Saving the Springs: Urban Expansion and Water Quality in Austin - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 57

control private property.” 90 This strong property rights aura is prevalent
in Texas, as an environmental activist notes: “Texas has this love affair
with sort of a cowboy image. You get to do what you want to do on your
own land and you have a right to do that. And this worked very well when
you wanted to put in a windmill pump and run some cattle. And we have
carried forward that mentality to a time when what you do on your land
makes a very big difference to everybody else. And it just doesn't work
very well.” 91
The regulatory approach of the SOS Ordinance extends Austin's cul-
tural interpretation of the springs upstream into the Hill Country. The
regulation is a means of translating new understandings of aquifer science
to the property ownership regime. However, its translation into legally
binding regulation using impervious cover restrictions, treatment strate-
gies, and setbacks is merely a proxy for the ecological fl ows of the land-
scape and falls short of refl ecting the interconnectedness of regional water
fl ows. In other words, the topology of environmental fl ows is in confl ict
with the topographic system of property rights that demarcates the land-
scape in discrete, bounded units. Despite the passage of the environmental
regulations, the aggregate effects of development in the region, even under
the stringent limits of the SOS Ordinance, continue to be unknown. The
landscape and subsurface continue to resist enrollment in the framework
of land use regulation and environmental protection.
On May 30, 1997, the aims of Austin's environmental community
were bolstered when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service granted the Bar-
ton Springs Salamander ( Eurycea sosorum ) protection under the federal
Endangered Species Act. 92 The salamander was discovered in the 1940s
and is only known to reside in the Springs. Unlike other salamanders, the
Barton Springs Salamander retains external gills throughout its life and
is dependent on a continuous fl ow of clean, clear, and cool water. 93 The
federal government identifi ed the primary threats to the species as the
degradation of water quality and quantity in Barton Springs resulting from
urban expansion in the Barton Springs watershed. 94 As such, the role of
Barton Springs as an indicator of the ecological health of the aquifer was
further solidifi ed, with the salamander serving as the proverbial “canary
in the coal mine.” 95 Where the development community reached out to the
state government to forward their interests, the environmental community
trumped this action by invoking the hammer of federal regulation. Protec-
tion of Barton Springs was now simultaneously a local issue of cultural
preservation and a national issue of biodiversity protection.