Weathered History: Galveston and Extreme Events

Abstract

Hurricane Harvey affected the Houston-Galveston area in unprecedented ways. A century earlier, the Great Storm was similarly damaging. A third disaster was Brownwood, a housing development that sank into the bay. Thomas Princen asks what these three events reveal about the past and signal about the future, and how they disrupt human endeavors to conquer nature. The First Peoples who inhabited the area lived with the land, but those who eliminated and displaced them promote the accelerated consumption of natural resources, especially oil, for economic growth. Continued extraction will spell collapse, as more severe weather events can be expected.