News and analysis for San Antonio and the South Texas bioregion.
Decades after channelizing vast lengths of San Antonio’s rivers and creeks as means of controlling floodwaters, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers engaged with the City of San Antonio and Bexar County in the ecological restoration of 8 miles of the San Antonio River south of downtown along what has […]
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 […]
San Antonio’s standing nationally on the clean-tech scene could be better. But for a newcomer on the scene being ranked 42 among U.S. cities is still commendable, according to Bryce Yonker, director of business development at Clean Edge. “The places that are at the top have been at this for […]
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, […]
San Antonio (and Houston, and Dallas, and Austin) have made important strides in building increasingly sustainable cities rich in low-polluting clean-tech technologies and developing carbon-reduction strategies. San Antonio’s CPS Energy and Austin’s Austin Energy continue to lead nationally in green-power sales, for instance, and important weatherization efforts, electric-vehicle charging stations, […]
Southern California Edison’s website boasts that the triple-reactor San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station is the region’s “largest and most reliable source of energy.” Three hundred and fifty billion kilowatt hours of energy generated since 1968 that have been “virtually free” of pollutants. And yet utility officials announced today that the […]