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