Dr. Davies holds a PhD in American Civilization from the University of Texas at Austin, and has had a career in editing and publishing books and journals, many of them about natural resource and conservation topics. She served as the Director of Texas A&M University Press, where she earlier worked as Editor-in-Chief and as the Merrick Editor for the Natural Environment. Prior to working at Texas A&M, she served as Founding Editor and Publisher of Texas Birds, a publication of the Texas Ornithological Society, as well as the Science Editor and Editorial Fellow for the University of Texas Press. In those capacities, she has worked with a number of funders and dozens of authors to bring scores of books and articles about the natural world to the public. The works have touched on a variety of conservation subjects, including water, wildlife, energy, public lands, forests, agriculture, and environmental history. She has also helped support writers through her service on the boards of two residencies for artists: the Madrono Ranch: A Center for Writing, Art, and the Environment, and the Thinking like a Mountain Foundation.
Region: Blackland Prairie
Bill Carr
Mr. Carr is a noted field botanist who has worked on plant inventories, surveys and protection efforts for Texas Parks and Wildlife (Natural Heritage Program), the Nature Conservancy of Texas, and his own firm, Acme Botanical Services. He has collected more than 37,000 plant specimens, with more than 15,000 catalogued at the herbarium at the University of Texas at Austin, to improve the understanding of plant distributions across the Southwest. As well, he was a co-author, with Jackie Poole, Jason Singhurst, and Dana Price on the reference volume, Rare Plants of Texas (Texas A&M University Press 2007), and has made contributions to a number of journals, including Lundelia, Sida, and the Journal of the Botanical Research Institute of Texas.
Bob Burleson
Mr. Burleson was an attorney based in Temple, Texas, whose passion for exploration and conservation took him on early float and canoe trips down the Big Bend Canyons, to efforts to create a national park in the Guadalupe Mountains, to service on the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission, and to work on restoring native tallgrass prairie.
Larry DeMartino
Mr. DeMartino is a landscape architect based in San Antonio who has long been interested and active in reconciling the land’s natural features with its intended use. His professional work has included site studies, layouts for private gardens, designs for public parks and open spaces, projects to protect urban streams and watersheds, and classes for university students. His volunteer work has also touched on these same areas. He has served on several appointed boards for the City of San Antonio, including the Committee for the Water Quality Ordinance, the Open Space Advisory Committee, the On-Premise Sign Committee, and the Ad Hoc Committee for the Urban Corridor Ordinance. In addition to his municipal work, he has been heavily involved in the formation and leadership of the San Antonio Coalition of Neighborhood Associations, a group that was effective in making sure that local government was responsive to citizen concerns.
Helen Dutmer
During Helen Dutmer’s elected service on the City of San Antonio Council (14 years) and the Bexar County Commissioners’ Court (6 years), she dealt with many significant environmental issues facing central Texas. In subsequent years, she has been active with appointed bodies, such as the San Antonio Zoning Commission, and with non-profit environmental groups, including the Aquifer Protection Association and the Bexar Safe Water Committee, that weighed in on many of the same topics. Many of the issues she has worked on revolved around infrastructure investments and regulatory decisions for protection of groundwater and surface water in the region. For example, she was involved in opposition during the early 1990s to the construction of Applewhite Reservoir on the Medina River, construction of the Dos Rios wastewater treatment plant during the 1980s, and passage of Ordinance 48106, an early and seminal effort in 1977 to control development over the Edwards Aquifer recharge zone.
Jim Eidson
Jim Eidson has served as the long-term steward for the Texas Nature Conservancy’s Clymer Meadow, an 800-acre remnant of the 12 million acres of tallgrass blackland prairie that once stretched from north of Dallas to south of San Antonio, of which less than 1/2% remains intact today. Trained in range land ecology and management at Texas A&M, Mr. Eidson used his skills to maintain and restore the Meadow and adjacent private tracts, through prescribed burns, reintroduced native grass and forb seed, periodic bison grazing, and exotic plant and woody species control. Mr. Eidson has also taught in the Biology and Environmental Sciences department at Texas A&M University in Commerce, Texas.
Sylvia Herrera
Ms. Herrera is an Austin-based community organizer, activist, and co-founder (with Susana Almanza) and health coordinator of PODER, People Organized in Defense of Earth and her Resources. She has worked to protect her east Austin neighborhood from hazardous industrial developments, including a tank farm, waste-recycling facility, a metalwork and casting plant, chip fabrication factory, and power plant. She has used her health training to survey her neighbors, identify health problems and possible causes, and empower citizens to speak out at public meetings to protect their community’s health and livelihoods. Throughout, she has worked to change the underlying segregationist zoning, dating back to 1931, which had allowed and encouraged many of these incompatible facilities to be sited in her residential neighborhood. Most recently, Ms. Herrera and PODER have sought to protect the integrity of east Austin from the gentrification that has come from the City’s smart growth initiatives, and ironically, from their very success in protecting and improving the neighborhood.
Pat Johnson
Ms Johnson is an artist working in ceramics, tile and paper. Also, she has long been involved in civic affairs, ranging from serving as precinct judge, to working on environmental matters. Her environmental work included helping organize and lead the non-profit group, Fayette County Resource Watch, which successfully pressed the Lower Colorado River Authority to cancel the Cummins Creek operation, a large lignite surface mine and power plant, in 1989. She was also involved with a public interest group, Clear Clean Colorado River, in persuading the City of Austin to improve their sewage treatment during the late 1980s to protect habitat and users in downstream reaches of the Colorado River. During more recent years, she has been engaged in opposing large-scale residential development slated for Fayetteville, the small, historic community where she has lived since the 1970s.
John Prager
Mr. Prager worked during his career for the Air Force and the University of Texas. As a volunteer and retiree, however, his focus was on protecting the lands and waters near his home in Elgin, Texas, east of Austin. Known for his careful and insightful research, Mr. Prager was particularly active in working with the Central Texas Lignite Watch, Fayette County Resource Watch, and the Bastrop County Environmental Network, in challenging a variety of lignite stripmining proposals for Powell’s Bend, Cummins Creek, and Camp Swift. He was also involved in opposition to central Texas projects to reuse the Longhorn oil pipeline as a gasoline conduit, to construct bullet trains, dams, incinerators and power plants, and to receive sewage from Austin and sell water to San Antonio. Late in his life, he was on the track of state-record size trees in his beloved Bastrop County, having already found immense, record-breaking black locust and American elm.
T. Paul Robbins
T. Paul Robbins has been an environmental analyst, author, publisher and advocate in the Austin area for many years. Frequently seen at Austin City Council hearings giving detailed, thoughtful testimony, he is also well known for his work researching, writing, editing, laying out, printing, distributing and fundraising for the Austin Environmental Directory, a broad sourcebook about environmental issues, products, services, and organizations in central Texas. He has also done wide-ranging reporting on conservation questions for non-profits and agencies, including the Hill Country Foundation, Public Citizen, Save Our Springs Alliance, SEED Coalition, Texans for Public Justice, the Texas Railroad Commission’s Alternative Fuels Division, and the City of Austin’s Environmental & Conservation Services, Energy Management Department, and Consumer Advocate office.