CSLS Speaker Series – “When Acts of God Became Acts of Man: Floods, Property, and the Legal Origins of Climate Change in Houston”

Featuring Jonathan Levy, Professor of History, Sciences Po Paris, Centre for History

Abstract:
This talk is drawn from a book-in-progress on the history of climate change in the city of Houston in the late twentieth century. Historians are currently at work exploring how to effectively write “planetary histories” of climate change; this book approaches climate from the perspective of the city that sits at the very center of the global carbon economy and that represents perhaps the most energy-intensive form of urban life that has ever existed. The talk draws from a chapter on the history of tropical storms and floods in Houston and their relationship to the city’s pattern of urban and ex-urban sprawl, with particular focus on the Brays Bayou watershed. It is centered upon a series of floods in 1979, which first brought the relationship between unregulated development and flood risk into city and county politics — exposing a jurisdictional vacuum that neither city nor county was willing to fill — and traces that failure forward through Tropical Storm Allison in 2001, one of the most destructive rainfall events in American history. The legal dimension is carried through to Kerr v. Harris County Flood Control District, in which in 2015 the Texas Supreme Court distinguished “man-made” floods from “Acts of God,” exposing decades of accumulated liability, only to quietly reverse its own ruling the following year.