Let’s return the wolf to Texas!

Mexican Wolves courtesy Larry Bohlin of Bohlin Creative 2015

For the sake of wilderness and our ecosystem, a growing number of people believe that the Mexican wolf should be given the chance to reclaim its rightful role in the Chihuahuan Desert of West Texas.

Please tell Texas Parks and Wildlife to support wolf-reintroduction efforts

Imagine the return of the “grand opera of Texas” while sitting around the campfire, hearing howling wolves in the distance, heads upturned, singing at the night sky. Imagine, the return of the gray wolf.

With all the attention on wolf restoration elsewhere in the Southwest, many people are not aware that the last wild Mexican wolves in the U.S., before the species went extinct in the wild in the 1970s, were killed just north of Big Bend National Park in Texas.

The fact that Texas is not part of the plan for saving the species is unacceptable. People need to know about this if we are ever going to see the wolf return to Texas and conserve our natural heritage.

The El Paso Sierra Club group has launched a Return the Wolf to Texas educational initiative, and we need your help in sending letters of support to Texas Parks and Wildlife Executive Director Carter Smith.

Please act today to return the Mexican gray wolf to Texas

Texas needs to put wolf reintroduction on its conservation radar screen, and with your help we can make it happen.

Sincerely,

Rick LoBello, El Paso Group Executive Committee, ricklobello@gmail.com
P.S.: Be sure to take action today and share this petition on Facebook and Twitter!

To learn more about the work of the Sierra Club Rio Grande Chapter’s El Paso Group, visit our Facebook page.

The Friday Video: It's An El Paso Thing

[Thanks and a hat tip to my old hiking buddy, Tommy Young, for finding this video. If you get elpasonaturally by email, the video won't be embedded. Please go to www.elpasonaturally.blogspot.com to view.]

Pay Attention to the Colorado River Crisis

Navajo Generating Station. Photo by Connie Crawford

Here's a little light reading for the weekend: Pro Publica's series Killing the Colorado. The analogies to our own situation with the Rio Grande are acute: highly subsidized cotton farming, urban sprawl, demand for water outgrowing supply and, thus, water importation. The water problem in the west exemplified by the situation with the Colorado River, is human driven and not climate driven although, often the power needed to "solve" water shortages releases tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. (Read End of the Miracle Machines in the series.)

Since sprawl and growth are such sacred cows here in El Paso, read the 'Water Witch'. (Apologies to my Wiccan friends.) Be sure to use the interactive map showing the sprawl of Las Vegas. Wish we had one for El Paso. Of course, it would probably make the ticky-tacky building sprawlers of El Paso lustfully drool.

The environmental reporter who investigated for the Pro Publica series, Abrahm Lustgarten, was recently interviewed on NPR. You can listen to that interview by going HERE.

Since this is video Friday, here is a whimsical look at the Navajo Generating Station of Page, Arizona. Subtitle: "Combining Carbon and Oxygen for a Warmer Tomorrow!"




Help El Paso Naturally turn El Paso "Green".

We Must Put an End to the Asphalt-Industrial Machine

I missed something the other day. I was so happy to see that the connectivity project for the Franklin Mountains State Park (the access and animal corridor to Tom Mays) was still a "GO", that I overlooked the rest of the report. The rest can be summarized easily: miles and miles and miles of concrete and asphalt.

Project after project widens freeways and highways and spurs. Project after project eats up more land. There is no mention by the Texas Department of Transportation of mixed used roads. There is no mention of narrowing roads and reducing speed limits to make livable, walkable places, promote communities and neighborhoods and health. 

It's a vicious circle. We create asphalt corridors for traffic. The added highways increase traffic which we must accomodate by widening roads, creating more spurs, laying more asphalt, etc. ad nauseum.

Please read a Better Cities & Towns blog post by Robert Steuteville: They paved paradise, put up a parking lot . . . “Big Asphalt” has compromised our health, safety, and welfare — but we can defeat it if we try. Don't just skim or scan it. Read it. Learn all the ways that asphalt harms us. 

Steuteville tells us that it's time to fight the asphalt-industrial machine and take back our communities and countrysides.

He's right.

Sign and Share the Petition against Fracking next to El Paso

Map taken from El Paso Inc., Searching for Shale Oil in Hudspeth County, Edgar Gonzalez, graphic artist. Note that the "prospect" is just over the hill literally from Hueco Tanks. Click on the image to enlarge.

Of the 172,000 acres Torchlight Energy Resources has leased for fracking in Hudspeth County next to El Paso, most of the land is owned by the University of Texas System. Click on the image to enlarge. 

Stop Fracking next to El Paso, Texas

Sign and Share the Petition

Fracking endangers the health, safety and welfare of people, pollutes the air and ground, results in rising crime and social and medical costs, utterly destroys ecosystems and permanently contaminates underground aquifers with toxic compounds and consumes billions of gallons of water. Yet, just a few minutes away from the city limits of El Paso, Texas a major metropolitan area of 675,000 people, and a few miles from the farming community of Dell City, Texas, the University of Texas System has leased over a hundred thousand acres to Torchlight Energy Resources, Inc. for the sole purpose of fracking. Torchlight Energy says that it may drill up to as many as 2500 wells on this area immediately east of El Paso called the Diablo Plateau which, with the Otero Mesa in New Mexico, forms a rich ecosystem of plants and animals. Torchlight Energy Resources must not drill there. The University of Texas Lands System must not allow them.

Please sign and share this petition.

Input on New City Facilities Sought

CITY OF EL PASO SEEKS ADDITIONAL COMMUNITY INPUT ON SIGNATURE PROJECTS OF 2012 BOND PROGRAM

The City of El Paso has scheduled additional opportunities for members of the community to offer input regarding the signature projects of the 2012 Quality of Life Bond program.

City staff will host the following two community meetings at which input will be received regarding possible facility sites, site uses, and amenities for the Children’s Museum, Hispanic Cultural Center and Multipurpose Cultural and Performing Arts Facility:

Tuesday, June 24, 2014
6pm
El Paso International Airport
La Placita Conference Room “A”
6701 Convair Road MAP
Parking in short-term lot will be validated

Wednesday, June 25, 2014
6pm
EPPD Mission Valley Regional Command
Community Room
9011 Escobar Drive MAP
Free parking available

Widening Rift?

Rio Grande Rift from space. White Sands is at bottom of the picture.

Because of the Virginia quake that shook D.C. and NYC followed quickly by the fury and floods of Irene, there was another seismic event that may have had more significance yet was overlooked.

On Monday, August 22^nd, just before midnight a 5.3 earthquake occurred near Trinidad, Colorado. The Colorado Geological Survey issued a preliminary report with pictures. It is believed that the quake was the result of movement along the Sangre de Cristo Fault which is part of the Rio Grande Rift system. What’s a rift? Forces on the earth’s crust can cause it to thin, then fracture (fault) and spread apart. The Rio Grande Rift began between 35 and 29 million years ago (although some date the event between 29 and 20 million years ago.) The Rio Grande Rift extends from Chihuahua, Mexico to Leadville, Colorado. Considering that in May there was a swarm of earthquakes in Chihuahua, Mexico just 85 miles from El Paso and just below Fort Hancock, Texas (an area also part of the same rift system), one must wonder what the continued widening of the crust beneath may portend – if anything in our lifetimes.

Here is some interesting speculation as well as information:

By the way, the Rift in our area is not visible because sediment from the ancient Lake Cabeza de Vaca has filled it from rim to rim. The Rio Grande’s movement south finally drained the lake about a million years ago into the Gulf of Mexico. Sediment is clearly visible along I-10, the bluffs above El Paso High and along Alabama. How deep is the sediment in the Rift below El Paso before you hit bedrock? Geologist Eric Kappus tells us that the depth below the Airport is 10,000 feet! On the west side it’s variable but “MUCH” less. Wow! The highest peak in the Franklins, North Mount Franklin, is 7,192 feet high (not counting all of the mountain that you don’t see below the surface which is about 18,000 feet total uplift!) Our Rio Grande Rift rivals the Great Rift Valley in East Africa – the place of our evolutionary roots.