This text explores the natural history of Texas and more than 2900 springs in 183 Texas counties. It also includes an in-depth discussion of the general characteristics of springs - their physical and prehistoric settings, their historical significance, and their associated flora and fauna.
This history explores the story of federal contributions to dam planning, design, and construction by carefully selecting those dams and river systems that seem particularly critical to the story. The history also addresses some of the negative environmental consequences of dam-building, a series of problems that today both Reclamation and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers seek to resolve.
This guide was written as a quick primer for transportation professionals and analysts who assess the impacts of proposed transportation actions on communities. It outlines the community impact assessment process, highlights critical areas that must be examined, identifies basic tools and information sources, and stimulates the thought-process related to individual projects. In the past, the consequences of transportation investments on communities have often been ignored or introduced near the end of a planning process, reducing them to reactive considerations at best. The goals of this primer are to increase awareness of the effects of transportation actions on the human environment and emphasize that community impacts deserve serious attention in project planning and development-attention comparable to that given the natural environment. Finally, this guide is intended to provide some tips for facilitating public involvement in the decision making process.
As ecology becomes the new engineering, the projection of landscape as infrastructure—the contemporary alignment of the disciplines of landscape architecture, civil engineering, and urban planning— has become pressing. Predominant challenges facing urban regions and territories today—including shifting climates, material flows, and population mobilities, are addressed and strategized here. Responding to the under-performance of master planning and over-exertion of technological systems at the end of twentieth century, this book argues for the strategic design of "infrastructural ecologies," describing a synthetic landscape of living, biophysical systems that operate as urban infrastructures to shape and direct the future of urban economies and cultures into the 21st century. Pierre Bélanger is Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture and Co-Director of the Master in Design Studies Program at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. As part of the Department of Landscape Architecture and the Advansed Studies Program, Bélanger teaches and coordinates graduate courses on the convergence of ecology, infrastructure and urbanism in the interrelated fields of design, planning and engineering. Dr. Bélanger is author of the 35th edition of the Pamphlet Architecture Series from Princeton Architectural Press, GOING LIVE: from States to Systems (pa35.net), co-editor with Jennifer Sigler of the 39th issue of Harvard Design Magazine, Wet Matter, and co-author of the forthcoming volume ECOLOGIES OF POWER: Mapping Military Geographies & Logistical Landscapes of the U.S. Department of Defense. As a landscape architect and urbanist, he is the recipient of the 2008 Canada Prix de Rome in Architecture and the Curator for the Canada Pavilion ad Canadian Exhibition, "EXTRACTION," at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale (extraction.ca).
This book was the first broad exposé of the social and environmental damage inflicted by the growth of corporate agriculture in California. Factories in the Field—together with the work of Dorothea Lange, Paul Taylor, and John Steinbeck—dramatizes the misery of the dust bowl migrants hoping to find work in California agriculture. McWilliams starts with the scandals of the Spanish land grant purchases, and continues on to examine the experience of the various ethnic groups that have provided labor for California's agricultural industry—Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, Filipinos, Armenians—the strikes, and the efforts to organize labor unions