Environmental justice news and analysis rooted in San Antonio and the South Texas bioregion
AUSTIN, Texas—This week, at SXSW Eco, a prominent conference bringing together sustainable business leaders, planners, and others, there are innumerable sessions devoted to startup businesses, socially conscious consumption, “bio-based economies,” genetic engineering, and synthetic materials. It is, by and large, a tech conference targeting industry- and city-scale innovations intended to […]
As with the Peace & Dignity Journey that threaded its way through Texas a couple weeks back, the IUCN World Conservation Congress convened for the first 10 days of this month is an every-four-years affair. Every time the assemblage of 217 governmental agencies and over 1,000 civil society organizations from […]
The island paradise is under attack. Thanks to destabilizing forces of climate change – rising sea levels and strengthening storms, particularly – some of Earth’s most picturesque locations are being scrubbed from the map. And the residents of these postcard settings are being forced to consider relocating to avoid being […]
Unpacking the National Climate Assessment and its call for urgent climate action. The summer of 2011 should have been a wake-up call for Texans. Not only was there a withering heat driven, in part, by human-caused climate change (remember those record-breaking 40 consecutive days of 100-plus temperatures?) but a crippling drought […]
Even as climate change science has tightened to a certainty, we’re witnessing the return of denialist ‘zombie arguments.’ Just over a decade ago, US Senator James Inhofe helped derail early bipartisan efforts to cap greenhouse gas emissions. His now-infamous 12,000-word, science-distorting speech concluded with a warning that international efforts to […]
We idle at a crossroads. It’s a harried intersection, to be sure, at a twilight hour. From one direction flow the rail cars of explosive oil, streams of latticed drilling rigs, water-sucking, chemical-spuming trucks, and the promise of mined Canadian oil sands snaking over the Ogallala – our nation’s largest […]
After wresting a semblance of its formerly wild self from the shop-lined canals and flood-control channels of the Alamo City, the San Antonio River winds its way through 60 miles of gently rolling brush country before reaching a “spot of entrancing beauty.” In the center of Karnes County—known best for its […]
Climate action in the U.S. will not come from some mass conversion of the largely white middle-class deniers, whose representatives even now hold the nation hostage in hopes of preventing universal health care. Neither will the righting of human relations with the planet be delivered by an enlightened political class of city […]