Every April the schools do something for Earth Day. A class walks out to a strip of grass by the parking lot with a flat of seedlings and a bag of mulch. Somebody's grandmother sends a tray of cookies. A poster goes up in the hallway with a blue-and-green globe on it, and under the globe, in marker, a word like "protect." The kids mean it. The teachers mean it. Then the bell rings, and the buses pull out onto Garth Road and Bayway Drive, and a good number of them drive home past a fence with a flare behind it.
Nobody on the bus finds that strange, and the fact that nobody finds it strange takes some saying.
Baytown is a refinery town. Nobody who lives here is confused about it. The complex on the channel is the reason the town has the shape it has. Humble Oil began building the refinery in 1919 and had it running in 1920, set beside the Goose Creek field so the crude would not have far to travel, and the plants that make ethylene and the plants that turn ethylene into everything else grew up around it over the decades that followed. The plants are the largest employers in town. The taxes they pay build the schools where the seedlings get planted. When a turnaround comes and the contract crews roll in, the hotels fill, the RV parks fill, and the restaurants on Garth Road run short of chairs. The money that bought the flat of seedlings passed, somewhere back along the line, through a drum on the ship channel before it got to the garden center.
And Baytown is a town that breathes. About eighty-five thousand of us. The same air moves over the units and over the ballfields. Most afternoons in the warm months the wind comes off the bay, a sea breeze pulled inland because the land warms faster than the water under the same sun; the air over the land rises, and the cooler air over the bay slides in underneath to take its place. It is a small heat engine, and it runs every clear afternoon whether or not anyone is watching. That wind does not check anybody's badge at the gate. Whatever is in it goes to the Nature Center and the hospital on Garth Road and the Little League diamonds the same way. The operator on the tower at midnight and the kid on the swing set at noon are pulling from the same tank.
An Earth Day essay written from somewhere else would pick a side. It would either be about the damage, with the flare as the villain, or it would be about the jobs, with the flare as a torch of progress. Both of those essays are easy to write. Both have been written many times. Neither of them can be written from here, because from here the two sides are the same people. The man who reads the air monitors lives on the same street as the woman who runs the cracker. Their kids are in the same class with the seedlings. There is no "them" to point at. There is only the town, which makes the fuel and breathes the air, and has to be honest about both.
Honesty starts with the ground.
This town learned early, and in its body, that what you take out from under a place shows up on top of it. The Goose Creek field was one of the first places anyone drilled from over the water; derricks stood in the creek and in Tabbs Bay, and as the oil came up, the land went down. Later, and on a larger scale, the whole Houston area pumped groundwater faster than the ground could stand. The water in the clay layers under this coast is part of what holds the clay up; draw it down and the clay packs tighter, and the surface follows it. The subdivision called Brownwood sat on a peninsula on the bay and went down with it, a little at a time, until high tides came into yards that had been dry when the houses were built. It flooded, was rebuilt, flooded again, and after Hurricane Alicia in 1983 the people gave it up. Where their streets ran there are now trails, ponds, and herons. The Harris-Galveston Subsidence District, formed in 1975, is the reason the sinking slowed: it decides where groundwater may be pumped and how much, and it pushed the region toward surface water instead. That is the kind of Earth Day story this town can tell without borrowing it from anywhere: a mistake made in plain sight, a rule written because of it, and a marsh where a neighborhood used to be.
The pelicans are the other story. Brown pelicans were nearly gone from this coast once. DDT worked its way up the food chain, from the water to the small fish to the bigger fish to the bird, concentrating at every step, and in the bird it interfered with the chemistry that lays calcium down in an eggshell. The shells came out thin, and the eggs broke under the weight of the parent settling onto the nest. The chemical was banned in the United States in 1972. The birds came back, slowly, and then not slowly. Now they fish beside the tankers. You can stand on the pier at Bayland Park and watch one fold its wings and drop into the water fifty yards from a ship riding low with crude, and both of them, bird and ship, are doing exactly what they came to do. Nobody arranged that as a symbol. It is just what the bay looks like on a Tuesday.
The poster has a history too. The first Earth Day was April 22, 1970. Before that year was out the federal government had an Environmental Protection Agency and a Clean Air Act rewritten with teeth in it, and two years after that the same agency banned DDT. The pelican on the piling at Bayland is a direct descendant of that spring. So is the monitor on the fence line, and the permit that says what the flare may burn and when, and the rule that tells a refinery how much of a given compound it may let into the wind. The poster in the hallway is the youngest form of a set of laws this town has lived under for about half the refinery's life.
So the ledger is real on both sides, and this town has entries in both columns going back a century. It knows what a poisoned bird looks like and what a sunken street looks like. It also knows what a paycheck looks like and what a hospital looks like with the lights on.
The honest version of Earth Day is larger than the poster, not smaller, and the place to see that is the barrel.
Every barrel that comes up the channel is a piece of sea floor. The crude is what is left of tiny marine organisms that lived hundreds of millions of years ago, died, sank, and were buried under mud until pressure and time cooked them into oil. A refinery does not make energy. It takes that old sea and sorts it into forms a person can use: the diesel in the school bus, the kerosene in a jet, the lighter fractions that go to the cracker and come out as ethylene, which becomes the plastic in the IV bag and the insulation on the wire that carries current to the incubator. The fertilizer that grew the wheat in the cookies the grandmother sent was made with hydrogen pulled from natural gas; about half the nitrogen in every human body has passed through that process. The earth in Earth Day is the thing we are made of, run through the plants, and handed back.
Even the flare belongs in the accounting. A flare is not a leak and not a decoration. It is a safety valve with a flame on it: when a unit has gas it cannot hold, because of a startup or an upset or a relief valve doing its job, the gas goes to the flare and burns there in the open air instead of collecting somewhere it could explode. What comes off the top, when the flame is burning well, is mostly carbon dioxide and water vapor, which is what comes off a candle. A tall steady flame over the channel is the plant saying, in the only sentence it has, that something is being handled. That does not make the flame free. Every pound that burns up there is a pound that did not become product, and above a certain size the burning has to be reported to the state, with the cause and the count. The town watches the flare the way it watches the weather, and it can tell the ordinary flame from the other kind.
The easy essays are wrong for the same reason. The one that says the plant is the enemy of the earth forgets that the plant is where a piece of ancient sea floor gets turned into the ambulance. The one that says the plant is progress and leave it alone forgets that the same wind that carries the flare's heat away carries everything else too, and that a town which sank its own neighborhood does not get to pretend the ground is infinite. Both essays are propaganda. Propaganda is what you write when you have decided not to look.
Looking is the job. The operator does it literally, sitting in front of the numbers all night, temperature and pressure and flow, waiting for the one that moves. The people who walk the fence line with the monitors do it, sampling the air at the property edge so that what leaves the plant is measured and not guessed at. The birders at the Nature Center do it in November, counting what came through, and so does the kid with the seedling, who is being asked, in the plainest way a school can ask it, to pay attention to something alive and keep paying attention after the poster comes down.
A refinery town is a good place to feel the weight of what that asks. A sea died and became oil, the oil was pumped up and refined and became the fuel in a bus, and the bus carried a kid to a school where she looked at a globe on a poster and thought about the earth: the ground, in other words, arriving at the point where it can look at itself and wonder how it is doing. The chain does not have a villain in it. It has a lot of people, most of them tired, trying to keep it running and trying to keep it clean, and those are not two jobs.
Nothing on Earth Day says the flare has to go out. Nothing says it gets to burn any way it wants. The town lives in the space between those two sentences.
Go back to the strip of grass by the parking lot a week later, after the poster has come down. Most of the seedlings have taken. One or two are lying over, the way one or two always do, and the mulch has gone gray in the sun. A sprinkler somebody remembered to set is ticking across them in the late light, and out at the curb the buses are lined up with their engines running, waiting for the bell.
