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Curriculum: Maps
The Texas Legacy site hosts a
variety of educational curricula, lesson plans, keys and ideas, and
supporting media, including video, databases, transcripts and other
material. Below you can find links to a variety of maps that
summarize and locate the resources and uses of the state, and help
give historic background and regional context to the environmental
issues that arise here. There are also some exercises that may
help you get started on using these maps to learn more about the
state, and how its natural resources can be both used and abused.
Maps of Texas natural
resources
Maps of Texas human uses
Map exercises
A key part of conservation is
understanding both the potential and the vulnerabilities of your
local area. Maps are a great tool to learn about your region.
Here are a few exercises and discussion themes that might get you
started.
Use the maps above to discover the
natural aspects of your community. What is the local
geology, soil, rainfall, and average temperature? How does it
differ from other parts of the state? How does the natural
character of your area influence how people use the land there -
what sort of crops they grow, trees they harvest, minerals they
mine, or livestock they graze?
Are there natural hazards
that are a basic part of living in your area of the state, and that
may bring up environmental concerns? For example, is your area
vulnerable to intense rainfall and runoff, raising the issues of
dams, levees, and impervious cover? Or, is your area
susceptible to faulting, making it riskier to use land waste
disposal methods? Or, is your part of the state drier than
most, bringing up issues of groundwater mining, surface water
imports, and so on?
Use the maps above to find the
built characteristics of your city or town. What are the
major roads, ports, airports, and railroads found in your community?
Can you trace some of these roads back in history to trails used by
Native Americans, Western explorers, or cowboys driving cattle to
market? Can you track your town's roots back to an old
mission, presidio or trading post? Can you understand why
people might have settled early, traded often and stayed long in
particular parts of the state?
Work with the maps to understand
how human uses of your part of Texas might raise
environmental problems. Do the railroads and ports allow for
heavy industry that might have air or water pollution, or solid
waste and deep-well injection impacts? Does the density or
growth of population lead to impacts from the number of people in
the area, such as sprawl, traffic, vehicle exhaust, non-point
runoff, flooding, subsidence, etc.?
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