'A concrete river had to be wrong': Environmental action on Houston's bayous, 1935--1980

The rise of a national environmental movement is well documented, and there are studies of local environmental campaigns, more often starting from the late 1970s onward than earlier in the postwar period. Less conspicuous in the historiography is a connection between local environmental campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s and the rise of a national environmental movement. Until recently there was a tendency within environmental history to assume a dichotomous relationship between local and national action.;"Save Buffalo Bayou" was an archetypal local campaign from several perspectives. First, the story of "Save Buffalo Bayou" dissolves the artificial separation between local and national. Timing, trajectory, and duration of the campaign suggest that early, local action was constitutive of, not separate from, the national movement. Second, beginning as a "not in my backyard" (NIMBY) campaign, "Save Buffalo Bayou" was the kind of local action that alerted Congress to the need for an environmental policy. Once Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the Save Buffalo Bayou Campaign achieved its objective when the Corps of Engineers solicited public input on the environmental impact statement and subsequently cancelled the flood control protect on Upper Buffalo Bayou. Third, as "Save Buffalo Bayou" progressed, newly established local chapters of national organizations supported the campaign as part of Houston's emerging environmental community, and activists were never just local as they appealed to and served with national organizations.;Hailed as an environmental victory, the Save Buffalo Bayou Campaign represented an expansion, through upper middle class networks, of twentieth-century volunteer conservation to postwar environmental activism. Organized to oppose the location and technology of the flood control project, "Save Buffalo Bayou" challenged government authority and policy planning a decade before "NIMBY" entered popular vernacular. Expanding to a "not in anybody's backyard" consciousness, "Save Buffalo Bayou" activists established the foundations of an environmental community in Houston, pushed open the doors closed to citizen participation, and established a vocal opposition to the hegemony of the pro-growth coalition of business interests that had ruled Houston since the city's founding, demonstrating along the way that local and national action are reciprocal and iterative.