In this week’s Dallas Observer we profile 20 of the metro area’s most interesting characters, with new portraits of each from local photographer Can Turkyilmaz. See the entire Dallas Observer People Issue here. Somehow a mosquito has sneaked into Jenny Land’s home. This shouldn’t have happened. Land sprayed garlic in…
Summer is upon us, which means public health officials in Dallas are well into their annual battle against West Nile. Mosquitoes throughout the county are being trapped and tested to detect the spread of the disease. Ponds and sizable puddles are being treated with larvacide or stocked with mosquito-eating minnows…
If you live just a little northwest of Fort Worth, chances are you’ve felt an earthly rumble and grumble at least once in the last six months. In the cities of Azle and Reno, dozens of such small earthquakes have struck in the last year. For an area that has…
In a dark basement at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, just north of downtown, sits a small, continually refreshed stockpile of radioactive waste that awaits disposal. After it leaves Southwestern, it is taken out to the tiny town of Andrews, where it is promptly added to the only…
If you watched the local news at all over the last week, you must have seen the breathless, helicopter-aided reports of the $700,000 luxury home falling bit by bit down a 75-foot cliff into Lake Whitney. According to those news reports, the home’s Florida-based owners first reported a fault line…
Texas’ historic drought is, at least, good for one thing: fewer mosquitoes. But according to researchers at UNT Health Science Center in Fort Worth, the mosquitoes that survive could be bigger, meaner and more persistent. Mosquitoes grow in stagnant water. If there are fewer mosquitoes, there are more nutrients to…
If an angry homeowner-turned-environmental-activist keeps getting vindicated by research, but all the important government people just ignore it, does the research make a sound? Probably not. Steve Lipsky, the homeowner in Parker County who became famous for being able to set his water on fire after Range Resources started drilling…
Baby, it’s really freaking hot outside. And it’s only getting hotter, according to the National Climatic Data Center. Texas has landed itself toward the top of another undesirable list, according to a recent federal climate data study by the Associated Press. The AP analyzed weather trends from the National Climatic…
Companies accused of poisoning our air and water typically pay a fine then move on, rarely becoming official criminals. If you want to get arrested for spewing something into the air, you’re much better off blowing weed smoke on your front porch than benzene from smoke stacks. But in 2007,…
There may have been a record-breaking 300 plus earthquakes in North Texas since December, but don’t point so much blame at the suspicious deep injection wells used to dispose of fracking wastewater. “A knee-jerk reaction could have a negative impact on our economy because of the large role the oil…
After the Denton City Council had its butt handed to it in court by oil company EagleRidge last Fall, Denton civic leaders decided to pretty much stop fighting EagleRidge altogether and let it drill close to a few residential neighborhoods. Residents complained, but the city said it had no choice,…
Global climate change is real, it’s caused by people, and it will have a significant, often unpredictable impact on the United States and the human beings who live here. Those are the takeaways from the third-ever National Climate Assessment, an 840-page, congressionally mandated tome released by the White House on…
Everyone in Texas, transplant or not, has been told that if you pick the bluebonnets that decorate the landscape across Texas in the spring, a state trooper will personally kick your ass, because you Don’t Mess With Texas and its dainty blue flora. Maybe your mom told you this oft-repeated…
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has consistently said that fracking has no significant impact on air quality, not in the Barnett Shale. Not in the Eagle Ford Shale. Not anywhere. It was news, then, when a TCEQ-funded study, performed by the Alamo Area Council of Governments, a San Antonio-area…
People who live in Flower Mound may or may not be at higher risk for developing cancer. The state already assured the public that there isn’t a cancer cluster back in 2010, but after a UT-Austin researcher published a recent report challenging the state’s methods, Texas has grudgingly agreed to…
We’re all getting sophisticated enough to agree that climate change is real, climate-deniers are wrong and someone should do something about it. Good for us. But what any of that actually means is still a major point of debate. On Monday the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released…
In the two years since the Dallas City Council made twice-per-week watering restrictions permanent the water situation in North Texas hasn’t improved much. We’re still in severe drought, lake levels are still low and long-term projections of drought and population growth still aren’t pretty. A slightly less verdant lawn seems…
Texas doesn’t necessarily want the lesser prairie chicken to die, but Texas is vehemently opposed to doing anything that might prevent the bird from dying. Late last year Texas was vowing to fight any efforts by the feds to place the dying bird on an endangered list, but the state…
Dallas thinks it’s really great that some of you people are interested in environmental bullshit. That’s the clear message we’re getting from the city’s 2014 Mosquito Plan, a report that makes a few lazy attempts to appease the environmental folks who have argued that Dallas’ current mosquito-killing methods are bad…
It might seem like an obvious point: no, you can’t just start a massive industrial operation right next to a middle-class residential neighborhood. Most homeowners aren’t cool with that. But Dallas-based EagleRidge Energy has boldly gone ahead and extracted oil on sites next to a few Denton residential communities anyway,…
The best argument against plastic bag bans like the one Dallas is set to consider very soon is that they’re not really worth the energy. Plastic sacks make up a relatively small fraction of the waste stream, hardly enough to justify inconveniencing shoppers or retailers. It’s not a particularly good…
If you’ve ever felt the urge to buy a single pair of fancy underpants for $16 from a bunch of bros with cool Facebook pictures, then you may have heard of Jonathan Shokrian. In the tech and fashion press, he’s known as the CEO of a very hip underwear website…
