May 3rd, 2013

Summer brings so much fun, but it’s also the dreaded season of the mosquito, and by that we mean, the Culex mosquito, which transmits West Nile Virus to humans. The virus can be deadly, so squelching the mosquito population and finding an effective repellent is important. Here’s a look at the latest thinking and the ingredients endorsed as effective mosquito repellents.

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February 12th, 2013

Outraged that the EPA dropped a case against a gas company that apparently contaminated private wells near Fort Worth, environmentalists from more than 80 groups in 12 states have called for an internal EPA investigation of the case.

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April 24th, 2012

The Meadows Foundation has given the Texas Trees Foundation $96,000 to fund what could be the largest tree planting initiative in the nation.

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August 24th, 2011

Get your gas masks out. Seriously, plan to hide indoors if you live in Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston or the Beaumont-Port Arthur or Tyler-Longview areas, the next few days are promising air that’s “unhealthy for sensitive groups.”

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February 1st, 2011

Meritage Homes, a large production homebuilder active in the Southwest U.S., has expanded its green home offerings to Texas.

The new Meritage green communities in Fort Worth and San Antonio will offer home buyers Energy Star-qualified homes that feature spray foam insulation and water-saving plumbing fixtures, among other features.

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February 25th, 2010

By Harriet Blake
Green Right Now

As passionate as his father was about civil rights, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is equally so about the environment.

In a lecture in Fort Worth on Wednesday, the 56-year-old son of the late Senator, advocated for moving the nation to green energy, which he doesn’t see as encompassing nuclear power.

Coal is not the only power-producing industry that needs scrubbing, said the longtime environmentalist, nuclear energy is simply not safe. “Nuclear energy is the most catastrophic form of energy. No bank will finance it…[and] no insurance company will insure it,” he said.

“It’s not just a bunch of hippies saying it’s unsafe. There are spills all the time into the Hudson,” says Kennedy, who serves as chief prosecuting attorney for the Hudson Riverkeeper, whose mission is the restoration of that waterway. Three Mile Island was not the last accident despite what nuclear advocates say.

He made it clear that lobbyists for fossil fuel and polluting energy industries are powerful and dangerous. The nuclear industry, for example, managed to find a way to get a Congressional exemption that leaves them free from damage. “All homeowners’ policies in the U.S. exclude radiation from the nuclear industry,” he said.

Kennedy believes greed has taken over the utility companies as well. “Utility companies make money by selling more energy – even if the energy is green. We need to change the rules,” he says. “Don’t reward bad behavior.”

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November 4th, 2008

By Barbara Kessler

Every spring, as sure as the sun warms the cedars and the birds flock back from Mexico, Lee Clauser leads a stealth group of intense adults dressed in khakis and boots to the edge of a wild thicket near his house in north central Texas.

They creep into the brush, quietly unloading their weapons of mass observation.

Putting binoculars to eyes, they look, and listen, for the brilliant Golden-cheeked warbler, and for the reclusive Black-capped vireo. Both songbirds are listed as endangered in the United States, their nesting grounds having been narrowed to a strip of Texas Hill Country that supplies just the right shrubbery and old-growth cedars. The birders, who come from Fort Worth, Dallas, New England, the Pacific Northwest and beyond, know that catching a glimpse of one of these delicate creatures is a rare treat.

“People have come from Europe to see those birds, both species. For birders all over the world, it’s a huge deal,” says Clauser, a retired banker and life-long bird rescue and rehabilitation expert.

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