Vol 2, Issue 7

With no end in sight to containing a spill that may have dumped 150,000 gallons of fuel oil into Galveston Bay on Saturday, the hit to Texas’ economy and environment is already huge — and sure to grow.

In this week's Bookshelf, our content partner Kirkus Reviews highlights The Frackers and The Attacking Ocean.

The kickoff for "Our Desired Future," a multimedia project to educate Texans on rivers, springs and groundwater, will be held at Parkside in Austin on April 8.

The Texas Wild Rice Festival will be held in San Marcos on April 11-12 and will feature a bike ride, music, art and screenings of films about the San Marcos River.

Paul Collins and Anlo Sepulveda, makers of the film Yakona, which just won the SXSW Audience Choice Award, say they were inspired by the San Marcos River, the subject of the film, over years of swimming and snorkeling in the river.

The Texas Water Development Board's Water Data for Texas website now includes groundwater data.

Spring Lake, the spring-fed source of the San Marcos River, which was once home to Aquarena Springs, the popular aquatic amusement park, is now a different kind of travel destination.

New Braunfels' "can ban" ordinance is coming down after State District Court Judge Don Burgess ruled that the city lacks the authority to regulate disposable items.

The U.S. and Mexico are conducting an ecological experiment by releasing water downstream from the Morelos Dam near Yuma, Ariz., into the Colorado River delta, according to a report in the science journal Nature.

The unrelenting drought in California has brought a new urgency to controversial attempts by Congress to create new reservoirs around the state or to expand existing ones.

A story from The Associated Press previewing a gathering of climate scientists in Japan highlights their report's major conclusion: Climate change includes not just environmental impacts like melting ice and threatened animals but also human impacts like hunger, disease and war.

Using data from the Texas Water Development Board's reservoir status tracker, our auto-updating map visualizes the current state of Texas reservoirs.