I met Will Becker just over two years ago on a nondescript residential street near Bishop Lynch High School in East Dallas. I was writing for Preston Hollow People at the time, and had wanted to meet him at a fetid, swimming pool in North Dallas, but he refused to…
Earlier this week, Time magazine opined that West Nile disease, which has now killed 12 people in Dallas County and sickened almost 300 more, is a “self-inflicted wound.” Bryan Walsh wrote that an extremely mild winter and scorching summer created a great breeding ground for mosquitoes. Climate change also isn’t…
There are many possible explanations for why this year has turned into the worst ever for West Nile. A mild winter and wet spring played a part, and maybe climate change contributed as well, but no one’s really sure. Except Time, that is. Bryan Walsh has a piece on one…
On Tuesday, you saw a glimpse of Dallas’ garbage future. The city’s long-term solid waste plan had some relatively progressive ideas — mandatory recycling, a plastic bag ban and “zero waste,” for example — but those won’t even be up for actual discussion for another couple of decades. Once the…
University of Texas prof Chip Groat’s ties to the natural gas industry raised a few eyebrows last month after a report he served as lead researcher on gave the hydraulic fracturing process a clean bill of health. “New Study Shows No Evidence of Groundwater Contamination from Hydraulic Fracturing,” the accompanying…
Best case scenario: The world’s largest retailer builds a spaceship that allows humanity to flee a trash-choked planet and spend several centuries growing ever fatter and lazier on an interstellar cruise, unwitting captives to a self-aware computer, until an oddly adorable trash-compacting robot unshackles us from our digital overlord and…
Just south of Dallas along Highway 67 in Midlothian is perhaps the country’s largest concentration of cement plants. TXI, Holcim, and Ash Grove all operate facilities within a couple of miles of each other, and the emissions they pump into the air tend to waft over Dallas when the winds…
Sherri Johnson’s condo butts up against a wooded creek a few blocks from Presbyterian Hospital. She likes to keep a few cats around, strays really, to keep the raccoons and possums and other creek denizens from making themselves too comfortable on her property. It works for the most part, but…
Shortly after it was established in 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency undertook a project called “Documerica,” which paid freelance photographers across the country to document the environmental and human conditions of the country. All told, more than 15,000 images were collected for the project, and then more or less forgotten…
There’s a reason State Farm wants to insure Johnson County homes against earthquakes. Injecting millions of barrels of fracking waste water loosens faults the way whiskey loosens tongues. Cliff Frohlich of the Jackson School of Geosciences deployed seismographs throughout a 43-mile grid in the Barnett Shale. They detected eight times…
So I was right yesterday. As Eric just reported, the pressure is on to escalate the local war on West Nile from truck spraying of pesticides to airplane spraying. This decision will be left to that august body the Dallas County Commissioners Court, scheduled at its next meeting to take…
So on the radio this morning I hear all about the spike in West Nile deaths in Dallas and how the county health department will be on the job tonight protecting us by sending the pesticide trucks through three more neighborhoods, this time in North Dallas. I just hope we…
Katherine Seale officially ended her five-year tenure as executive director of Preservation Dallas early this year, but she didn’t stop working. Instead, she’s been hanging around as a volunteer until the nonprofit found a new leader. That just happened. The nonprofit announced in a press release today. that David Preziosi,…
I suppose it was only a matter of time before Texas politicians, still on a high from their glorious victory over the evil, job-killing dunes sagebrush lizard, turned their attention to similarly insidious threats to our economic well-being. This time, the threat comes from four species of salamander — the…
Earlier this month, three East Texas hamlets with a collective population of fewer than 2,000 souls filed suit in a federal court in Oklahoma City to halt construction of the southern half of The International Pipeline Formerly Known as Keystone XL. The Keystone was to be a massive piece of…
The Texas Parks And Wildlife Department, the state agency that operates state parks and regulates hunting, fishing and related activities, announced today that it is seeking corporate partners. Seriously. Says so right on their website in big, bold letters: “Texas Parks and Wildlife Department Seeks Corporate Partners.” From the announcement:…
The Associated Press has news for the people who live above the shale formations experts say have transformed America’s energy terrain: Critics of the gas extraction process known as hydraulic fracturing are as guilty of hyperbole, or downright dishonesty, as the industry’s most ardent defenders. To wit: Josh Fox, director…
Zebra mussels, the innocuously named but virulent mollusk, were first discovered domestically in the Great Lakes back in the late 1980’s, having spread westward from their native Eastern Europe and hitched a ride in the ballast of U.S.-bound ships. Since then, they have spread through the nation’s waterways. They were…
Dallas-based Luminant, the electricity generation arm of Energy Future Holdings, got hit with a violation notice from the EPA Friday, accusing it of completing major modifications to its northeast Texas coal-fired plants, Big Brown and Martin Lake, without installing modern pollution control devices. The notice of violation says the modifications…
You don’t have to look terribly hard to find garbage at White Rock Lake: Plastic grocery bags, water bottles, plastic foam cups, lots and lots of beer cans, other stuff. It’s so common it fades from consciousness, becomes part of the landscape, except of course when it becomes the entire…
Our record-busting summer 2011 continues to be an object of fascination to climate scientists all over the world. Alongside floods in Thailand, drought in Eastern Africa and the European heat wave, the driest, hottest year in recorded Texas history has provided a case study for gauging the influence of climate…
Together, they have a population of fewer than 2,000, but the tiny East Texas hamlets of Reklaw, Alto and Gallatin have an outsized mission: To halt the southern portion of TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline, a conduit designed to ferry some 830,000 barrels of Canadian tar sands a day from an…
