Adaptation. Mitigation. Justice.
Frio County, Texas, Struggles with Fracking’s Leftovers (First published at the Texas Observer.) On a gravel road in rural Frio County, sheriff’s deputies are doing something they never thought they would—enforcing state environmental laws in the oilpatch. The truck drivers they were ticketing were certainly surprised. “No, I don’t understand,” a […]
Carolyn Lochhead opens her recent sprawling indictment of human population growth as the driver of global environmental destabilization with a raft of Texas-specific statistics. Strung together with hardly a verb or adjective to buffer the cold facts, it imparts an unshakeable sense of despair: “196 endangered or threatened species, severe […]
I haven’t had time to follow up with Elena Craft (right), health scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund’s Austin office, who served to keep a recent air-quality panel at San Antonio’s Rackspace on point about certain local and state-level policy failings responsible for fouling our shared respirable resource. I had intended to reach […]
A dozen years since the closing of Kelly Air Force Base, ailing residents and community activists gathered to decry contamination, injustice. Victor San Miguel presents a proud and defiant image outside the entrance of Port San Antonio, formerly Kelly Air Force Base, site one of the nation’s worst toxic contaminations. […]
When CPS Energy, San Antonio’s publicly-owned utility, mailed out letters to the owners of solar-sporting homes in early April announcing that it was considering a program that would cut payments for sun-derived energy nearly in half – from 9.7 cents per kilowatt hour to roughly 5.6 cents – residents were […]
As an estimated 10 million Mexican free-tailed bats — nursing mothers and their young — began to form into a swirling gyre and rise on a gentle South Texas wind, a small crowd gathered on split-wood benches overlooking the slowly darkening Comal County cave for a lesson in bat ecology […]
In the summer of 2007, a pump at the Blue Line Corporation in East San Antonio was “inadvertently turned off,” releasing about 50 pounds of hydrochloric acid into the air. Five employees at a nearby business began to experience breathing difficulties and called emergency responders. Four were examined onsite for complaints […]
A new report on the dangers of accelerating sea-level rise along the Texas Gulf Coast from a coalition of leading scientists and state research institutions is a call to action. However, while the report “The Risk of Rising Sea Level: Texas Universities Ready and Able to Help Coastal Communities Adapt” (pdf), pulls […]
One month after ATSDR gives the “all clear” to current dioxin risk, the U.S. Navy prepares for a new cleanup effort. [NOTE: This is likely the most important story I wrote during my time in Mississippi. While it was on the front page of the Gulfport paper on September 12, […]
For a time, Fukushima Dai-ichi’s 2011 triple-reactor meltdown seemed to herald the demise of the global nuclear industry. Japan took all of its plants offline. Germany — with a strong anti-nuclear movement and Green Party in ascendance — closed eight of its plants and pledged to close the remaining nine […]
Despite city-wide flooding during the second wettest day in historic record, roughly 200 San Antonians congregated at the Alamo, the much-vaulted “shrine” of Texas liberty, to join an international day of protest chronicling a long list of alleged tyrannies perpetuated by food conglomerate Monsanto. “Welcome to the March on Monsanto,” […]
A conversation with John Farrell, director of the Energy Self-Reliant States and Communities program at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. San Antonio’s publicly owned utility, CPS Energy, recently argued in favor of ending net-metering on the grounds that upper-income solar owners were saddling low-income residents with an unfair share of […]