What Will Happen If the Rivers Disappear? | Short Film Showcase

[Music] It would make a huge difference, folks. We're making the decisions; we'd get out and see just how special Texas rivers are and Texas bays are. I have to believe it would change the way they approach decisions, really understand what's at stake.

So, I grew up in North Texas in the town of Munster, and the closest river was the Red River. I didn't get out there a lot; it was a pretty magical place, and actually, it was just kind of far enough away that it seemed kind of mysterious. This is different; it's wilder, more scenic, and the area around town, the farmland, was a lot more going on in terms of wildlife.

I studied Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences as my undergrad degree, and I'm going to law school. I worked with an attorney who was doing a lot of fights against reservoirs that were really about trying to protect the rivers from unneeded projects. It just made a lot of sense to me, and it gave meaning to doing something to protect the natural world and pass it on to future generations. Kind of haven't looked back.

[Music] So, 150 years ago, Texas didn't really have natural lakes. We had rivers, and we had limited water demands, and people would divert water from the rivers when they needed it. As the population has grown and the water demands have grown, the ability to just meet those needs by pumping out a river during dry years wasn't adequate.

So, we started building reservoirs, putting dams on the rivers to catch flow, so that during those dry periods, you'd have a lot of water in storage that you could then pump out and apply to use. We have now built about 200, we call the major reservoirs, in Texas. When we first issued water rights in the 1800s and 1900s, we didn't really think much about what are the environmental implications of giving the right to take that much water out of the river.

And have literally, you know, issued rights to take out more water than there will be in the rivers during drier years. If we're not careful, we'll drive the rivers; you know, we'll lose the health of the river, which will also affect what happens to our bays and estuaries on the Gulf Coast because they rely on those river flows to keep them healthy.

[Music] We have a water planning process in Texas where we project water needs about 50 years into the future. We project needs for municipal, industrial, and irrigation—remaining all those things—but we don't project what is the environment. What's the environment gonna be like in 50 years? We plan to meet all those other needs, but not the need to have healthy rivers and healthy bays.

You know, that's crazy. I can’t imagine that the people of Texas think it would be okay to just wipe out our rivers and our bays. I just—I don’t think that's how Texans approach things, but it's kind of below the radar. We're not thinking about it.

Droughts are kind of a complicated phenomenon, and they're a natural event. We have droughts; they're gonna happen. But what happens with water management is that, as we're capturing river flow, we worsen those natural droughts. We make the low flows lower; we make the duration longer. Because we're capturing water in reservoirs, or we're taking it out of the river, we're diverting it for human use.

And so, it's that combination of things that really drives the river very low, and that's a time when some organisms that can't move freely, you know, they're gonna dry out and gonna die, and parts of the river are gonna dry up.

2011 was an incredibly intense drought—very low rainfall, kind of unrelenting heat. Reservoir elevations were down; water was just evaporating really, really quickly, and we weren't getting rainfall. You had portions of the Guadalupe where there was no flow; you know, that's extreme.

And for the bays, really what happens is the salinity levels get high when you don't have enough freshwater, and then it starts building up, and that's really bad for a number of organisms. I just can't tolerate that. It can just decimate the oyster population. A certain amount of that in the system can recover, but if you take it too far, if we push it too far, you may not. And then, you know, we've lost the oyster fishery.

People tend to think about it during drought, and then we forget when it rains. We kind of start getting lazy in our habits, start being wasteful about water use again. We just can't afford to do that. We've got a limited amount of water; we've got a rapidly growing population.

And if we're going to continue to have flowing rivers and healthy bays, we have got to use water as efficiently as we can. Still, put way too much on, long; we have leaky pipes or distribution systems—just lots of things that we do where we use water in a really wasteful way, and it's just way too precious to treat it that way.

And on the state level, we have to make river protection part of our water planning. We plan for all these water needs; we don't plan for healthy rivers. We don't say, well, you know, how much water does the river need to stay healthy, and let's plan to provide that water because if we don't plan for it, we're not gonna have it; we're gonna fail.

What's really got to happen is that people have to speak up, and they have to talk to their government officials and say, you know what? I care about this; I want to see rivers taken care of. There's this tendency to, you know, focus on economics, which is incredibly important, but in the process, we tend to forget about how important the natural beauty and natural attractions of Texas are in that economic growth.

If we waste that, I mean, it's going to cost us not just ecologically, but it's going to cost us in terms of the economy. I'm not just doing it for a job; I mean it 'cause I care. I feel like there's so much at stake.

Yeah, it's really hard, and I have to remind myself—everyone smile! I mean, this is the long battle about the short one, and there's still a lot of good that can be done. A lot can be protected, and some other gets lost in the way; it's sad. It's not the end of the fight, and keep going—too much at stake!

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