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Posts Tagged ‘bayous’

Rosgen “Natural Channel Design”: Restoration, Resistance, and Rebellion

Posted in retoration, science, tagged , , on February 7, 2014| 1 Comment »

Review of: Fields and Streams. Stream restoration, neoliberalism, and the future of environmental science. Rebecca Lave. The University of Georgia Press. 2012.

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David Rosgen is perhaps the best known practitioner of stream restoration in the United States, and perhaps beyond. His method, Natural Channel Design, is specified in many state and federal agency-funded projects. This method in fact is specified by the Harris County Flood Control District for the Memorial Park Demonstration Project, a “restoration” of an unchannelized segment of Buffalo Bayou on the southern flanks of Memorial Park, in Houston. (more…)

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Time Travel on the Prairie, Part 1

Posted in coastal prairies, tagged , , , , on July 3, 2013| 2 Comments »

endless prairie

A glimpse of saltmarsh prairie. Imagine the hamlet of Houston is somewhere just over the horizon.

Do you ever wonder what the land where you live looked like before you arrived? Playing around with the historical photos in Google Earth* can give you an idea what one might have seen, at least from the air, as far back as about 1940.

But what about 150 or more years ago, before the tangle of highways and sea of rooftops? If you live along the Texas Gulf Coast, can you picture the millions of acres of tall grass prairie? Coastal prairie, steeped with marshland and traced with shady bayous, was the predominate landscape in our area from the Pleistocene Era to a few decades ago.

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Roads and lily pads: there’s a link?

Posted in stormwater, stormwater wetlands, tagged , , , , , on June 20, 2013| 1 Comment »

Water lilies in the Mason Park wetlands (Photo: Milt Gray), public bikes (Wikimedia Commons)

Water lilies in the Mason Park wetlands (Photo: Milt Gray), public bikes (Wikimedia Commons)

Once in a while, a newspaper article about pedestrian bridges makes a brush with stormwater management. Sounds pretty random, right?

This recent one in the Houston Chronicle doesn’t spell out the connections between transportation planning and managing stormwater, but we know that vehicles are a source of pollutants which wash off roads into storm drains. (more…)

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Coming soon to a bayou by you

Posted in stormwater, Walkability, tagged , , , on February 25, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Many park destinations are along Houston’s bayous, but often you can’t follow the waterway from one destination to the next. That’s a limitation when you want to travel through the park–walking the dog, running, or biking–as opposed to settling in for a picnic or sunbath.  Happily, the Bayou Greenways 2020 program will fill the missing links between public green spaces with a continuous trail system along the major bayous. (more…)

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