Personal Environmental History
September 8, 2021 By: Student Example Two
The historical environments of my family have included rural, urban and suburban locations in five states and three countries. However, for the purpose of this paper I will limit the family environments to the ones that supported my mother’s side of the family and my immediate family. I will show that each generation of my European American family possessed differing views of their environment as well as a unique relationship to their environment.
In 1915 my mother’s parents married and settled in the small Oklahoma town of Norman while my father was attending the university there. The area around town was a mixture of fenced farmlands and wide grassy plains. The occasional tall tree or house were the only features that broke the otherwise flat and even countryside. After receiving his degree in geology my grandfather was offered a job with an oil company in Houston and they loaded up the model T and moved South to Texas. My grandparents were among the many people at that time that were flocking to the state to find their fortunes in oil. His job as a geologist was to seek out oil where it lay in the fields of Texas and Oklahoma. He took the large sum of five thousand dollars that he saved working for Standard Oil of Texas and built a solid two-story brick home on a one-half acre suburban lot with a well-manicured lawn and shrubs. Therefore, oil was the major resource that made our life in Houston possible.
After the move to Houston my grandmother and grandfather adopted the idea of the environment as a powerful entity that demanded respect. The high heat coupled with oppressive humidity and swarms of blood-sucking mosquitoes made Houston ís semi-tropical climate quite a change from the arid plains of Norman Oklahoma. At the time my grandfather moved to the Gulf Coast of Texas the closest thing to air conditioning was a heavy, warm breeze created by an electric fan next to a window. Furthermore, every day during the week he would dress in a three-piece suit and drive downtown to work in one of the ultra modern but as yet not air-conditioned buildings called skyscrapers. During one particularly hot summer my grandfather purchased a new invention called an attic fan that claimed to draw a cooling breeze up and through the house at all times. In actuality this modern wonder only succeeded in moving the hot humid air from one room to another and at night it pinned unsuspecting bugs up against the window screens.
Consequently, when I asked my mother what major resources sustained her in the environment in Houston she jokingly replied “freon”. The advent of what she used to call “refrigerated air” made a major impact on her quality of life. It must have been an absolute miracle to flip a switch and in a few minutes be able to feel comfortable in your own home, to sleep when the nights “cooled off” to eighty-five or ninety degrees with a relative humidity hovering around the ninety percent range.
To get relief from the sweltering climate of the Texas gulf coast my grandparents built a cabin at six thousand feet in elevation in the mountains of New Mexico near the village of Ruidoso. Each summer they would take my mother and her sister there to rest and relax in the cool dry climate. The cabin and the village of Ruidoso are both situated close to the border of the Mescalero Apache Indian reservation and as a result have an interesting mix of European-American, Spanish and Native American cultures. There she was exposed to the cultures of the Mescalero Apache, Zuni and Hopi Indians and those experiences formed her respect for the interdependent relationship of humans with the environment and she in turn passed those values on to me.
I was raised in a suburban area of Houston and the landscape consisted of wide lawns, pine forests, small creeks and bayous. My parents had the house built to take advantage of the views of the property with floor to ceiling picture windows that allowed the landscape to become part of the rooms in the house. On the property my parents used the practice of organic gardening to recycle lawn clippings, leaves and banana peels. This recycling gave my parents the ability to put back nutrients that were taken from the soil. I grew up with a large compost pile and spacious vegetable garden that my parents tended frequently. The garden provided abundant amounts of fresh, tomatoes, lima beans, squash, cucumber, corn, melons and berries and pecans for almost the entire year. It is hard for me to remember a meal without something from our own garden. In watching my parents carefully tend the garden and pay attention to natural balance of the environment, the notion of stewardship of the land was passed on to me.
I myself have lived in the American Southwest and various parts of California and become extremely aware of the importance of water as a natural resource. Growing up in a semi-tropical environment I took water and rain for granted. No one had irrigation systems for their landscape; it was virtually assured that summer rains would sustain the vegetation and people of that area. I moved to California in a drought year I was introduced to the concept of water rationing and conservation. I became aware of things like low-flow showerheads, drip irrigation, and water saving toilets. The awareness I gained helped me to link my actions with the health of the environment and realize that I could change my habits that would in turn have a positive effect on the environment. As the demand for clean water increases and water rights become more hotly contested, it will be interesting to see how California and the western states deal with this scarce resource.
In conclusion I would like to say that living in many different environments with many different cultures I have gained an appreciation of the importance of keeping a balance between human needs and the needs of the environment. The challenge in the future for myself and others living in these sometimes fragile ecosystems will be to find that equilibrium that allows humanity and nature to sustain each other.