The rock shelters of the Pecos Canyonlands are an archeological treasure trove, preserving a remarkable record of prehistoric life. Some of those treasures are literally waste: coprolites, fossilized human feces, from the caves have yielded vivid insights into the diets and ritual lives of ancient people.

When the Rio Grande ran dry in Big Bend National Park last spring, photographs of the park's iconic canyons framing an empty riverbed sparked concern not only in Texas, but nationally. The response was justified.

Today, Big Bend National Park is a place to escape from the modern world and into the wilderness. But this harsh and majestic place was also home to countless people, from archaic hunters to 20th-century farmers.

Now celebrating 15 years, Alpine's Borderlands Research Institute fuses scientific rigor with practical conservation.

It’s at the heart of what residents and visitors alike treasure about this place. The desert-mountain country of the Trans-Pecos is Texas at its wildest, and, in recent years, efforts have surged to understand and safeguard its singular natural heritage. … Continue reading → Hosted by for KRTS

The first European to encounter Native American life in our region bore witness to a distinctive phenomenon. When Cabeza de Vaca arrived at La Junta de los Rios, present-day Presidio-Ojinaga, in the 1530s, he found farming communities. The starving Spaniard was fed beans and squash. But he also learned that many La Juntans were away, “hunting cows,” he wrote. The evidence of that “cow” hunting was on display – bison robes abounded at La Junta.

Poet Rita Dove wrote that the plants “wait until the world's tucked in and the sky's one ceaseless shimmer – then lift their saturated eyelids and blaze, blaze all night long for no one.” A century and a half earlier, the English Romantic John Clare claimed that, “hermit-like, shunning the light, it wastes its fair bloom upon the night.”

A vivid image leaps to mind when we imagine traditional Native American life in the West: the bison hunt. We’re told the iconic creatures were both revered and relied upon – that every part of the animal was put to use. We might even think Native Americans on the West Texas plains subsisted exclusively on bison meat.

A vivid image leaps to mind when we imagine traditional Native American life in the West: the bison hunt. We’re told the iconic creatures were both revered and relied upon – that every part of the animal was put to … Continue reading → Hosted by for KRTS

“They create a desert and call it peace,” a first-century Celtic chieftain said of the Roman army devastating his land, rousing his warriors to resistance. Our species can indeed lay the Earth to waste – rendering places lifeless through plunder and violence. But natural deserts are never sterile. They're places of austerity, but also of hidden life.