Saving the Springs: Urban Expansion and Water Quality in Austin - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 46

Bluebonnets, Golden-cheeked Warblers and Black-capped Vireos, and so on
through a catalogue of this natural environment of Austin, Texas. It is through
this natural environment of Austin, Texas, that I love America. 41
A Fragile Land: The Texas Hill Country
A particular focus of Austin residents, regional politics, and urban growth
is the land to the west of the city known as the Hill Country. The bound-
aries of the Hill Country are loosely defi ned but comprise an area span-
ning several counties and hundreds of square miles of largely rural area
characterized by rolling landscape, massive live oak trees, spectacular fi elds
of wildfl owers, and picturesque views. 42 There are a plethora of historical
comparisons between the Hill Country and Mediterranean environments,
particularly the Tuscany region of Italy. 43 However, the appearance of a
bountiful landscape that could rival the agricultural production of Tuscany
was deceptive. Famed LBJ biographer Robert Caro characterizes the scenic
beauty of the Hill Country as a trap for early settlers:
[The grass had] grown so slowly because the soil beneath it was so thin. The Hill
Country was limestone country, and while the mineral richness of limestone makes
the soil produced by its crumbling very fertile, the hardness of limestone makes
it produce that soil slowly. There was only a narrow, thin layer of soil atop the
Hill Country limestone, a layer as fragile as it was fertile, vulnerable to wind and
rain—and especially vulnerable because it lay not on level ground but on hillsides:
rain running down hillsides washes the soil on those slopes away. The very hills
that made the Hill Country so picturesque also made it a country in which it was
diffi cult for soil to hold. The grass of the Hill Country, then, was rich only because
it had had centuries in which to build up, centuries in which nothing had disturbed
it. It was rich only because it was virgin. And it could only be virgin once. 44
It was this virginal appearance of the Hill Country and its promise for
great agricultural productivity that would attract earlier settlers entranced
by the Edenic character of the landscape. 45
Early land use in the Hill Country consisted largely of cattle ranching
and cotton farming, activities that had devastating effects on the soils and
vegetation by compacting the land and encouraging runoff during storm
events. Although agricultural land use is different from urbanization, it
has similar physical effects in terms of producing polluted storm-
water runoff. These impacts were amplifi ed as land use in the Hill Coun-
try gradually expanded to include suburban residential and commercial
development. Today, the area continues to support cattle ranching but the
region as a whole is increasingly characterized by single-family residences
in suburban subdivisions. 46