‘Make a difference’
. . . By Jim Hiney
With three simple words (and $46 million to back them up), Ed Harte set the course for a marine science research center that could potentially change the way people view and use the Gulf of Mexico.
Five years in the making, the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies (HRI) opens its doors to its first scientists in August 2005. The brand new, 57,000-square-foot building stands at the entrance to Texas A&M-Corpus Christi (TAMUCC).
“This is the signature institute of the university and it is the signature building on campus,” says Robert Furgason, former TAMUCC president and now director of the HRI.
“The building is on the forefront of the campus and the institute is on the forefront of what the university is doing around the Gulf of Mexico,” adds Dr. Wes Tunnell, the HRI’s associate director.
The Harte Research Institute is an American-based tri-national collaboration with Mexico and Cuba focused solely on the Gulf of Mexico. It is, or will be, as much a think tank as it is a marine laboratory, thanks to its quietly persistent progenitor.
“When we started planning for the Harte Research Institute in 2001, we envisioned that it would be another science institute within the College of Science and Technology,” recalls Tunnell, who has spearheaded planning for the institute’s scientific aspects. “But as we met and talked in our advisory council meetings, Ed was pretty explicit that he wanted us to do more than science. He wanted us to impact policy. He wanted us to take the science and, if policy wasn’t good, use the science to change policy so it was good for the long-term sustainable use and conservation of the Gulf of Mexico.
“Ed is a man of few words,” Tunnell says and then chuckles, “but when he speaks, everyone listens.”
The HRI will raise public awareness nationally about a region that Tunnell calls the “third coast” because it is habitually ignored by the American people.
“Many people go to the northern shores of the Gulf and visit, say, Mobile or Biloxi or Galveston and they look out over this muddy water and they believe the entire Gulf of Mexico is just muddy water,” says Tunnell. “They also know of all of the oil and gas development that has taken place in the past 50 years to 70 years and they think oil and gas production is all bad. They put together all of these stories of refineries and oil spills with the muddy water and they conjure up in their minds that the Gulf of Mexico must be a nasty place.
“Yet when you travel a little way offshore, the waters are beautiful and clear,” he says with a bit of exasperation in his voice. “In the southern Gulf, where there are coral reefs, you could easily believe you are in the Caribbean. Some of the reefs are in trouble, like the ones off Veracruz, but the ones off Yucatan and Campeche Bank are beautiful.”
Americans should be very concerned about the Gulf’s status because it affects their lives in many ways. It produces about 40 percent of all seafood consumed in this country and 95 percent of the oil and gas produced domestically offshore, “and this is not insignificant to our lives,” says Furgason. “We had better look at the whole Gulf as a system. What the farmers are doing in Minnesota or Iowa or Illinois impacts what’s happening in the Gulf, as do the shrimp trawlers that work there. You have to stand back and take a look at the Gulf as a whole, and that’s what the Harte Research Institute is really set up to do, not only from the U.S. perspective but to bring Mexico in there and the Cuban aspect as it can be developed.”
The ocean in general has not curried as much respect from the public as has the land, Tunnell says, noting that 12 percent of the Earth’s landmass is protected in the form of parks, refuges and similar designations but less than 1 percent of the ocean is protected.
Beyond its dedication to the Gulf of Mexico, the HRI sets itself apart from other marine institutes through its emphasis on interdisciplinary research, its focus on sustainable use and conservation of the Gulf, and its commitment to include Mexico and Cuba in the institute’s planning and projects.
“Half of the Gulf borders Mexico,” notes Furgason. “You can do anything you want here but if you don’t have good relationships and get international programs going on, you can’t make the same impacts. I’ve found the Mexican government to be a very willing partner in what we’re trying to do and they are doing good work down there.”
Working with Cuba has proven more difficult, given the current state of relations between Washington, D.C., and Havana, yet Tunnell and HRI advisory council member Dr. David Guggenheim recently received a $90,000 grant from the Bay and Paul Foundation in New York to continue his work characterizing Cuba’s northwest coast — the area facing the Gulf of Mexico and a place Tunnell refers to as the country’s least studied coast.
He now travels to Cuba a couple of times a year to foster good relations and to help the Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of Havana find resources and technology to conduct marine research.
The HRI’s most distinguishing challenge is to impact public sentiment and, in turn, public policy. To do that, it must first overcome the public’s ignorance about ocean issues.
“You can go to an average grocery store today and buy orange roughy and Chilean sea bass taken from the Pacific Ocean with huge trawlers that scrape the tops of the sea mounts and kill the corals,” bemoans Tunnell. “The fish they are bringing in are species that must be 50 years old or older before they’ll reproduce. The trawlers will move from one seamount to another taking all the fish, and they are in international waters, so no one is doing anything. Getting the general public to know those things is tough.”
Dr. Sylvia Earle, one of the nation’s preeminent oceanographers and chair of the HRI’s blue-ribbon advisory council, has built a career on trying to educate the public about the plight of the declining world ocean. The woman who is so well respected that she is called the U.S. Sturgeon General has often given presentations about trawling, complete with pictures of what the sea mounts look like after a fishing boat has gone through.
She looks at her audience intently and asks, “Would you collect oranges from an orchard with a bulldozer?”
To say the least, Tunnell and Furgason are pleased that Earle will help the HRI fulfill its destiny.
“People all over the nation want seafood and they don’t realize that some of the reports that have come out in the last two years say that 90 percent of all the big fish in the ocean are gone. People don’t believe it because they are still catching fish, but if you go back and look at history, the big jewfish, snapper, grouper and blue fin tuna — there are not many of them left anymore,” Tunnell says sternly. “We’re on a slippery slope going downhill. Both the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy and the Pew Oceans Commission reports say it is time to turn that trend around. If we leave it another 10 years, some of these species will go extinct — some of them are already commercially extinct. The Harte Research Institute is primed to be at the right place at the right time in history to make a difference for the Gulf of Mexico.”
$46 million vision
Ed Harte is no stranger to environmental issues or philanthropic endeavors, particularly in the Corpus Christi area.
Through his lobbying efforts, Harte was instrumental in convincing the federal government to designate the Padre Island National Seashore in 1963. Three years later he chaired Corpus Christi’s Bay Drilling Committee. The first such municipal committee of its kind in the nation passed ordinances limiting oil and gas drilling in Corpus Christi Bay.
Harte is also a long-time member of the National Audubon Society, serving on its board of directors from 1964-70 and from 1972-79. He served as the society’s chairman from 1974-79.
He and his wife, Janet, contributed $1.8 million for a library in Flour Bluff named after her. In one year they gave almost $20 million to a variety of charities and organizations across the nation and donated $3.5 million to help build TAMUCC’s recently completed performing arts center, which faces Corpus Christi Bay a few hundred yards away from the HRI building.
Harte lost his beloved wife to a long illness in February 1999. His children had already received their inheritances, so Harte turned his attention to the best use for the rest of his considerable fortune and he asked his children for advice.
There were many possibilities. Harte could make one large gift or many small ones. Given the breadth of his philanthropic activities, Harte’s money could fund any number of activities anywhere in the country.
Son Christopher suggested that, if his father really wanted his generosity to make a difference, he make one large gift instead of many small ones. As it happened, Ed’s other son, Will, had recently met renowned oceanographer Sylvia Earle at a banquet. He suggested that the family read her book, Sea Change: A Message of the Oceans, the story of her 30-year adventure exploring the world ocean and her plea for preservation of Earth’s last frontier.
After reading the book, the family decided that Ed’s money was best spent sponsoring research on the Gulf of Mexico and that research should be centered at TAMUCC.
Harte has been traveling between New York and Texas over the past few months and could not be reached for comment for this story. But he talked about his life and the HRI during a 2003 interview with Texas Shores, which named him a Coastal Legend for his lifetime of dedication to Texas’ marine environment.
“We felt it was important to keep the activity that the money financed in Corpus Christi, which is where we made a lot of what we have,” he said in 2003. “I felt some obligation to Corpus Christi and my children did, too.”
He walked into Dr. Robert Furgason’s office in the late summer of 2000 with a heck of an offer for Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. Harte wanted to give the school $25 million to endow five chairs for top-flight marine scientists.
Surprisingly, Furgason, who at the time had been the TAMUCC president for almost a decade, told Harte his gift was a nice idea but was wholly inadequate.
“Up to that point, this inadequacy had escaped my notice,” Harte said a few weeks later in a published newspaper report, when his even more generous gift was publicly announced.
Furgason still smiles to this day when he recalls Harte’s version of their conversation.
“That’s a pretty good story,” he chuckles. “The truth is when he walked into my office he had in mind what he wanted to do, and I didn’t. When he outlined what he wanted to do I told him you have to have a critical mass and you have to have enough breadth of programs if you really want to make a difference.”
Starting an institution like the one Furgason envisioned — one that could carry out the university’s academic mission as well as being a world scientific center — would take a long time to build from the ground up.
Instead, Furgason suggested, the institute should try to attract established, high-caliber people who had impressive research credentials and could in short order provide the institute with a high profile in the realm of marine institutes.
“There was no magic number, but I suggested that we would have perhaps six major research units that would constitute the institution,” Furgason says. “I said we needed endowed chairs for each unit so we didn’t have to worry about the whims of the Legislature for money and then we could direct the efforts of the chairs.
“I also talked about how people in major research efforts have support groups,” Furgason recalls. “Each chair needs a couple of endowed graduate fellowships to support the research activities. They also need some type of support for travel and equipment and things like that. Finally, I said the institute needed enough of an endowment that it could operate on 5 percent of the money.”
The final price tag was $46 million. It is one of the five largest single gifts ever made to a Texas university and it created a one-of-a-kind research institute.
That Furgason could have looked such a generous donor in the face and tell him that his gift was not enough is mind-boggling, but to ask for $21 million more is almost unthinkable.
As he sat in his downtown Corpus Christi office in 2003, the then 80-year-old Harte was asked about his first thought after Furgason’s bold statements.
“I thought he was right,” he said without hesitation.
When Furgason reached the final tally, Harte wanted the figure put on paper. The page-and-a-half document spawned by two men’s vision and one man’s money created the basis for the HRI.
“When you look at the endowments of the top marine labs, Woods Hole is the 800-pound gorilla. It has an endowment of more than $250 million,” says Tunnell. “The Harte Institute is number two at $46 million.”
Harte and Furgason had one more discussion about where to locate the institute. There was no room in any of the existing buildings on campus and Furgason guessed a new building would cost between $15 million and $20 million, not including the cost to equip it.
“Ed insisted that his money go to fund programs,” says Furgason. “He asked that we word the endowment in such a way that it was restricted from being used for major capital construction because that would eat up the funds quickly.”
Furgason agreed to Harte’s request and in 2001 approached Texas lawmakers about funding a permanent home for the HRI. Legislators responded by appropriating $18 million for a building and by approving Furgason’s request for a continuing $300,000 special line item in the state’s budget to help support the HRI’s infrastructure through a variety of ways, such as funding support staff or acting as matching money for outside research grants.
Furgason’s ability to obtain more than $18 million in state money for the HRI was the latest example of his uncanny fundraising ability, although he is quick to credit good timing.
“It is never easy to get a special item, but I did it in 2001,” Furgason says. “If I had tried to get it in 2003 with the budget situation the way that it was, I think we would have been dead in the water.”
During the 14 years Furgason was president of TAMUCC, he brought more than $200 million into the university through gifts and capital campaigns. Tunnell credits Furgason with being one of the major factors in TAMUCC’s transformation from a sleepy backwater university to one of the most prominent campuses in the Texas A&M University System.
“I had friends who went to school here when it was the University of Corpus Christi — a Baptist school with 600 to 800 students who were housed mainly in old Navy barracks,” says Tunnell. “When I came here in 1974 the school was open to juniors, seniors and graduate students only.”
The university was one of about a dozen “senior colleges” created by the Legislature and located in towns that already had strong junior colleges but no four-year institutions. Lawmakers never really figured out how to fund the senior colleges so they were chronically short of money, Tunnell says, “But it was a great place to teach because the average age of the students was 32-33 years old and they were people who had been out in the workforce and decided they wanted to do something else, so they went back to school to get an education. Those kinds of people are easy to teach. They were here with a mission — to get their degrees and get on with life.”
Tunnell believes three events that occurred relatively close together set the university on the path to prominence. Corpus Christi State University, as it was known at the time, became part of the Texas A&M University System in 1989 (the school changed its name to Texas A&M-Corpus Christi in 1993). Furgason was named the school’s president in 1990 and the university became a four-year institution in 1994.
“I can’t separate those three elements,” says Tunnell. “Could Dr. Furgason have brought $200 million to this university if we had not been part of The Texas A&M System or gone to being a four-year college? I don’t know.”
At about the same time, Furgason surveyed the school’s attributes, assets and location, and established six major areas — among them was marine and coastal environments, including marine sciences and environmental sciences — where the university could focus its academic attention in pursuit of its own identity.
“We didn’t want to be just little Aggies,” Furgason laughs now. “We wanted to emulate some of the things the main campus does well but we also wanted to carve out our own future based on the fact that we have the opportunity to do things substantially differently because of our youth. Our youth is a blessing and a curse. The curse part is you are young and you don’t have a track record. The blessing is you don’t have a track record.”
He was not afraid to take some bold steps to realize his goals for the university. In 1998, he announced a $15 million capital campaign, “something universities of our size and youth just didn’t do at the time,” Furgason says. “Yet this community seemed receptive to that and ready for it.”
Displaying their faith in Furgason, local leaders put their hearts and souls into the campaign and raised $22 million.
In May 2001, Furgason traveled to Galveston to meet with Dr. Sylvia Earle, who was in town with her Sustainable Seas Expedition. Over lunch, Furgason told Earle about the role her book played in stimulating Harte’s gift and he asked if she would consider leading the advisory council.
Earle quickly agreed and has become more than just a celebrity figurehead.
“I have been very pleased that Sylvia has bought into the institute heart and soul,” says Furgason. “She is an international figure who is invited to do programs and give speeches all over the world, so you can’t expect her to sit in your backyard and have that kind of visibility. But she tries — and amazingly well — to be involved at every major event we have.
“She is a delight and she not only has high visibility herself, but she is using that to help us build our visibility with folks who other people know and highly respect,” he says.
Due to her globetrotting schedule, Texas Shores could not reach Earle for comment.
Through her considerable contacts, Earle has helped turn the advisory council into an oceanographic dream team featuring such prestigious names as Jean-Michel Cousteau; Guggenheim, former vice president of The Ocean Conservancy and now an ocean conservation consultant; Dr. John Ogden, director of the Florida Institute of Oceanography; Dr. Kumar Mahadevan, executive director of the Mote Marine Lab in Florida; Guillermo Garcia Montero, director of the National Aquarium of Cuba; and Admiral Alberto Vazquez de la Cerda, Ph.D., from the Mexican Navy’s Oceanographic Institute and the University of Veracruz.
Will Harte, one of the original council members, has recruited several key members to the group, including Eugenio Clariond, chairman and CEO of the large Latin American industrial conglomerate Grupo IMSA. Clariond hosted the advisory panel’s March 2005 meeting in Monterrey.
Clariond also serves on the board of Fondo Mexicano para la Conservación de la Naturaleza (Mexican Fund for the Conservation of Nature). During a presentation to the HRI’s advisory panel, Fondo Mexicano’s executive director, Lorenzo Rosenzweig, noted that more than 90 percent of the several hundred conservation projects undertaken in his country in the past decade have focused on the land.
Of the few projects involving marine resources, only two projects were on the shores of the Gulf. Through a memorandum of agreement, Fondo Mexicano has now pledged to work with the HRI on research projects in Mexico, help raise awareness of Gulf of Mexico issues among the Mexican people and foster good stewardship of the Gulf’s resources.
From Pangea to present
The Gulf of Mexico is a relatively young geologic feature when compared to the age of the Earth. The oldest rocks found thus far are more than 4 billion years old. The Gulf of Mexico has been around in its current form for about 1.5 million years, although its origins go back a bit farther.
The history of the Gulf of Mexico goes back about 250 million years or so, although its origins remain the topic of debate among geologists. Tracing the formation of the Gulf further back than that is very difficult because little is known of the area that would become the Gulf of Mexico prior to the end of the Paleozoic period, says Dr. Amos Salvador, retired professor of geology at The University of Texas in Austin.
Salvador edited The Gulf of Mexico Basin, published in 1991 and the tenth volume in The Geology of North America series published by The Geological Society of America. Salvador also wrote all or parts of several chapters in the book, including one on the origin and development of the Gulf of Mexico.
At the end of the Paleozoic period, the area now known as the Gulf of Mexico was part of a single land mass formed by all of the continental plates in the world — the super continent called Pangea.
About 215 million years ago, molten magma from the Earth’s interior bubbled to the surface and began to crack Pangea apart. Envision, if you will, a blueberry pie with a light, delicate crust and an overly generous helping of filling. As the thicker-than-liquid but thinner-than-solid filling heats to boiling, the bubbling goo expands and rises, breaking through the crust and pushing it aside.
In the same way, the North American and European plates began separating, says Salvador.
By the middle to late Jurassic (about 160 million years ago), the shifting North and South American plates, including an area known as the Yucatan Block, created an opening that allowed water from the Pacific Ocean to cover part of the land between the two plates.
“These were probably very shallow ponds, so the seawater evaporated and formed salt deposits that later became salt domes,” explains Salvador.
For the next 15 million years, the North American Plate and the Yucatan Block continued moving away from each other until they formed what is basically the Gulf of Mexico Basin as it exists today. There was still no connection between the basin and the Atlantic or Caribbean, says Salvador, although this theory is open to debate.
Beginning about 145 million years ago, the only change to the basin was it began to subside, or sink. “As the plates were pulling away, they stretched the crust,” says Salvador. The weight of sediments brought into the basin by early river systems caused the stretched crust to sag.
At the same time, the subsidence opened a connection to the Gulf Basin with the Atlantic and Caribbean oceans, says Salvador.
The water level in the basin rose and fell for the next 120 million years, ultimately falling in the west enough to expose the land that is now Mexico and the Yucatan Peninsula, cutting the Gulf’s ties to the Pacific Ocean. The shoreline in what became the United States, which had run through what is now Oklahoma and northern Florida gradually migrated south until about 1.6 million years ago, when it settled in more or less its current location, says Salvador.
Sometimes referred to as the American Mediterranean or America’s sea, the Gulf of Mexico now comprises about 596,000 square kilometers of surface area.
About 85 percent of the continental United States drains into Gulf, with the Mississippi River accounting for 64 percent of the total river flows.
The Gulf’s economic impact is as large as the Gulf itself. The nation’s most lucrative fishery — shrimp — is primarily confined there. More than half of the nation’s refining capability and 80 percent of its petrochemical production facilities are located along the Gulf coast.
More than 65 percent of all the oil imported into the United States comes through Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, with the vast majority coming through Texas.
Four of the nation’s top 10 ports handling more than 50 percent of the nation’s waterborne commerce are located in Gulf states, and the region’s tourism industry is worth about $20 billion per year.
“The resources are huge,” Tunnell reiterates, before throwing in another surprising gee-whiz fact. “Many people don’t realize that behind income tax, the federal government’s largest source of revenue is fees from oil and gas production in the Gulf of Mexico.”
Big chairs to fill
Dr. Richard McLaughlin made a small piece of history in December 2004 when he accepted an offer to become the HRI’s first endowed professor — the one for marine policy and law.
He brings with him an impressive resume of work experience (most recently as a professor at the University of Mississippi Law School) and three law degrees: a juris doctorate (J.D.) from Tulane University, a master’s degree (LL.M) in marine law and policy from the University of Washington and a doctorate in law (J.S.D.) from Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley.
“Richard is a low-key guy who wins you over quickly,” says Tunnell. “He has done some great work and he is very easy going. Part of the reason Dr. Furgason took the job as director of the institute was to make sure the right people are hired. He’s said over the years that if you hire good people, good things will happen, so that’s what he intends to do during his tenure.”
The HRI’s advisory council charged Tunnell with the responsibility of developing ideas for potential endowed chairs and then bringing those ideas back to the council for approval. The subject for the chair McLaughlin now holds was a foregone conclusion. Tunnell’s second recommendation — a chair focusing on Geographical Information Systems, or GIS — was not as self-evident as his first but it was an easy choice.
“GIS is currently THE technology being used all over the world as a tool for analyzing and visualizing data,” he says.
To determine the remaining chairs, Tunnell studied pressing issues facing the Gulf of Mexico and he combed through the recently released U.S. Ocean Commission report, the Pew Oceans Commission Report and Defying Oceans End, a report co-edited by Earle that set an agenda to reverse the decline in health of the world ocean.
He talked with experts at marine labs located along the Gulf of Mexico as well as well-known East and West Coast institutes like Woods Hole and Scripps.
He also looked at the scientific resources already available — primarily those at Texas A&M University in College Station, The University of Texas Marine Science Institute in Port Aransas and at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi.
“We did not want to duplicate things,” says Tunnell. “We have the Texas Coastal Ocean Observation Network based here (TAMUCC), so we did not want to duplicate that. We did not want to hire a physical oceanographer because Texas A&M has good physical oceanographers. I looked at what wasn’t available and then what the Gulf of Mexico needed.”
To stay true to the HRI’s commitment to interdisciplinary research, the endowed chairs had to cover areas conducive to cooperative and coordinated research.
Based on Tunnell’s recommendation, the advisory council approved establishing endowed chairs for ecosystem studies and modeling; marine biodiversity and conservation science; and oceans and human health.
In April 2003, Tunnell’s long-time friend and Corpus Christi native Billy Causey, superintendent of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, returned home as a featured speaker in the Edward H. Harte Distinguished Lecture Series.
Tunnell seized the opportunity to pick Causey’s brain about the decade it took Causey to help establish the sanctuary, which initially proved a very contentious issue with local divers and fishermen “who did not want anyone messing with their waters and the status quo,” says Tunnell.
Causey began changing the minds of his opposition when he began showing them in dollar terms the degradation of coral reefs and declining fisheries. He hired a socio-economist who determined the value of diving, the value of fishing and the value of seagrasses in terms of the money they brought into the local economy from tourists.
“Billy was able to show the public that the dollars that could be brought in were far greater if they took care of the resources instead of just taking things away from them and letting them degrade,” says Tunnell.
He took Causey’s story to advisory council members, who agreed the sixth and final endowed chair would be in coastal and ocean socio-economics.
The HRI’s administration is under the gun to hire four of the six endowed professors this year — at least two by September, when TAMUCC plans to offer a new doctoral degree in coastal and marine science systems.
As Tunnell explains it, “System science looks at systems like the Gulf of Mexico and uses massive data sets to show what has happened within the system in the past, what’s happening now and then predict what will happen in the future.”
TAMUCC would have been able to offer the Ph.D. program eventually, but the creation of the HRI hastened the degree program, says Tunnell.
“The higher education coordinating board was specific during final approval in October 2004. They said we must have two of the six endowed chairs by September 2005 when we start the new Ph.D. program,” he says. “They saw that we needed senior level eminent scientists to be part of the Ph.D. program.”
Two endowed chairs — those in oceans and human health, and coastal and ocean socio-economics, will most likely not be filled until 2006 or 2007, says Tunnell.
Each of the six distinguished professors will be given a fairly free hand to establish their research priorities and build their respective programs. McLaughlin, who started work with the HRI in June, is now starting to build his program and he has already chosen a number of research priorities.
Tunnell offers his thoughts on the types of issues that the other five endowed chairs might address.
GIS
In the simplest terms, Geographic Information Systems are tools used to gather, manipulate, analyze and combine information about virtually any aspect of the Earth’s surface. The data take many forms, including maps, 3D virtual models, tables and lists.
“We know from what state and federal governments are getting into that GIS is the wave of the future as far as the tool for managing the environment, so we knew we needed to have somebody to help us with that,” says Tunnell. “We didn’t want to hire someone who is just a GIS technician. We want to hire someone who uses GIS as a tool for conservation and science. We say we want to build a GIS of the Gulf of Mexico and we want to do that to help conservation.”
The well-known environmental conservation group The Nature Conservancy provides a good example of a GIS system used for conservation purposes. The group is testing a GIS for the Caribbean Sea and the land there that includes data on resources like rain forests, coral reefs, seagrasses and sandy beaches.
“If they wanted to protect, say, 10 percent of all of the best or the last great places that have seagrass beds, coral reefs and mangroves, they can punch the information into the GIS to see where those locations exist now and see where they could preserve others,” Tunnell explains. “The model could tell them that they’ve set aside enough of these areas in the Virgin Islands but not enough in Grenada.”
GIS requires an enormous amount of computer power to handle the massive data sets it creates. The HRI building will feature fiber optic computer connections and Furgason obtained funding from the state to finish connecting the rather ominoussounding “dark fiber” laid between Houston and Corpus Christi during the tech-heavy 1990s.
In reality, dark fiber is simply unused fiber-optic cable. Often, companies laid more fiber-optic lines than they needed at the time to avoid the cost of having to install more cable later to meet demand.
Dark fiber will increase the HRI’s ability to transmit data by as much as 20 times, says Tunnell, allowing its researchers to connect to any facility with a supercomputer and to work with the massive data sets.
Ecosystem studies and modeling
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) defined the Gulf of Mexico as a large marine ecosystem, one of 64 such ecosystems in the world. The U.S. Ocean Commission recommended in its report released last year that the nation move to ecosystem-based management of its marine resources and suggested that the Gulf of Mexico be managed as a single ecosystem.
Whoever becomes the HRI’s endowed professor should be able to create a model of a small corner of the Gulf or the entire body of water, depending on the model’s topic.
For instance, a model could be created that would tell resource managers how a large amount of rainfall in the Sierra Madre Mountains of eastern Mexico (and the subsequent nutrient-rich runoff) would affect shrimp production for the next couple of years.
Tunnell sees Gulf of Mexico modeling as an opportunity for the HRI to expand its sphere of influence beyond the Gulf.
“We want to apply the Harte model of how to study, manage and create policy for the Gulf of Mexico and then transfer it to the other 63 large marine ecosystems,” says Tunnell. “If we can create a model that is good enough to impact the other 63 large marine ecosystems around the world, then we become truly international.”
Marine biodiversity and conservation science
As Texas Shores prepared to go to press in June, Tunnell announced that Dr. Thomas Shirley, professor of invertebrate biology at the University of Alaska-Juneau, has been hired as the Harte Endowed Professor of Marine Biodiversity and Conservation Science.
Shirley is a Texas native who “went to Alaska for a one-year appointment and stayed for 22 years,” says Tunnell.
The term biodiversity has been a popular buzzword in the environmental community for many years, and with good reason. Most healthy ecosystems — certainly the Gulf of Mexico — rely in part on sustaining a diverse number of living things.
An ecosystem is a complex machine with many parts, metaphorically speaking. If a part is damaged or goes missing, the machine either works less efficiently or stops altogether.
“We don’t want to lose components of the biodiversity, like the West Indian monk seal that is now extinct in the Gulf of Mexico,” says Tunnell, referencing a species of seal that was aggressively hunted through the 1800s on the islands of the Campeche Bank off the northern coast of the Yucatan Peninsula.
The last confirmed sighting of the so-called “sea wolves” was in 1952 off Seranilla Bank in the Caribbean, between Honduras and Jamaica.
“There are already many endangered and threatened marine species, including birds, sea turtles and some marine mammals,” notes Tunnell. “A checklist of species we are putting together is going to help us assess what all is endangered within the Gulf of Mexico, as well as assessing the number of invasive species. All of these things are part of biodiversity and we want to look at all levels of species, not just the charismatic megafauna.”
Charismatic megafauna is a term applied to animals that have popular appeal, such as dolphins, that can form the basis of conservation campaigns and fundraising drives.
Invasive species often enter ecosystems where they have no natural predators, allowing them to out-compete and replace the native species. One invasive species may replace several native species, thus decreasing the biodiversity with potentially devastating consequences.
Take the European honeybee, for example. It was brought to this country by European settlers and eventually overwhelmed American honeybee species. Recently, a parasite has emerged that is killing European honeybees — threatening to wipe out the country’s primary source of pollination.
Having large numbers alone is no guarantee that a species can avoid approaching extinction. The now extinct passenger pigeon was once the most numerous bird species in the world. Flocks of up to two billion birds sometimes darkened the skies as they traveled to wherever they found the best crops, but they were doomed by human expansion and technology.
As people moved westward across the country, they chopped down many eastern chestnut and oak trees that provided the birds with most of their food. The birds also became a good and seemingly endless supply of food for people and as sport targets. The invention of the telegraph let hunters know quickly where the flocks nested and the rise of the railroads gave hunters a convenient way to transport large numbers of birds to population centers in the eastern part of the country.
Closer to home, Tunnell recalls reading a report from 1892 by the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries that said 500,000 pounds of sea turtle meat was processed in the Corpus Christi District that year.
“Does that tell you what used to be here?” he asks emphatically.
Oceans and human health
Human life is inextricably linked to the world ocean. We rely on it for food, our livelihoods, recreation, and climate and biological cycles, among other things. Even our blood bears a similar chemical composition to seawater.
Human health is likewise linked to the world ocean and suffers from the effects of contaminated waters, degraded ecosystems and declining natural resources. For example, the federal government has in place guidelines on the number of servings of certain fish that people should eat in order to avoid harm from mercury deposited in the ocean by human actions and accumulated in fish tissue.
But the ocean is also home to a far greater number of plant and animal species than exist on land. Species diversity equals potential when it comes to new pharmaceutical discoveries. The greater the number of species, the greater the chance that one of them will yield a viable new drug to fight cancer or other malady.
Coastal and ocean socio-economics
What is the value in dollars of a seagrass bed, a salt marsh, a coral reef or an acre of muddy ocean bottom? Finding the answer to this question could go a long way toward improving conservation of marine resources, but it will most likely be the second or third question Tunnell wants to see answered by his expert in coastal and ocean socio-economics.
“The first tier priority is to find the real value of tangible items like the fish being landed now or what the real value is of tourism in each city along the Gulf of Mexico,” says Tunnell. “Coming up with a valuation for a resource like a wetland is a bit shakier than establishing the economic impact of tourism.”
As Billy Causey’s story pointed out, people do not tend to appreciate and protect resources until the resources have appreciable values attached to them. Prove to a businessman in Freeport that bird-watching tourists will spend $1,000 a week in his store as long as there are piping plovers in the area and he is more likely to support whatever conservation measures are needed to keep the birds in the area.
Coastal and ocean socio-economics has a non-monetary side as well. Tunnell foresees research work on the demographics of coastal areas as they exist now and how the populations might be dispersed a century from now.
Areas like the Padre Island National Seashore are protected from human development, says Tunnell, but resource managers need to know how increased human populations around Corpus Christi and Mustang Island will affect the park in the future.
A matter of policy
McLaughlin could have been a man on a hot seat.
The newly hired Harte Endowed Professor of Marine Policy and Law, McLaughlin became the first of what will ultimately be six researchers who will chart the institute’s course, perhaps for decades to come.
He also took on the position that in name and expectation goes most directly to Ed Harte’s demand that the institute affect public policy.
McLaughlin could have been a man on a hot seat, but he feels quite differently.
“It feels wonderful to be appreciated,” says McLaughlin without hesitation. “The first thing I did when I met Ed Harte was to thank him for creating an endowed chair for a marine policy person. In much of my career I’ve spent my time trying to convince scientists that there is a place for policy and law in their research. Interdisciplinary research is a valuable thing to promote, so to have Ed Harte and the organizers of the Harte Research Institute make this a priority is very fulfilling for me.
“I hope I can develop public policy initiatives and try to change policy as it relates to the Gulf,” he continues. “I hope to bring Mexico and Cuba into the policy making process so the Gulf can be managed as an integrated ecosystem.”
Joining the HRI brings McLaughlin back to his roots, legally speaking. He taught courses in a variety of subjects, like property law and international law, at the University of Mississippi, “but my real love is ocean and coastal policy and law,” he says. “Being at the Harte Research Institute will give me the opportunity to conduct research full time in an area that interests me and do it in an interdisciplinary way.
“I really appreciate the institutional and community support I witnessed in Corpus Christi — the fact that Dr. Robert Furgason moved over from the presidency of the university to become director of the Harte Research Institute indicated to me that there is a lot of institutional support,” McLaughlin says of the factors helped him make his decision to join the HRI. “During my visits in Corpus Christi I had contact with members of the community and they indicated that they were fully behind the institute, so professionally I thought it was a good fit for me and the institute has a great future in Texas. My wife’s family is in San Antonio, so the move brings her closer to them and I also wanted to be closer to the ocean. I’ve spent almost 18 years 300 miles from the coast and it is very nice to get back to the ocean.”
McLaughlin believes Tunnell and Furgason have given him carte blanche in developing his program because they liked the ideas he laid out during his interview process.
“They haven’t asked me to do anything in particular other than to make a difference and create a world-class program,” he says. “Those are my marching orders.”
His proposal included creating a three-part program comprising, first, high quality research that will allow the HRI to gain in a short period of time the type of credibility it needs to be perceived as one of the premier marine institutes in the nation. Second, he will teach a series of academic courses that will entail collaborating with other TAMUCC faculty members, and third, he will lead an effort to get the public involved in the HRI.
“The public has to be involved and be supportive of the HRI,” McLaughlin says. “They really need to have a stake in the success of the institute, so I thought outreach would be a very important component of our work and that we need to develop an outreach program locally — to bring the South Texas constituency into the process — as well as nationally, for the entire Gulf region, and internationally, with Mexico and Cuba.”
He is modeling his outreach program on his experience with the National Sea Grant network. Characterizing himself as a “product of Sea Grant,” McLaughlin served as director of the Sea Grant Legal Program at the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Consortium for 12 years.
“I really developed an admiration and a need to rely on advisory agents and the work that advisory agents do,” he says. “Advisory agents can provide you with the kind of information you just don’t get when you are in an institutional setting like a university. I proposed that at some point we should try to fund something akin to an advisory agent in Mexico so that person could ground truth what is really going on down there and serve as a liaison between the constituents in coastal Mexico and the researchers at the HRI.”
Asked for an example of the type of research he might do, McLaughlin quickly points to a ticklish legal situation between the United States and Mexico in a spot called the Western Gap.
The Western Gap is an area in the Gulf of Mexico about the size of the state of Maryland that is located in the west central Gulf outside of both countries’ 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs). Under international law, both nations have the ability to exploit the oil and gas resources in that particular zone if they can come to an agreement.
In 2000, the two countries negotiated a treaty that divided the Western Gap between them and gave them authority to exploit the resources there. The treaty also created a 3-mile buffer zone in the middle of the gap to protect oil and gas reservoirs that might straddle the treaty boundaries. If one nation exploited what in essence is a shared reserve, it could siphon off the resources of the other nation.
The treaty created a 10-year moratorium on all exploration within the buffer zone.
The U.S. Minerals Management Service has leased some blocks in the Western Gap for oil and gas exploration, says McLaughlin, while Mexico has refrained from doing so to date. McLaughlin says research needs to be done on how the Western Gap will be managed when the moratorium expires in five years.
“This is a unique area for the United States,” says McLaughlin. “It is the only area where oil and gas will be produced outside of our 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone, and I’m sure that the United States needs to have some additional research on the legal and policy implications of developing the Western Gap.
“When 2010 hits, the buffer zone could be a zone of cooperation or a zone of competition between the two nations,” he adds. “I would like to provide research that would promote the former rather than the latter.”
As part of his research, McLaughlin will examine existing laws and policies that govern the exploitation of resources in similar zones around the world. He will look at customary law as well as law in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea to see what the international legal implications are of exploiting the region. He also plans to bring in collaborators like economists and other marine resource experts from the United States and Mexico to provide input on how the resources in that region should be managed, and then to provide guidance to the two nations that might help them to better manage the area cooperatively.
“No one thinks about it, but it is the farthest boundary we have — it is the first boundary, really, between Mexico and the United States,” McLaughlin stresses. “We generally think of land boundaries, but the boundary in the center of the Gulf of Mexico is the first one that the two nations have to contend with, and they have to get it right.”
Realizing his research has no binding effect on either country, McLaughlin says the only thing he can do is try to influence the two governments to make the right decision.
“Law and policy are different things,” he explains. “Policy is simply what you want to do. Law is how you want to get there. Ultimately, the real goal is to affect a legal change of some kind in which the enforcement and implementation of a policy is finalized by creating a binding law of some kind. Whether you achieve that goal or not depends on all kinds of issues, including whether it is a wise policy choice or not. Who knows, maybe we’ll find out that in the Western Gap a zone of competition is what we’re looking for. At this point, I think that is unlikely, but we haven’t done the research yet.”
McLaughlin calls the potential for working with other faculty members on research projects — as he proposed in his Western Gap work — one of the most exciting aspects of his new position.
He has already talked with TAMUCC associate economics professor Dr. David Yoskowitz, who is interested in common pool resources, about developing a collaborative piece on the economic and socio-legal aspects of the Western Gap.
“I am not a scientist,” he freely admits. “I don’t have the information necessary to promote new policies without an adequate scientific basis for making an assertion. I hope to work very closely with all of the endowed chairs and also other faculty members on campus. The strength of the Harte Research Institute is the fact that we are all going to be working together in one building and we’ll be relying on each other’s expertise to a great extent.”
Depth of design
Husband and wife architects David Richter and Elizabeth Chu Richter gladly discuss the varying practical and artistic aspects of their favorite project — the HRI building.
“We’re talking about it right now, so it is our favorite building,” laughs David, president of Richter Architects in Corpus Christi. “Your favorite building is the one you are working on, that’s how you do good work. But this is going to be one of the high water marks of our careers. Designers have to let go of their buildings. It is like a child you don’t want to let go of. Very soon it is going to be on its own, it’s going to have to speak for itself and other people will have to decide how good a building it is. We’re not the ones to say how good the building is, but it is pretty exciting to us.”
Richter Architects, in association with Houston-based Watkins Hamilton Ross Architects, designed and have overseen construction of a non-stereotypical academic structure that hopefully will inspire more questions than answers.
“I want people to feel intrigued by the building and feel that it is beautiful,” says Elizabeth, Richter Architect’s chief executive officer. “I want it to be something they want to go into and find out more about it.”
The building provides an interesting combination of required boxy scientific design with creative flow and environmental sensitivity — and it all began with the land.
“In any project you have to be inspired by the site, especially a site as good as this one,” says David Richter. “But you also must have environmental sensitivity aside from just responding to the site. The building must be well tuned to the sun, wind and other elements.”
Both of the Richters are certified in the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) system, a national program of the U.S. Green Building Council that is setting standards for designing environmentally sustainable structures.
By coincidence, the Richters’ home is located near Oso Bay, not far from the TAMUCC campus.
“We live about a quarter-mile from (campus),” says David. “Our house is on one of the estuaries to the bay that wraps around the island university. For the past 15 years, we’ve been as connected to this environment as this building is, so it wasn’t difficult for us to be aware when this project came up and that it would be something we would be interested in. Environmental architecture is an important part of what we do.”
In coming up with the design for the HRI building, the Richters wanted it to be “in one sense scientific and technological in its expression because this is a cutting-edge science facility,” says David. “But we also wanted to express the organics, excitement and the poetry of the sea.”
The Richters took note of the sun’s position and path of travel over the building site during various times of the year in order to minimize energy costs. Their final design is basically a rectangle with the long sides facing north and south. All of the laboratory space is located on the south side of the building, which features smaller windows with what David terms “eyebrows” over them to cut down on the amount of summer sun and heat entering the building, when the sun is higher in the sky. During the winter, when the sun’s path is lower across the site, the southern windows allow more light and heat into the building.
The east and west sides of the building present a small profile to the morning and evening sun, again in an effort to cut down on heat gain.
A wall of windows dominates the north face of the building — the side that people see as they drive past the university. The windows let in a large amount of the muted sunlight that is a benefit of northern exposure.
The light will fall on the institute’s offices and meeting rooms, and will be bounced into interior hallways by a reflective metal ceiling. The north face also provides a panoramic vista of Corpus Christi Bay.
“The building finds its own place in the sun,” Elizabeth explains. “We take advantage of the north side, where you can have expansive glass and not have any kind of adverse sunlight penetration. We kept the east and west sides with minimal surfaces to avoid heat gain. You don’t gather up as much heat if you do not have as much surface.”
David adds, “This is an office environment in which they may find that turning on the lights is optional. The labs themselves will require artificial lighting, but a good bit of the offices and the circulation paths will be such that they are bright and comfortable without any lights on at all.
“There is a new ethic that if daylight is controlled in a certain way, it creates a much more habitable environment than does artificial lighting,” David Richter says. “As a cloud goes by, it modulates the light and you feel like you are so much more connected to nature, even if you are not looking out the window.”
“It makes you feel like you are more part of the day,” Elizabeth adds quickly.
An undulating covered walkway leads up to the main entrance, located on the south side of the building toward the east end, and leads visitors into an impressive lobby and a conference center, which juts out from the ground floor on the north side of the building.
“The walkway through the doors is like a fish that swims through the building and then bursts out on the other end into the conference center,” says Elizabeth. Wooden panels on the lobby ceiling give visitors the feeling that they are walking under a school of fish. The lobby and conference center are the public centerpiece of the building, she says, so “they are the most metaphorically connected to the sea.”
The outside of both the conference center and the main entrance are framed by twisting brick walls designed to look “like an oyster opening up to reveal a gem,” Elizabeth Richter continues. “That brings an element of discovery and intrigue to the building which helps to translate the study of the Gulf of Mexico. You only see the surface, but there is something below that you’d like to find out about.”
The three-story building also features:
- Six wet labs;
- two seawater labs;
- two dry labs;
- a GIS suite;
- a teaching classroom/lab;
- an education/outreach suite;
- offices for each endowed chair;
- eight faculty offices;
- eight offices for research scientists;
- offices for 15 graduate research assistants;
- archives for photos, video, specimens and documents; and
- a dive locker.
Outside the building, rainwater will flow sequentially through a series of retention ponds and into Oso Bay. Previously, all rainwater went directly into the storm sewer and straight out to the bay, so any surface contaminants were washed right to the bay. The retention ponds will let many of the contaminants settle out of the runoff before it reaches the bay.
David says the HRI building is the first structure on campus to utilize bio-filtering as part of its landscaping.
Most people may not immediately notice the retention ponds because they will not always have water in them and they are partially obscured by the other notable addition to the campus’ entrance.
A huge sculpture (Tunnell believes it to be the largest sculpture in the state) of earth, masonry wall stones and stainless steel has replaced much of the nondescript piece of land at the northwest corner of the TAMUCC.
Where once there was an open field of dirt, patchy grass and a slight hill is now dominated by a stone-lined berm rising from ground level at one end, where it is anchored by five stainless steel spires, to an apex topped by a 61,000 pound stainless steel fan shape (as in a folding hand fan) breaking over the ground like a cresting wave.
Philadelphia-based sculptor Robert Roesch named his creation Momentum, an acknowledgement of “the learning curve while you’re in school,” says Roesch, who is also the head of the sculpture department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. “As an educator myself, I think one of the things school affords is a chance to develop momentum for the world out there. Plus, the word itself is very uplifting.”
The $500,000 sculpture was commissioned and paid for by the Corpus Christi non-profit Devary Durrill Foundation created by businessman Dusty Durrill in memory of his daughter. Among its other artistic contributions to the city, the foundation commissioned the statue of slain Tejano singer Selena Quintanilla-Perez that graces the entrance to the Peoples Street T-head pier on the waterfront in downtown Corpus Christi.
Roesch recalls his fortuitous first glimpse of the site that is now home to Momentum. Early in the foundation’s competition to find an artist, Roesch flew to Corpus Christi and made his way toward the university. He stopped for coffee at a convenience store located on the corner of South Alameda Street and Ocean Drive, just across the Oso Bay bridge from the campus.
“I looked up and realized I was looking at my hill,” he says with a bit of awe still in his voice. “I literally blinked my eyes once and saw the sculpture.”
Momentum combines a long-time staple of Roesch’s sculptures with his more recent shape of preference. The commission for the sculpture came at a time when Roesch was transitioning from using the fan form (which he has built and used in sculptures for 30 years) to spire-driven works.
Contrary to popular belief, the five spires do not represent the five names the university has had since its creation. The tongue-in-cheek truth is “six spires were too many and four were too few,” laughs Roesch. “My reasoning for choosing five was because they set a cadence or a motion movement. There had to be enough spires there to give a sense of strength. You can talk about the five points on the Texas star and things like that, but the five had to do with some basic understanding I have of universalities and design that told me an odd number of spires placed at that distance from the fan would make a very powerful statement for me. The sightline between the cleavage of the fan and the spires is describing momentum, it’s describing movement.
“Most of what I feel about the world of art is not to commemorate anything,” he explains. “I believe art talks about the here and now. As the years go by, if the piece of work still speaks of the here and now, then it is a successful piece of art. I wanted Momentum to be a fresh beginning every time somebody looks at it and becomes inspired by it. I want it to be a fresh, new experience and not to have to mean anything. Every person who drives by there has a different opinion of what’s going on but they all tend to agree there is a strong movement in it and it has momentum.”
Roesch describes the gracefully sweeping berm, or “ship’s curve,” as the way he “plays with the ground.”
The topside of the berm is covered in grass — inspired by a daily sight outside the window of the Ocean Drive living quarters Dusty Durrill furnished to Roesch for the year he spent in Corpus Christi building his sculpture.
“There was a field at the intersection of Airline Road and Ocean Drive, and I used to watch the grass blowing in the wind from my window,” he says. “It was very inspiring. It looked like the sea to me.”
Momentum is probably the largest project Roesch has done to date, he says. The two-fan and 10-spired Wind Spirit Gateway he created for the city of Wichita, Kan., has more steel in it, but “in terms of the way I handled and engineered it, Momentum is far more spectacular in its sweep and movement.
“I would guardedly say it’s my favorite piece that I’ve done,” admits Roesch, before conceding that “each piece I’ve done has remained my favorite one. If I go to Boone, N.C., I’m going to be smitten with the piece I did there (the all-spire Orion on the Appalachian State University campus). But Momentum was clearly one of the most spectacular projects I’ve done because we defied the natural gravitational pull of the Earth and I really struggled with that long shape in the front.”
Roesch says it was relatively easy to leave so much of his creative and physical energy behind in the form of his sculpture. The university and community gained an inspiring piece of art and Roesch gained new friends and a life of memories.
“What I have is pride and happiness,” says Roesch. “I’ve long been intrigued by ancient Egypt. I look at pieces that are 4,000 years old and see that the feelings they evoke today are every bit as new and fresh as they did when they were first built. If I could have just a little piece of that, then I feel like I’ve had a very full life. Part of Momentum was fulfilling those life dreams.
“I don’t feel that the sculpture is very far away from me at all,” he says.
The Richters, too, are pleased with the outcome of their design.
“Ed Harte said, ‘Make a difference,’” says David, before Elizabeth completes his thought.
“This building is going to make a difference,” she says. “That was the inspiration for us as designers going into the project.”
The pressure of designing the university’s signature building was self-inflicted.
“We put most of the pressure on ourselves,” says David. “It’s a pleasant problem to have when a client puts very high expectations on a project because that gives us license to do what we would have done anyway.
“In architecture these days, among high profile works, there is a certain amount of showmanship going on in terms of design — design that is put in place to try to make a statement. There isn’t anything in this building that does that. It is all there for a purpose. People are sensitive to styles, and styles come and styles go. A good designer should strive to do something that is not going to become passé,” he says. “It may be art, but it isn’t style.”
Elizabeth describes the HRI building in very artistic terms.
“The structure is something that invites you to savor it, to take your time and discover it,” she believes. “It has depth in its design much like it has depth in the subject matter — the Gulf of Mexico.”
Making the grade
Tunnell and Furgason expect lofty achievements from the HRI because Ed Harte expects no less.
“We want to sustain and conserve the Gulf of Mexico. That is our mission and it will keep driving us,” says Tunnell. “We want to be an institute of excellence that does the best of policy, science and management. We want to provide the best information and the best science to achieve the goals to sustain and conserve the Gulf of Mexico.
“If we are able to do that in all three countries, then we will encircle the entire large marine ecosystem that is the Gulf of Mexico,” he continues. “We want to make sure that we are tri-national and this is not just a northern Gulf of Mexico initiative, which has happened so many times before.”
Tunnell believes it will take three to five years for HRI’s endowed professors to get their programs established and “up to speed,” so there is no way at present to say how the institute will compare to the nation’s leading marine science facilities.
“One thing is certain,” he says, “we’ll have to prove ourselves.”
The question is how do you prove that the people in a three-story building in Corpus Christi are ensuring the future for America’s ocean?
Governmental leaders, businessmen and stakeholders from the five American states bordering the Gulf of Mexico will meet with their Mexican counterparts for three days in November to discuss common problems involving their shared ocean.
One of the charges that participants in the 2005 State of the Gulf of Mexico Summit will have is to develop a report card that will allow the public to assess the impacts the HRI is making over the long term.
Tunnell favors choosing a number of specific subjects, like wetlands loss, water quality and fish stock assessments, for the report card and revisiting those areas every five years in conjunction with future summits to find out if conditions have improved or declined.
“If we see the report cards improving, then we are accomplishing what Mr. Harte asked us to do,” asserts Tunnell. “We’ll be making a difference.”
Coastal Legend: Sharron L. Stewart
An ardent environmentalist
By Jim Hiney
A light-colored cat with remarkable facial coloration saunters into the miniature art gallery comprising the living room walls of Sharron Stewart’s fashionable yet unpretentious Lake Jackson home.
“That’s Paloma,” says Stewart, pausing from the tour of paintings she is leading from her pillow-laden couch. “She is named Paloma because she is female and she has a Picasso face.”
Diffuse sunlight pours through ample windows, gently illuminating the front room of this red brick home that Stewart says reminds her of a schoolhouse. The combination of art, light and furniture create a serene, restful atmosphere.
Continuing the tour, Stewart points to a painting rich in browns, oranges and yellows of rickety wooden stairs perched over a barbed wire fence. “That’s the first oil painting I ever did,” she says. “I did that while I was in high school. It must have been about 1957.”
A starkly contrasting watercolor of a barn and surrounding land covered in snow hangs beneath the oil painting. The barn was near Benbrook Lake and her parents’ Fort Worth home. Stewart painted it in the early 1960s from photographs she took of it one winter.
Behind the couch and to Stewart’s right hangs a peaceful watercolor scene of a four-story home among beautiful green trees, with sparkling blue water in the distance.
“That was my grandparents’ home on Vashon Island, which is between Tacoma and Seattle in Puget Sound,” she says with a distant gaze. “The home was originally built as a boarding school for the children of Baptist missionaries. The gray shadow of a building behind the house was the gymnasium.”
A touch of sadness seeps into her narration as she reveals, “I did that painting in 1965, the year that home was torn down. I did it from a photograph taken when I was a year old.”
The wife of one of the missionaries gave Stewart’s grandmother an egg tempra painting she had done of a ship sailing the South China Sea. Egg tempra, Stewart explains, is like a cross between watercolor and oil — kind of a natural acrylic. The painting, which Stewart loved as a child when it hung in her grandparents’ home, now adorns Stewart’s wall.
Over there, Stewart points, is a pastel of her daughters, Leslie and Melissa, when they were children. It is next to the rubbing of a tombstone in Massachusetts done by her good friend and fellow artist Neil Caldwell. A watercolor of her son, John, hangs above the grave rubbing.
The tour ends a thoroughly enjoyable 20 minutes later with Stewart stating the obvious.
“Art was my first interest in life.”
In this setting, she looks and talks more like the art teacher of her past than the ardent environmentalist who took on The Dow Chemical Company in its own town, fought ocean-borne incineration, served on many state and national environmental advisory committees, wrote the first oil spill response plan in the nation, haunted the halls of the Texas Capitol pressing for environmentally friendly legislation, and helped create the Galveston Bay Estuary Program and the Galveston Bay Foundation — which in June of this year honored her with its lifetime achievement award.
The list of environmental fights she has waged and causes she has championed in the past nearly four decades is far too voluminous to recount.
“It’s a given. If you are in the environmental field in the Brazoria County area and there is some issue you are interested in, you end up calling Sharron Stewart,” says Mike Lange, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) wildlife biologist. “It doesn’t matter what side of the issue they are on, they end up calling Sharron to talk to her.”
One thing needs to be made clear up front. Stewart could not have accomplished as much as she has and gained the accolades that followed without the unflinching support of her family, especially her husband, noted attorney Vaughan Stewart.
Sharron Stewart is the first person to say that Vaughan and her children willingly gave her the time and space to travel the Texas coast and the country in pursuit of her work on behalf of the environment.
“Vaughan and her children deserve gold medals because she gave up a lot of time that was theirs as well,” says former state Sen. A.R. “Babe” Schwartz, who was one of the best at filling Stewart’s time with environmental work. “I know how much she gave up and how much they permitted her to give up of her time to do what she wanted to do.”
“Vaughan’s a good mother,” long-time friends Neil and Mary Lou Caldwell laugh in unison.
Sharron Stewart has pursued a variety of environmental issues using a unique mixture of intelligence, humor, civility and humanity.
“She is a genuinely good person and she does what she does for the public good,” says Mary Lou Caldwell. “I think she is a remarkable person in that she has been able to stay committed and work so hard all of these years in the face of adversity.”
“Sharron has a good sense of humor and she is bright as hell,” adds Neil, a former state representative and now a district judge. “She is well-read and civilized. She is just good people.”
“Sharron has many good qualities, but she can be opinionated,” Mary Lou says hesitantly, revealing one of the worst kept secrets in the state. “She turns some people off that way.
Stewart appears to be a living contradiction of personalities.
“I guess that’s what I was trying to say,” Mary Lou continues, tempering her words. “In social settings she is well-mannered, congenial, well-bred and polite, but put her on an environmental issue and she can get as mean as a snake.”
Stewart is a woman of strong beliefs and she feels her beliefs are right, Neil interjects. “It’s not difficult to turn people off when you know they are either fools or bad people. She dealt with a lot of people of that ilk and she does not suffer fools gladly.”
Mary Lou characterizes her friend as a very passionate person with the zeal to get the right thing done. “She is controversial because she stands up on issues that are for the general public good,” Mary Lou adds with a noticeable amount of respect in her voice. “I think she is one of the bravest people I know. I have a lot of admiration for her.”
Stewart has zeal, but she differs from many other environmentalists because she is not a zealot.
“I describe Sharron in specifics to people by relating the account of Henry David Thoreau being thrown into jail because he would not pay any income tax in protest of the Spanish-American War,” says Charles Moss, another long-time friend and Brazoria County Marine Agent Emeritus. “Ralph Waldo Emerson went to jail to visit him and is reported to have said, ‘Henry, how is it that you are in jail?’ Thoreau responded, ‘How is it that you are not?’
“That represents Sharron’s position. She is not a zealot, but she will grab the banner and take the fire so that others can rally around a cause and defend it. It is an admirable trait, but she takes a lot of heat.”
Stewart is adept at more than the crusading side of the environmental movement. She mastered the art of environmental politics at the knee of one of the state’s master politicians — Babe Schwartz of Galveston. Schwartz was one of Texas’ early coastal champions. He entered the Texas Senate not long after the Texas Open Beaches Act passed in 1959 and he spent the next 21 years protecting that law and writing many more that in total form the basis for the state’s Coastal Management Plan.
Schwartz met the Stewarts in the early 1970s when they volunteered to campaign for him in Brazoria County during one of his senatorial re-election bids. In the Stewarts, Schwartz found fellow liberal Democrats and kindred conservation spirits.
After Schwartz won re-election, “Sharron showed up at my office and wanted to volunteer to help on environmental matters,” Schwartz recalls. “I never had her on my payroll except for $1 per month. I never paid her any money of consequence, it was a pittance just to give her legitimacy. The legitimacy was she was on my staff.”
Stewart provided Schwartz with a wealth of information on any given environmental topic he was working on legislatively. “I was never without good information and I certainly never lacked for anything to say in a speech on the floor of the Senate while Sharron was around. She’d give me more damn stuff to read than I could pour over,” Schwartz laughs now.
Stewart worked diligently on beach, coastal and environmental issues on Schwartz’s behalf. She became one of his most trusted and important staff members and advisors — a fact readily apparent to everyone in the Capitol.
Schwartz used this knowledge to his advantage.
“When I had something really important pending in one committee, I’d send Sharron to some other committee meeting with a stack of notebooks and papers in her arms. All of the lobbyists who were always following me around trying to kill my bills would follow Sharron,” Schwartz laughs heartily. “She was my decoy.”
Working for Schwartz, Stewart learned that “your policy document is your budget. You can write all of the beautiful words you want and hone them down to perfection, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t get the bucks put with it.”
Stewart put her considerable environmental experience to work during the 1990s in an effort to save a large portion of the remaining Columbia Bottomland — an old growth forest that at one time covered 1,000 square miles in Brazoria, Wharton, Fort Bend and Matagorda counties.
“The bottomland is basically located in the flood plains of the Brazos, San Bernard and Colorado rivers. Because of its location right next to the Gulf of Mexico, it is extremely important for migrating songbirds coming across the Gulf in the spring time and moving south in the fall,” says the USFWS’ Mike Lange. “The ecosystem is extremely diverse and has a lot of endemic plants. The area has changed dramatically over the years. About three-fourths of the land has been cleared for various reasons — mostly agricultural conversion to grazing land during the 1950s and 1960s. There was also some logging, clearing for pipelines and now urban development as Houston expands and the towns down here expand.”
The city of Lake Jackson wanted to build a golf course on 200 acres in the center of a more than 800-acre tract of the forest. Stewart and the Houston chapters of the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club sued the city and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (COE) over the permit the COE granted the city to build the golf course in a wetland area.
At the same time, Stewart joined an immense public-private partnership dedicated to saving and conserving about one-tenth of the original forest — 70,000 acres mainly in Brazoria County and bounded by U.S. Route 59, Texas Route 6 and the Galveston County line.
“Our goal was to save some of the jewels of that original ecosystem because it is tremendously important to migratory birds and for the total forest ecosystem,” says Lange.
The city and the COE eventually won the lawsuit, but Stewart and the environmental lobby won a huge moral victory, believes Lange, because they forced the COE to change the way it looks at flood plain forests.
When the COE issued the original permit for the golf course, they “basically ignored wetlands within the forest and looked only at coastal wetlands,” he says. “The court case was an educational experience for the Corps because it taught them that forested wetlands are wetlands, too, and are an important resource. When it appears you’ve lost the battle, it’s hard for people to look at the whole and see what has been gained, but there was a shift by the Corps toward conservation of forested wetlands — not enough in some of our views, but at least there was a shift.”
Lange applauds Stewart for her work to save the Columbia Bottomlands, which far exceeds simple activism.
“She is a tremendous resource who not only understands government and politics, but she is a tremendous strategist and she has a lot of ideas on ways to approach public policy,” he says. “She always has the long-term interest of the environment and the people foremost in her mind.”
Stewart actively helped raise funds for the partnership from private citizens and public grants. She told Lange of possible funds available through the Coastal Impact Assistance Program and helped him complete a grant application. At the time, Lange felt the likelihood for receiving any of the money “seemed a total impossibility to me, but with her encouragement and help we secured $1 million for land acquisition, and that is just one example.”
The partnership currently has about 16,500 acres of the 70,000-acre goal under conservation.
Whether she is facing off against private industry or government, Stewart has never been one to shy away from a fight.
“I’m the kind of person who does not like being intimidated. That’s not the way to get rid of me,” she says, revealing another of the worst kept secrets in the state. “The harder you make things for me, the more stubborn I become. My mother calls it Norwegian stubbornness. I don’t think it always served me well, but I certainly have it.”
Sharron Lea Stewart was born in Tacoma, Wash., on Oct. 18, 1938, the second of two children for Earl Hoff and Muriel Vye Hoff. Her brother, Bob, was eight years older so, “we were essentially two ‘only’ children,” she says.
As a freshman electrical engineering student at the University of Washington in 1925, Earl took a job as a janitor at Graybar Electric, a wholesale electric company. The oldest of four children, Earl sent money back home to his mother while he attended college. Health problems forced Earl to drop out of college before his senior year but he continued to work his way up through the ranks at Graybar Electric to become one of the company’s top managers.
In 1929, he married Muriel, and the couple lived in Tacoma. The Hoffs spent weekends and summers with Stewart’s grandparents on Vashon Island. Muriel’s father converted the house into low-rent apartments during the Depression in an effort to keep teachers from leaving the area.
Earl became the family’s chief breadwinner, supporting his in-laws as well as his own family.
“My father was basically bringing in all the groceries,” says Stewart. “Of course, my grandparents’ land provided everything we would need.”
Vashon Island introduced Stewart to the beauty and awe in nature. Earl and his father-in-law built a small cabin for the Hoffs near the water. Stewart vividly describes the cabin’s window boxes and large picture windows. Near the water, her grandfather also built a stone oven, and her father wired the area for electricity. Family and friends gathered there often for cookouts.
“When the tide was in it was as beautiful a spot as there is on Earth,” says Stewart, her eyes closed as she pictures the scene in her head.
When Stewart was 8, her father was transferred to Montana to re-open a four-state electrical district that had been closed during the war. It was a large job in an area where transportation was not easy, but Earl accepted the job with the understanding that, if successful, he would in a few years return to Seattle in a top management job, says Stewart.
An illness prevented Earl from ever getting that job.
“Five years into our stay in Montana, I had suffered four years of rheumatic fever,” Stewart says. “The doctors said I would not live through the winter when I had the last attack. My Dad’s company created a job for him. They could have made one for him in Florida or in Dallas, and we chose Dallas because my mother’s cousin was in Dallas. We had gone there the year before, and stayed with them for several months.”
In junior high, Stewart took an art class taught by Barbara Maples, who fostered Stewart’s love of art and made an impression on her that remains to this day. Stewart did not participate in physical education classes because the rheumatic fever had damaged her heart, so Maples took her on trips to buy or scavenge art supplies.
“She taught me the skills I needed to be an art teacher far better than when I did my teacher training years later at Kimball High School (in Dallas),” Stewart asserts.
Junior high also revealed Stewart’s stubborn, non-conformist side. At the time, girls were not allowed to take what were traditionally considered courses for boys, like wood shop or metal shop, and no boy dared take girly courses like home economics. “I tried to take shop and mechanical drawing in junior high, and they would not let me,” Stewart says in apparent frustration before a wry smile appears on her face. “Years later, as a teacher, I taught all of those classes.”
She blossomed into a strikingly beautiful (and brainy) young woman who began modeling for the Bobbie Brooks line of women’s clothing while she was still in high school. After graduating from Woodrow Wilson High School, Stewart had planned to attend The University of Texas, but her love life got in the way.
“I got engaged and my mother had a fit because I was going to get married and not go to college,” says Stewart. “She said, ‘Why don’t you go out to SMU (Southern Methodist University)?’ Well, my friends were all going off to college and I couldn’t stand it, so I went off and enrolled at SMU.”
Her parents moved from Dallas to Fort Worth and convinced the art major (through the threat of taking away her car) to transfer to Texas Christian University (TCU). During the following year, the self-described “Dallas girl” missed SMU, where she had been on the modeling squad. Stewart had entertained thoughts of making modeling her career until a professional photographer told her she was not tall enough or thin enough to be a fashion model.
“He told me I was the girl-next-door type,” she recalls.
Stewart’s parents relented and let her return to SMU after she issued a threat of her own. A friend landed a job as a hostess for American Airlines and Stewart accompanied the woman to a required physical to lend moral support. The airline offered Stewart a job as well.
“I told my parents that I either went back to SMU for my junior year or I was going to take a job with American Airlines,” she smiles mischievously. “So I went back — and I kept the car.”
Life changed dramatically for Stewart once she returned to Dallas. She married her fiancée, gave birth to her son, John, and divorced her husband. She returned to TCU and graduated from there in 1962 with a bachelor’s degree in education.
Stewart had met Vaughan through mutual friends while she was attending SMU and he was a student at North Texas State University (now the University of North Texas) in Denton. He drove to Dallas on Wednesday nights and the pair went dancing with friends at Jimmy’s Club, a popular nightspot near campus and across the street from the Mrs. Baird’s bread bakery on Central Expressway and Mockingbird Lane.
“There was nothing initially romantic about our first dates,” admits Stewart. “We just went out dancing.”
They married in 1964 and Stewart moved to Austin, where Vaughan attended law school at The University of Texas. She taught five subjects — art, English, wood shop, metal shop and government — at Pierce Junior High School and had lined up a job to teach just art at the newly completed Reagan High School, but Vaughan found a job with a law firm in Henderson, near where he grew up. The firm did a lot of trial work — the kind of work Vaughan wanted to do.
Stewart found work as an art supervisor for a public school system, but she says she resigned when she was asked to sign a voucher for art supplies she didn’t order. Pregnant with her daughter, Leslie, Stewart started an art league with three other women and sold paintings through a local furniture store.
Three months to the day into her pregnancy, Stewart stepped outside her home on her way to a doctor’s appointment and was sprayed with malathion by a city contractor trying to exterminate mosquitoes that were non-existent where Stewart lived.
“We lived on top of the highest hill in Henderson,” she says. “I never saw a mosquito.”
The malathion reacted with cologne Stewart had put on before leaving her home and before she had walked 15 feet to her neighbor’s house, “goose egg-shaped brown spots appeared in the bends of my arms.”
Three months later, Stewart’s body was covered with liver spots and she had turned jaundiced. Her doctor put her in the hospital and ran a battery of tests. The eventual diagnosis was that Stewart was allergic to all aromatic hydrocarbons — common ingredients in oil paints and insecticides. Malathion had triggered her reaction, but her love of art aggravated her condition.
Vaughan was ready to open his own law practice and Stewart wanted to leave Henderson, so they looked to the Texas coast and settled on moving to Lake Jackson.
“Lake Jackson had good schools and every street had sidewalks to walk on,” Stewart recalls. “It was a pretty little town of about 10,000 when we moved here in 1968.”
By a strange quirk of fate, the Stewarts moved to a town located in the shadow of petrochemical giant Dow Chemical, and into a three-county area that produces half of the nation’s aromatic hydrocarbons.
But the Stewarts were environmentally naïve and did not discover they had a big problem until a month after they moved, when the prevailing north and west winds of winter changed to south and east with spring.
“The air from Dow made Leslie and me sick,” says Stewart. “At the time, I was pregnant with Missy (her third child, Melissa). I was very concerned, so in 1969 I joined the Beleaguered Earth Study Group with the American Association of University Women. For the first time I got a reading list of environmental books and in 1969 and early 1970 I read 127 books on the environment.”
A group of Dow union workers had formed the Citizens Survival Committee to fight the company on environmental issues and in 1970 they asked Vaughan to do some work with them. Sharron got involved with the group as well and learned lessons that she could not get from any book.
“They educated me about Dow Chemical and its practices,” she says. “They told me stories about things they had done that they had been ordered to do. They got Babe and Neil to request a public hearing on Dow’s very first water quality permit, issued under the Clean Water Act.
“Literally, the first battle I ever got involved with was fighting Dow Chemical over the largest water permit in the United States of America. It still is”
In the three decades since that fight, Dow has cleaned up its emissions considerably, but taking on the company in the company’s town cost the Stewarts socially and economically. People faithful to Dow refused to use Vaughan’s law firm and “some people we socialized with would cross the street in downtown Lake Jackson rather than talk to me,” Stewart says. “The streets in the old portion of downtown Lake Jackson are very wide, so these people had to walk a long way to avoid me.”
Tensions between the Stewarts and Dow lessened over the years, as is evidenced by the company’s willingness to help Stewart try to gain some high profile public positions. Stewart found herself under consideration to become the first woman on the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission (TPWC). At the same time and unknown to Stewart, Schwartz nominated her to be a member of the commission that would oversee the Texas Deepwater Port Authority (TDPA) — an oil import monobuoy that was to be located about 26 miles off Freeport.
Stewart approached Dow’s chief governmental lobbyist for a letter supporting her appointment to the TPWC, which seems like an odd choice of backers. Gov. Dolph Briscoe’s office approached the same gentleman about writing a letter of support for Stewart’s appointment to the deepwater port commission.
In each case, the gentleman was willing to write the letter. When she learned of the nomination by Schwartz, Stewart halted all efforts on the TPWC appointment. “Babe was right,” she says. “I could have more effect for the environment, and the good of the state, with the TDPA appointment.
“Dow thought I was reasonable in the years developing the coastal management program,” Stewart says. “After they failed to drive us off, it was better to get along than not get along.”
Schwartz shares Stewart’s feelings.
“The people she’s working against respect her for her dedication to her causes and what she does,” he says. “She is not unreasonable. She will not fight you to the death over whether a tree has fallen in the forest. Everything she has done has been for the right reasons and done the right way.”
She could have avoided the battle with Dow altogether by moving again, but that was not an option.
“We believed we could do something about the problem,” Stewart says, explaining her decision to stay in Lake Jackson. “My question to myself was, ‘Are you going to run away from every problem in your life?’ There are always problems. All you do is change the name of the problem. Aren’t you supposed to do something about it?”
Through all of the years and the battles, Stewart never kept track of wins and losses. “I never thought of things that way,” she says. “It’s more like one thing leads to another.”
Many “one things” led Stewart to what she calls her proudest accomplishment — playing a major role in creation of the Galveston Bay Estuary Program. Her work on Texas’ first attempt at a coastal management plan during the 1970s led to two appointments to the National Advisory Committee on Oceans and the Atmosphere, which took her to Washington, D.C., for six years. There, she learned what she calls “a more civilized system of government, although now it is more like the Texas Legislature, which is unfortunate.”
She greatly expanded her network of contacts in Washington, which helped her immensely when she learned of the National Estuary Program that had been created as a part of the reauthorization of the Clean Water Act in 1986.
Stewart saw that the Great Lakes and Chesapeake Bay were getting a lot of financial attention from the federal government, but the Gulf of Mexico and its estuaries were being largely ignored “even through they were more crucial to the nation’s fisheries. Of course, Chesapeake Bay is in Congress’ backyard and the Great Lakes are covered by an international treaty with Canada on pollution issues.”
In particular, Stewart felt Galveston Bay was far too important not to be part of the National Estuary Program.
Stewart says she unsuccessfully lobbied Sen. Lloyd Bentsen’s (D-Texas and chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works) office for 10 months to have Galveston Bay added to the program.
In April 1986, five minutes after walking into a conference hosted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in New Orleans, Stewart was approached by then-Texas Sea Grant College Program Director Tom Bright.
“He asked me, ‘Why isn’t anyone lobbying to get Galveston Bay into the estuary program?’” she says. “I said, ‘I am, and I just came from Bentsen’s office. I was over at the House Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee lobbying there and they told me I had to have a document from the state submitted as to why the estuary is in trouble.’ Bright said, ‘You get me the information and I’ll write it up.’”
A few minutes later, Jerry Wermund from the Bureau of Economic Geology (BEG) at The University of Texas, sat down with Stewart and Bright and posed the same question. Stewart told him about Bright’s offer to write the submission document. Wermund said that BEG had just completed the raw data for the update on the land use report for Galveston Bay and he would get a copy to Bright immediately.
The proposal did not come together completely until July, when Stewart talked with one of her Washington, D.C., contacts, Phil Cummings. Cummings had served as the general counsel for the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works and had been the chief author of the Clean Water Act.
Cummings told her to submit a letter on behalf of Texas Sea Grant, with Bright’s signature, and that Stewart should co-sign on behalf of the Texas Environmental Coalition. He then told her to send the submission document to Bentsen, with open copies to Sen. John Chaffee (R-Rhode Island), Sen. John Mitchell (D-Maine), and Rep. Walter Jones (D-North Carolina). Chaffee was vice chair and Mitchell was the second ranking Democrat on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. Jones chaired the House Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee. These were the two congressional committees that heard items related to the Clean Water Act.
“Phil told me, ‘We’ll see to it that their staffs ‘convince’ Bentsen to put it in on the floor of the Senate,” Stewart says with a smile.
Bentsen did nominate Galveston Bay and it was included in the National Estuary Program — with some unusual help from Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas). Gramm had voted against the Clean Water Act. If he had voted not to include Galveston Bay in the National Estuary Program, other Republican senators would have most likely done the same. At Stewart’s request, Gramm left the Senate Chamber — known as taking a walk — before the vote, signaling his colleagues to vote in favor of the provision.
After that, notes Stewart, Bentsen became the bay’s leading champion.
More than 30 years into her environmental activism, Stewart says she does not know what impact she has had on the state’s marine environment.
“I’ve made lots of good friends and I enjoyed it the entire way. It was never dull,” she says. “Some you win and some you lose. Some you win, but they keep coming back up again, and you have to keep fighting. I have had a wonderful life — that is absolutely true. It certainly turned out different than anything I ever expected.”
Her friends find it easier to put into words what Stewart has meant to the state.
“This part of the world is a much better place because she came along,” believes Neil Caldwell. “She’s made a lot of difference.’
“She has caused a lot of good to happen for Texas in general and the Gulf Coast in particular,” adds Mary Lou Caldwell.
Without Stewart and people like her, the environmental movement would not be complete, says Schwartz.
“You’ve got to have volunteers with enthusiasm, intelligence, the time to participate and the will to walk against the wind and stand in deep water,” he says. “You can pick all of the words that mean success, all of the words you use to describe a person who is a success in what they do, and all of those words describe Sharron.
“In every instance, she has always been a perfect lady,” Schwartz continues. “She has always been part of a team and I’ve never seen her try to play the Lone Ranger. She has always been willing to lead when it was necessary and to follow when it was necessary, but she has never been out of the fight. She maintains her poise and good nature and just keeps on being Sharron. That’s hard to do. Nobody ever said they enjoyed a fight with me, but most people would say they enjoyed every minute with Sharron.”
Moss believes Stewart’s patience, strength and determination are born of an inner spirit given to her by a greater being.
“She is a non-denominational born-again Christian and sees creation as divinely inspired, which probably lends to her dedication and advocacy for the environment,” says Moss, who is also an ordained Christian minister.
“She has a great love of the beach and the Gulf of Mexico — that’s the place where she finds peace and room to meditate,” he concludes. “Nature is her church and the beach is her altar.”
Going after the Flow
by Cindie Powell
Texas’ bays and estuaries breathe.
Instead of air, the breath is the flow of water into and out of the bays from the open Gulf of Mexico through tidal inlets, driven by the ebb and flow of the tide.
Inhale during flood tide: the waters of the open Gulf and their contents, including organisms like red drum larvae, which rely on Texas’ bays and estuaries as nursery grounds.
Exhale on ebb tide: freshwater and pollutants that flow into the bays from rivers and other sources.
Because the tide is cyclic, some water goes through many cycles before permanently leaving the estuary. And anything that disrupts or alters the flow can have an impact on the reproduction of native species and the dispersal of pollutants ranging from sewage outflows and agricultural runoffs to oil spills.
Thus, knowing more about the basic hydrodynamic processes that govern the flow of water through these inlets is vital to understanding how human activity might change the flow in positive or detrimental ways.
Two researchers, Drs. Scott Socolofsky and Kuang-An Chang of Texas A&M University’s Department of Civil Engineering, are conducting laboratory experiments under a grant from the Texas Sea Grant College Program to study the patterns in the formation of eddies — currents formed by the unsteady tidal pulsation and with a circular motion — as the water exits the gaps in barrier islands between bays and the Gulf.
“It’s important to understand mixing and exchange between the estuary and the open ocean,” Socolofsky says. “As the eddy forms, it captures a certain bulk of liquid, and it moves as a coherent structure, so if it moves out of the inlet and then far enough away that the tide doesn’t bring it back in, then that fluid has left the estuary and won’t come back. Or if it stays close enough to the inlet that it comes back in, then that fluid exchanges more slowly with the ocean.
“An example of a constituent that might move with the tide would be the red drum fish — they spawn offshore and then the larvae grow up in the estuary. They can’t swim three miles into the estuary, so they are transported by exchange with the estuary, which can be governed by these vortices. So if we decide to build jetties or do something to the inlet, then we would want to know if we are going to change either the net exchange or the locations of the exchange.”
Although numerous studies have demonstrated the importance of the exchange process itself — and millions of dollars have been spent on its effects, from beach nourishment projects to research on the impact of pollution on coastal ecosystems — not as much attention has been paid to the underlying hydraulic mechanisms that drive the exchange itself. Earlier Texas Sea Grant-funded research by TAMU’s George Jackson, David Brooks and Cheryl Brown studying larvae transport from the ocean into the bays has shown that pairs of large eddies whirling in opposite directions form from tidal action at these inlets and that they dominate the mixing process. Socolofsky and Chang’s project takes the next step to study the formation of these vortices in the controlled conditions of the laboratory.
In the new shallow wave basin of the Reta and Bill Haynes ’46 Coastal Engineering Laboratory at Texas A&M, Socolofsky and Chang built a simple model of a shallow bay with an outlet to the Gulf. Their “barrier island,” constructed of cement blocks, can be adjusted to increase or decrease the width of the outlet. The researchers can also change for other variables — the speed and volume of the outflow, the relative depths of the water — with the geometry simplified compared to conditions in the field.
“We do the experiments in the laboratory rather than in the field because in the laboratory all experimental conditions can be controlled,” Chang says. “We can control different water depths, different tidal periods, different openings, geometry variations and the bottom friction. There are a lot of uncontrollable parameters in the field, so we think the laboratory experiment is probably necessary to understand the mechanism.”
As one student uses a remote control to move the massive crane — and the crane-mounted camera — into position over the model for the day’s first experiment, others prepare to distribute small, floating plastic pellets that are used to visualize the flow field during an experiment. After each experiment, the pellets have to be collected, scooped up by hand with nets, for the next test.
The pellets are evenly distributed in the “tidal inlet” and for several feet on the “Gulf side” of the model. The pump is turned on, simulating an outgoing tide, while the overhead camera takes 45 photographs per second. The images are recorded on a computer in the camera, then downloaded to a laptop at the side of the basin where the researchers can review them.
The overhead camera provides a full-field, two-dimensional snapshot of the positions of the pellets, showing the water’s movement and providing information needed to develop velocity vector maps.
“We also will later use dye injection, so when we take a picture we will know where the dye goes with quantitative information on dye concentration,” Chang says.
The images from the overhead camera are the primary measurement method. The researchers also are taking readings from acoustic Doppler velocimeters (ADVs) that measure the water velocity in the laboratory to verify the conclusions from the photographs.
“The camera will give us the data that we’re looking for,” Socolofsky says. “Any other measurements that we make are just to verify that data.”
“We don’t think that’s going to change anything, because I have been using this camera technique for more than 10 years. The reason we need to vary the data is because this is probably the first time anyone has used this technique in this huge field. Usually we are talking about on the order of four to eight inches of field of view at most,” Chang says.
The shallow wave basin at the Coastal Engineering Laboratory measures 75 feet wide and 125 feet long, and can be filled with water up to five feet deep, although Socolofsky and Chang’s experiments are much shallower — in the four-inch range. The facility was dedicated in 2003 and cost $7.6 million to build and equip, including the $1.5 million wave maker.
Chang and a colleague in Japan developed the software that is being used in the measurements, and they are making it available on the web for free download. He says that the setup would also work in the field — if you could find a location to mount the camera.
“If you were able to install this camera in some way, you could see the eddy form, see the velocity, and you could see the free surface pattern. We just don’t know where to mount it, because there’s no room in the field to mount a camera,” he says. “The area might be a mile, because the eddy size may be quite big. You would want to capture the whole eddy, so you would probably have to mount it really up high, like on a helicopter.
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