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…
Before the city of Dallas was contacted several years ago about accepting a few dozen mostly undeveloped acres along the edge of the escarpment in southwest Dallas, few outside the Niblo family knew what it contained. It had been settled as part of the Peters Colony, which was founded at…
We at Unfair Park will never, ever tire of hearing Rex Tillerson, the CEO of Irving-based ExxonMobil, the largest private oil and gas company in the world, admit that the product he peddles has in fact caused the earth’s climate to change. This is the corporation that has for decades…
The lesson of the Highland Park Party Barge is the lesson of Winfrey Point is the lesson of 30 years of history in East Dallas. At key rubber-meets-the-road moments, City Hall becomes the single worst enemy that inner city neighborhoods can confront. Forgive the Parkies, for they know not how…
Twenty years ago, White Rock Lake was a dump. The park was run-down. The lake itself was half-filled with silt. The main activity out there at night was people having intercourse in cars and then going to the bathroom on the lawns of nearby houses. Good times. The strong souls…
Last night at the Turner House, the Old Oak Cliff Conservation League unveiled its 2012 Architecture at Risk List, its annual enumeration of properties in danger of being demolished, neglected, and otherwise relegated to the dust bin of history. They offered a sneak peek of the first item on their…
The ability of a leukemic cell to remain in an immature state, capable of relentlessly propagating, has remained one of the vexing obstacles to the effective treatment of leukemia, particularly acute myeloid leukemia. Rather than maturing, or differentiating, inside the blood-cell forming kitchen of the bone marrow, they grow and…
Join Unfair Park once again as we delve into the deep and thorny question: Where exactly can the fracking company Trinity East drill for natural gas in the city of Dallas? Today’s episode: The Corps of the Matter. A story this week in the Morning News pointed out that the…
Take a look outside your window. You’ve probably gotten used to that omnipresent, smoky haze that hangs over the Metroplex like a pall of economic viability — upwind power plants a’chugging; cars snaking down tangles of toll roads and highways; shale gas production amid the cities and ‘burbs slowed but…
Last summer — the state’s hottest and driest on record — brought Texas ranchers to their knees. Rains have revived parts of the state, especially the east. But 50 miles west of Fort Worth and further, the drought varies from severe to exceptional. So, what’s in store for us this…
While Jim’s wife hosed out the dog house over his Arboretum screed this morning, lawyers for the Arboretum and the city were in court trying to get a judge to let them turn Winfrey Point into a temporary parking lot, to prepare for the crush of visitors for this weekend’s…
Hey, Dallas Arboretum: Do you really not see how this is shaping up? You have one of two things staring you in the face. A great opportunity. Or a well-deserved black eye. You are in court this very moment, hauled there by citizens trying to stop your plans to decimate…
Sierra Club on Tuesday sued Dallas-based Energy Future Holdings, the state’s largest unregulated generator of electricity, accusing the company’s Big Brown coal-fired plant near Fairfield of thousands of violations of Clean Air Act standards. The environmental group gave the company an ultimatum last fall when it discovered a litany of…
Before SMU prof Al Armendariz had even warmed the seat at his post as EPA regional chief, he was pilloried as an activist whose research into the air pollution caused by fracking operations made him unfit to run a five-state office overseeing some of the industry’s most important drilling grounds…
When President Obama appointed SMU prof Al Armendariz to the EPA regional post in Dallas back in 2009, it was to the sound of collective groaning from the energy industry and Republican politicos. Only months before, he’d authored a study citing oil and gas production as a major source of…
Let’s talk trees for a moment. They’re a bit like orphans or endangered species in that when people cry out to save them, there’s little push-back, even if little action is ultimately taken. But in an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times, one sentence amid an opus of tree-praise…
