Resilience Roundtable Series

Join us for this conversation with educators that operate in diverse pedagogical sites, ranging from using the sacred waters of Texas to understand Indigenous lifeways, theater-based embodied practice for learners to connect with their own bodies, and learning about water management from past societies to link to our current context. 

In this special edition of Planet Texas 2050’s Resilience Roundtable Series, Environmental and Water Resource Engineering Professors Paola Passalacqua and Matt Bartos will reflect on their experience witnessing the Way of Water: Onion Creek with Artistic Director Allison Orr and Producer Lisa Byrd of Forklift Danceworks.

In this panel, we will discuss how researchers and managers at the Marine Science Institute and the City of Corpus Christi are working to shed light on the interplay between contaminants and aquatic ecosystems, the techniques to trace their presence, the impacts they can have on human and environmental health, as well strategies for their mitigation.

Today, urban dwellers tend to think about where their water comes from only when it stops flowing, or when it flows too much. This water usually makes it to residential consumers through an extensive and technologically sophisticated infrastructure that remains largely invisible outside times of crisis. Across much of human history (and in many parts of the world today), by contrast, the question of where to get water for daily needs was much more immediate.

The Texas Gulf Coast faces several pressing water-related issues. Water contamination from industry, floods, and saltwater; a stressed water supply from urbanization; and the looming peril of sea level rise represent only a few of the interlocking challenges that coastal communities face. This panel of scientists, advocates, and planners will illuminate how these challenges are being met.

The complex way in which water moves and fills up the land is shaped both by geologic processes and the political economy of building housing and infrastructure. Decisions made decades ago affect the landscape of hazard and risk in the present and near future.

Water has always existed as a paradox. It creates and destroys; it heals as well as harms. Water shapes the land both by carrying away and leaving behind, telling the stories of the earth over and over again. Artists are among many who ask us to continually listen to these stories while remembering that we ourselves are bodies of water.

How do we make sure there is sufficient water for all human and non-human communities in the present and the future? How do we ensure equitable access to quality drinking water for all?