In 2000, Andy Sipocz, a biologist with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, noticed that someone was building a subdivision on prairie slough wetlands on the outskirts of Houston. There were a lot of reasons why this was not a good idea. Even though it might look to a casual observer as though the slough wasn’t doing much for the city, its clay soil was binding to toxic metal and chemicals from local industry and keeping them from spilling into waterways. Its plants were capturing fertilizer runoff from fields upstream before it could spill into the water supply and storing rainwater in their roots, some of which stretched as much as 15 feet down into the earth.

As one of the most vulnerable cities in the country to hurricanes, Houston needed all of its wetlands. Sipocz knew that migratory waterfowl used the area where the subdivision was being built; that was the only reason he needed. He tipped off the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and construction on the subdivision stopped. 

Then, in 2001, construction started up again. A Supreme Court ruling had weakened the Migratory Bird Rule just enough to give local officials who were more excited by development than soggy wetlands the ability to greenlight projects, and not get dinged by the Feds. To these local officials, it was hard to get excited about protecting grasses, no matter how often people described them as critical. Mike Talbott, the then director of the Houston flood control district, referred derisively to wetlands as “these magic sponges out in the prairie.” 

Houston area residents who bought new homes were also excited, until those houses began to flood. Even buildings outside of FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Association) floodplain maps filled with water every time a major storm rolled through town. One group of residents in west Houston sued the entire city in an attempt to force it to deal with its flooding problems. Houston’s location on the Gulf of Mexico means that the weather-related impacts of climate change (heavier rain, stronger storms) are becoming more evident than they are in other areas, but the rest of the country is catching up fast: Floods are already America’s most common, and most expensive, natural disaster. 

The bad news about Hurricane Harvey is the flooding that it’s brought to Houston could have been mitigated if people had made different decisions as recently as two decades ago. The city wouldn’t have had to put a moratorium on development—just steer that development away from the coastline, with rules that kept new pavement to a minimum. Zoning could have ensured that commercial and residential buildings were either built several feet above the floodline or with a first story designed not to mold over or otherwise deterioriorate if it was flooded every few years. Developers could have been required to chip in for emergency reservoirs and other stormwater infrastructure that could have helped the city cope with drought as well as rain. A realistic look at Houston’s flood risk under climate change could have resulted in a comprehensive plan to evacuate the area’s most vulnerable residents, before flooding got so bad that they had to be rescued. 

For decades, scientists warned that Houston—a city that has been trying to solidify its swampy nature since it was founded—needed to stay permeable if it was going to survive the crucible of climate change. The good news is that in the last several years, those warnings have been coming from Houston’s neighborhoods as well as its scientists. Whether or not residents connected the city’s flooding with climate change, they knew there was a problem even before this storm came and proved it.

They won’t get much help from our current administration, which is busily undoing rules that would have helped prevent the kind of development that has devastated Houston. But some of the most profound environmental movements in U.S. history—the freeway rebellions, for example—started at the local level. Changing the city to make sure that damage never happens again will be difficult but can be accomplished the same way.