Tom Vaughan Interview, Part 2 of 2

DT: When we left off on the last tape, we were talking about the sampling that you've done and that others have done on the Rio Grande and some of the impacts on the water quality of the river. And I was curious if you could take us upstream a little bit and talk about any sampling or data that has been collected from some of the creeks that flow through Laredo and into the river. I understand that in 1994 there was a toxic study that was done that was useful. And maybe you can tell about it and any trends that might have occurred since then.

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TV: Yeah, well, the International Boundary and Water Commission and the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission, the Texas Department of Health, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife and a whole long line of state and federal agencies and their counterparts in Mexico did a study of the toxic materials in the Rio Grande and its tributaries. And that study was published in 1994. What they were doing was looking for toxic materials in water, in sediments, in fish tissues, at different points along the river. And they actually sampled at places along the river, all the way from El Paso Juarez to-

00:02:40 - 2365 to Brownsville, Matamoras. And they screened for about 174, I believe, toxic chemicals - organics, pesticides, metals and so forth. And my recollection is that at some point along the way, they found thirty toxic chemicals that ex-that exceeded either EPA levels or some other agency's levels. The absolute worst place on the Rio Grande at that period of time, according to their sampling, was just downstream of Laredo and Nuevo Laredo. I think they found eleven toxic substances in the river just below Laredo and Nuevo Laredo. And that was the-the highest incidence of toxic materials at any given place.

00:03:28 - 2365 They also looked at the creeks, the tributaries and I mentioned Manadas Creek earlier where the Anzon smelter had been for several decades. And it was no surprise that antimony and thallium and some other heavy metals were found in high levels there. The other creeks in Laredo that they sampled were Zacate Creek. Zacate Creek is the creek that runs pretty much down the middle of-of Laredo. And one of the major toxic chemicals they found there was diazinon. Now diazinon is an insecticide that up until about two years ago, you could go down to the local grocery store or any place that

00:04:16 - 2365 would sell insecticides and you could buy diazinon. Well, in the U.S. it was taken off of the market about two years ago because it was determined that this caused some pretty serious neurological damage, especially in children. Well, Zacate Creek had high levels of diazinon and there's no agriculture per se on-on Zacate Creek and so the speculation, of course, is that it's us! You know, we got fire ants, we got imported fire ants out in the-out in the lawn. We got to get rid of those fire ants well how we going to-well diazinon. And so I think the diazinon in that creek was largely the result of just the-the inhabitants using-overusing this insecticide and then the runoff into the storm drains

00:05:10 - 2365 and then eventually into the creek was the cause of that. One of the other creeks is Chacon Creek, which is one of the-is the biggest watershed in the Laredo area. And one of the main contaminants there was chlordane. And chlordane is another pesticide-another insecticide but it's been banned in the United States for, oh, approaching thirty years now and-but a very persistent pesticide. Initially when it was first on the market,

00:05:44 - 2365 we used it for all kinds of applications. Eventually it was approved only for termite control. And so, if you were going to build a structure that might be potentially damaged by termites, you would treat the soil where you going to build that structure before you build it and extremely persistent and so, there were high levels of chlordane in Chacon Creek in the sediments of Ch-Chacon Creek, even though it hadn't been used in this country for well over twenty years before that study was carried out. And so the tributaries-each tributary had its own profile of-of toxic substances based pretty much

00:06:28 - 2365 on what's going on in that watershed.

Then on up river the-the second worst place was just below El Paso. And so any time you have a municipality, a city, there are things going to be going in to the-going in to the creeks and then into the water of the-the rivers. And so we expect a spike in, you know, contaminants of some kind or other, whether it's fecal contamination or heavy metals, just depending on what's going on in the-in the watershed that leads into the river.

DT: Do you know of any research that's turned up connections from these toxics in the river with public health problems? I know there have been a lot of concern about neural tube defects down in the valley, anything similar to that that you can put to?

00:07:20 - 2365 TV: Well, all I can say about that is there was, you know, a lot of speculation about the relationship between toxic materials, either in the water or the air that cluster down in Cameron County of-of the neural tube defects, the-the anencephaly and the spina bifida. I just read an article in the newspaper recently that they-there's a new twist on this that it perhaps was contamination of corn used to make tortillas that these women may have been eating during the first trimester of pregnancy and toxins from the-the fungus that was growing in the corn may have been a contributing factor. That's something I-I don't know. I haven't read the study that reported that, just a newspaper

00:08:14 - 2365 article. But that's kind of a new-new twist on it. Certainly I would say one of the things that that generated was a lot of interest in pregnant women or women that are going to become pregnant potentially to be sure to get enough folic acid in their diet because there certainly are studies that do indicate vitamins in the diet can, at least, have some effect on preventing neural tube defects. Now, I don't know if we'll ever really know what caused that cluster of-of those defects down-down in the lower Rio Grande Valley. But we do know that there are, you know, toxic chemicals going into the

00:09:00 - 2365 river, that there are people that dump things illegally. At the University here, you know, we have to keep a close track on our waste chemicals. And once we get a-a container of waste chemicals, we have to pay somebody good money to haul that stuff away and dispose of it properly. And so, it's an expensive proposition to have to get rid of toxic chemicals. And I'm afraid a lot of people find it easier just to dump it in the creek or dump them in the river and-and so, I'm thinking that's the source of some of the contamination that's gone on in the past and probably continues to th-to this day.

DT: You pointed out that the pollution problems that were identified in the 1994 study were clustered around El Paso and Laredo and I guess were connected with those municipalities in the urban growth that had occurred there. I was curious if you could talk a little bit about the growth in Laredo and maybe tie it in with the passage of NAFTA back in, I think, it was in 1995 and the influence that might have had on the pattern in Laredo growth here in the Laredo and Nuevo Laredo areas?

00:10:23 - 2365 TV: Well, I think Laredo was already pretty heavily involved with dealing with Mexico even pre-NAFTA. I think NAFTA probably speeded up some of the-the activity. I think since NAFTA was a three-country trade agreement, all-all we look at down here on this border is what's happening between U.S. and Mexico and the NAFTA was a fifteen year phase-in program. Not everything happened in 1995 and so, new-new segments of that agreement get implemented as time goes by. So I think we're in about the eleventh year of a fifteen year phase-in and certainly the-what I see going on in-in

00:11:13 - 2365 Laredo and Nuevo Laredo and the number of trucks-certainly there are more trucks now then there were pre-1995. I-I hear nine thousand, ten thousand trucks a day crossing the World Trade Bridge upstream of our Jefferson Street water treatment plan. But-the interesting thing to me is if we look at Laredo and the growth of Laredo out toward the World Trade Bridge out-what we call a Mines Road, Farm to Market 1472, twenty years ago if we had been looking out in that direction, we would have seen mainly

00:11:56 - 2365 agricultural plants. We would see onion fields and today we see houses, we see warehouses, we see a bridge carrying trucks back and forth across the river. So that-that area has grown tremendously and part of it is, I'm sure the result of NAFTA being implemented. One of the good things that that bridge did for us be-before the World Trade Bridge which, like I said earlier, I think was a bad place to put it-but one of the things it did, it got a lot of the traffic off of I35. Before that bridge opened, in the evening, trucks would back up three or four, five miles on the international highway 35

00:12:41 - 2365 out here waiting to get across into Mexico. And so it became a parking lot on the-the interstate. And so that's one of the things that the-the bridge did was to get a lot of the traffic out of the downtown area, out of-off of I35 before it gets into Laredo. And so those trucks now go to the-the bridge-the World Trade Bridge without having to come directly into-into Laredo. Bu-but the growth continues out that way, growth continues in south Laredo as well. A new Wal-Mart going in, every time I drive, you know, doing our water sampling down river-every time I drive out hi-highway 83 south, I see new

00:13:26 - 2365 businesses, new houses, just tremendous growth going on down there. And so, a lot of the-a lot of the, I guess we could call it prosperity has been the result of trade with Mexico and the NAFTA being a part of that trade.

And then, you know, one of the things that I speculate about and I can't get very many people to-to agree with me and that's probably because I'm usually wrong more than I'm right-that if NAFTA does what it's supposed to, in another four years or so, we're not going to need as much warehouse

00:14:05 - 2365 space as we have in Laredo because the way it works now is material comes from somewhere in the United States down to the border. And it doesn't cross the border into Mexico until the customs duty's paid, until the paperwork's done by a broker in Mexico. And so the stuff gets off-loaded into a warehouse and sits there until the paperwork's done and the duty's paid. Well, if NAFTA is implemented and there's no duty to be paid on materials going into Mexico, there will be no need for the material to sit in warehouses as it is at the present time. So, I don't know if they-the-if we may see a little dip in the economy of Laredo when NAFTA is fully implemented or not. That's just speculation on my part.

DT: NAFTA seems to be mostly about freeing up the movement of goods and services back and forth across the border but I guess another thing that's happened in the last twenty-five years since you arrived is a continuing stream of immigration, legal and illegal. And I'm curious what sort of impacts you see on these population changes, both in the Laredo area and then, you know, far downstream in Texas and more northern states?

00:15:29 - 2365 TV: Well, even since I've been in Laredo, I've certainly witnessed immigration, a lot of it illegal immigration. The more time you spend down on the banks of the river or in the river, the more opportunity you have to see people crossing the river. And it's certainly not an uncommon sight to see people crossing the river at-in Laredo and up and

00:15:54 - 2365 downstream from Laredo. Just, you know, from observation, I think probably in the past twenty-five years, the number of people crossing illegally has increased. Certainly one of the ways you can tell how many people are crossing the river at a particular point, you go out on the river. Most of the people that cross the river illegally, strip down, you know, to their underwear, perhaps and put all their clothes in a black plastic bag and carry it on top of their head or in an inner tube or someway or other and then when they get across the river they abandon the wet clothes and put dry clothes on and abandon the black

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plastic bag and head inland. And so, you can find just mounds and mounds of clothing left on the banks of the river. And one of the things is do occasionally, I go down to a, you know, a common point where people cross and leave clothes and pick them up and take them to the dumpster and then go back in a couple of weeks and I can gauge how many people are crossing at that particular point over a period of time. But certainly I think that there's been an increase in the number of people. This is something else that I don't know if there's any way to quantify this but my other observation has been there

00:17:21 - 2365 are far more females crossing the river today than there were twenty years ago by looking at the female apparel left on the banks of the river. You know, I didn't use to see that very often but now, you know, it's a lot of evidence that there are a lot of women crossing the river that I didn't use to see very much of.

DT: Besides, I guess, this being a sign of poverty and people looking for jobs in the U.S., do you see it as any sort of long term sign of the population trends here in the country and the United States and what sort of impact that has on natural resources and on pollution levels and so on?

00:18:13 - 2365 TV: Well, I don't-I think, you know, one of the-one of the selling points of NAFTA was it was going to improve the economic situation in Mexico to the point that these people would be employed and would not need to seek a better life elsewhere. Well, it looks like, maybe that hadn't been too successful because there's still a constant flow of people. And the other thing is, from what I understand and actually observe, it used to be mainly people coming from Mexico but in-in recent years there's been a big upturn in immigration from Brazil, crossing the-the Rio Grande, lots of people from Central America crossing the Rio Grande at Laredo. So, it's not-not only Mexicans looking for

00:19:04 - 2365 work in the United States. It's people from-and I understand lots of people even coming from China up through Mexico and crossing the river here.

But, yeah, if-if Mexico the-the-the only-the only solution that I see is somehow or other Mexico's economic situation has got to improve. And as long as the economics of Mexico are as they are today, that stream of people will continue to flow through here. There's just no-no way around it. I don't know what the actual numbers are but I have read that Mexico's population growth was going to, over the next few years, put approximately two million people into the population with no prospects of jobs. A couple million people a year is a lot of people to be crossing the border or looking for-for a way to improve their economic status.

DT: Well, does it make you think about what is a sustainable population here? And what's the struggle with trying to maintain a population that is sustainable and yet not have some sort of anti-immigrant fever here along the border, throughout the country?

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TV: Well, since-since one of my interests is water, one of the things that I wonder about, anyway, is how big a population can live on the banks of the Rio Grande on the U.S. and Mexican side? How much water is there? And well, I mentioned drought earlier, you know, back in-back in the fifties we had a drought when Falcon Reservoir was being constructed downstream of us. That was an excellent time to build a reservoir because they didn't have to divert any water because there wasn't any water in the river. But since then, you know, the river, the-the Amistad was built and there have been times in the past where both of those reservoirs were full. They were at conservation

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capacity, you know. They couldn't hold any more water. And so, at that point in time, there was actually water leaving the Rio Grande going into the-the estuary into the Gulf of Mexico. As you may know, there have been some times in recent years where the Rio Grande did not make its way all the way to the Gulf, that it was impeded by a sandbar and the flow simply was not enough to carry the-the river to the-to Boca Chica. So, but water is a-the quantity of water and population growth is a big concern. Right now, because we did have some pretty good rains last year, the Rio Grande, the-the

00:22:01 - 2365 reservoirs, Amistad and-and Falcon reservoirs, as far as the United States conservation is concerned is about ninety-plus percent. So as far as the United States is concerned, those two reservoirs are almost full. As far as Mexico ownership of the water, I think it's somewhere around 40-45 percent full. And so, right now if we look at Falcon Reservoir, if we look at Amistad reservoir, they seem to be in pretty good shape. In-in 2002, they were in terrible shape in terms of water storage. I think the United States; we were down to about twenty-five percent of the conservation pool. Mexico was well under ten percent. I-well, depends on how you want to look at it. As far as Mexico was concerned, the

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reservoir was either ten percent full or ninety percent empty. As far as U.S. concerned, twenty-five and seventy-five or thereabouts. But certainly droughts come and go and we're-we seem to be, at least in our part of the-the Rio Grande, okay as-as far as storage in those two reservoirs but it's been a long time since it's rained here. I think on the-the weather last night, I heard that it's been about-almost seventy days since we had miserable rainfall here. Yesterday we did have 2/100th of an inch, which is considered measurable so we have broken the spell with 2/100th of an inch of rain.

But,

00:23:41 - 2365 you know, quantity of water in the Rio Grande and I might-might have also mention, they way I view the Rio Grande is actually two river systems. The river originates as the headwaters in the Rio Grande and the San Luis Valley of Colorado. It makes its way down through the great State of New Mexico and essentially ends at El Paso Juarez. The-the river downstream of El Paso, a strip of that river is-is known as the

00:24:12 - 2365 "Forgotten River" and part of that is described as an intermittent stream, which means it may well be dry part of the time. Well, our river originates in the mountains of Chihuahua; the Rio Conchos Basin is where the water that we see in Laredo, a good deal of it comes out of the mountains in Chihuahua. We also have the Pecos River. We have the Devil's River and we have some other tributaries and springs along the way. But we've, you know, there was a point a few years ago in the Big Bend Region the river was dry. And-and that certainly will happen again and more people there are demanding

00:24:59 - 2365 water from the Rio Grande, the-the-the bigger demand we're going to put on that water supply and there's going to be a finite number of people that can be supported by that river.

Of course, in Laredo, we've heard for years about a secondary source of water. And we're in the middle of the political season in Laredo and all the politicians, both at the county level and the city level are talking about well when I'm elected, we're going to go out there and get this secondary source of water so we don't have to rely on the Rio Grande. We're going to find groundwater somewhere that we're going to supplement our

00:25:45 - 2365 Rio Grande with. Well, we haven't been too successful at that yet. You know, there are aquifers out there; water quality in most of those aquifers is way less than the quality of the water in the Rio Grande. So, even if we could tap into an aquifer that would supply a significant amount of water, it would take a good deal of cleaning up to make it potable water. And so, even if we find a secondary source, it's going to be very expensive.

DT: Can you talk about some of the reasons that there may be water shortages in the future for Laredo and downstream cities? I understand that, you know, population growth is-part of it the demand is going up but there has also been problems with construction of dams in more recent years, in Mexico on the Conchos and also salt cedar growth along some of the channels that run into the United States, can you add some detail to that?

00:26:52 - 2365 TV: Well, if we go down to the banks of the river and take a look at the vegetation down there, especially in places like Laredo and then up on the Pecos, which is a tributary that leads into the Rio Grande and in that forgotten river section of the river, one of the major problems is Salt Cedar and Salt Cedar is a very thirsty plant. It's a non-native species imported from the old world. It's-it's found from North Africa all the way across into China, different species of it and was imported in the United States oh, for a couple of reasons, I suppose. One is simply as an ornamental, people to grow in

00:27:39 - 2365 their yards and the other some people thought it was a good way to stabilize the banks of rivers. When you grow Salt Cedars, eventually they-they produce a lot of seeds and those seeds get washed here and there and blown here and there. And once you've got Salt Cedar, it's very difficult to get rid of it. The-from the literature I read, they-they tell me that a mature Salt Cedar can evapo-transpire up to two hundred gallons of water per day. And if you have thousands and thousands of-of Salt Cedars then you've got a problem and...

(misc.)

DT: When we broke just a few moments ago, we were talking about Tamarisks, Salt Cedars, on the Rio Grande and you were explaining the problems they have caused with the flow. Can you give us a little more elaboration on that?

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TV: Well, the-the Salt Cedars are found in the-the tributaries of the Rio Grande. The distribution of Salt Cedars is not uniform along the river. If you go up, oh, let's say to Dryden up the river 150 or so miles, you see Salt Cedar but not very many. It's places-especially spl-places that have been highly disturbed and the banks of the Rio Grande in Laredo, I had some students, one of my ecology projects, a couple of years ago-their project was to determine how many mature Salt Cedars there were between bridge number two in downtown Laredo and the World Trade Bridge up river. And so they spent a good deal of time just, you know, traversing from one end to the other, mainly on foot,

00:29:42 - 2365 to count the-the mature Salt Cedars. And they came to almost 4,000 Salt Cedars on the U.S. side in that short stretch of-of the river. Now, that's mature, I mean, when we talk about mature Salt Cedar, we're talking about diameter of eight to ten inches minimum and then on up from there. And so, if-if each one of those is actually transpiring a couple of hundred gallons of water per day, that is a significant amount of water. And that was just between the two bridges that we were talking about and that was only on the

00:30:19 - 2365 U.S. side and certainly there's Salt Cedars on both sides of the river.

So, the City of Laredo is actually the-the Parks and Recreation of the City of Laredo has decided that they may try to do a little-a little bit of Salt Cedar control along the banks of the river in-in the City of Laredo. Unfortunately, the only way that I know of that you can do that is with some kind of herbicides. You know, if you just go down and cut the tree down as close to the ground as you possibly can, that's not going to control it because it's going to put out suckers that grow up and before long, you got a huge bush and it

00:31:02 - 2365 eventually turns into a huge tree again. So, just cutting them is not-not the answer. So you'd have to cut them and then treat the-the stump some way with an herbicide. And my-my students actually did a little bit of-of investigation about that and what kind of herbicides would work the best. And certainly the-the Salt Cedars can be controlled with herbicides but it's a very labor intensive and a very expensive proposition to do that. You know, then-if-in terms of the amount of water that you can conserve, you know, you'd have to cut down an awful lot of Salt Cedars and-and it would be an ongoing

00:31:44 - 2365 project because, like I mentioned, they produce a lot of seeds and there are a lot of seeds out there and they get windblown and they got-get carried by the water. And so, if you were really going to be serious about controlling them, you'd need to start up river or up creek and work your way down because going the other way is not going-not going to get you anywhere.

DT: I guess one of the other concerns about flow to the river has been the proposals for dams. And some dams have been built, of course, the existing ones you've talked about Elephant Butte, Amistad and Falcon, but also I think there's been one actually constructed on the Rio Conchos in Mexico and then one that was proposed but not constructed at near Dryden. Can you discuss the-those two?

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TV: Well, the-on the international portion of the Rio Grande, the U.S. and Mexico signed, what we call the Treaty of 1944 and the Treaty of 1944 apportioned the waters of the Rio Grande and the Colorado River. And so, it was a fairly complex treaty but the idea was some water that originates as precipitation in the United States will be delivered to Mexico and water that originates in Mexico will be delivered to the United States.

And for us in this part of the Rio Grande, that Mexican water originates mainly in the-in the mountains of Chihuahua and the Rio Conchos Basin. The Rio Conchos is also that

00:33:21 - 2365 watershed-the-the population growth there in-in Chihuahua and along that watershed is also really taking off. And so, there actually, I believe, five reservoirs on the Rio Conchos in Mexico, Boquilla being the largest one. And so, Mexico impounds water along that watershed for use for agriculture mainly but for other uses as well. And so, water that, at one point in time would've made its way directly down to the Rio Grande is now being impounded in Mexico.

And up until a couple of years ago, that Treaty of 1944-the conditions of that treaty were not being met by Mexico. Mexico, at one point

00:34:12 - 2365 in time, owed the United States somewhere on the order of one and a half million acre feet of water. An acre-foot is about is-an acre is-a football field is about an acre so, if you can envi-envision a football field with a foot of water on it, that would be an acre-foot. That's about 326,000 gallons of water and Mexico owed the United States one and a half million acre-feet of water. Well, they were in the midst of a drought, just like we-I mean, it was, you know, it was a-the drought and so, they were not releasing water from the Rio Conchos Basin into the Rio Grande for the United States. And so,

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they were in arrears of their-of their water debt, the water payment to the United Sates. Well, they're-they're in the process of paying that off and-and actually one of the reasons the Rio Grande reservoirs, the Falcon and Amistad, as far as the U.S. is concerned, are in pretty good shape is because part of that water is water that's been transferred from Mexico in their attempt to pay off the water debt.

Then the other thing that some people find a little surprising is that most of the water-about 85 to 90 percent of the water in the Rio Grande belongs to irrigation districts, belongs to agriculture. In

00:35:44 - 2365 order to take water out of the Rio Grande, you have to own the water and water rights are bought and sold as a commodity. And so, if you wanted to buy a few acre feet of water, you would find somebody that was willing to sell you a few acre feet of water and you could buy that. But most of it belongs to agriculture and during the-the drought when Mexico was not able to meet their obligation, it was mainly the farmers in the lower Rio Grande Valley that weren't getting the water that they normally would've gotten to

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irrigate their crops. Municipalities have priority even though agriculture actually owns most of the water. If the reservoirs get to a certain point, they get so low then agriculture is the first to be-have to curtail their water uses and municipalities continue to draw water out of the river.

But the-the treaty of '44 called for a maximum of three reservoirs on the Rio Grande and those two have been constructed, Amistad and-and Falcon and there's been talk over the years of a third reservoir. I don't think it'll ever happen, personally. I just don't-I don't really see a place for a third reservoir but once again, I could be wrong.

DT: Well, you told us a lot about the water quality and flow regime in the Rio Grande and about a lot of impacts on it. I was hoping if you could use that as a background to some of the advocacy and educational work that's been done at the Rio Grande International Study Center, which you were one of the founders of and have been a chair for a number of years of the board, perhaps you can explain what the Center's been involved in?

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TV: Well, as I mentioned earlier, one of our main focuses has been education. And when we talk about education, we're talking about educating school children from, you know, kindergarten all the way up through college and university students. But we also thought there was a need to educate some of our local politicians. I-I don't know how many people understand that, okay, we have some regulatory agencies, we have the EPA and in Texas, we have T.C.E.Q., the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality but

00:38:33 - 2365 those two agencies don't really do a whole lot unless the municipal government wants them to. And so, really the City Council is a much more important body than most people realize when it comes to decisions that are made affecting water, affecting the environment. And so, one of our-one of our goals was to try to educate the City Council, the County Commissioners and people that-that make decisions locally about, you know, some of these decisions may affect water quality, may affect the flow in the

00:39:18 - 2365 river. And so, that's one of the things our International Study Center has tried to do, is to educate all the way from pre-school on up.

DT: Can you give us some examples of classes you've offered or campaigns that you've pursued with politicians?

00:39:37 - 2365 TV: Well, more-the most recent thing that has been done is what we call the Green Space Ordinance in the City of Laredo. The-the idea there was-as-well, Laredo is interested in growth and municipalities, and local governments tend to think growth is always good. I don't necessarily agree but certainly one of the things that companies, let's say from out of state that are interested in setting up some kind of operation in Laredo, down here on the border-they bring in their-their executives and they, you know, they ask some questions about, you know, how many golf course do you have? How many, you know, amenities do you have that if I move here, if I move my company

00:40:26 - 2365 here, what are my people here going to do? And one of the things that people coming from more verdant places than this, they say "Wow, where's-where's the greenery? That's one of the things that they want to know about because-and essentially the only place we have greenery, naturally, is along the watercourses, the creeks. Unfortunately the creek, Zacate Creek that we mentioned earlier that runs down through the middle of Laredo has been largely channelized and-and got concrete banks and there is no vegetation per se growing along there. No trees, no habitat for birds, no-so, anyway the

00:41:14 - 2365 Green Space Ordinance which the Rio Grande International Study Center was a part of working on with-with the development community, with the-the land developers and the-eventually the City Council was to get that ordinance hammered out. And it took a good while to get it hammered out because developers were interested in developing every square foot possible, which would encroach on the creeks. And so, one of the educational activities we carried out was to try to get the-the developers and the City Council on board with the idea that, you know, it might be a good idea to preserve what

00:41:59 - 2365 greenery we have because some people are kind of interested in that and some people like to have parks that have trees and birds and butterflies. And so, anyway, the-the-that was one of the-the more recent things that we've done to try to educate people of the value of preserving the creeks. And certainly one of the-one of the arguments that we were able to make was if you just have a concrete chute that goes directly to the river, all the contaminants are going to go directly into the river. There's not going to be any-

00:42:40 - 2365 any absorption by the soil. There's not going to be any chance for vegetation to-to help remediate these problems. And so we've-we've worked pretty hard to get the Green Space ordinance passed. And now we're involved in trying to be sure it gets enforced. So the-that's-that's one of the educational things that we've done at the-at the city level anyway.

The other-the other thing I want to mention is the-the-at the Laredo community college there is a center there called the Lamar Bruni Vergara Environmental Science Center and that center is dedicated to study of the Rio Grande Basin. And they

00:43:29 - 2365 have displays over there of the plants and the animals of the Rio Grande watershed. Well that is an outgrowth of-of work of the Rio Grande International Study Center. That was, you know, our-that was our baby. It's actually the uni-the college that owns it and maintains it but that was one of the-the things that the-the Rio Grande International Study Center was initiated and-and got going several years ago.

DT: And the program there is partly to show the biota, the fish, from the upper reaches and the middle reaches, lower reaches?

00:44:09 - 2365 TV: Right, we-we, you know, it's not only the-the things you would find around Laredo and this in the Tamaulipan part of the Rio Grande watershed but there-there, you know, an aquarium that has the fish from the headwater region, the colder and then all the way down to the estuary. Now another thing that we've done educationally along

00:44:31 - 2365 with the center over there, we-we had a grant, well, actually had two grants that we wrote curriculum for different grade levels in the-in the public schools that the teacher would teach lessons on environmental science. And then the students would take a field trip to the center to observe some of the things that they had studied in the classroom.

And then there was curriculum for follow-up on that. And so we had-we have curriculum for various grade levels. And the second grant we got was to translate that into Spanish. And that grant also brought a lot of students from Nuevo Laredo to the

00:45:19 - 2365 center. Their-their teachers dealt with the curriculum in advance and then they took field trips to the center and there were follow-up curricular activities. And so, that's one of their-our educational aspects of our organization is to-to get teachers more knowledgeable so they can teach their students about environmental issues and the Rio Grande issues and-and-and have a field trip to the Environmental Science Center.

DT: We often start to wrap up these interviews by asking you, you might have somebody, some kind of a message for the future. You've been involved in education from school age kids, at the Bruni Vergara Center and also undergraduates and even graduate students and then even politicians, adults. What sort of message would you want to pass on to the younger generation about the natural world and about conservation in general?

00:46:28 - 2365

TV: Well, I think if there's one message I would like to get-get across to-to-to people, in general, is pay attention to what's going on around you, you know. Try to understand, you know, what one action might-the effect that it might have on other things in your environment. I-I told you that I-I teach this Natural History of South Texas course and one of the things I always do the first lab, I say "We're going to go out and spend a half an hour walking around campus." And so we'll go out and we'll walk around campus and then we'll come back into the lab and I will ask "Well, what did you see?" And you-maybe you wouldn't be surprised but quite often I get oh, I didn't

00:47:12 - 2365 notice anyt-I didn't see anything, I, you know, I didn't, you know, I didn't see anything out there. Well, one of the-one of the things I want people to-to do is start paying attention on-to what's going on out there.

And the other thing at the-at the university level I, you know, I encourage students to get involved in what's going on out there. I mean, I'm not a politician and I don't support any political party or candidate but a lot of these decisions that are going to affect all of us are obviously made by politicians. And so I'd like for our-our students to start paying attention and, you know, if they have an opportunity to get involved in some of these things, it may influence the politicians and

00:47:58 - 2365 others to-to make the right decisions environmentally when it comes to-to water conservation, you know, what can we do to conserve water? Look around see-see what other places have done. I mean, Laredo is-is not-does not have a very good record of water conservation, you know. We're not really big on conservation and part of the reason is well, people say "Well, if we don't take it out of the river, it just goes on down river, you know, we missed it" Well, is that a bad thing? So, yeah, I think education is-is one of the things I'm extremely interested in trying to educate students and, like I say, all the way up about the consequences of some of the things we do.

DT: It seems that you've worked hard to get people to pay attention to the natural world in general but in particular the river and I was wondering if you could close out this interview by telling us about trips that you've made to the river, either in inflatables or kayaks or canoes?

00:49:11 - 2365 TV: Yeah, well, when-when we-like I mentioned earlier, I grew up in the desert and spent most of my life in the-in the desert before I came to Laredo. And when we first started looking at the river, we thought well, we-we ought to get out there on the water because it probably looks a little different from that advantage point than it does from the banks of the river. And so we started-we had an old military surplus life raft, a seven-place raft. And so we get seven people in that and-and we'd always take the pump with us because it leaked pretty badly but we would do little excursions starting up river and then coming down to Laredo and then going through Laredo, seeing some of the outfalls,

00:50:00 - 2365

some of the problems of where things were coming into the river. We've pretty much graduated from the old leaky raft to canoes and kayaks now. If you-and it's surprising, I guess, in a way, how few people actually use the river for any kind of recreation. Certainly if you're in Austin you go to-I mean you see kayaks and canoes out on the-on the-the rivers all the time. Well there's very few people that have canoes or kayaks

00:50:37 - 2365 in Laredo. And so this is another thing we've tried to educate people on. Hey, that river-that river's, you know, a beautiful river. And if you get out on the river, there are lots of things to see and do.

And so, I teach-I teach in the summer time, I teach a course for teachers. It's a-the name of the course is Teaching Environmental Science and it's funded by the T.C.E.Q. and a part of that course, I insist that the students actually take a little canoe trip with us as part of the course. And it turns out that a lot of them are a little apprehensive at first but I think it-in-in the end, it's probably one of their favorite

00:51:18 - 2365s parts of the whole course, something that they had never done, that they'd never consider doing and get a better idea of the river and what goes on in the river and along the banks of the river. So we-we do canoe trips as often as possible.

DT: What do you think that they see and enjoy the most when they visit the river on boat?

00:51:41 - 2365 TV: Well, I think most of them have never seen the river except when they cross the bridges and that's not a very attractive sight. As I say, it's a beautiful river. I mean, it is just, you know, gorgeous especially if you get away from town and you see wildlife that you don't see in town. I mean, you see lots of Great Blue Herons, lots of egrets, lots of other kinds of-of birds that inhabit the banks of the river. One of the-one of the trips in the past couple of years, in the summertime, we were paddling along and there's a turkey that actually flew acr-a wild turkey, that flew across the river in front of us, you know. I think-I think that amazed the students more than anything, you know, seeing a turkey out there on the-on the river.

DT: Well, thank you. Is there anything you'd like to add?

00:52:41 - 2365

TV: Well, I appreciate the opportunity to talk with you today. And, you know, I'm sometimes more optimistic than other times. I think we've got some challenges ahead of us here in-in Laredo and in the Rio Grande watershed as a whole but I hope, you know, fifty years from now, that the river will still be flowing and we'll still have the wildlife and the-the vegetation. And so, I appreciate the opportunity, thank you.

DT: Well, thank you.