Houston: A Cautionary Tale for Atlanta?

In the 1950s, when I was a toddler, my family moved from Virginia to a house in, what was then, the outskirts of Buckhead; it was built beside two streams that converged at the bottom of a forested slope in our backyard. It was a wonderful place to play and learn about nature in the woods and streams that were full of life back then: crayfish, snakes and a variety of fish species.

Given the topography of the house site and few development regulations, a portion of our split level home had been constructed less than fifteen feet from the edge of the creek that we called Gold Branch. (In 2014, my colleagues and friends arranged for the stream to be officially re-named Riverkeeper Creek, in recognition of my environmental work, but that’s another story...)

In 1959, Lenox Mall was built upstream in our watershed and the creek that received the drainage from that previously forested, now hardened, mall site became a raging, muddy torrent when it rained. It was my first,