Passport to Texas

Passport to Texas Legacies …from Texas Parks and Wildlife

Joe Moore is an educator and former Executive Director of the Texas Water Development Board. He understands the importance of freshwater inflows to the health of bays, estuaries and to us. Getting others to understand has been a challenge.

You cannot imagine the reaction you get from an audience in Lubbock when you tell them that instead of pumping the water to Lubbock, you’re going to let it flow into the Gulf of Mexico.

A major engineering consulting firm was meeting with an advisory group one time, and we were talking about freshwater inflows. He suddenly realized we were talking about assuring freshwater inflows, and he said, ‘You mean you’re going to give the water to a fish before you give it to people?’ They didn’t understand the economics of freshwater inflows.

There was a 1957 conference on this campus [Texas Tech] in which waste was described as a bucket of water that escaped into the Gulf of Mexico. The objective at that point was to dam every river in Texas so that there was not a drop of water that went out of a Texas river into the Gulf of Mexico. So the Trinity would stop flowing before it got to Galveston Bay. Every river in Texas would be so controlled that no water would quote, be wasted into the Gulf of Mexico, end quote. That’s how little understanding there was of the significance of freshwater inflows.

Protecting freshwater inflows protects out future.

Our show is produced in cooperation with the Conservation History Association of Texas. Visit them at texaslegacy.org.

For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti.

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