New member welcome: Save Buffalo Bayou
CEC is delighted to welcome Save Buffalo Bayou to the Citizens’ Environmental Coalition.
4121 Mandell #3, Houston, TX 77006
https://www.facebook.com/SaveBuffaloBayou
sbb@savebuffalobayou.org
Board Founding President: Frank C. Smith, Jr.
Executive Director: Susan Chadwick
Save Buffalo Bayou’s motto is “Working with Nature, Not Against it.†Save Buffalo Bayou is focused on educating and furthering more understanding about the natural lifecycle of our rivers, addressing the real issues behind flooding, behind erosion of property, the pollution of our waters, and protecting this irreplaceable resource in the middle of our city. Save Buffalo Bayou is a 501c3 nonprofit association.
Save Buffalo Bayou’s general mission is to educate all about proper land management on our many streams, the best modern science, and the most enlightened practice around the nation and the world. They strive to work with government agencies to develop enlightened flood and erosion control and drainage policies that respect the natural process of our local bayous and creeks, their floodplains and watersheds, the trees and vegetation growing on their banks that are so vital for the health of our waters, our environment, and us. Save Buffalo Bayou advocates for the protection and restoration of all our bayous, creeks, and streams, as well as our prairies and wetlands. We support natural or “green†solutions to flooding because they are more effective, cheaper, and better for our health and our environment.
Frank C. Smith Jr., the founding president of the board of Save Buffalo Bayou, served on  the executive committee of the Bayou Preservation Association for nearly fifty years and has lived on Buffalo Bayou throughout his adult life. His childhood summers in the Rockies inspired his lifelong love of the outdoors. However “Smith was busy making a living, when he wasn’t sailing or flying his plane, and was not actively involved in environmental issues…[until a] conversation with Terry Hershey, [when] Smith joined with her and oilman George Mitchell, who also lived on the bayou, to fight against plans, already funded and in the works, to strip, reroute and channelize with concrete Buffalo Bayou west of Shepherd Drive through the Memorial area all they way to Addicks and Barker dams.† In 2009, CEC awarded Frank Smith its lifetime achievement award for his inspiring and lifelong commitment to the environment.
Save Buffalo Bayou was founded in 2014 in response to the proposed Memorial Park Demonstration Project with the aim of preventing Houston’s Buffalo Bayou in and around Memorial Park from being bulldozed and rerouted. Continuing their mission of education, Classes on the Bayou is a canoe trip down one of the last natural stretches of Buffalo Bayou, exposing individuals to the ecological and aesthetic value of our bayous and of respecting  their natural course throughout time.
Image attributions:
- Great white egrets flying on Buffalo Bayou past banks of Memorial Park to be bulldozed. Photo by Jim Olive.
- Yellow-crowned night heron by Frank X. Tolbert 2.
- Morning on Buffalo Bayou, March 18, 2017, shot by Jim Olive from a high bank in Memorial Park looking downstream with River Oaks Country Club property on the right.
- Frank C. Smith Jr., founding president of the board, Save Buffalo Bayou, in Memorial Park on a high bank above Buffalo Bayou. Photo taken May 5, 2016, by Jim Olive.
- Kayakers on Buffalo Bayou on Sept. 29, 2016. Photo by Jim Olive.