Andrew Sansom
Author
Pub. Date
2015.
Language
English
Description
In a stunning tribute to one of Texas’ most enigmatic waterways, a veteran East Texas historian and a professional photographer have together created an homage to a lake like no other—half Texas, half Louisiana, a swampy labyrinth of bald cypress and water plants filled with mystery, legend, and a staggering amount of biological complexity. Classified as a Category 1 Habitat for wildlife by the US Fish and Wildlife Service and encompassing a state...
Author
Pub. Date
2013.
Language
English
Description
No natural resource issue has greater significance for the future of Texas than water. The state's demand for water for municipal, industrial, agricultural, and recreational uses continues to grow exponentially, while the supply from rivers, lakes, aquifers, and reservoirs is limited. To help Texans manage their water resources today and plan for future needs, one of Texas's top water experts has compiled this authoritative overview of water issues
...Author
Pub. Date
2018.
Language
English
Description
In this stunning photographic tribute to one of Texas’ most intriguing and perhaps least understood rivers, Riverwoods: Exploring the Wild Neches takes readers on a unique adventure along, and sometimes into, the wild and murky waters of the Neches River. The Neches flows through the heart of East Texas, past primordial bottomland forests, timber and oil industries, and elusive denizens—humans, alligators, bobcats, and herons. Although the river...
4) Barton Creek
Author
Series
Pub. Date
2019.
Language
English
Description
While Barton Springs Pool is an iconic landmark of Austin and many people are familiar with the end of Barton Creek and its seven miles of public greenbelt, less is known about the forty-odd miles beyond that tumble and twist across private lands, eventually feeding the Colorado River. Legendary fights saved Barton Springs in the 1980s and 1990s, when the pool repeatedly was closed because of pollutant runoff from streets, nearby construction, and...
Author
Pub. Date
2014.
Language
English
Description
Growing up near the Sabine, journalist Wes Ferguson, like most East Texans, steered clear of its murky, debris-filled waters, where alligators lived in the backwater sloughs and an occasional body was pulled from some out-of-the-way crossing. The Sabine held a reputation as a haunt for a handful of hunters and loggers, more than a few water moccasins, swarms of mosquitoes, and the occasional black bear lumbering through swamp oak and cypress knees....
Author
Pub. Date
2017.
Language
English
Description
First appearing on early Spanish maps as the Río Escondido, or hidden river, and later named Río de las Nueces after the abundant pecan trees along its banks, the Nueces today is a stream of seeming contradictions: a river that runs above and below ground; a geographic reminder of a history both noble and egregious; and a spring-fed stream transformed into a salty, steep-sided channel. From its fresh, clear headwaters on the Edwards Plateau, Margie...
Author
Pub. Date
2018.
Language
English
Description
Premiere paddler and Texas Canoe Racing Hall of Famer Bob Spain presents a thorough and personal guide to all aspects of canoeing. He opens with a brief history of canoes and canoe making in North America followed by an illustrated how-to section on proper paddling technique and posture. Instructional photos and drawings by Spain’s paddling partner and wife, Joy Emshoff, help make your first-time paddling adventure less intimidating and more enjoyable....
Author
Pub. Date
2018.
Language
English
Description
From two veteran ecologists comes a new and sweeping exploration of the natural history of Texas in all its biological diversity and geological variation. Few states, if any, can match Texas for its myriad species, past and present, and its many distinctive landscapes, from prairie grasslands and hardwood forests to coastal lagoons and desert mountains. Beginning with the stories of how biologists and naturalists have over time defined the ecological...
Author
Pub. Date
2017.
Language
English
Description
For eighty-seven miles, the swift and shallow Blanco River winds through the Texas Hill Country. Its water is clear and green, darkened by frequent pools. Wes Ferguson and Jacob Botter have paddled, walked, and waded the Blanco. They have explored its history, people, wildlife, and the natural beauty that surprises everyone who experiences this river. Described as “the defining element in some of the Hill Country’s most beautiful scenery,” the...
Author
Series
Pub. Date
2019.
Language
English
Description
When a team of five explorers embarked on a 1,200-mile journey down the Rio Grande, the river that marks the southern boundary of Texas and the US-Mexico border, their goal was to experience and capture on film the rugged landscapes of this vast frontier before the controversial construction of a border wall changed this part of the river forever.
The crew—Texas filmmaker Ben Masters, Brazilian immigrant Filipe DeAndrade, Texas conservationist...
Author
Pub. Date
2006.
Language
English
Description
From its origins on a sandy hillside in Van Zandt County, the Neches River flows through the heart of East Texas. In its watershed lies some of the wildest country in Texas, tucked amid the remains of one of the finest hardwood forests in the world. With the goal of keeping the Neches flowing free, East Texas native and riverman Richard M. Donovan takes readers canoeing down a two-hundred-mile stretch of the upper Neches. Through two national forests...
Author
Pub. Date
2015.
Language
English
Description
Since the 1950s, competing interests for use of Edwards Aquifer resources—the primary source of water for more than two million people in south central Texas—were at war. They had tried many times to resolve their differences about how to conserve, allocate, and use the water, but had always failed. Finally, under the patient leadership of Robert Gulley, thirty-nine diverse stakeholders reached a consensus on the use of the Edwards Aquifer that...
Author
Pub. Date
2012.
Language
English
Description
Writer and artist Margie Crisp has traveled the length of Texas’ Colorado River, which rises in Dawson County, south of Lubbock, and flows 860 miles southeast across the state to its mouth on the Gulf of Mexico at Matagorda Bay. Echoing the truth of Heraclitus’s ancient dictum, the river’s character changes dramatically from its dusty headwaters on the High Plains to its meandering presence on the coastal prairie. The Colorado is the longest...
Author
Pub. Date
2014.
Language
English
Description
If all the people, municipalities, agencies, businesses, power plants, and other entities that think they have a right to the water in Texas actually tried to exercise those rights, there would not be enough water to satisfy all claims, no matter how legitimate. In Sharing the Common Pool: Water Rights in the Everyday Lives of Texans, water rights expert Charles Porter explains in the simplest possible terms who has rights to the water in Texas, who...
Author
Pub. Date
2015.
Language
English
Description
Arguably, no other institution has transformed the heart of Texas like the Lower Colorado River Authority. Born in the Great Depression of the 1930s, LCRA built a chain of dams and brought predictability to the cycles of extreme droughts and floods that had long plagued Austin and other communities. It also brought hydroelectric power—and with that, modern-day civilization—to the hard-scrabble regions of Central and South Texas. With those achievements,...
Author
Pub. Date
2018.
Language
English
Description
Incorporating seven years of photography and research, Krista Schlyer portrays life along the Anacostia River, a Washington, DC, waterway rich in history and biodiversity that has nonetheless lingered for years in obscurity and neglect in our nation’s capital. River of Redemption offers an experience of the river that reveals its eons of natural history, centuries of destruction, and decades of restoration efforts. The story of the Anacostia echoes...
Pub. Date
2006.
Language
English
Description
In December 2004, an aging black Labrador retriever on the first hunting trip of her long, good life spooked at the sound of gunshot and was lost amid the frigid rice fields of the Texas coastal prairie. For a week her owner searched for his old companion, knowing that her age and inexperience were stacked against her survival. When family obligations pulled him halfway across the country, sadness and gloom pervaded the approaching holiday. Then a...
Pub. Date
2017.
Language
English
Description
In Of Texas Rivers and Texas Art, Andrew Sansom, a leading Texas conservationist, and William E. Reaves, an influential Texas art collector and historian, have teamed up to showcase some of the finest contemporary river art detailing the gorgeous traits of Texas landscapes. The featured artwork comes from Randy Bacon, Mary Baxter, David Caton, Margie Crisp, Keith Davis, Fidencio Duran, Jon Flaming, Charles Ford, Pat Gabriel, Hunter George, Billy Hassell,...
Author
Pub. Date
2015.
Language
English
Description
While fog does not come easily or frequently to Central Texas, when it does, it inspires moments of quiet and reflection. David K. Langford captures those moments here in stirring images of the comings and goings of fog on Hillingdon Ranch, family land that has benefited from the stewardship of six generations. These photographs in turn inspired an essay by writer Rick Bass that takes him back to his own memories of fog—in the Texas Hill Country...
Pub. Date
2018.
Language
English
Description
Winner, 2020 Philosophical Society of Texas Nonfiction Prize In 1969, J. David Bamberger bought what he described as “the sorriest piece of land” in the Texas Hill Country for the specific purpose of restoring the degraded landscape. Today, Selah, Bamberger Ranch Preserve is one of the largest habitat restoration projects in the state—5,500 acres—and serves as a model for land conservation and environmental education. The ranch has earned...