It's time again to stop the bulldozers on the bayou

I feel responsible.

In 1966 Terry Hershey asked me to join with her, George Mitchell, and then Congressman George Bush in their campaign to stop the Army Corps of Engineers and the Harris County Flood Control District from bulldozing the natural banks of Buffalo Bayou near our homes on the west side of Houston.

At the time none of us knew what we know now: that the trees and vegetation that grow on the bayou's banks are so important to the quality of our water, to erosion and flood control. We just knew that we preferred and respected nature. My house backed up to the bayou, and I let the enchanting forest back there grow wild. I was one of the only homeowners in our small neighborhood on the river who never had problems with erosion. Others who cut down the wild trees and plants saw their backyard gardens and lawns wash away.

We stopped the bulldozers on the bayou back then, and at other times too over the years. The organization that we formed became the Bayou Preservation Association, and eventually I became the president of it. I am still on the executive committee of the BPA, as it is called, though the organization no longer serves the cause of preservation. The BPA has lost its way.

I deeply regret the role that I played in bringing Colorado river guru Dave Rosgen and his deceptively named Natural Channel Design methods to Houston. Like many people, I believed initially that his methods were "natural." They are anything but. Rosgen's methods may use wood and rock rather than concrete. They may pretend to mimic nature. But in Houston these controversial techniques are being used to destroy nature in order to rebuild it, in the senseless belief that somehow artificially reconstructed nature will be better than nature itself.

The little-known project the BPA now promotes and helped to create—and that I voted against—would use Rosgen's techniques to wreck, dredge, and channelize a perfectly healthy and natural stretch of Buffalo Bayou nearly 1.5 miles long as it passes between our great public Memorial Park and the Hogg Bird Sanctuary on the north and the River Oaks Country Club golf course on the south.

Hundreds if not thousands of shading trees will be razed, many of them riparian species too small or too young to be counted by the vegetation survey conducted by the Harris County Flood Control District, as noted by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality in its criticisms to the Corps about the $6 million project. The commission also questioned why this test project was being conducted in this historic natural area, little disturbed for nearly a century, and filled with towering trees, very old majestic bluffs and prehistoric sandstone formations.

Officially a proposal of the Harris County Flood Control District and known as the Memorial Park Demonstration Project, the project is being funded with $4 million in taxpayer funds from the city and county, as well as a $2 million contribution from the country club. I cannot understand how the county and the city in particular, when there is so much that needs to be repaired, can so easily find millions to spend on something so destructive and so unnecessary.

My great friend, the late conservationist Army Emmott, called the bayou a "ribbon of life." It should be left alone to do what nature does best: adjust, restore and heal itself. And that is what the Memorial Park Conservancy recommended in its 2004 Master Plan.

Before Ima Hogg's death in 1975, I promised her that I would do everything in my power to preserve the park that she created and protected for so long. She would be appalled by this project.

It is heartbreaking to me that the Conservancy and the BPA now support this tragic, misguided, destructive experiment.

This Monday afternoon, Oct. 27, the members of a committee known as the Harris County Flood Control Task Force, of which I was once the chairman, will vote whether to support the project, now being considered for a permit by the Corps. In an unusual move, the chairman of the task force has announced that the meeting will be closed to the public, and that people who try to attend will be turned away.

The Houston City Council, although it has already approved and funded this project, must also vote on whether this experimental "demonstration" project is a legal use and taking of public parkland, according to state law. I urge the people of Houston to contact their city council representatives to tell them that this is a waste of public funds and not a proper use of our great urban park.

For more information, visit www.SaveBuffaloBayou.org.