This year, I’m predicting, Corpus Christi will be inundated with journalists from national outlets wanting their own story about the city’s imploding water supply failures. As the city lurches toward the ignoble status as potentially the first modern U.S. city to run out of water, we are witnessing an echo of shocks felt in much larger cities, like Johannesburg, South Africa, where much of the population suffers under ‘Day Zero’ conditions due to “infrastructure failure, poor planning and weak accountability,” as The Citizen writes.
Those of us from state and bioregional projects like Deceleration will also be reporting on the evolving situation. But, as I make clear in this month’s newsletter, this story goes back much further. In spite of that history and all of its lessons, communities across the Laguna Madre area of South Texas—and beyond—are poised to make the same easily preventable mistakes.
— Gaige Davila
Months Away from Running Out of Water, Corpus Christi’s Officialdom Still Holds Industry More Dear Than its Own Residents
Gaige Davila | Deceleration
It’s been about two years since I first reported on Corpus Christi’s water. I shouldn’t be at all surprised that what residents were worried about back then has not only happened—a city so enamored with billion-dollar industry that it pushed into the bleeding edge of water promises to the detriment of residents—but is even worse than predicted. Yet here I am, writing this from just a few hours away in Austin, Texas, after screening the documentary Shifting Baselines by Julien Elie, being surprised for another reason.
It has to do with the idea behind the title of the film. That idea was first elucidated by Daniel Pauly, a fisheries biologist who is heavily featured in the film.
Here’s a good Ted Talk listen on the concept of shifting baselines from Pauly himself, but think of it as our collective understanding of “normal” changing imperceptibly, year by year, until the new “normal” begins to collapse. Only then would people notice anything was different at all.
For instance, if you were to watch any Corpus Christi council meeting or see its city manager, Peter Zanoni, talk about water, you’d assume the industrial companies and the region’s drought were always there, beyond history, in a productive tension. It’s a convenient illusion for industry boosters. But the people who live there know better.