Draining the Swamp

This topic is not just significant in that a Houston media source devoted 8 pages to an environmental article, it's also the topic of Rice's Environmental Law course taught by Jim Blackburn this semester.

Blackburn's the lawyer representing the city of Shore Acres versus the US Army Corps of Engineers. At stake? The ongoing expansion of the Galveston Bay ship channel will have ripples of ecological disasters from truck emissions for product transport to wet land destruction. And we haven't even gotten to the inevitable container and ship fuel leakages.

If there's a better topic to illustrate today's lecture, "Environmental Racism? Or Classism?" I haven't found it yet. Political and commercial interests versus jobs for the area made impoverished by environment-depleting industries. It's a long read, but it might be the most relevant of our semester.

houstonpress.com | Draining the Swamp | 2005-01-13: "A scorched-earth management philosophy is sucking the life out of our region's wetlands"