Ground Truth: A nature immersion camp in the Texas Hill Country offers lessons on water conservation and environmental stewardship (Texas Architect)
At the end of a hot June day, down a dusty ranch road in the Hill Country, a bunch of sixth graders sprawl on picnic tables under the cavernous canopy of a grove of live oaks. The sun is sinking; the cicada chorus is rising; and after a day of conservation projects that included weaving ashe juniper branches into erosion controls above the creek, the kids are worn out. They would usually go for a swim, but this summer the swimming hole is low and full of green algae. “Nobody wants to be in it right now,” says a camp counselor. Instead, they’re writing songs. One is an ode to the mysteries of nature. Another, called “Van Feet,” is an ode to, well, summer camp.
Plugged In: In a time of climate disasters, libraries merge high-tech and very low-tech methods for supporting their communities
(Texas Architect)
“People have this nostalgic view of libraries, like, I went there in third grade and checked out ‘Charlotte’s Web,”” says Dianne Connery, director of the Pottsboro Library. “And I love ‘Charlotte’s Web.’ But that’s not what’s happening here.” What’s happening in Pottsboro — a community of 2,600 or so, about a 90-minute drive north of Dallas on the Oklahoma border — is everything else (plus a book club). When the ice storm of 2021 hit, Pottsboro experienced the kind of cascading system failures that were hitting larger urban centers: no water, no electricity, limited communication. The library, housed in a small brick building near the center of town, became a kind of default operations center. “We don’t have a newspaper,” says Connery, “so the library Facebook page was already kind of a bulletin board for the community.” The library staff set up portable toilets. They contacted ranchers with working wells and organized those ranchers and their trucks to pump and deliver water to residents whose pipes had frozen. When FEMA offered a delivery of blankets, the agency didn’t know where to send them; the library stepped in to receive them and then signed up community members to receive intensive training from FEMA for disaster preparedness.
Facing the River (The Architect’s Newspaper)
When Dietert’s mill went up, Kerrville was not yet a town. It was a shingle-makers camp, populated, in the words of Joe Herring Jr., Kerrville’s longtime historian and current mayor, by “some of the German immigrants, eager for a sight of crystal waters and fertile valleys, a few Tennesseans in search of adventure, and some businessmen of San Antonio.” These men looked at the giant cypresses flanking the river and saw roofing materials for a booming population of new Texans.