Passport to Texas

This is Passport to Texas

Cast your gaze across the Texas landscape and its majesty and diversity become evident. Yet to experience the full depth these qualities you must dig deeper; go beneath the surface.

07— All these things behind me are not mountains. They’re the edge of the rim of the canyon; we’re 800 feet below the level of the ground.

That’s ranger Randy Ferris talking about Palo Duro Canyon.

12—This is like a reverse mountain. I mean, everything is flat; if you’ve driven across the Texas Panhandle, it’s like driving on the world’s largest billiard table. And then we get to Palo Duro Canyon, and the bottom just drops out of it.

Hidden worlds also exist below the surface of fresh and salt water – especially saltwater. Sylvia Earle, Advisory Board Chair, at the Harte Research Institute, says we must treat the Gulf with care and reverence or lose it.

17— We have in the past thought it was free, and infinite in its capacity to recover no matter what we did to it. But we’re learning that unless we take care and understand that this is a shared ocean, and that we need to work together to understand it, take care of it, and to use it – but don’t use it up.

View a segment on the Texas Parks and Wildlife PBS TV series called Beneath the Surface this week. Check your local listings.

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

This entry was posted on Friday, September 26th, 2014 at 12:00 am and is filed under Conservation, Land/Water Plan, SFWR. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.