In ten impassioned essays, veteran Texas environmental advocates and conservation professionals step outside their roles as lawyers, lobbyists, administrators, consultants, and researchers to write about water. Their personal stories of what the springs, rivers, bottomlands, bayous, marshes, estuaries, bays, lakes, and reservoirs mean to them and to our state come alive in the landscape photography of Charles Kruvand.
Allied with the Texas Living Waters Project (a joint education and policy initiative of the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation, and the Environmental Defense Fund, among others), editor Ken Kramer joins his fellow activists in a call to keep rivers flowing, to protect wildlife habitat, and to save tax dollars by using water efficiently and sustainability.
INSIDE THIS BOOK:
Introduction: the Living Waters of Texas—Ken Kramer
Where the First Raindrop Falls—David K. Langford
Springing to Life: Keeping the Waters Flowing—Dianne Wassenich
Hooked on Rivers—Myron J. Hess
Falling in Love with Bottomlands: Waters and Forests of East Texas—Janice Bezanson
On the Banks of the Bayous: Preserving Nature in an Urban Environment—Mary Ellen Whitworth
A Taste of the Marsh—Susan Raleigh Kaderka
Bays and Estuaries of Texas: An Ephemeral Treasure?—Ben F. Vaughan III
Rio Grande: Fragile Lifeline in the Desert—Mary E. Kelly
Leaving a Water Legacy for Texas—Ann Thomas Hamilton
Texas Water Politics: Forty Years of Going with the Flow—Ken Kramer
About the Author
KEN KRAMER is the director of the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club. He has an extensive record of involvement in water and other environmental issues, serving on advisory committees for state and local agencies. Awarded for his work by the governor of Texas, the Sportsmen Conservationists of Texas, the League of Women Voters, and the Nature Conservancy, he lives in Austin. His PhD in political science is from Rice University.
CHARLES KRUVAND is an Austin-based photographer whose work has been featured throughout Texas, including at the Dallas Museum of Natural History, the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, the Wichita Falls Museum of Art, the Heard Natural Science Museum, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and the International Museum of Art and Science in McAllen. His photographs are also in the corporate collections of Kodak, Texas Instruments, Frito-Lay, and Citigroup. He is the recipient of the 2010 Art in Service to the Environment Award by the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club.