Texas Is Losing Its Rivers.

What is Texas without its rivers? Where we swim, float, gather. We talk about them as a source of life and sometimes as a source of tragedy. Either way you cannot describe Texas without them. What we have never done is leave them alone. We dammed them, pollute them, moved them, and pumped the water out from underneath them. Ben Masters spent three years filming what that left us. We've altered them so extensively that we don't even really have a reference river of what a natural river is anymore. I felt a lot of anger in the making of this film just to to look at what Texas historically was with all of the springs. You know we've lost hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of springs. We've lost thousands of miles of creeks that used to look like this. They don't have water anymore because the water table has dropped so low because of aquifer pumping. In 1975, a hydrologist named Gunnar Bruhn cataloged the major and historic springs of Texas. By the time he published his book six years later, about 11 percent of them had gone dry. Researchers went back and checked in 2024. That number neared 30 percent. In the same span, the water pumped out from under Texas went from about 250 million acre feet to roughly 700 million. New data shows natural springs in central Texas are drying up at an alarming rate. The data has scientists worried, especially as areas across the state, including central Texas, continue to see rapid population growth. You know the good news is that we can we can bring them back. Ben is an award-winning wildlife filmmaker and a trained wildlife biologist, a decade deep into documenting Texas and the American Southwest. He and his team at Fin and Fur Films are responsible for Deep in the Heart, narrated by Matthew McConaughey, and now the sequel, Texas Rivers, narrated by Ethan Hawke, and it's in theaters this week. What the film argues is bigger than restoration. To save our rivers, our springs, and an abundant water future, what we might need is a reckoning in how Texans relate to our water. I joined Ben out on a creek in the hill country to ask what three years on these rivers actually changed. Managing for healthy rivers is a choice that we should make. Managing for unhealthy rivers where we deplete the aquifers, kill the springs, kill the creeks, kill the base floats, where our rivers become dry and void of life, like nobody nobody wants that. Yeah. So let's let's not do that. Like we have the choice of living with vibrant rivers and aquifers, so let's let's do that. Why cover rivers in the way that you did? Why did that make sense to be the sequel? Rivers are just so ingrained in our culture. Like if you go to Austin, into the capital, it's Brazos Street, it's Nueces, it's Colorado, it's Guadalupe. Like rivers are a part of who we are. You know, I grew up on the Canadian. I went to high school on the Concho. I went to college on the Brazos. Now I live on the Colorado and I like to hang out on the Devils and the Pecos and float the lower canyons of the Rio Grande and go trot through the swamps on the Nueces. Like rivers, in so many ways, they define who we are. The very shape of Texas is shaped by the Red, the Rio Grande, and the Sabine. Like rivers are where all of our major cities and towns are located. Rivers are where a lot of our wildlife is located and, you know, the river systems are so unique here. You know, we have this amazing natural phenomenon of a state that kind of slowly and gradually goes out into the bays and estuaries and way up high we have these huge aquifers, the Edwards Aquifer, the Ogallala Aquifer, and they seep out of these springs and they fill up the creeks and then they provide the base flow of the creeks and then they provide the base flow of the rivers and we have thousands of miles of rivers here and they produce these cathedrals of trees, these amazing places that anybody that's ever walked along a Texas creek bed knows and loves and appreciates. What evolved or changed in the appreciation, especially in the trajectory of a project like this, covering, you know, our waterways to such degree, to such different lengths and ends of the state, how did that shape your reflections and understandings of our rivers here in Texas? It's easy to be very critical of the past and to look at the people who built all the dams and all the reservoirs and all the levees and all of the dikes and poured billions of dollars into our water infrastructure and point the finger at them and say, you know, why did you destroy our rivers? And I think that's kind of an easy cop-out because the reason why many of our dams were created is because our rivers also have a dark side. We've had events like the one we had last year where the rivers took the lives of people and if you look back at a lot of the justification for the dams and for the development of our rivers, they were kind of sourced with good intentions by people that were, you know, making the decisions that they could with the information and values that they had at the time. And, you know, I think that we would have developed a lot of our dams and a lot of water infrastructure differently now had we known then what we know now. And that for me was somewhat of an epiphany. I mean, whenever we filmed our sequence on the Guadalupe River, you know, seeing the flood, you know, putting the cameras down and helping people with the recovery efforts for weeks, we helped pick up some of the trash and the debris and just feeling that heartache. People looked at the river not as like this beautiful, tinkling source of life, but as this horrible monster that stole the lives of their loved ones. That happened in Laredo in the 50s. That happened on the Colorado in the year 1900. Rivers, they're meant to flood, they're meant to expand, but whenever they do, if there's folks in the way in the floodplain, it can absolutely upheave cities and communities. And I get it. I understand the reason why people want to control rivers. But the thing that I really kept coming back to in this film is I think it's important that we kind of change our land ethic towards rivers from trying to control them to trying to work with the nature of rivers because we've been trying to control them through concrete and through engineering and there's still disasters that happen. And that concrete and that infrastructure has, it's so expensive to maintain and it's so devastating to the natural ecology of the rivers itself. And I just think we need to really look at the system as a whole and analyze a lot of the benefits and cons and try to balance this challenge that we have of how do we provide food for 30 million Texans, how do we provide water for 30 million Texans, and then also provide springs that still flow, creeks that still flow, rivers that still run. Most of what you see moving in a Texas river between storms is not this week's rain. It's water that soaked into the ground sometimes years ago and came back out at a spring. That is the base flow and it is what keeps a creek running through a month with no weather. Pull enough water out of the aquifer and the spring stops and the creek it fed stops. The river it fed runs low. The water in those creeks belongs to the state, but the water underneath it does not. Since 1904, Texas has followed what is called the rule of capture. Pump what is under your own land and if you dry up a neighbor's well or a spring, it is generally not something anyone can sue you over. Groundwater districts can cap pumping where they exist, but much of Texas has no district at all. Now there are exceptions. Maybe what the future of water in Texas asks for, the future of our rivers, is that the exceptions become the rule. That anger wasn't the origin of our aquifers running dry and being depleted. It wasn't to kill creeks. It was in response to the drought of the 50s and people needed a way to irrigate their crops. It was in response to a growing population and how do we meet the needs of people. I get it, but at the same time I think all Texans agree like we should have springs, we should have creeks, we should have rivers and our trajectory as a society is to continue to deplete our aquifers and I think we need to change that. I think we need to change it quick. What were some of those brightest spots in your opinion that do give you hope and help you know that you want to share and urge Texans on and be like hey we've done this before, we can do it. Not that it's not hard but we have done things like this before. Yeah I mean I think that we're beginning to understand and appreciate how rivers function more and more as they're studied and a lot of it's pretty common sense. I mean you know if you have a river bottom and it's full of big tall trees and lots of foliage and deep-rooted grasses and sedges, this thing's going to flood. This creek floods and whenever it does all these big trees they're going to slow down the flood waters. A lot of the sediment is going to get deposited along the creek within the vegetation. It's going to build up this flood plain and make it this fertile river bottom and you know a healthy river bottom it mitigates the severity of flooding but also all these banks you know there's water that gets stored in the banks and then during drought it's going to slowly ooze out of the banks and keep that base flow of the river continuing to pulse. So I think that recognizing that that healthy rivers that's in our benefit for both a flood mitigation perspective as well as a drought mitigation perspective and we know that because we have examples of that and for me seeing the Natchez River was a really transformative experience because the Natchez you know in their early 1900s late 1800s that whole thing was clear cut and over the last century it's come back the cypress tupelo swamps the big beautiful pines like that whole river valley has restored and once again it functions like a natural river and I think that there's a lot that that we can learn from the Natchez in giving the river space to flood, giving the flood plain enough space to be wild so that it can you know give us those benefits of flood mitigation as well as bank storage to continue providing water through drought. So the Natchez River was was a story of of hope within the film for sure. What did you come to understand from the human mechanics at play with a story like that one? What's cool about the Natchez and this goes for pretty much all big conservation victories is it didn't start with some well-financed group in DC or something like that. It was a bunch of people that lived there that just loved their river and you know spent decades advocating for better river and water management and you know they convinced the Texas legislature and their representatives to go to bat to you know help protect their river, help give it e-flows, help stop unnecessary dams and development, help you know create these parks and reserves that provided the functionality of that river and I think there's a lot of opportunity for improvement of that in Texas and we're really fortunate. I mean every ecoregion has an advocacy group like of real individuals who care so deeply oftentimes dozens of individuals or hundreds of individuals and I think for me that gives me a lot of a lot of hope is the fact that whether it's the Devil's River or the San Marcos River or the Natchez like there's people that have devoted their lives to helping that river keep its function and not every state has that not every place has that and we have that here in Texas. If you went back to the people who began advocating for the Natchez River and the Big Thicket in the 1930s and told them hey did you know that in a hundred years you're going to have like the most recovered river in Texas and it's going to be the shining example of hope they wouldn't have believed it so sometimes it seems like an impossible task and it just takes time. Your first film with Unbranded to deepen the heart you're making media that hopefully makes an impact here in Texas and that's what's kind of kept you going what do you hope is that takeaway from from Deepen the Heart too? You know I really hope that managing for healthy rivers is a choice that we should make you know managing for unhealthy rivers where we deplete the aquifers kill the springs kill the creeks kill the base floats where our rivers become dry and void of life like nobody nobody wants that so let's let's not do that like we have the choice of living with vibrant rivers and aquifers so let's let's do that you know there's some big obstacles in the way unfortunately a lot of our water management a lot of our water infrastructure a lot of our water policy and law was created over a century ago by people using the information that they had at the time but they didn't even have calculators they didn't have the information that we have now they didn't have an understanding of how groundwater is intimately connected with surface water and why are we continuing to use that same management and laws looking 100 years into the future like we should be looking at the reality of where we're at today and managing into the future not stuck in some mindset from 1840. I think one of the most important things that we can do as river lovers is just go out love on your river man go fish go tube go float go boat go have a good time and take your friends with you. All right y'all thanks to Ben Masters for the time and the great conversation. Deep in the Heart 2 Texas Rivers is in theaters September 25th. It starts streaming October 27th on Apple TV and Prime. Links to learn more about the film and watch the full trailer are below. And thank you again to Ben and the Fin and Fur team for letting me use shots from the film in this video to share with you all. One last thing I write a newsletter called My Texas Field Notes. It's a short Friday dispatch from the same desk to trail workflow behind my essays, short films, native plant guides. Each one distills the freshest takeaway from the week's work. Sign up to get the next one in your inbox at CoryAmes.com