Adaptation. Mitigation. Justice.
The Texas Railroad Commission’s about-face on natural gas flaring can be partially linked to pressure from European companies concerned about Texas’ dirty gas. Amal Ahmed | Texas Observer In February, members of the Texas Railroad Commission finally got the message. The three commissioners of the regulatory body that oversees the […]
Two years ago, the City of San Antonio launched a war on the birds of Elmendorf Lake. The target was the hundreds of cattle egrets who have been roosting at this Westside ecological gem for decades. By razing the island to the ground, and dismantling possibly hundreds of nests, the assault destroyed the nesting ground for many related migratory birds. Many young were killed.
With many research projects sidelined by COVID-19, community members in Texas and beyond can help keep a range of important research on track, from taking local water samples to simply counting the birds. Theresa Crimmins, Erin Posthumus, & Kathleen Prudic The rapid spread of COVID-19 in 2020 disrupted field research […]
Welcome to the second edition of your weekly ecological, commonsensical, and anti-commercial news wrap for the Greater San Antonio and South Texas bioregions (i.e., the watersheds of the San Antonio, Medina, and Guadalupe Rivers as well as the wider Gulf they feed). (Oh, and Happy Pigskin Superspreader Day! Please wear […]
What a time to start a weekly news wrap-up on the climate justice front. Stories of sweeping and rapid change have followed the incoming Biden Administration: reentering Paris and punking the KeystoneXL pipeline. On this front, a number of outlets have you covered. WaPo has (almost) all the executive-order action […]
Deceleration · 14: Rights of Nature Movement Reaches San Antonio Marisol Cortez In Spring of 2012, at the tail end of my time teaching in Lawrence, Kansas, I had the privilege of attending the Rights of Mother Earth Conference at Haskell Indian Nations University. I’d found my way to Haskell […]
We are excited to present Deceleration’s first foray into DIY publishing—an avian-themed poetry zine called Words for Birds 2020: Poetics for Pandemics. Read it here … with two bonus features for our online readers. Marisol Cortez When the pandemic nixed Words for Birds, an annual workshop and reading held at […]
Deceleration‘s third broadcast for the Covid-19 era in San Antonio includes a healing plant walk with Human Path founder and director Sam Coffman … conversation with Ceiba Ili about the recovery of indigenous identity (and great musical offerings) … and reveals the City of San Antonio’s continued harassment of birds […]
“I speak for this river carrying the stillborn, the dying — this water that quenches the thirst of bosque, mergansers, warblers, and ash-throated flycatchers.” At Deceleration, we’re big fans of poetry that connects people to the land, to the air, to the spirits of our deeply intertwined families, this dance […]
Marisol Cortez As Día de los Muertos approaches – bedecking local H-E-Bs in all manner of commercialized Latinidad – another familiar ritual begins in the far northern reaches of the hemisphere. Like glacier melt rolling downhill to join with rivers and eventually oceans, a tributary of monarchs moves slowly southward […]
Bird-dispersing chemical warfare comes to the Westside’s little Aztlan, our ‘place of herons.’ Editor’s Note: This is the second of a two-part series. Click here for part one, a dispatch from Brackenridge Park. Marisol Cortez Roosting together on a mid-March Sunday evening, the birds of Bird Island sound collectively at times […]
How the slow attention of local women exposed an institutional war on the birds of San Antonio. Editor’s Note: This is the first of a two-part series. Read part two, “Place of Herons,” here. Marisol Cortez In 1962, Rachel Carson—government scientist, nature writer, breast cancer non-survivor, and queer woman on […]