TRANSCRIPT
INTERVIEWEE: John Scanlan (JS)
INTERVIEWERS: David Todd (DT) and David Weisman (DW)
DATE: October 14, 2003
LOCATION: Austin, Texas
TRANSCRIBERS: Robin Johnson
REELS: 2250, 2251, and 2252

Please note that the recording includes roughly 60 seconds of color bars and sound tone for technical settings at the outset of the recordings. Numbers correlate with the time codes on the VHS tape copy of the interview. “Misc.” refers to various off-camera conversation or background noise, unrelated to the interview.

DT: My name is David Todd. I’m here for the Conservation History Association of Texas. We’re outside of Austin, Texas at the home of John Scanlan. It’s October 14, 2003 and we’ve got the good fortune to be interviewing John Scanlan about his many roles and contributions as a—as a lawyer, as a photographer, as a philanthropist and many other roles in the community. I wanted to thank you for taking the time to talk to us.
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JS: It’s a pleasure to be here with you.
DT: Good, well I thought we might start where we often do and—and just talk a little bit some of your early years and if there were relatives, parents, family members or—or teachers perhaps who might of introduced you to an interest in the outdoors or to conservation?
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JS: Well, I was born in Brownsville to a family who had a long history in South Texas. My mother’s side of the family’s named MacAllen and my great-grandfather John Mac—my great-great-grandfather, John MacAllen married a woman by the name of Salome Bail and she had amassed a large land grant through her family. She had inherited part of it through her family and then put—put it back together in Northwest Hidalgo County and as a consequence as a young man or a young boy, from the time I was six on, I would go out there and work in the summertime, all outdoors and that—that was during the great drought in the fifties and so I experienced that in South Texas. And we were
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basically a cattle ranching family and so I did have a whole lot of experience out there from the time one—not long after I was born, the second world war broke out and my father was too young for the first and too old for the second in as much as he had two children and so he went in the State Department, volunteered and we lived in Caracas, Venezuela for the early formative years. My parents elected to speak only in Spanish to both me and my brother and as a consequence, Spanish is my first language and in fact I couldn’t speak a ver—word of English until after the war when we came back and lived in Washington. But, in the period between 1946, when we returned to Brownsville from
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Washington and the time I went away to prep school, which would have been when I was fourteen, I spent a great deal of time outdoors. My father was an avid hunter, particularly a bird hunter. We were taught very early on that you didn’t shoot you weren’t prepared to consumed or eat and he didn’t particularly like deer hunting, although the tradition in South Texas was that a young man went out and got a buck and I did that and I’ve never shot another one since then as much as they’re a nuisance around here. But I did enjoy bird hunting and early on he gave me a s—single barrel Steven Shotgun and I got my first limit when I went out after he had taught me how to shoot. It wasn’t much of a challenge
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because the dove and white wing population at that time on our place at the ranch was—was pretty phenomenal, so it was fairly easy to get a limit. And I always took home and we consumed what we di—we never shot more than a limit even though the place we hunted was remote enough where there was unlikely you’d ever find a game warden. So I did have time to spend out there. We—when I was twelve or eleven years—twelve years old I guess, or thirteen, I went out to work one summer at the ranch and my cousin and I made a little extra money by catching owls and—and road runners and various
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other animal that the—animals that the San Antonio Zoo—the game wardens would come by and pick them up and take them up to the San Antonio Zoo, so we supplied the zoo with a lot of wild animals from South Texas. And then a chap came along who purchased rattlesnakes and we—we got in the business of catching rattlesnakes and…
DT: How did you catch these animals?
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JS: We had a—well the—the—typically we’d find a nest or something that was—for road runners and, you know, get the birds while they were small which meant we had to feed them as if we were their mothers from the very beginning. So we’d have to go out and capture lizards and it’s a sandy country, so you could just take a bush and then you’d essentially tap the lizards on the head or—or—or on their entire bodies and it would kind of paralyze them for a minute and we’d put them in a box and then take them back and feed them to the road runners or the owls or whatever other animals we had. But the rattlesnakes we had a rod that was about that long and there was a wire that ran through it
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and came out and formed a loop right at the bottom. And you could take that and put it around the snake’s head and tighten it and then you could pick it up and I’d have a gunnysack and we’d drop it in the sack. And what would happen is typically at noon why, the cowboys would come by—my job was early in the morning, I’d go out and round up the horses and saddle them all and we’d ride and work until noon and then we’d come back to the—to the ranch house and in the heat of the day from about noon until three o’clock in the afternoon they took a nap, a siesta and that’s when my cousin and I would venture out in the Jeep. It’s an old Willis Jeep that had been manufactured during the war and it was open, it had a canopy on the top that was made of canvas. In the back
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of the bed was kind of like a pick up, a very small pick up. And we had a box in the back and we’d pick these lizards up as we—and put them in that bag. And very sandy country so consequently there were two big ruts in the main drive and we’d just pull the throttle and the Jeep would move along at, you know, two or three, maybe five miles and hours and we’d go along and catch lizards. We ran on a rattlesnake we’d put it in the bag. And then we had a big pit the obj—the guy would pay us by the pound so we always wanted the rattlesnakes to be well fed, because the heavier they were, the more—the more we’d earn money. But back in those days all the fences had wooden gates and they were really heavy and because it was sandy country the post that they were stuck in the ground on
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would usually lean over and the gate would rest on the sand and it was a pain to just open these gates. And about that time my uncle became convinced that he ought to put lifetime gates in which were aluminum –light, extruded aluminum panels, really light weight, I mean you could put—it—you—took—I mean even at that age I could lift one up and carry it. And one noon we’d caught two rattlesnakes and had them in this gunny sack in the back trailer part of this Jeep and we were busy collecting these lizards and putting them in the box and we’d come over a little rise and we’re started down a hill and the Jeep picked up a little bit of speed even though it—it had the throttle on. And I got
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back in the seat to slow down to, you know, change directions and I looked over my shoulder and these two rattlesnakes that we had in the bag had—the bag had come undone and they’d worked their way out and were coming between the two seats in the J—in—in the—in that Jeep and my cousin and I bailed out. We just simply dove out of the side of the Jeep and onto the sand—I mean that—but the Jeep got away from us and went down the hill and hit this lifetime gate, the first one that had been installed. It cost forty-five bucks, which was a lot of money and we’d maybe get six or seven dollars a snake. We got the snake back in the bag and—and ended up putting them in the pit so
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that we finally sold them, but we ruined the gate. And the balance of the money that we earned from selling these small animals to the San Antonio Zoo was paid—was used to repay this—this aluminum gate. So anyway, I did have—I spent a lot of time outdoors as a youngster.
DT: Did—and you said that it was—a—a lot of this was during the fifties, during the drought, can you tell what the drought was like in South Texas?
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JS: I remember that very vividly. I remember going out to work in December and the ground was bare. When I say bare I mean there wasn’t—there wasn’t any vegetation. These mesquite trees were still there of course the—but there was nothing there you—we would go out—w—we—our cattle operation was such that the cattle would be bread to give birth in January and the reason for it was we had a thing called the screw worm fly. And there was an eradication program not long after that, but what—what happened is the fly would lay its eggs in the um—where the umbilical cord was and the eggs would then create a—a larva which would then simply make the sore remain a sore and would
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continue to eat around it, it was pretty gruesome. And so we would elect to have the cattle bear calves in December and I would go out and a—to help and we would ride out in the morning with hay to feed the cattle. If a cow had had a calf, she was normally too weak to get up and so there were four of us and we’d put basically drill stem underneath the as it was lying down, bear in mine, this was sandy country, so getting a—a drill stem all the way underneath a cow was not a big deal and then the four of us would lift the cow back on its feet. Quail, the quail population had virtually gone to nothing and—and—and they normally need cover, but you could see them running on the ground. The other thing that was interesting is when it was over and we began to get rains, the grasses came
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right back. I mean this is kind of a normal cycle in that part of the country. We didn’t have any running streams; all the waters came from water wells. So you had to conserve water, you had to be careful about it. As a child when we went out there, there was no electricity and no telephone, so we had kerosene lamps. We had an outhouse with a—with a cesspool and—before they had septic tanks and drainage fields. The water pressure came from water that was pumped by windmill up to a second story elevation, which gave you the pressure, but we—we would go down and bathe. There was a—a big tank up high and it had an enclosure underneath of the screen door and the cowboys and—and w—we as—as young—youngsters could go down there, but the water was cold. It came right out of the tap, but that’s where you’d take a shower. So I—I spent a
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whole lot of time out there as a kid and I spent a lot of times out doors. I mean I’d watch pickery havilenas, hogs or pigs. There were wild—wild pigs out there that had become feral. There were feral cats, kangaroo mice. A friend of mine came down from prep school where we were together and one summer collected a bunch of these in a shoebox. Back then Eastern Airlines would fly back and forth, we’d put him on the plane in Brownsville with a box full of these kangaroo mice that he wanted to take home as pets and he got to Corpus and he got ready to take off and he wanted to just peek in the box to make sure everything was alright and they all got out and were running on the—running
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on the floor on the airplane it was flying between Corpus and Houston and most pe—their ver—they have large, you know, soulful eyes and a little tuft on the end of their tale, so they don’t look like a rodent, but they’re clearly a ro—no question about the fact they were rats. And he had everyone help collect them all and put them back in the box. By the time they got to Houston, they all had them back in a box. But we—I spent, you know, the summers and during the holidays out there so I got to see the seas—four seasons. In the spring if there had been plenty of rain, had wild flowers like you never see. We had migrating bird populations that, you know, everything from large geese and ducks to, you know, a painted bunting. And I remember one of the ones that I really
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liked who—it was a vermilion flycatcher. They’re very territorial and they’re very beautiful bright colored bird and, you know, you could stand in one place and they would go catch a fly and then come back to their—their place. I loved—my favorite were the quail. I always—when you see them kind of run across a road, they will go one at a time, you know, across an opening and they look like they’ve raised their skirts to run across when they run. And we had some mainly bobwhite, but occasionally we’d have some blue quail. So I—I did spend a whole lot of time doing and enjoyed the outdoors. I did, you know, I would—when my father and I would go bird hunting later on when he was
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suffering from emphysema and very close to—to his death, we would go out—I’d go out with him and friends and he and I would end up sitting under a Mesquite tree near a tank in the afternoon and he was quite a good shot, but at that point his health was failing and we would sit and talk. And he’d talk about what it was like when he was a kid out there. So I—I did have that background in the outdoors. And we were close to the beach so I spent time down at South Padre Island before the causeway was in. And you’d take a ferry from Port Isabel, or Point Isabel as the old timers used to say, dow—out to South Padre and back in those days it was before the—the oil spill from the big rig off the coast of Campeche in Mexico…
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DT: (inaudible)
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JS: I don’t remember, w—was that the name? I don’t remember the name, but it was…
(inaudible)
JS: Yes, but it was before then and there were sand dollars along the beach. And then when the causeway was first built, I had a close friend who had a trailer down at the trailer park that it’s a—very end—south end of the island named (?). She had been a schoolteacher and Alef was at the time she was a very stern woman and I always was kind of frighten for her. We—we’d sleep outside on cots under the stars in the summertime and this is when—when I was younger, between the ages of, oh I guess probably and the time I would spend at the ranch. And back in those days, you’d get a
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nickel for every bottle you returned and so Monday morning we’d get the Jeep, they had an old Willis Jeep too, and of course it—I didn’t have a driver’s license it was back in the days when nobody really cared and we would go up the beach and collect the bottles that people had left. And it worked, I mean, you know, we were kind of entrepreneurs, that is to say we never had to pay any overhead because we didn’t pay for the gas in the car, but we’d go up and down the beach collecting bottles. And Alef would take us—would take us crabbing and floundering and you’d take a broom stick and put a nail in the—in it—in the bottom and then you’d fashion a—a—a—basically a sharp point with a file on the
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other end so there was not a barb and we’d take lanterns and we’d go on the bay side at night and with the lanterns you could see the crabs in the water, the water was very still there and you’d catch the crabs with the net and you’d put them in a bucket or a flounder because you had to be very careful that you didn’t poke a ray because a ray is got a tail with a hook and it could be very dangerous because you had to—you had to hook the flounder and then put your hand underneath it to lift it up, there was no barb. And the first time I went out I ended up picking up what was then a female crab that had an egg sack on the bottom and it was kind of a bluish color or purple color as I remember. And I thought the thing was sick, I was getting to throw it back in the water. And I remember Todd saying to me, don’t throw that crab away and she said—I said well it looks like it’s sick and she said, haven’t your parents taught you about the facts of life? And of course
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at that age I thought well let’s not go any further than that. And she said, let me show you. This is a female crab and this is a sack of eggs that she has and let me show you the male one. So she picked one up until she found a male one and sure enough the bottom is very pointed and she said, now doesn’t that look like a penis? I thought to myself, I don’t want to answer that question. But anyway, so I had spent time at the coast too and I—I did spend a lot of time outdoors so I had a—a kind of a—a—that was kind of a diversionary kind of thing. So the outdoors have always represented that to me and I’ve continued to do it. I—I—I’m with a group in Santa Fe that walks every Wednesday,
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called a chili, hiking and marching society. And we go—in the summertime we start at about nine thousand feet and walk for—for seven miles, usually an elevation of fifteen hundred feet twice. We’ve done Sandia Peak and in the winter time when it gets cold the group goes down to the lower climates where there’s less likely to be snow and we walk down there, so—or go to places like Bandoleer where you can walk in the winter time. So you—you know that’s always continued to be—I’ve done the Grand Gulch in Utah, which is a nine-day hike with a large format camera photographing there. I’ve done the Galapagos, Antarctica, any number of places, so I still like the outdoors.
(inaudible)
JS: You know, we didn’t…
(inaudible)
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JS: We didn’t have television, so that the only kind of activities that we had was either playing outside, riding a bicycle, that kind of thing. But when we got back to Brownsville after the war my parents had built a house that they had rented (inaudible) and hadn’t sold it, so we moved back into that house and it had a large front yard. And the government, I presume it was the public health service, but I can’t be sure, would in the summertime when we had tropical rains or we had a—for example a hurricane that came in and dropped in a lot of water with—with great big military airplanes, four engine large plains would swoop over the city at about five hundred feet above the—
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Brownville’s very flat and would spray the town and I think they were spraying with DDT at the time. And of course we’d he—could hear the planes because we didn’t have air conditioning, our houses were all open and my brother and I would go out and stand under this DDT spray as the planes flew over. And then it became more proficient or more profitable for them to spray the areas by having trucks going down the alley with a spray machine in the back and of course you could hear them coming for blocks. And so we would chase these trucks and run behind them in this fog that they created and it was—it—as well DDT or some other chemical. Speaking of things that were kind of interesting for us at the time, but probably in retrospect were not t—very healthy thing to
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do, my parents were clearly not aware of the fact that DDT was harmful to mammals. The—the theory was that these sprays would kill insects, like the size of a mosquito, but clearly wouldn’t affect either dogs or cats or people for that matter. And for example we had arsenic in the garage—my father had—and it was always kept out of our reach, but by that time we were old enough to know not to get in—not to play with it or anything, but he would create a concoction—we had red ants and they could be vicious. And you didn’t want to play or stand in an ant bed, that’s the last place you needed to be, but to get rid of them in the yard, he would make this concoction with arsenic and we’d pour it down the hole. And of course, we now know that—that that’s very dangerous. It was
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probably the first chemical that was banned we didn’t—I mean it was banned we thought primarily because of the danger to human beings if they got it, which was clearly true, but I think it was banned for other reasons because it—it went into the underground water system and it—it was a chemical that didn’t naturally, you know, dissipate. When I got to be fourteen years old I got a job a cotton gin. My father had done the corporate the—the gin owner and I got a job that summer. Well it turned out they liked my work and so I ended up working at the cotton gin every summer and I worked in the office. I really wanted to work out on the suction pipe because I figured that I could build my upper body muscles out there and that promised me that after the first year I could get out there and work, but as it turned out my work was so good for them in the office that they were
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hesitant to train somebody else and wanted me to stay there. So I ended up st—working in the office. But while I was there the first summer, they thought it would be a good idea for me to pick cotton for a half a day and I did. And it—it was a—it was an experience I’ll never forget. It certainly iNPRessed upon me the fact that I wanted to get an education and work inside in an air-conditioned office, but I pick cotton for a half a day. A good cotton picker could pick four hundred pounds of raw cotton in a day. I got to about forty-five pounds in a half a day and even at that age my back was killing me the
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next day. It was—and the—the cotton we had in South Texas had wou—would bloom twice so the end pr—we didn’t have machines come through and it was high quality cotton because it was picked by hand so it didn’t normally have—the machines pick up a lot of other trash in there. And so anyway, I did that and, you know, occasionally I would like to go watch these pilots who would then spray the cotton fields with—with, you know, chemicals to keep the bugs—the bole weevil particularly out. And I’d stand at the end of the lane and try to photograph them; my interest in photography had begun about that time. And—but never the less the spray, you know, the wind would be gentle and the plane would come over and whatever they were spraying would, you know, end up on you. And at that time, like I said, we presumed that whatever they were doing was not harmful to humans or mammals for that matter, but only harming to—to these little bugs
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that—and in 1967 I ran for the legislature and there was a fellow named—I think his name was Alton Bennet in the little town of Olmito, which is in Cameron County near Brownsville in South Texas. And Alton had a tomato canning factory and I went out to call on him—my father had also represented him as a lawyer and he was already a—as I recall on a walker or in a wheel chair and his f—hands and fingers were all distorted and he had great big thick glasses. And my father had told me that what had happened to him is he’d had a—he’d had an overdose of some kind of poisoning that they used—agricultural poisoning and that his reaction was that way. And at any rate I—one precinct I carried by a very substantial majority, I think I had a—ended up with ninety-two percent of the voted in that precinct. I didn’t win, fortunately or get elected to the State
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House, every time I go over there I want to come back home and take my clothes off and disinfect out in the yard before I go in the house, but I didn’t get elected and it a—you know, in—in retrospect when I think about the—the—the DDT that I—the fog that I ran in—well there was one other thing as I remember Tom McCann, the shoe store, had a thing the called a fluoroscope and you could go in the store and you’d put on some new shoes and you’d sit and look in the scope—down in a scope at your feet and you could see the bones in your feet in the shoe and, you know, we knew at that time or that is most—scientist knew that eradiation from—from any kind of a x-ray like that was harmful, particularly the reproductive organs and—and these things were, you know, we were teenage or pre teenage children and we’d sit and look at ourselves for hours, our—
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look at the bones in our feet, you know, with this thing, which is in retrospect—they took it off the market at some point because it became obvious that it was harmful. But when you think about that and you think about the DDT, you think about the powders that they sprayed that Alton Bennet—that made his life miserable, made him basically a cripple and—and even the arsenic we had, to me it seems to only make sense that these chemicals, whoever’s propounding them, whoever wants to sell them or market them ought to have the obligation to do the necessary testing to determine the affects they have on human beings. It’s—it doesn’t make any sense to do it any other way or the claim this precautionary principle that argues that you can put them on the market, but there’s a—there’s a—there’s any—there’s a presumption that if they don’t work, you take them off.
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I think it ought to be the other way around. There’s always the comp—we do that with drugs, other things that people consume. Clearly something we’re going to breathe is consumed in the same way and it ought to be treated likewise, that is tested to determine its effect on humans. The argument is it’ll make things very expensive, well the fact of the matter is, it’s expensive on the other end if you don’t make a determination that it’s not harmful. And secondly the consumer ends up paying it all anyway. The notion that some corporation is going to lose its profit, it’s not, so they’ll just raise the price and if the—the product is beneficial enough it’ll be produced anyway. So I—in retrospect when I think about that that there’s a—there’s a fellow named David Rowe who was a staff member of the Environmental Defense Fund, back when it was called
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Environmental Defense Fund, in the California office and was able to get an amendment passed that placed the burden on manufacturers to advise people whether or not the product they were putting on the market was either a carcinogenic or harmful to people and it created a burden on them, which I think is very wise. It hasn’t passed anywhere else, but it has in California.
DT: You were talking about things that had happened in your childhood and teenage years and I was wondering if you could bring us on a few years and talk about high school or college times that might have influenced you some way in conservation interest?
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JS: Well, I had gone to a Catholic school in Brownsville, mainly because it was better than the public school academically. And in the eighth grade I came home one day and told my father that he was going to hell because he didn’t go to church often enough. And he then had a quick talk with my mother—we were raised Episcopalians and suggested to her that we were going to go to public school that he didn’t think it was the priest’s business to be telling his children that he was going to go to hell because he wasn’t going to church often enough. So my mother’s family had had a history of going to Swanee, the University of the South—the military school and the University, and I had
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also a cousin who’d gone there and an uncle. And my dad basically represented a couple of banks or businesses, but by and large individuals in South Texas and so there were times for example when—when he couldn’t be paid in cash so people would bring corn and, you know, we’d end up shucking corn all after—all one weekend and then freezing it, or if they didn’t have a product, they would go down to the—to the port and catch crabs, so we’d have fresh crabs, but we’d put that away—so that they had saved a little bit of money and this was going to be a sacrifice for them. And so they—they ended up inviting me to consider going away to prep school and I was ready, I mean I was really ready to get out of Brownsville at—you know, Brownsville—I—I didn’t realize how bereft it was of—of anything, of any kind of a culture thing. I mean we didn’t have—
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whatever we had in the way of radio stations played, you know, basically cowboy music. The first TV station was on the Mexican side and it was black—obviously black and white and I remember the bulk of their programming was wrestling. I remember Gorgeous George. He’d come out and hit the other guy with this platter over the head. I mean it was pretty corny stuff. And Brownsville didn’t have an orchestra. At one time before the turn of the last century it did have an opera house and Matamoras had an opera house and they were quite cosmopolitan because they were near the coast and had that kind of an influence. But by the time I’d grown up th—the major ports were Corpus and Galveston and they pa—kind of by—by passed Brownsville. The old opera house had become a—a garage for, you know, working on cars. It was a beautiful old brick
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building, but it was converted into basically a, you know, a yard where people worked on their cars. And I was ready to get out of Dodge; I mean I really wanted to get out of Brownsville. And ended up going to the—to Swanee Military Academy in Tennessee and spent four years there. You know I spent a lot of time there kind of readjusting. I did well finally, but it was a—it was a har—hard experience to get out of a very small town. The blessings that Brownsville did offer is that I went to a school that was probably ninety percent Hispanic and so I was a minority. I was not only a minority in terms of the ethni—ethnicity of the school, although my grandmother was Hispanic and I spoke I Spanish, I was also an Episcopalian in a Catholic school, so I had the experience of kind
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of being an outsider the whole time and that was good. At any rate I went to Swanee for four years. We spent a lot of time outside because it was a military school and we did military tactics out—out there, but, you know, it was kind of a change in my life where I went from, you know, being kind of a regular kid at home to a military school that was very structured that focused on academics and some on athletics. And I ended up—m—my parents had pretty much exhausted their—their savings to send both me and my brother there. My brother’s two years younger than I am, but is a year ahead of himself, and so when it came time to go to college, it was pretty obvious to me that I kind of h—had to figure out how to get there on my own and I got an NROTC scholarship to the
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University of Virginia. And accepted it and showed up at the University of Virginia in September and that year my father who was a lawyer got elected to the district court bench and would have, by being a judge, a fixed guaranteed monthly income. And my father called me that September and said, look I think you ought stay in the NROTC program, but not be a regular, be a contract student. The contract student had only a two-year obligation, where as the regular student had a three after you got out and I did that. And so I went to Virginia for four years. I majored in Philosophy largely because of the experience I’d had in the Catholic school. I’d hope that Philosophy would some how answer a whole lot of questions for me, but it only created more, but—and was in the
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NROTC program. When I got out of the University of Virginia with a BA degree I was commissioned an Ensign in the Navy and was ordered to report to San Francisco to the twelfth naval district, which would then send me to the ship where I had been assigned—to—to which I’d been assigned. And I went from there to the U.S.S. Osborne, it was a destroyer, an old World War II converted destroyer. And she was expected to be in Subic Bay in the Philippines and so the Navy put me on a plane and flew me across the Pacific, to the Philippines—to Clark Air Base in the Philippines and then over—I rode a bus over to Subic and joined the ship there. And I spent two years in the Navy. Did a—what we call a WESPAC cruise. I spent nine months in the Far East, a couple of really good
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typhoons, but I got to see Hong Kong and Yakuska, Japan and Sasabo, Japan. And I got to go over to Nagasaki and see where the second of the two atomic bombs had been dropped and went to ground zero and saw the devastation that it had ravaged on the town of Nagasaki. And then spent the rest of the time operating off the coast of California.
DT: It’s interesting that you talk about two episodes there that had great power. One is the natural phenomenon; the typhoons and then man made ones, the two atomic bombs. Can you compare the two or what your reactions were
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JS: Well, I went over with my commanding officer, a fellow named William Lancaster, who I turn—turned out he was a very conservative republican and would sit in the ward room table and tell me—he knew I’d—knew I’d majored in philosophy and he’d say to me, he says, you know what happened to the Greeks? And I said, no what happened to the Greeks? And he said, well they were all homosexuals and that’s why that society collapsed and I’d—I mean even—this was in the—in the early sixties. I thought to myself, I’m—I’m not sure how that connection works. But I found it to be kind of an amusing anecdote at the time. But he turned out to be a—kind of a—he didn’t have any children, so I turned out to be kind of a surrogate son and—and had wonderful experiences with him as a commanding officer. I saw him get passed over for promotion for captain and when he did, he became very interested in the morale and how the crew
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was. And when he did that—our little destroyer won a—won hands down all the awards in the division and then in the squadron. But we went over to Nagasaki and by the time I went there which would have been 1962 it had been rebuilt. But at ground zero there was a—a monument and photographs of what it—the devastation and it was pretty gruesome to see what had happened. They had photographs that were—that were pretty direct that the burns that people suffered and the radiation sickness that they had afterwards. And it was a—you know I went largely just to see for myself what—what it had wrought because I was always kind of interested in aviation, I had one time wanted
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to go to the air academy, but my eyes weren’t good enough, so I couldn’t get in. And I’d read the story about the Enola Gay and about the—the cruiser that had taken the bomb across the Pacific that was sunk after it had left at Tenien. And had always kind of been interested in Naval history and military history and—and it was pretty—I mean these were civilians essentially that was suffered and the whole object was to just send the nation into enough shock so that they would, you know, abandoned the course of the war. And the typhoons on the other hand were kind of spiritual experiences. We ended up in a typhoon after—on our way back across the Pacific to the U.S. where we had forty-five foot waves and the—the—the bridge on the destroyer was forty foot—was forty-five feet above the water. And we were with the Canberra Cruiser, there were eight destroyers
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around her in a screen and she couldn’t travel very fast because she had had her sh—superstructure redone. And without getting a great deal of detail if a ship has a quick movement, that is to say, it r—rotates on its axis fast, it’s normally thought of being really sea worthy. If it has a very slow movement, it’s thought—and particularly if it hangs at the end, that it is very un-sea worthy and unstable and could capsize. And at the end of World War II four destroyers were caught in a typhoon and all four capsized, lost a thousand men. It was probably the greatest single loss of life unrelated to the war, was that loss. And so we would fill our bilges with water where we had petroleum, because water if it’s in a—in a –in a closed container and absolutely full takes on the—the gravitational properties of a solid. If it’s only half full—when you rotate a glass the
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water’s center of gravity shifts. And—anyway we ended up in a typhoon with these forty-five foot waves and you know, you’d go down and then the whole bow would go in and the water would go over the superstructure and she’d come up over the top. And I came up to relieve the watch one night—I served as—as communications officer, my general quadrant station was on the bridge, I was the officer of the deck and there was a figure in the captain’s seat and I thought it was the captain who was concerned about the ship’s safety. And it turned out I said before my eyes had become accustomed to the—the dark, and I said captain is that you over there? And the voice came back and he said, no this is the padre, Chaplin Threadgill. We were the division ship so we carried the—
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not only the medical officer and the—the commodore, but we also carried the staff, one of whom was the Chaplin and he was a Baptist preacher. And he’d served in World War II as a Marine, as an enlisted man in the Marine Corps. And he said to me John, he said, let me tell you something, I would rather be back on the beaches at Iwojima than where we are right now. And so I said to him, I said Padre, I’ll make a deal with you, you pray and I’ll drive. And we were in this typhoon for a week. And they’d strap you to your beds at night—to your bunks. The chairs which are like the chairs I’m sitting in—the ward room table was bolted to the floor—welded to the floor and the chairs were turned around so that they backs faced the table and they were literally tied to the legs of the
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ward room and we had nothing but cheese and bread for—for five days because the weather was so bad, they couldn’t cook anything. And it was pretty awful. At any rate, you know, I finished my tour in the Navy and came back here to law school. And while I was in law school the Johnson administration started the Great Society and part of the Great Society was the office of Econ—o—the OEO—Office of Economic Opportunity I guess. And as part of that—it was a legal aid program and I was really bored in law school, you know, the seating of a hundred and twenty-five seats, you were assigned chairs, they took role. You know, I had been on a ship that had six nuclear depth charges that were ten kilotons, essentially the ty—the—as big a bomb as had been dropped on Hiroshima and here I was sitting in a seat—in an assigned seat and was being taught by
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professors who hadn’t practiced law. And I—I became bored with law school and my sense about law school was that it really became a way to, kind of, ferret out the cream of the crop, the very top ten percent of the students. And those students were sent to the big firms, which basically represented corporate America. And in those firms they would be trained how to practice because when you get out of law school, unlike medical school, you could—didn’t even know where the courthouse was or the clerk’s office or what to do there. And so I volunteered for the clinic that was created to work—well, let me back up, the law school had a clinic and it was basically a divorce clinic, it was run by Woodrow Patterson and all they did was uncontested divorces for people who didn’t have
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any money at all. The OEO program created offices in East Austin, in the Hispanic area and in the Black area and then there was one presumably in the courthouse for White, poor Whites. And I first was assigned to the Black part of town on the Twelfth St. And the director of the program at—realized that I was fluent in Spanish and so my second year in law school when—when I started working for them I was moved to the Hispanic’s section, 1619 East First, right by Via Senior’s Funeral Home. And I worked with John Trevino who then became a city council member and mayor pro tem here and a fellow named Richard Moya who was a county commissioner for a while later on and worked over in east Austin. And it was a lot of work to be done. I mean basically poor
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in—in this part of the country had really never been represented so there was a backlog of any number of things that needed to be done. And I started—I spent my—all my free time in law school over there as a volunteer. I had been offered a job as a clerk where I would have been paid, but I was on the G.I. bill, t—my two years in the Navy were sufficient to qualify me for the G.I. bill and that meant that my tuition was paid for and they paid for my books and various other things. I think there may of even—may of even been a stipend as well. And so I felt that I really didn’t need the—the stuff and so—the—and so I w—worked as a volunteer and when I finished law school I was offered a job by them. And the process of creating a legal services program here had been difficult
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one and if it hadn’t been for the work of Tom Reevley who then went to the Texas Supreme Court and is now senior status on the U.S. f—Circuit Court Of Appeals and Page Keaton for example who was dean of the law school, we would not of had a legal services program. But they were able to convince the local bar association that it was good. And I ended up over—and like I said in east Austin and they hired me after I got out of law school, but Hamilton Lowe who ran the program and was basically an appellant lawyer who had some what of—as I recall, a drinking problem. He was kind of an old member of the bar that was trusted and was farmed out to kind of run this
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program, wouldn’t do what we then called legal reform litigation, things like challenging the one year minimum residency requirement for welfare assistance. I mean if you can believe this, most of the money was coming from the federal government and it meant that if you moved from one state to another you were not—you were then ineligible for legal services for—I mean for welfare assistance for a year. So there were a lot of things that—we focused basically on the primary things that people needed in terms of legal services, one was getting welfare services to people who needed it. There was a whole backlog of divorces—I mean people because they couldn’t afford to get divorced would simply break up and then take up with somebody else. So there were punitive marriages and illegitimate children under the way the statute was created at the time and we did a
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lot of that to kind of, you know, kind of get that area up to snuff. But Lowe—Hamilton Lowe was very much afraid to challenge any of the other things in the—in the basic system. Basically he wanted just to do largely divorces and so I left and went to South Texas, back to Brownsville to practice and I ran unsuccessfully for the legislature in 1967. And in 1969 a woman named Barbara Cason from Laredo, her family had been an old Lebanese family—Catholic Lebanese family in Laredo who were prominent there and she began—they upgraded the—the legal aid program here to be part of a clinical program and she invited me to come back and by that time Lowe—we merged them—the law school clinic with the local OEO program—Lowe by then had retired or had passed away, I don’t remember and we took on some really serious litigation. We integrated public housing here in Austin. Austin was the first public housing project in the country.
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The Rosewood project was built in ’49. It was the original resolution interestingly enough was written by then the housing authority’s lawyer who was on the fifth—was—was a lawyer at time went on to be the fifth circuit and was going to be the—one of Lyndon Johnson’s appointees to the Supreme Court. I’ll think of his name in a minute. He was blind. But the original resolution read that the Rosewood project would be for the Negroes, near the Negro playground and the Negro’s school, Santa Rita Court would be for Hispanics, because it was near the Hispanic park and the Hispanic school and Chalmers which was in south Austin would be for whites. And this is in 1949. In 1969, twenty years later these projects were still—Rosewood was Black, Booker T. Washington’s had—had been built by then, it was all black. Santa Rita was Hispanic
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and Chalmers was white. And the theory for this—these projects would be it—that it was a transition for people who had moved in until they got established and then they’d move out because they were no longer eligible for housing assistance. And the housing authority had become h—had a ten million dollar grant to build another project and they had located it on Balm Road and Balm Road is right across Eblustein Blvd. across from the Go Valley Wastewater Treatment Plant which is the principal wastewater treatment plant for the city at the time and it was at the end of the major runway at Bergstrom Air—Air Force Base. And it was going to be all black. And—and perhaps some Hispanics, but largely black and we sued to enjoin the construction of that project and asked for a mandatory injunction that hou—public housing be built all over the city and it was in federal court. And I guess my—this was back in ’69 or ’70 and my interest in the
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environment had to do in some respects with this project. I mean here we were going to put people who wasn’t going to have air conditioning in a project across the street from the wastewater plant and the wastewater plant back in those days were not terribly efficient. If they had a spill or anything it went right into the Colorado River, they didn’t bother to clean it up. But the odors were pretty—pretty awful and the prevailing wind from the southeast blew these odors right into where this project was going to be. And the project by being located at the end of the major runway at Bergstrom—Bergstrom had phantom jets at the time and also was a jet where they—an airbase where they had B52’s that were armed with nuclear weapons. And I remember seeing the movie Dr. Strange
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Love and well—and coming home and finding that the bug tank that was right there along the front of the Bergstrom said peace is our profession and I thought it’d been joke and Dr. Strange Love littled to find that that was, you know, painted on this the—the Strategic Air Command’s water tank. And so we sued in federal court and—and—and ended up winning a substantial victory that was never appealed to the fifth circuit court of appeals and stands now ordering the housing authority to build public housing projects outside of east Austin. At that time the—they were trying to integrate the public schools in Austin such—it would’ve meant bussing and just became so apparently ridiculous to build another public housing project that would of only required more bussing. At any rate we won the suit. And my principal job in the
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litigation—we—we had a slam-dunk case on integration and segregation. They had done it as a matter of policy, there’s no question about it, it wasn’t haphazard. But my principal job in this lawsuit was to make—to prove that these housing was—was not going to be habitable. You going to—you were going to have it near the surplant with flies and whatever happen to them and then the smelt and then the other thing was that the noise level that for forty-five minutes, not at one specific period of time, but in intervals, the noise from these jet aircraft was above the speech interference level. And the speech interference level is essentially the level we’re talking at right now. In other words the noise was going to be loud enough so that you and I couldn’t hear each other talk. And while we won hands down on the non-environmental causes, we didn’t win those, but we won the lawsuit in any—in any event and my job was to prove this up. I spent with Tom Buckle one night out at the end of the—on the—on the sight with
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recording devices and a meter where we could actually measure the decibels as these planes came over and we recorded them and played them back in the court room. And Judge Roberts said to me, you understand of course Mr. Scanlan that the appellant court will not be able to test your theory about the level of the noise? And—and—and my answer was, we know that, but we trust the judgment of this court. Well it turned out that Jack Roberts had been in the Air Force during the war and lost most of his hearing while he was stationed in Lake Charles, Louisiana. In the afternoon after he heard these jet noises—because we could—we could max the level that we had recorded on this odometer or whatever this meter was that we measured the noise level on in the courtroom and at the end of that day he got very sarcastic—he got ready to get off the bench and he said this has been the most enlightening thing I’ve heard all day and left the
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bench. But we didn’t win on that basis, but never the less that was probably the first bit of environmental litigation we had. Tom was a—my par—who then subsequently became my partner in 1975 went from being a legal aid attorney to the attorney general’s office with John Hill in the environmental section and in environmental enforcement. He had represented the air control board and I think that’s where he cut his teeth.
(misc. about changing tape)
[End Reel 2250]
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JS: You’re—you’re references as how—how did I get involved in the environmental movement? I was more interested in the way that the environmental justice movement, although it didn’t have a title like that when I first got interested. I mean the—the notion that you were going to build a housing project adjacent to a sewer system, a sewer plant that was—didn’t have a particularly great operating record and at the very end of a runway where not only were you, you know, exposed to the noise, but the kerosene that these planes burn, you know, when they’re not on burning it at full rate and landing, you know, they were essentially spraying this stuff, we didn’t get into that, but I was—I was principally concerned about the way the poor were being exposed unnecessarily to an environmental—to—being placed in the worst environmental part of town. And you had
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asked earlier whether I was aware that in 1928 the city of Austin had pla—placed a m—a ma—or adopted a master plan. Under the—under the Texas statutory scheme for city controls, you have zoning and zoning then is n—contingent on the development of a master plan. And this started in the 1920’s and by 1928 Austin had adopted—nationally started in 1920, the commerce department under Herbert Hoover had developed a set of model ordinances for cities and statutory schemes for states to pass. Texas passed them along with virtually ev—every other state. And the scheme had zoning, planning and then a master plan over the top. And in 1928 Austin developed a master plan and the master planned essentially called—there was—at that time Austin was divided on an—in
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a north-south axis by West Avenue and by East Avenue. East Avenue was the highway from San Antonio that went through Austin up to Waco, which is now the corridor for interstate 35, or—yeah 35, that’s East Avenue. And East Avenue was denominated in the ’28 plan to be the border or the boundary between the poor Hispanics and blacks who were to live on the east side of town and the whites who basically were going to live on the West side of town. I mean it was explicit, it wasn’t implicit, you didn’t have to read between the lines. We introduced that plan in evidence as part of our case in the Black Share Residence Organization vs. Romney, which is the case I was talk—talking about. And—and it was part of the proof that we had to show that the segregation of public
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housing was part of a plan to put basically minorities in East Austin. And it was pretty obvious that—that—if you remember I think it wasn’t until 1949 that restrictive—racial restrictive covenants were thrown out by the Supreme Court as being state action so that you could privately exclude minorities, principally Blacks from East—from West Austin by these restrictive covenants. It was not surprising to me that the railroad yard was over there, that the chemical plants were over there, that the depots w—the—the—the storage units for petroleum were there. But while I was working for legal aid in East Austin, on East First St. and East Twelfth, the—the role—the causal relationship between ground water contamination from these storage tanks and the air quality from these storage tanks had not really surfaced. We were not aware of that connection at the time, or at least I was not aware of it and—and clearly our program wasn’t. It’s interesting in a sense because I—I—I was then in 1972 offered a clinical teaching fellowship at Harvard and I was particularly interested in legal education, not from and environmental point of view, but from the fact that, you know, the top ten percent of the class would go to major firms that had enough capital to take the time to train those students who were already very smart in how to practice law and that the other eighty or ninety percent of the students were simply turned loosed on the public—turned loosed—turned loose on the public without any training what so ever. So they basically cut their teeth experimenting on private citizens. I mean think of the medical profession if the first time somebody got to do surgery after they got out of medical school and understood those concepts was when,
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you know, some poor person showed and—and needed some kind of an operation. And fortunately about the time that I got a—that I—and I was interested in that from the time I was in law school. It was pretty clear to me that—and my father was a judge and at that time would tell me about lawyers coming to practice in front of him for the first time who, as he described, couldn’t hit their ass with b—both hands. And so I became kind of interested in that. I, you know, when I—when I went to Brownsville I—every time the grand jury met I was appointed to represent people con—you know, indicted for felonies and, you know, the basic training I’d had was reading a few cases in criminal law and knowing conceptually what the rules were, but not understanding, you know, how in an
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arraignment you could force the state to put on at least a prima facia case against the defendant so that you’d—could do discovery in criminal cases. But at any rate to make a long story short I came back in and was interested in that and then it ended up going to Harvard and doing it there. And, you know, m—my interest again there was in turning out a legal profession that was competent to represent everybody including the poor. And at Harvard i—in the clinical program where I worked at Harvard, we represented low-income citizens. But again, the principal things we did was debt, essentially private matters or public welfare and in large measure because those were the priorities. I mean there was a sense in which the environmental issues took a back seat because you wanted to make sure that people were living in the kind of arrangements that made them, quote,
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legal by—by most standards, that people were getting an income that was sufficient to support themselves, that the welfare department was treating youngsters that it took in its possession properly, that kind of thing. And those were at the very top of the list. In 1975 I was graduated, I got an LLM from Harvard and I had really wanted to come back here and teach at Texas, but if you know anything about law school faculties, they are really kind of—very similar to the English land owning system in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. You know, you had carved out something that you’d taught and that was yours, even though, you know, you didn’t own it, you kind of carved that territory out and changing the curriculum in law schools then became, you know, or essentially an earth moving experience. Texas was behind the other schools. Harvard
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had a clinical program; my daughter then went to NYU in New York where after the first year and a half everybody did clinical work. I mean it was clearly the—in the—the idea was in the—in the making and some schools were in the vanguard, not Texas. The other thing was is that I hadn’t done particularly well in my under graduate law school and law school faculties don’t want to add anybody who doesn’t make them look better, in other words, they wanted students that had clerked for the—not practiced, but clerked with the U.S. Supreme Court or some court of appeals because it made them uniformly look better. And so I didn’t get an offer from Texas, I got one from the University of South Carolina and I got one from the University of Tennessee, but I had roots and family here
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in Texas and by that time had a daughter. My parents were getting older and so I decided to come back here and practice. And I took on Tom Buckle as a partner sometime about 1976. And Tom had been a student in the clinical program representing low income people and then he’d gone to the attorney general’s office and worked in the Environmental Enforcement Division and—and then came over to work with me. And when he did he basically took on representing citizens who had environmental—who had standing to raise environmental claims before the agencies. That’s one incidentally of the principal things that the Bush administration both here and in Washington has done, is that role back the standing that citizens have to challenge environmental agency decisions. But any rate he—that’s where he—he went to work. And about that time I
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started writing—I was a—I was appointed to the planning commission here in Westlake and I served for a year there and was asked to write—rewrite their zoning ordinance, which is the first experience I’d had with that. So I wrote the zoning ordinance and then was invited to chair the zoning and planning commission. And I did that for about six or seven months and then wrote their sign ordinance and then I was invited to be the city attorney, to represent the city. And I largely became interested in municipal law representing small cities and we ended up representing Westlake, Lakeway, Sunset Valley, Jonestown, yeah, and then other—doing stuff for other little cities around here.
DT: Can you tell me from your experience why Texas has such a different land use system of regulation and why it looks different?
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JS: Well, for example the signing ordinance—the sign ordinance here for Westlake it is—it was pretty unique when we did it. We were way ahead of our time. And I was moved by the state of Vermont. The state of Vermont has no billboards. And it doesn’t in large measure because they banned them in 1922, irrespective of what their content was, they’re simply banned, so that there wasn’t a commercial speech and a free speech issue raised. But their signage—sign ordinances were really impressive. You’d go into the little towns and there were no big signs. There were no neon signs. And there were no, what I call totem poles, you know, where you have a shopping center and you have this large totem pole that has—so and interestingly enough they rarely have a street address so that if you look it up in the phone and it tells you the street address, you can’t
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find the number, so a—a—at any rate a—a—and this relates to environmental issues as well because of my—my own perspective about where we are on environmental issues. The—Vermont is a small state and municipal boundaries go to municipal boundaries. They’re no spaces with no controls. Whereas in Texas because it was so big and municipal boundary went only as far as necessary and then there were no controls, because counties have very little in the way of controls, so you have large areas of the state where there were no controls, you could—you could have a—a rendering plant just beyond the city limits and there were no controls, you could have a mine, you could have a, you know, a polluting factory right beyond the city limits and the city couldn’t control them and then when the city extended its controls they were typically grand fathered and
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the best you could do was amortize them to zero and then force them to get off the—off the property. So that’s one of the main distinctions. The other is that the—that folks in this states, you know, believe that property right is in the Anglo Saxon sense, you know, (inaudible), and you can do what you like on your property, irrespective of the fact that it may be a nuisance, but there were old common law nuisance statutes that governed everybody, but by and large those are hard to bring and hard to win. You’ve got to be really doing something offensive on your property and affecting somebody else’s property in order to stop it. And in about 1920 in the case of Euclid vs. somebody, it was the case that went to the Supreme Court where the Supreme Court said cities could pass
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zoning ordinances and Euclidian Zoning has nothing to do with Euclid, Euclid was the name of the town. It’s basically a very primitive system of zoning. I mean it’s horizontal for example you either have single family residences or businesses or apartment dwellings or light industrial, heavy industrial. It’s since become more complicated because we realized that if we want to—cities to contract in size and increase in density, you—you normally will permit people to have on the ground level some kind of a commercial enterprise and then have apartments on up—upper levels. But the—originally the Euclidian notion was basically single-family dwellings and what we normally think of Levittown. And while I was here in Westlake as their city attorney—
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Westlake is on—is on septic systems—private sewage facilities is what they’re called, but it’s a septic tank. Septic tanks have been used since about the 1930’s. And while I was city attorney Carol McClellan, Carol Keaton McClellan Strayhorn—she was then Carol Keaton McClellan was mayor of Austin and would always suggest that Barton Creek and Barton Springs were being polluted by our septic tanks. And I knew very little about septic tanks when I first moved out here. And in some respects she was convincing enough to make me think that that was the case. And there were instances for example where vegetation that is not natural to this habitat you’d find. You’d find fig trees for example at—at—out here and, you know, there’s no way a fig tree can grow out here unless its got very rich nutritional help. And there were bar ditches while I was city
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attorney where I could see, you know, algae blooms and algae bloom were normally associated with high nutrition in the water. And I convinced the city manager to sample these bar ditches to determine whether or not the water was essentially wastewater from a septic tank. And at the time I had friends over in—in Austin at the wastewater department who agreed that they would test the samples. I would simply assign a random number so they wouldn’t know where they were and then I—I put some water—I simply filled them full of water right out of the tap just to keep them honest. And they did a whole series of these nineteen tests in areas where I had r—I—I was really suspicious that maybe the septic tanks weren’t working. And in every instance the water quality in the ditch was m—met the state standard for—for water that people could swim in. So I
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got to thinking that maybe conceptually I had—I had this thing backwards. And we then found a place where a new house had been built and the septic system was in the front yard and there was literally a whole in the ground where water would seep out. And I became convinced that this was—that the septic tank had gone in, the drain field had gone in, the drain field had found its right to this hole and it was pouring out into the ditch. And there was a—there was a classic’s professor here f—at the university, he taught Greek. And he agreed to let us do whatever test to determine whether the water was running out of his house, into the septic then into the drainage field and then out into the bar ditch. And we did every conceivable test. We tested the water quality. Well, the
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water quality was really quite good. We tested—we put dyes in the toilet to see if the dye came—it never came out. So we were not able to trace the source of the water supply. It turned out it was a natural spring that had become operable by the way they had torn up the soil around there and the water was clean. And I became convinced that the septic tanks were not on a one-anchor track. We’re not really—I mean i—in a climate like this we’re not hazardous to anybody and that Carol was wrong, well she was dead wrong. It turned out that there was a—a—a pump station, west water pump station right there near Barton Springs that had malfunctioned and raw sewage from Austin’s own water pipes was going into the springs and the water hadn’t migrated from this far away. And so I got really interested in that—in that aspect and got to be—then wrote the septic tank
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ordinance for Westlake. And it was probably novel and more innovative. We encouraged people to have gray and black water systems and to use the gray water systems to water their lawns. And then I ended up, you know, this was very automobile friendly, very pedestrian unfriendly city, one acre tracks, which probably environmentally in terms of ground water are very sound, in terms of air pollution are very bad, in terms of using space properly were not terribly good. I had served in about 1975 or ’76 on the Greater Austin Master Plan. And the master plan had encouraged that water and wastewater systems in the city would grow north and south along the interstate
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highway and not west and east. And, you know, it was—it was never enforced, it was laughing stock over there. The fact of the matter is that irrespective of whatever zoning ordinance and master plan Austin had, the water and wastewater department and the electric department paid no attention to it. So they ran their lines and their power lines wherever they wanted to, or wherever developers wanted it and the master plan was—was a joke. For example when Loop 360 was first built around the east—the west part of town between Lamar and Bee Cave Road, by the time the road was finished the Austin electric department had two, I guess a hundred and forty-five KB lines on either side of the road and there was nothing out there—I mean nothing. There wasn’t a filling station, there
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wasn’t a restaurant, but they had already provided the electrical system to spread in that direction. And in—and in Texas particularly you need three things, you need water, wastewater can normally handle off—can be handled onsite if the site the site is big enough, you need power, whether it’s the form of natural gas or electricity and you need transportation. And here the city and the state had basic for all virtues—all practical purpose supplied two of the three that were needed and—and getting water at that point was not a terribly bad thing to do. So while, you know, there was a conceptual plan for making growth go north and south, the city and the transportation department, the highway depar—department were doing their own thing. So it—it really served no—very little purpose at all.
DT: What do you thing the pressure was on the Texas Department of Transportation or the Municipal Water Supply or the power department to try and extend services?
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JS: Well, they saw their o—their job is to try and anticipate growth irres—I mean their—their notion is that you can’t manage growth and that you t—that their burden is to serve it and that’s how—that was the—the underlying thing that the folks—th—that the LCRA engineers were exactly the same way, you know, if there was an area that was going to grow they wanted to have the power lines, now they want to have the water supply and that was their M.O. They were—they were—most of them were engineers who were basically more concerned with the physics of getting the substance there whether it’s an electron or a quart of water and they had very little concern about the other issues. I
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mean they were—that’s where they were driven and, you know, this—this—the legislature then encouraged that by the creation on municipal utility districts and it then became a question of whether the city was going to supply those people or whether they were going to supply themselves. And the city engineers, you know, it was bureaucracy they wanted to keep their jobs and they wanted to grow and that’s—that was the driving force. And so it became a—you—you—a—it just—it became futile to have a plan because there was no enforcement at those levels. You could have a plan but it made no difference if the city wastewater department was going to surreptitiously extend the line. Un be know—give you an example; sometime in the late forties or early fifties somebody
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wanted to build a hotel on the west side of Lake Austin, right at the point opposite the water intake from the—o—o—on Lake Austin which is right across from the LCRA building and, you know, you went to the city and the city put a wastewater line under the lake. And that wastewater line had a, you know and infant—a finite capacity. The hotel was never built and some developer discovered it. Los Altos came along which is high-density condominium project on this side of the lake and then it became a question of who—who owned property there could tie up the right to use it. And it was gravity fed for a while and then became a forced main, because you could push more through a forced main than you can through a gravity one and now the whole west side over here
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has—is along the lake in Austin’s jurisdiction has got wastewater. It’s that simple. And when you do that the density goes from a very low end to a higher end. And the higher the density the greater the run off, the greater the pollution that goes in the lake. I mean it just—it—it, you know, not only do you have pollution from, you know, animal matter but from organic waste that people put on their yards, from trash and plastic bags that float into the river, you know, it just—it—it goes on so—automobile petroleum that has fallen on the—on the roadway that gets in the water. It just, you know, it escalates. And—and that’s essentially what’s happened.
DT: You mentioned earlier the Lower Colorado River Authority and that’s a power and water supplying entity that operates on even a bigger scale than the city and county right here locally. You served on the board at a pretty pivotal time for the LCRA and I was wondering if you could talk about two of the projects, the power project in an associated mine and then also the Columbus or it was also called the Shaw’s Bend Dam, can you tell us about those?
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JS: I was appointed by Bill Clements in 1980 who was a Republican governor. And I was appointed because at the time Lloyd Doggett was the state senator and they did a rank political trade, Clements got to avo—appoint someone to the Austin Court of Appeals who was a Republican and didn’t win re-election then, since then there are—are Republicans who have been elected to that court, and—and the trade was that I was—got to be appointed as one of the two Travis County members. Travis County has two members on the LCRA. There are fifteen board members. Travis County has two, each of the counties in the district that are in the water shed have one and then there are two or three or four directors elected from the—the electric service area which includes San
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Marcos, counties that are in another water shed on the south and a couple on the north. But anyway I got to be—I—I was appointed by Clements as a rank political compromise and at the time the general manager was Charles Haring and Charles Haring had been the senator from this area who then was responsible for a lot of the appointments to the board who then made him the general manager, which was a pretty cushy job that paid pretty well at the time, somewhere on the—as I recall in the order of a hundred thousand dollars or more. And I went to my first board meeting and realized that first of all I was the youngest member on the board, secondly that was—it was made up of largely of—of small political hacks from each of these counties. And in my case—in—in—when I
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came there three of the board members had been on the board as long as I’d been alive. The LCRA was about forty years old and three board members had been on there for forty years and they were all male, there was not a woman on the board at the time or even the notion that a woman would be on the board. And, you know, I didn’t know—I’d taken physics in college—I didn’t know a whole lot about electricity and power generation or transmission or distribution lines and didn’t know anything about public financing and had never served on a major corporate board before so I had my work cut out for me and I—and I—I—it was really kind of a—for me it came at a really good time because it was intellectually very interesting to put all of this stuff together and make sense out of it all. And, you know, the LCRA didn’t have any nepotism rules so
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everybody was related to everybody else on the board—on—on the staff. They never had anybody who had any interest at all in the environment. They never had any interest in anything like environmental justice. Essentially it was—it was kind of a rather interesting concept. It was modeled after the TBA. It was a public utility in a state where most of the utilities were privately owned. You had Central Power and Light on the east, Houston Power and Light on the east; in the north you had Texas Utilities. Austin had its own publicly owned electrical system so did the city of San Antonio, but by and large those were the big ones in Texas. And the—the LCRA was terribly afraid that their time had come and that the state was in the position of being likely to sell them off to—to privatize them and hadn’t—that hadn’t quite gotten to be fashionable, but they were treading on—on really, kind of, light ground. And the irony of it is, it was modeled after
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TBA and for all practical purposes it was really basically a product of the depression and The New Deal. And it was Lyndon’s vision about pork and he got Roosevelt to not only build these public housing projects in East Austin, which were the first projects in the nation, but he also got the federal government to agree to finance the building of the dams that the Ensel Empire Co—when it collapsed in the thirties didn’t finish. And so he got very low interest loans, some of which were still being paid off forty years later, to build the various dams on the—on the Colorado. And the board’s vision at the time was to provide low cost electrical energy to business in the—in the area that was served. Most of them were folks in the more pop—populated areas who were bankers or, you
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know, Chamber of Tom—Commerce kind of types, really people who were largely promoters of growth. And they’d have a few ranchers from the western part of the district to kind of balance things out. I remember one of the first things I did on the board was to give all of the members of the board Dr. Seuss—Seuss’s, The Lorax and simply told them that if they didn’t understand the message that they ought to give it to their grandchildren in the hopes that when they came along, they would have an opportunity to make some changes. But it was really an uphill battle. I was trying to think where—where to start. At one point what finally kind of got them in gear was there were no rules—no rules about building marinas in any of the lakes and somebody was proposing
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to l—build a marina on Lake Travis that literally would occupy half of the distance across the lake. And, you know, I’d—I had been writing zoning ordinances—well when I first moved to Westlake, I went to a town hall meeting—I thought this—I didn’t realize that Westlake was a separate municipality, I thought it was just a subdivision in the city of Austin. And I went to the first meeting and the question was whether or not to regulate septic tanks and people would get up and claim that the communists were taken over, that we were here regulating wastewater and that it was part of a communist’s conspiracy. I was in a state of shock. I mean it was incoNPRehensible to me that people didn’t realize that you had to reg—regulate something that could become a real nuisance if you didn’t manage it
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correctly. Well the LCRA board people essentially came from the same background. I was viewed as someone who’d gone to Harvard, who had been raised by a nice family in south Texas and—and, you know, gone astray, I mean really gone astray. And I remember having a party out here at my house, I don’t have any curtains, I mean I do in this room, but not in my house and the wives of the board members would say to me, you know, you don’t have any curtains, we—how—how do you—don’t you worry about people looking in you? And, you know, I live on eight-acre tract, I’m hardly worried about somebody—if somebody wanted to come look at me at my age, let them come, I mean—but that was the kind of mentality. And when they got—when they realized that
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someone was going to basically usurp lake for their own private interest, they got kind of keyed up and we passed and ordinance controlling marina on the lake. And then somebody downstream in Bay City who was by a—another col—lawyer colleague of mine whose—who had—somebody was going to build a nuisance in the flood plain and threaten the water supply for Bay City and so, you know, that kind of thing egged them on and little by little it—it—first of all when—well—well Lloyd asked me—he—he had given me a choice, he said do want to serve—he said I’m—I—I need help. I want you to do one of two things. I want you to be the county chairman, democratic county chairman or serve on the LCRA board or both. And at that time the county—the democrats in the
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county were terribly fractured, even though I knew most of the Hispanics and the Blacks there was, you know, there was a lot of animosity within the democratic party. And I read the LCRA statute and the statute said you had to be free holder, essentially you needed to own an interest in property in the county where you were going to be appointed, so I qualified in that respect, there was no age limit or anything, no other qualification. And I told them that I didn’t think that I could do both and in reading the statute I realized that the LCRA had some jurisdiction over pollution. Written into the statute that was written in the 19—1939, 1940 and so I decided to—to get appointed to serve on the board. And l—little by little we were able to move the board to, you know,
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for example be p—particularly interested in the lakes in policing them, in providing warning systems if there were storms, boat safety, water pollution in the lakes and around the lakes and they got more and more interested in that kind of—and little by little we created an environmental department over there, but it was a long haul moving the LCRA from being essentially benign with respect to the environment and being more particularly interested in raising—keeping low rates. About eight percent of the water—eight percent of the electric power, the DLCRA, there was always the question of how you allocate the cost—well let me back up. The other issue that came—became prominent was the question of whether or not there were going to be inner basin transfers, whether water from this basin would be moved out of the basin to San Antonio which is in dire need of water or to Houston at the lower end. And that—those—those kinds of issues began to raise the interest of the more parochial owners, the rice farmers who had rights that preceded the LCRA and who the LCRA contracted with in order to build the dams. And the LCRA has ended up buying those water rights so that they’re now owned by the public. There were those issues there were the—the issue of the fact the river had been over subscribed, that is to say there—there are more demands on it than the water supply. There were issues of building dams in the upper Colorado River, which
00:40:21 – 2251
essentially alerted the people to the fact that this is a finite resource and that it was important to take care of it. So all of those issues came into play. And then we had a very fortunate experience. A fellow named Pat Oles, I think in some respects in—who was a—who was basically very friendly with Bill Clements and who was on the governors staff with respect to appointments. Pat and I got to be reasonably good friends, but I think largely through Pat’s instance and in order to make Bill Clements look like he might be more environmentally friendly created the Lake Austin and Lake Travis—oh I forget the in—title of the—of the committee…
DT: (inaudible)
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JS: …select committee—Water Quality Standards for Lake Austin and Lake Travis. And I was appointed the chair of the committee and—but I had made it very clear that I was not going to serve on a committee unless I knew who the members were because I—the last thing I wanted to be was be co-opted on water quality standards. And I got appointed chair and we had Dr. Firsch as I recall who was an engineer and very pro water quality and—and very—ex—extremely well qualified on water quality issues, to serve on the committee. And I was elected chairman and I immediately created a technical
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committee to make recommendations to us. And this was in the late summer or early fall and between September and the time we issue our report, Bill Clements loses to Mark White. And in that interim period between the election and—and the swearing in of the governor and in—including his staff we had an enormous opening to be able to do what we wanted and we basically created standards that prohibited any discharge into Lake Austin or Lake Travis of—of wastewater and it was adopted unanimously by the committee, recommended to the water quality board. And it happened largely because at that point in time, Clements’ staff was out of office and they were lame ducks, and by that time Mark White, who didn’t have a particularly good record on the environment,
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hadn’t gotten his foot in the door. And so we just had—it was a—a really—a—a freak and we ended up having—fortunately gotten then standards passed and then adopted by the—the—I—I don’t know if it was Texas Water Commission or the Texas Environmental—whatever the environmental—they change their names all the time, they’re like banks, so whatever it was, we got that established and it’s now a matter of policy. No discharges of any municipal partially treated waste into the Colorado River either on Lake Travis or Lake Austin.
DT: Maybe you could tell us what was happening downstream as well?
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JS: Yeah, but—let me say that about that time I married a woman who was the first woman who was appointed to the LCRA board and I—I—what—do you remember the—do you have the year that I appointed to that?
DT: 1980, you were appointed to the LCRA.
JS: No, no the—the committee—the—the select committee…
DT: ‘82
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JS: ’82, okay well it was that period. In 1986 I—I married the first woman that was appointed to the board. She lived downstream. She represented Fayette County. And there were a couple of things that happened in that period. The first thing was that she’d always said, you know, you people in Travis County are looking out for yourselves, you want clean water upstream, but you don’t want clean water downstream. And sometime in that period Austin created a thirty million dollar bond issue to cr—to upgrade their water quality discharge from the lake—from the Austin treatment plants and have what they call tertiary treatment, which essentially would’ve treated the water to remove all solids, to make it reasonably clear and then to make it nutrient neutral, so that it wasn’t pumping a bunch of nutrients into the Colorado River. Two things happened then. One
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was I became aware of the Environmental Defense Fund and the man—man named Zack Willy and David Rowe. Zack Willy was an engineer with EDF and he—he and a—a lawyer wrote a short book about success they’d had in California. And their success centered around the fact that the city of Los Angeles needed additional water supply so they were going to take it from the central valley system. And the question was, creating a large bond issue to create more dams in Color—in California to bring water from the upper northern part of California down to Los Angeles for water. EDF at that time had a lot more pizzazz than it does now, but they opposed the bond issue. And Willy and the lawyer who were engineers made the case that if they took the irrigated water in Southern California and lined the canals with concrete tubing that the water savings would be equivalent or more than the water they needed to be piped from dams in Northern
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Colorado. And more importantly it would be about half the price. In other words that if they efficiently used the water in the farming area in Southern California, that they could have their cake and eat it too. And they were successful. They defeated the bond issue for the dams in Northern California and created the—the info structures in these canals to line them with concrete and the water savings was then transferred to the city of Los Angeles. It was a win-win project and EDF was extremely successful in that. At the same time David Rowe who was an attorney with them created what they called the Elfin model and wrote a book called, Dynamos and Virgins. And it—he was an heir to the Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s fortune. And Pacific Gas and Electric essentially is the major supplier of electricity in California and the en—elfin model essentially proved
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that it was cheaper to conserve electrical energy than it was to build new power plants, conceptually the same model that was used with respect to the California Water Project for Los Angeles. And he was able to persuade the board of directors that if they would underwrite the cost of conservation, they would reduce the need for creating more electrical power. And they were both very powerful books at the same time the LCRA here was in the process—they had had a terribly bad experience. Originally they had relied exclusively on water then they relied on gas for a generation, then they had a gas-fired plant up in Marble Falls and they had gas-fired plants down in Bastrop. And when the price of natural gas shot to four dollars a thousand cubic feet in 1972 and
’73—was it seven, no it must have been ’75 and ’76, somewhere along there, they realized that they needed to have another power supply and they went to coal. And this
00:49:04 – 2251
was before I was on the board—they had the Fayette power project and the had cre—created I think—they—they went in partnership with Austin. It’s a coal fire plant and the coal comes from Montana. And I understand or have come to understand that power plants are built for their energy supply. If it’s coal and they build it for coal, it has and eight thousand BTU content. It has to be cold. It has eight thousand BTU content and it has a certain sulfur content, etcetera. You can’t turn around and put other kind of coal in it. And so they built these two plants and low and behold first thing that happened is Montana places a severances tax on taking coal out of Montana at thirty percent or
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something along that order and they file a case and go all the way to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court says states can do that. It’s permissible for them to do it. So all of a sudden they once again had a power supply where they couldn’t control the price. And the LCRA board had a study done to determine what would be the next best fuel. And this—they had Chase Econometrics—it was a great experience for me because I realized that, you know, hiring those experts and doing that stuff is like reading goat entrails. They—they are—you know, they’re not—they’re—they’re just speculating, I mean they’re not clairvoyant, it’s pure speculation. And apparently the LCRA had hired somebody who had—and they told them what result they wanted. They had priced nuclear power—and—and I might add the reason the LCRA never got involved in the nuclear plant that the city got involved in was quite frankly because I think most of the
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board members didn’t believe that if they couldn’t see atoms they existed, so I think it was superstition more than anything else that kept them out of there, but whatever the reason we were damn lucky, but that’s what my feeling was. And they hire Chase Econometrics who came down and their projections were that two years or three years from the time they did the report the price of nat—no by 1992 the price of natural gas would be fifteen dollars a thousand cubic feet, in fact it was less than two dollars a thousand cubic feet and that the only reliable source was lignite. And the closest lignite was essentially probably a third of Fayette County. And it was lignite that was of—had four thousand BTU content, the coal we were getting was twice—in other words you get twice as much power out of half as much coal from—or—from the same amount of coal coming from Montana. And they had secretly created a private organization that was
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going out and buying up lignite interest in—in Fayette County. And the Fayette County lignite had the BTU of cow manure, four thousand BTU’s. And when the people in lignite count—Fayette County who realized that they were serious about digging the whole county up found out about it, they went through the roof. And then they—LCRA decided that they were the bureau of reclamation that they needed another dam on the river. Well if you’d read Cadillac Desert and now knew what Willy and EDF had done and what David Rowe had done in terms of conservation, you knew that they didn’t need any of this stuff, that they could achieve the same result without having to build another—a power plant. I might add that this lignite also was more polluting, that is air polluting. And I was able to pursued them that they needed to create a study to determine the increase number of deaths caused by air pollution for the building of this plant. Of
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course when it came back and it was, you know, two or three per year why, you know, that didn’t seem to make any difference. But anyway I got them interested in David Rowe’s book and we basically were able to cut down the amount of energy we needed. The LCRA did undertake some conservation and to my knowledge hasn’t built another plant and finally abandoned the—the—the Fayette Power Project. But only after they had bought a fifty million dollar dragline that was sitting out there on the ground that was partially put together that had to be sold. And—and—and my x-wife Patricia Wilson, had chided me all along about the fact that, you know, here we were—of course Fayette County wanted more industry and they were very happy to have the—the Fayette Power
00:54:00 – 2251
Project. I mean the—meant that people had, you know, good employment with a good retirement system and if you remember correctly because of the—the railroad trains that the LCRA needed to transport their coal from Montana, they created a big railroad yard in Smithville where people who repair—so that they had one good will downstream. I meant they had the won the goodwill of the people in Smithville because Smithville and Bastrop now had—Bastrop had the gas power plants, Smithville had the rail yard and Fayette County got the—was the next biggest down, got the Fayette Power Plant. But she chided me about the fact that we all—that we here in Austin were playing with a double standard, we wanted clean water above us and we didn’t care how polluted the water was below, that we wanted cheap electricity in this area and in the Highland Lakes and were willing to pollute in Fayette County for it. And then lastly that they were going
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to build a Shaw’s Dam. Well, you know, if you read Cadillac Desert you realized these dams really never pay themselves back, if they wasn’t electrical generating power with these—with respect to these dams upstream they just never would’ve—at least the way water was priced at the time, would’ve never paid back their cost. And so we were successful in large measure because of the outcry from—I mean the people in Fayette County really figured that they were getting the shaft and the fact of the matter is that this Shaw’s Dam was going to be only about four or five deep and it was going to me basically a mud flat most of the time, depending on how the water was allocated and stored on there. The idea was to store water in there when we had a great surpluses and to use it to re—rely—or to provide the rice farmers with water and etcetera. Well in it—in that period of time the LCRA bought up those rights. You have to understand that the
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water was terribly, badly misused at the time as well. The rice farmers who had first rights on the Colorado River and made deal with the LCRA when it was created that their water rights would not be second to other rights the LCRA sold, were using six acre feet of water for every acre of rice. And they were essentially using water as a herbicide. If you keep water enough on rice land, nothing else can grow except rice. They get—there weren’t any native weeds and stuff that could grow, so they were using water to keep it down. And there were studies that had been done in other parts of the world that suggested you could do it with one acre foot, so there was a surplus of five acre feet of water and it was being sold at a subsidy. I mean the rice farmers were getting a subsidy from the federal government and then they were getting an enormous subsidy on the cost of water here. And so, you know, in many s—cases the success we had in making them
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change their—their policies at the LCRA was that it simply wasn’t cost effective. And that’s where EDF was very successful in being—in being persuasive and saying, look if you do things slightly differently, you can conserve and reduce the demand and it’ll cost you less than if you build new power plants. And the LCRA has not built a new power—I think—I take it back, I think they have a gas generating plant in Bastrop, for peaking purposes. And I think they—they’ve bought and purchased some interest in Wind Power in West Texas, but I don’t think they’ve built ano—another coal plant or a lignite plant.
(misc.)
[End Reel 2251]
DT: John, early in the interview you talked about how worked intersected with political issues and personalities and I was wondering how environment is affected by it and affects politics and your role in the getting the League of Conservation Voters started?
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JS: Well, I’ve kind of been on the fringes of politics. I ran for the legislature unsuccessfully and the whole time I—people think that sports are the principal form of amusement in—in Austin and quite frankly I don’t think that’s the case. I’ve always thought that people here are interested in politics and that that is the—the, you know, the battleground and it—and it keeps entertained. You know politics is played a very important role in—in virtually everything I’ve done. I got appointed to the LCRA board because I’d been one of Lloyd Doggett’s early supporters. The water quality of the commit—the committee to set water quality standards for Lake Austin and Lake Travis was largely a political thing I think to make Clements look greener and because there was
00:03:25 – 2252
a hiatus between his—his failure to be re-elected and Mark White re-elected we were able to get standards passed that were—and it was a unanimous decision by the committee and included developers as well. You know and there were politics here in Westlake—I was run off as city attorney in 1987 because of a quote, claim conflict of interest. I had anticipated that Westlake would have transmission lines coming through it by the city of Austin and passed and wrote an ordinance for the city of Westlake, requiring the city of Austin to provide three routes, not just the one they wanted and have to satisfy the city on which was the best and we set standards for trans—d—distribution lines and transmission lines as a consequence the city elected—the cit—the electrical system elected to use the existing transmission lines and simply upgrade them. But they were prepared to run 145 KV line, which is those big poles that have the three strands
00:04:46 – 2252
that are fairly separated apart as opposed to the—the—half that which will run—you—see in—in municipalities usually as a distribution system. But anyway they succeeded in running me off the city attorney about the time that there was that wonderful collapse of the housing industry and oil prices went up and so that the rules that we had established with a more environmentally sensitive city council here were not challenged for the next five or six years because the economy had collapsed. So that was fortuitous. But, you know, one of the experiences that I had that I think is—is worth mentioning is the fact that when we first wrote the—the sign ordinance for Westlake, which if my recollection serves me right, a sign could be no larger than fifteen square feet, that’s three by five, three feet, you know, being something like this and five feet, it sounds big, but by most
00:05:53 – 2252
standards it’s a small sign, and they had to be made out of maiden materials. We got an awful lot of static and there is a threshold at which people kind of accept those standards and then want them to be a part of their community. And I can’t tell you where it is, whether it’s forty-nine percent or fifty-six percent or sixty-six percent, but there came a time when enough people had complied with the ordinance so that they expected anybody else who came along and wanted a sign to do it the same way. And this community has gotten a lot of credit for what they call signage—there’s not such—I think that’s a modern day word, but for the fact that we don’t have billboards and we don’t have totem poles. The city’s streets where there are signs have addresses and numbers, street numbers so that you can find a place if you—if you look it up. And that
00:06:57 – 2252
the signs are by and large reasonably attractive certainly much more attractive than—oh, what’s the name of the street in Austin that’s—Burnett Road, which is terribly unattractive. But what I’m saying is that there’s a point where once these standards are in place and enough people are complying, it shifts and there are other classic examples of this. I mean you couldn’t convince me when I first started practicing law that you could pass an ordinance where people would carry plastic bags and pick up dog feces for their animals and yet in San Francisco and New York people do that regularly and if you don’t do it, you’re viewed as being uncivilized at the very least, immoral perhaps at the worst. And again it’s, you know, there’s a—there’s a place where the perception changes and the standard changes and it’s not necessarily—I don’t think it necessarily has to be a
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question of law—cigarette smoking is a good example, where we can move across the threshold to a point where we’re doing things that are better for ourselves and for the environment, the place we live. And as a consequence I got interested in what it would to take to get—to try and work that over and I—and I got interested in two places. I’ve always been very fond of KUT, the local NPR station here in town in large measure because I think programming was designed for our local audiences on the one hand, but more importantly on the other, my sense was that NPR unlike the Fourth Estate even the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal of—new—good newspapers, were really telling the whole story that informing the public required a little more. And so I—KUT got a new station manager in the form of Stewart Mandavol and for some reason someone said, you know, I had been raising money on KUT on their semi-annual fund drives on the air and I’ve been a
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supporter and somebody had suggested to Stewart that he and I have lunch. And so we had lunch and Stewart will tell, when I—I met him I said let me tell you there are two things that you need to know. First is we—we’re informal and you can take the suit and the tie off you don’t need to wear that an—anywhere else and secondly we need local news programming. We need a news desk here and if you ask around that is what we need more than anything else. And he’s done both, I mean, he’s much more informal and he’s created a noon—news desk. And my notion there was that we needed—that if you look at the statistics, most of the people that are sensitive to environmental issues, listen to public radio, but the problem has been that locally we haven’t had a public radio news
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team that went out and asked environmentalist to talk about the subject that we’re—of—of consequence in the community. And, you know, he’s hired a news staff and we had a—a luncheon not all—long after they started where we put the news members together with the head of NGO’s here in this town and they had lunch, they passed around each other’s cards and information about what they do. And they created a directory that provides their news staff with people who—to whom they can address questions, who are ably and amply qualified to address the issues of the day. That was one half of it; the other was the hope that somehow we could raise enough money in the local political system both here and Austin and statewide to make difference, and quite frankly that hasn’t been the same kind of success. We’ve raised on the order of a hundred and fifty to
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two hundred thousand dollars in election cycles, but that’s—that’s not enough to make any difference. And I’m disappointed about that. I’ve come to the conclusion that unless the system is radically changed or somehow the internet becomes a vehicle for providing the kind of information that people who have our disposition can use and be effective, that we’re set for self destruct. I mean, I’m not at the least bit hopeful. The money in politics in this state—a hundred, two hundred thousand dollars is simply not enough to make any difference at all. So that’s—that’s where we are. We—we’ve had some success with—with NPR and local news programming that makes our side—give our—
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our—our—the folks on our side an opportunity to be forthright, intelligent, compelling on environmental issues, but on the other our effectiveness in the legislature has substantially diminished, even with two hundred thousand dollars, which is, I think, a lot of money. I believe that Krugman is correct in his new book, I think it’s entitled Unleashing or Un-something, but in it he says that, you know, politics has substantially changed, the dialog is from center to right and the last forty years have bought—brought more environmental degradation and I’m—I’m—I’m—Unraveling, I think is the name of his title of his book, Paul Krugman, who is an op-ed writer and economist at Harvard who writes for the New York Times and he’s the only voice out really saying, you know, we have really undone, you know, we—we’re in the process of undone—un—of undoing what I worked for throughout my lifetime. I mean I’m basically a new deal democrat; my sense is that the democrats have been a colossal failure. I believe in them as much as I do the republicans from where we are. Few of them have backbones. They—they’re—
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they run from solid districts that they’ve carved out for themselves, there’s no chance—there’s very little chance of moving them and that they system really become not representative. And I don’t—I’m not optimistic about the future at all. I don’t see any great changes, money has become the object of politics and I don’t—I don’t see that changing in a life—in my lifetime.
DT: What is your advice for younger people who want to carry on the torch?
(misc. about angle)
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JS: You know, I think there’s got to be a very, I don’t want to say radical change, but a democratic change and I don’t mean by that Democratic Party. I think—I think part of it is that young people appeared to be more conservative than we were and I think largely because the media spoon-feeds them that. I think basically they’ve got to become involved. It’s their world and if they’re not interested in it, it—it’s certainly not going to change. My view is that there won’t be any change short of some catastrophic incident. And, you know, you think of the ones that have made changes, Trenoble, certainly rises above the top, Three-Mile Island, with respect to nuclear weapons, you know, the Texas
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City fire, when the boat exploded at the docks in Texas City full of fertilizer. I think something along those lines when people realize—I’ve—I’ve always felt that EEF and ED now have made a mistake (inaudible) policy of relating—of health, pardon me, health to the environment. That’s the nexus, people have got to believe—got to first understand and believe that if they don’t do something, it’s hazardous to their health. They’ve only recently begun to pursue that in some of their areas. But I think they’ve been taken over by investment bankers, unfortunately. And I ended up resigning from that board very disgruntled about the fact that the term—that the—the support of the North American
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Free Trade Agreement was made by a inside group and while the inside group wanted to protect banking interest and intellectual property rights and they built it into those agreements, World Trade—Free Trade agreements. They could of just as easily built in agreements that dealt with the environment with human rights, with labor standards. And instead we’ve simply farmed out the work to places that are unregulated and we’ve reached even a lower common denominator, child labor in the shoe business overseas, child labor in clothing manufactures overseas, you know, we’ve agreed to pass laws
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about smoking in this country, but opposed the U.N.’s sanctions on smoking worldwide at the same time. And—and you know that kind of hypocrisy in the long run ruins our reputation as a world leader among other things. So I don’t—I’m not hopeful—I—I, you know, I’ve got a grand daughter that’s two years old and I wonder what—what—I’m very fearful that she’ll look back on this generation and—and essentially view us as people who were greedy about energy consumption and—and not the least bit worried about the pollution that she’s going to have to live with.
DT: (inaudible)
JS: Yeah, exactly that story—and that story.
(inaudible)
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JS: I wish I—I mean I really wish I could answer that question. I think we’ve had a problem delivering environmental message – we haven’t done a good job of that. I mean EDF has got a fifty million dollar annual budget (inaudible) and, you know, they’re not delivering the message; I don’t know how you can talk about the guy whose president of Exxon. I mean if you stop and think about pollution in the world and you think of it on a very broad sense, getting phone calls in the evening, during the dinner by telemarketer—during your dinner period by telemarketers is—is reprehensible, I mean there’s no—no nees—no need for that and you ought to be able to put yourself on a list that keeps all of the phones off or you can selectively choose who you want. I bet that this guy from
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Exxon has done that—that he’s on the—on the—on the telemarketing—the don’t call list, just like the telemarketers are on the no call list. And I’ll bet you that the guy who’s president of Exxon has got a place (?) or Aspen, somewhere that, you know, is a community that doesn’t have any industrial pollution to speak of. And (inaudible) vacations there. But I doubt seriously he’s driving a Prius, (inaudible) Hummer. You know, we’ve got a common message, is there any opportunity for us to get together as a group and try to do something like a website—like Move On or any of the other websites.
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And you know, th—they were not willing to give up their mailing lists, they didn’t—they—they’ve—they were afraid that they’d lose patrons if they went from, you know, issues of choice and match them up with issues of the environment and I—unless, you know, we’re—things aren’t going to change—we’re so fractured that we each have our own, kind of, little group where we preach, you know, it’s like preaching to the choir, and we’re not willing to go beyond that. And I—I wish I could tell you the answer. I don’t know what it is. I think part of it is the perception is that they don’t—some of them don’t believe in global warming, it’s hard for me to ac—accept that. It’s hard also to put a relationship between—between any act—single activity that we do and the net total of pollution, for example I drive—I have—I had a Prius here and my daughter has it in San
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Francisco and I’ve ordered one of the new ones, but you know, if we all went to cars that double—two and a half times the mileage, we could reduce our gas consumption by presumably that amount, I mean and we’d—we’d be less reliant on—but sometime—somehow tying the two together, the relationship between our daily activity on the one hand and pollution on the other, the total effect of pollution is really hard to—to fathom. It’s really hard to put a—make the connecting thoughts. I do think for example that there are some scientific iNPRovements, which in and of themselves will make a whole lot of differences. I think that hybrid engine is one, I think the Internet is one, I’d—I—I for one for example travel less and am able to do more by doing it on the Internet. My son’s gallery in Santa Fe is a good example of that. His notion, which I think was kind of
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novel and I he’s—he’s the next generation, he’s the people that we’re going—are affected by it—to just give a—an illustration, one of the artists that the gallery represents has—is represented by a gallery in Santa Monica where he has thirty-five prints that sell for a thousand dollars a piece, so he’s essentially got a thirty-five thousand dollar investment in that gallery. Wilson’s notion was that by putting his entire body of work on the internet and available at our gallery, that he didn’t have to print thirty-five images and people—the—on the one hand the artist didn’t have to put that many in the gallery and on the other, the patron had a larger choice. And I think that kind of thing will reduce a lot of unnecessary consumption. For example, some of these prints would never
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sell, but that’s just a very small idea of how things are working. But that’s not going to be enough. Thomas Friedman wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about three weeks ago where he said the way to solve the problem of rebuilding Iraq is to charge a dollar a gallon in tax, so we can fund it. It would reduce gasoline consumption if you think of—that the market is elastic and the price and demand are related to one another and—on the one hand, and so it would reduce gas here, it would redu—reduce the amount of gas—gasoline and petroleum products we use. It would lower the price because the production is greater than that. And it would let—make us less reliant on the Middle East for—for—for oil and it would pay for that. But, I mean, ask yourself when any politician in this country is going to run with that. I mean it’s just not going to work. You know, we have,
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you know, Madonna’s right, we’ve become a materialistic society and we want to buy every—I mean look at the catalogs and the magazines; they all want to sell you some new gadget, something. So I—I just—I mean I don’t—I think that we have basically become addicted to consumption from the—from the amount of fat we eat in food at McDonald’s to—to the latest television screen and un—until we change the way we live, we’re going to continue to consume twenty-five percent of the world’s—what—whatever it is—twenty-five percent of the world’s natural resources and only represent eight percent of the population, or whatever that figure is. I mean it’s staggering and I don’t see it changing short of some catastrophe.
DT: Can you just help us understand some of the things that are not materialistic in your life that give you pleasure and joy, whether it’s the photography that you do or beautiful places that you visit?
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JS: Well, I have joined a group of octogenarians, I’m the youngest person in the group in Santa Fe called the Santa Fe Hiking and Marching Society and every Wednesday we go for a walk. You know, the only thing I wear are a pair of boots, I carry an apple and—and some cheese and crackers and water. And we in the summertime we start in the Pecos Wilderness and walk seven and a half miles, usually a change in elevation of fifteen hundred feet or more. And, you know, two weeks, three weeks ago I was walking above the Santa Fe Ski Basin and mushrooms—I don’t—I mean I couldn’t tell one from the other and wouldn’t dare touch one of them, but the mushrooms were prolific.
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Everywhere you looked, it was almost as if you were walking on a sea of to—of stools, you know, that—m—m—and in the su—in the winter time when it becomes too cold to walk in that climate, I walk—they walk down in the valley of the R—down in the Rio Grande valley somewhere to Bandelier and walk in that valley where the Indians lived a thousand years ago and just below Los Alamos. And they walk in places like that. And I do that once a week on Wednesday. It’s a nice time to meditate. It’s a nice time to just breathe clean air. I must say that my group—there’s a certain irony and humor in everything we do, as I said all of these folks are in their eighties, I’m sixty-three, they have done it every—every Wednesday, fifty-two weeks a year unless Christmas falls on a
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Wednesday and so they’re all pretty healthy. But at the end of the walk, the—the person who is leading the walk then provides some kind of a—of a party meal. And it was unbelievable to me, here they’re doing the healthiest thing they could possibly doing at—be doing at their age and they get down at the bottom of the walk and have potato chips and chocolate chip cookies and brownies and I mean, you know, they’ve basically undone exactly what it is that they presumably were going to get over by doing that. The—yeah they air conditioning unit just came on, so, I don’t know whether you have—I mean that to me is—it’s simple, it—it—we all go together in single car, I mean we fill up
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a car so we’re not one person in an automobile, so there are five of us that travel and—actually there are thirteen or fifteen members in the group, so we take three cars. And you know, we’ve done the Pecos Wilderness, we’ve done Anasazi Ruins, we’ve gone up in central northern New Mexico and walked in the Desert and it’s a wonderful—it’s a glorious experience. We’ve walked in the rain, in the creek beds. And, you know, you—you take the time—I’m the most liberal in the group, most of them are much more conservative than I am. One of my patrons, when I was first invited as a fellow who walks and has done this for twenty years and hates environmentalists, so I have to laugh
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and I’d say, but for the fact that the National Park System or the National Forest is owned, we wouldn’t have an opportunity to be walking here, but sometimes, that escapes them. But again, here you have somebody who, you know, for twenty years has walked in this wilderness and, you know, wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t think it—they ought to privatize it.
DT: Thanks for walking in the wilderness a little bit with us. Anything you’d like to add.
JS: I can’t think of anything, right off hand.
DT: Well, thank you very much for your time.
[End of Reel 2252]
[End of Interview with John Scanlan]