Back in the good old days of cartoons, it was considered howlingly funny for a cartoon character to be old, bald, not very bright and legally blind. Have him walk into a door and fall down sharply: The audience was spitting up popcorn, falling out of their chairs. We’ve made…
Reverchon Park is one of Dallas’ best public spaces, an unexpectedly sylvan expanse sandwiched between Uptown and Oak Lawn. Yesterday morning, the loveliness was marred by an overpowering stench of gasoline. like someone had dumped out several gallons of fuel a few feet away. The smell had no obvious source. There…
I’m worn out. I spent part of my day trying to get Howard Garrett, the Dallas-based national radio host known as the “The Dirt Doctor,” to take an hour or two away from his lifelong battle with Big Chem, Texas A&M and the pesticide industry and pat himself on the…
This latest round of catastrophic flooding on the Mississippi River and its tributaries is trying to tell us something: Don’t believe a single thing our local or federal officials tell us about flood safety. But if we were capable of learning that lesson, we wouldn’t be where we are right…
You can probably trust the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on this one. The dam holding back Lake Lewisville probably isn’t going to fail in the immediate future. The 180 billion or so gallons of water it holds back probably won’t burst free and wash away the half-million people in its…
This is the last thing I will ever write about water, I promise, really and truly. It’s all going to be about space aliens and sexual enhancement operations from here on out unless something gigantic happens. But since we’ve been chatting anyway these last few days about problems with a…
North Texas Journalism professor George Getschow’s piece in The Dallas Morning News on dangers in the Lewisville Dam managed to put urban flooding in Texas in what I have always believed is the most useful framework — the Bible. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, responsible for safety of this 6-mile…
Spent the morning yesterday out on Lewisville Dam at the foot of Lake Lewisville with an entire caravan of other mediatoids getting de-panicked by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which seems to be in sort of a public relations panic. Small wonder. Publication last weekend by The Dallas Morning…
Nearly 200 countries signed a historic agreement to combat climate change last Saturday during the global climate summit in Paris. To achieve that goal would mean a massive slow-down of carbon emissions, climate scientists warn, an effective “de-carbonization” of the world economy. But it’s not just carbon consumption that scientists…
The black specks that appear to grow out of Elida Lopez’s driveway have the distinct look of the industrial waste. And, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, they probably are. These squared off chunks of rubber, called battery casings or battery chips, are byproducts of car-battery recycling. In other cities, the…
Ten weeks ago I had my hair shirt on with my sandwich board sign hanging from my shoulders predicting possible Biblical-scale flooding catastrophe as we entered the season of the fall rains. Might be time to grab those Bibles soon. All those stories you saw on TV last weekend of people…
Back in 1977, ExxonMobil’s senior scientist told the company’s management committee that humans are probably causing the planet to warm through all our burning of fossil fuels. Months later, Exxon launched a massive program to further examine the link, research that included spending over $1 million on a tanker that could…
Generally speaking, zoos are in the business of selling tickets. If they can help conserve and protect the animals they display along the way, that’s nice too, but to exist, zoos need to put on a show, and that means they need animals to fill what is, let’s be honest,…
Dallas, a city that has repeatedly gotten in trouble for concentrating its affordable housing in poor, blighted areas, safely away from white people, is now being praised for housing poor people on a site that used to be contaminated with lead. So, hey, we’re finally doing something right. The Environmental…
Cattle, like other mammals raised on a pasture, eat grass. But if there’s one things humans do well, it’s mess with nature, and so hundreds of years ago humans began sharing their discovery that feeding cattle corn makes them grow fatter more quickly. Sometime around the 1950’s, modern Americans took…
The hearings held by the Texas Railroad Commission to determine whether or not fracking companies XTO Energy and Enervest could continue injecting wastewater brine into the ground in Azle and Reno — towns in Tarrant and Parker County that have been hit with dozens of earthquakes in 2013 — went…
Former EPA regulatory director Eric Schaeffer remembers sitting in on an industry meeting in which an executive reacted to finding his business was on the list of the country’s top benzene polluters. The company boss told other executives he didn’t want to be on the same list next year. When you…
Some of our state agencies have confusing names. The Texas Railroad Commission, for instance, is the name of the entity that regulates fracking. And the agency called the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has actually kept a fairly consistent stance against environmental quality. Don’t feel bad if you’re confused. The…
The dumping of pig blood into a creek that feeds the Trinity River is an awkward moment in Dallas history. The Columbia Packing Co. was caught doing the type of corporate malfeasance that sounded like a story out of a Third World country or the Dark Ages, except the story…
The state of Texas has won a small victory in its fight to continue dump stuff in water in defiance of new Environmental Protection Agency regulations meant to protect the integrity of the nation’s water supply. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has joined with other states’ attorneys general to stop the…
My first inkling that America’s lawn obsession might not be terribly healthy came around 1995. We’d just moved into a new house in Far North Dallas, and 10- or 11-year-old me decided that the next-door neighbor’s lawn — green and smooth as flawless as a golf-course fairway with manicured grass…
The late-summer Sturm und Drang over high water rates made it to the Dallas City Council this week, where Dallas Water Utilities Director Jody Puckett explained that, calm down, you’re water meter’s fine, you probably don’t have a leak, you just probably forgot during the weird monsoons of spring and early…
