Texas Matters David Martin Davies

The Smokehouse Creek fire was the largest wildfire in Texas History burning over a million acres in the Panhandle. The fire has been out for over a month, but the disaster continues. We are going to get an update on the recovery and what needs to happen to prevent other massive wildfires.

In Loose of Earth, a story of a tight-knit evangelical family in West Texas, the oldest daughter tries to make sense of the contradictions of the world she is warned about and the world she has to occupy. When her father contracts cancer from "forever chemicals" her world come crashing down. The memoir is Loose of Earth, and we hear from the author Kathleen Dorothy Blackburn.

This week on Texas Matters.How HEB is too woke for the GOP. Electric vehicles need places to charge. And covering state news just got a big boost.

This week on Texas Matters: The forecast for the coming summer is record breaking heat. It could be a deadly weather disaster that will challenge emergency services and put Texans at risk. And why a Texas plastics company is failing to accurately monitor its toxic discharge into the Gulf.

Hillcrest in Corpus Christi is a historic African American neighborhood that has long faced environmental racism but is now confronting displacement from a massive desalination project. Environmentalists point out that the desal, hyper-salty brine discharge will be very harmful to the bay and shouldn’t be built.

The last time a total solar eclipse crossed Central Texas was in 1878 – the heyday of the Wild West. That eclipse was crucially important to America’s rise as a scientific power and saw many of the era’s great scientists (including Thomas Edison) trek out to unsettled lands to witness the event firsthand. On April 8, Texas gets another gander at a solar eclipse—but this time without the train robberies and frontier backdrop.