaps somebody was visiting California’s Napa Valley and got a harebrained notion that our arid, unpredictable landscape could masquerade as some sort of tourist attraction that grew wine grapes.

If there is anything Dripping Springs, Texas is unlikely to ever be famous for it will be consistently lush landscapes, but you wouldn’t know that by listening to the Salt Lick’s developers who have the audacity to name their new project, “Driftwood”, even though there is an established community by that name of which this BBQ joint and its adjacent illusions of grandeur are but a tiny part.

No one living in our lovely little "postal fiction" of Greater Driftwood stands to benefit one iota from any of this, well not unless you also plan to get with the program and find your own way to attract tourism. Snake Farm? I have no idea what these people are thinking, but surely they have heard about wells going dry from one end of the county to the other and noticed we spent most of the summer with nary a drop of rain.

Our community needs to revisit the concept of “The Commons”: a shared community where we each have our private realm, but where we each have a share in a common heritage, common concerns and a sense of being part of something larger than ourselves.

Scott Roberts, the owner of the Salt Lick, owes our State Representative Patrick Rose a really big favor. Well, he has been paying upfront on that favor for years, hosting those big fundraisers out at the Salt Lick and not making Patrick pay a dime.

Representative Rose, rather than use his time and talents this past legislative session to secure for our area’s water supply some legal protections and research funding or work to get Hays County some enhanced abilities to hold the reins on rapid development, instead spent his entire time, apparently, on a special law designed just so Scott and his business partners could levy their very own sales tax for their little fiefdom. Last week’s election was priceless. There was only one person qualified to vote to establish that taxing entity, Scott Roberts. The vote was 1-O. The ayes have it.

How much water does it take to grow a grape? Not only do you need water for irrigation, but it takes a lot of water to wash those bottles and keep the floor of your winery clean, wash away your pesticide residue and feed your tourist population, not to mention to make sure your other landscaping stays green. Well, according the Texas Water Development Board, the 2008 estimate for Hays County’s 150 acres of vineyards was 400 acre/feet of water or the amount of water it would take to fill 400 football fields to a depth of one foot. This was for irrigation only and did not even address all the other things a vineyard requires water to do.

Can we really afford to keep grapes and tourists hydrated when some of our local households are having to truck in water just to stay afloat?

Grapes are essentially delicate little orbs of water and sugar perched precariously on vines that are a tasty treat to a host of predators. What is being sprayed on these vines to prevent insect depredation, disease, mildew and to cut down on the inevitable native “weeds” that surely would love to share in that bounty of water is anybody’s guess, but when I downloaded the “list of pesticides commonly used on wine grapes” I got ill just reading it. There is a comprehensive list at pesticideinfo.com. Don’t read while eating…or drinking wine.

Google, “water quality + vineyards” or any related site and you will be treated to what it like to live near a vineyard and all the problems these communities are having being wine’s next-door neighbors. Where does all that toxic run-off end up? What about herbicide overspray and the inevitable shift in insect populations caused when you kill off one or two species or introduce a new pathogen into the local ecology?

To make matters worse, there was not a grape in sight this year as a late April freeze had nixed this year’s harvest along with my crape myrtles. So all that water the vineyards drank up this past summer while the rest of us were conserving and watching our own landscapes turn into toast was spent just growing grape leaves and dreams.

It is puzzling to me how folks got the idea that this was a good locale to try their hand at a water-thirsty crop in a time of decreasing rainfall and groundwater resources?

Seems that a few large landowners are increasing their vineyards even as our ability to use groundwater decreases dramatically. Are these vineyards using rainwater harvesting? I don’t see any of them erecting massive pole barns adjacent to their field to collect and store rainfall, but simply damming up our local creeks for irrigation and/or pumping the aquifer, our shared water supply.

We need a good agricultural base in our county, but are vineyards the way to go? Crops should be chosen based on what the climate and the water resources can actually support, not simply what a few enterprising landowners decide is best for their bottom line, regardless of the effect this will have on their neighbors and the shared water table. If there are too many bugs or diseases in a particular area, shouldn’t less-susceptible varieties be planted, making less of an impact on the soil, air and water and making an organic option possible?

If anyone at all is minding the store, we need some serious community conversations before allowing former cattle ranches and open lands to be converted into vineyards.

What might turn a few pockets into lusher landscapes threatens to do so at the expense of thousands of residents who depend on groundwater as their only water source. Shouldn’t we consider what is being planted before giving carte blanche permission to any and all comers who seek an ag exemption?

Are all agricultural endeavors equal? I don’ t think so, and there is a consideration given to this when pondering how many cows a acre can support in the Hill Country vs. The Blackland Prairie on our eastern shores. Shouldn’t more attention be paid to just why a person needs an agricultural well and how much water they are planning to pump out of our shared aquifer?

As it stands, agricultural wells are completely exempt from oversight by the groundwater conservation district, just like a family’s domestic well, even though the potential impact on the aquifer could be immense.

Granted, we should all be looking to rainwater as our next water source and especially to conservation as the cheapest water available anywhere, but until then we are all in this together, this effort to use less groundwater.

So, when you hear that term “agro-tourism” or hear tell of yet another landowner wanting to plow up his range and plant grapevines, ask yourself and then ask them if trying to turn Central Texas into wine country is really such a great idea.

I think we all know the answer.





Susan Cook is a native Texan and a resident of Driftwood, Texas.