Shifting Landscapes: Historic Tales of Environmental Disruption in Austin, TX

Oral history interviews narrate how we came to live in the world of today. Such interviews teach us about the social, cultural, and political forces that have shaped our current reality. Through recounted childhood stories, memories of change, and dreams for the future we can understand how a city like Austin came to be. The Austin Public Library has preserved oral history recordings from over 400 local residents. While we can chronicle the history of popular topics like Austin’s music scene, our environmental history remains understudied. 

The interviews presented here were conducted between 1964 and 2004 and speak of the shifting relationship between Austin residents and their natural environments. Through these interviews we create a broad understanding of processes of urbanization, industrialization, and gentrification that have been imposed on the natural environment and local communities. These changes came in a push to develop Austin, forever changing how people relate to their environments. 

Environmental Harmony or Disruption?

Bathing in crystal clear creeks. Basking in grand shaded trees. Running through untouched open fields. Such are the experiences of interviewees like Dot Norwood and Janet Fish, who through their descriptions paint a picture of abundance and peaceful communion with natural spaces. But woven through these narratives are anecdotes that contrast this reality. Previously hidden stories emerge through these oral history interviews, ones that narrate skirmishes between Indigenous communities and settlers and the experiences of residents facing the consequences of infrastructural development. The disparity in the types of stories outlined in these interviews brings to light a relation of privilege that illuminates who and what benefits from city expansion as it progresses to environmental disruption. These interviews speak to a process in which ecosystems, and how people relate to them, are changed, frequently due to human interference. 

In vivid descriptions of childhood memories and changing cityscapes, interviewees bring forth  previously forgotten details that highlight disparities of power and access. Experiences of environmental harmony were not lived by all Austin residents, but by those wealthy white communities most represented by the city. Unraveling the memories illustrated in these interviews, it becomes clear how communities' relationships with their environments are dependent on their societal status, something hinged upon racial and class background. While white wealthy Austinites spoke of joy found in natural beauty, interviewees like Ben May and Silvia Herrera depict an Austin that abandoned their communities in pursuit of urban development. These differing experiences emphasized the class and racial disparities of the time, ones that continue today in current practices of exclusion and marginalization that furthers environmental disruption. Shedding light on the reality of residents all across Austin, these interviews force us to reframe how we understand the historical development of the city. In these interviews those who experienced the consequences of Austin’s urban development tell their stories along with those that created this reality.

Community Preservation

When we experience our natural environments how often do we think about how those before us interacted with it? Or how communities with varying ideologies and worldviews do? These oral history interviews create a tapestry of Austin’s memories. One full of appreciation for natural beauty that traces how city expansion and development affected environments. While the perspectives of white and wealthy residents are dominantly recorded and preserved, an important narrative shift is made with Herrera and May that emphasize a reality we see today, one of environmental separation and collapse maintained by a city that prioritized community preservation based on their perceived value. 

While the narratives of expansion and environmental relation are not equal, the interviews have a common thread of community resilience and pride. The interviewees bring us into the past showing how they relied on one another in times of need and experienced pride and faith in times of joy. These collective community memories let us look into how residents interacted with not only one another, but outsider communities as well. Many of the interviews make reference to interactions and relationships with Indigenous communities and Black Americans, at times using derogatory language. These aspects of the narrative are crucial to further understand social norms at the time that placed communities of color outside paths of progress and into the margins. The Master Plan of 1928 is one such example, through perceived city modernization plans Black Austinites were forcibly moved off their land and segregated. Contending with this reality, interviewee Ben May brings us into a reflection of the community and environmental effects of the plan. Seen as disposable, communities of color like Clarksville and those in East Austin were ultimately discarded and made to disproportionately experience environmental disruption. These interviews provide necessary context into how communities throughout Austin experience their environments, land, and the city.

The Interviews

The historical interviews presented in this series will progress as follows. In an interview from 1967 with Dot Norwood and her childhood friends, the women recount shared memories of their childhoods growing up in Hyde Park and share historical accounts about their family ancestry, property, as well as encounters with Indigenous communities. Through a story of sisterhood, the infrastructural development of Austin begins to be revealed in its relation to the natural environments experienced by the three women. Contrasting with visions of beauty and progress elicited in Norwood's interview, an interview conducted in 2004 with Sylvia Herrera examines the changing natural landscape as experienced by East Austinites as a direct result of urbanization and gentrification. Despite neglect from the city, Herrera takes us through the origin and success of PODER, a grassroots social justice organization based in East Austin that she helped to found. Following Herrera, are two interviews from 2002 with Janet Fish, a prominent environmental conservationist of the region, that show an Austin of the past now only experienced by white wealthy residents. In lush descriptions of camping trips and fording rivers, Fish paints a picture of natural beauty that she narrates alongside tales of Comanche and “hillbilly” clashes with Austin residents. 

To shift perspectives we continue with an interview from 1967 with Ben May and other residents of Clarksville, the historical freedmen town, where its origins are brought to light in a story highlighting the heart and soul of this vibrant neighborhood as it has faced challenges of gentrification and ever-advancing infrastructural development. Competing with this frequently overlooked narrative is an interview from 1964 with white residents Robert F. Bacon and Ella Lambert Bacon, that follows major events in Austin’s history such as the Capitol burning and the breaking of a dam. These stories are reimagined to create an image of a past Austin wrought by environmental forces. Continuing with the narrative of a changing Austin we have an interview from 2000 with Rowena Stenis, Tom Stenis, and Llewellyn Smith that shows early relationships to natural environments, one based in beauty and progress. This expands into discussions of land ownership in relation to the Comanche Nation, a tribe of the American Southwest. Ending the series with this interview, we are able to experience the dominant perspective of Austin residents as they look back at their environmental relations.

Austin Today

The Austin of today looks vastly different from the Austin described in the interviews presented above. The cycles of urbanization and industrialization that interviewees like Norwood and Herrera express, have progressed to overcome once treasured natural environments, forever changing how residents throughout the city approach environmental engagement. This development, and the voices amplified in these tales of expansive progress, has not been equal. While much has changed, the same systems that perpetuated marginalization and environmental disruption continue today primarily affecting communities in East Austin. 

In an effort to document current effects of urbanization and gentrification on natural environments in East Austin, contemporary oral history interviews have been conducted. Led by a team from UT Austin in collaboration with PODER, these are meant to bring to light underrepresented perspectives of the city. Through narratives of changing environments, memories and stories long hidden are allowed to shine.

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Content Warning: Some interviews contain disturbing or offensive terms and phrasing in reference to Black and Indigenous residents. We acknowledge the historic, systemic inequities represented by this material. Because we wish to be honest about when and who history harms, we have not edited the audio file, but we have altered the written transcriptions and use asterisks to signal offensive language.