Book Review

Canada and the United States

The eleven essays that comprise this interdisciplinary anthology examine the interaction between the city's residents and the south Texas landscape, demonstrating how humans and their environment have shaped each other. San Antonio and its environs represent an environmental bordertown located at a point where the Texas hill country on the southern edge of the Great Plains meets the gulf coastal plain. A second boundary also shapes the regional environment, as the city lies near the climatic transition zone between the humid East and the arid West. Together these natural boundaries strongly influence the environmental character of the region, which is the topic of James Peterson's essay, "San Antonio: An Environmental Crossroads on the Texas Spring Line." He notes that the city is an oasis dependent on the Edwards aquifer and predicts that water will play a larger role in the future of Texas than oil has in the past" (p. 39).	1
Reliance on that aquifer, conflicts over its use, and the search for additional surface water sources are constant themes in San Antonio's history, and they became the focus of the city's mid-twentieth-century "water fights." The critical issues of protecting the aquifer and also extending adequate water and sewage lines to Hispanic neighborhoods invariably encountered the resistance of the city's political and economic elite, whose interests were identified with development of the central business district as well as suburban subdivisions. Water management consequently divided along ethnic and class lines to the detriment of Hispanic residents until relatively recently. Similarly, efforts to protect the aquifer by restricting growth have had only limited success in preventing suburban sprawl in the recharge areas above the aquifer.	2
This book looks beyond the natural environment to include articles that assess San Antonio's social ecology. If the city has had a mixed record on environmental issues, its approach to social crises was somewhat worse. Again, city leaders, exercising their power through the Good Government League in the 1950s and 1960s, largely overlooked construction of such urban amenities as neighborhood parks. San Antonio's few open spaces, editor Char Miller writes, "were telling marks of a closed society," as were the city's incidence of social pathology and disease (p. 6). Although the high infant death rate subsided after the city belatedly extended water and sewer systems to the west side, city residents still confront threats to their well being, most recently pollution emanating from military installations around the city. The most serious occur at Kelly Air Force Base, where neighborhood residents, fearing for their health and property, formed a Committee for Environmental Justice and filed a civil rights case based on environmental racism.	3
San Antonio prides itself as "the birthplace of historic preservation in the United States west of the Mississippi," and that topic is discussed under the heading of "Land Marks." While such volunteer groups as the San Antonio Conservation Society effectively saved individual sites, namely the Alamo ("Texas' most hallowed shrine"), rehabilitation projects have not fared so well, as John Hutton's critique of the Alamo Quarry Market reveals. This upscale mall, once heralded as a unique rehabilitation project, proved to be a planning disaster that exists in "an uneasy relationship to its historical predecessor" (p. 233). The failure of imagination in this instance reflects the seeming lack of vision among the city's business leadership, which thinks largely in terms of corporate development. Hutton captures the essence of San Antonio's neglect of its social, environmental, and built environments when he claims that "San Antonio is a poor city with dreams of becoming a prominent one" (p. 238). Caught up in a vision of national urban prominence, the city's establishment has paid scant attention to matters that did not reinforce their narrow perspective.	. . .