BioIntegrity

04/13/2026

New vids! From the last few weeks of heat-cutting, air-moistening, and rain-making, by TRICKLE-watering big trees, for Central Texas. Here's part 4, from March 23, 2026, "Increasing Rain Chances" --> https://youtu.be/0NKTYsd28WM

04/11/2026

New vids, here's Part 3, "Beating the Heat." This shares IRLs from watering sessions #4 & #5 on Sunday, March 22, 2026. Local media in the Austin, TX, area made a huge deal over how the heat dome covering the Western USA would affect our area this weekend.

So, on Friday, March 20, Chris Searles decided to start a new field test: watering old growth Live Oak trees that were essentially leafless (due to ongoing harsh drought conditions since 2010) to see if that could cool his neighborhood -- and Austin downwind.

His effort appears to have been successful. Here's Chris' footage from the third day of watering to beat the heat: https://youtu.be/a6dMNo_-DrQ

04/10/2026

New vids! From the last few weeks of heat-cutting, air-moistening, and rain-making, by TRICKLE-watering big trees, for Central Texas. Lots of successes, again. Here's part 2, Cool & Breezy: https://youtu.be/bL0IyHuAIT0

04/10/2026

New vids! From the last few weeks of heat-cutting, air-moistening, and rain-making, by TRICKLE-watering big trees, for Central Texas. Lots of successes, again. Here's part 1: https://youtu.be/gf3nX6bTvzg

04/09/2026

New content: https://mailchi.mp/biointegrity/040926 "Game-Changing for Good." Check it out!

04/08/2026

We're launching a new series of IRL videos from Chris' most recent Strategic Watering effort. It started as an effort to stop a heat wave. That worked, it seems. Twice. Then we started trying for rain. We got four or five of those. And, all along we were rehydrating, nearly-dead, old-growth, Live Oak trees -- which is in and of itself worth doing. Here's a favorite photo from Day 4 of 13-day effort. Videos start posting this afternoon on our YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/

Trickle at the trunk!

04/06/2026

Chris here -- We got 4 rains over Central Texas since I started trying help bring it in two weeks ago via trickle-watering, only one of those four was strongly predicted. I am thrilled...

In part because given the conditions I’m working in, these successes indicate the resiliency of even the most-droughted trees & forests — most of the trees in this series of waterings were leafless, old-growth live oaks.

Video is from today at 2pm.

Please start trickle-watering your trees at the trunk.

And keep an eye on the BioIntegrity page, report coming.

03/24/2026

duh!

A study says warming has accelerated in the last decade, with temperatures rising nearly twice as fast as they did between 1970 and 2015.

03/24/2026

On the Evidence, Texas was Trees > Plains before 1860

What is the evidence?

Since posting "Texas Forests: Before 1860" last week (https://realchrissearles.substack.com/p/texas-as-it-was-forests) , a few folks have asked for verification of the data.

In short, the work we are summarizing quotes from, and synthesizes, the known entirety of writings on Texas ecology before 1860.

These were all eyewitness accounts written on-the-spot.

The collection's author, Prof. Del Weniger (currently under-appreciated), literally first compiled ALL of the written material on Texas, pre-1860, before narrowing down that huge body of work to only the "on-the-spot" eyewitness accounts.

Here, he explains why.

Professor Weniger—

"In the beginning I had thought to use reminiscences right along with these contemporary reports… But looking at all of them together, I soon found that I had assembled a hodgepodge of statements containing contradictions and paradoxes from which I could make out very little.

"As a result, I went back through our references and separated out all of the reminiscences. When I had left only the reports written at the time of observation, before 1860, I found I had eliminated almost all of the contradictions and paradoxes and had remaining an almost completely consistent body of statements which gave coherent pictures of what was then in the land.

"In each verifiable case, later stated assertions were wrong and the early on-the-spot accounts were correct..."

More of Mr. Weniger's thoughts, in brief, here: https://realchrissearles.substack.com/p/on-the-evidence-texas-was-trees-plains "On the Evidence, Texas was Trees > Plains"

03/23/2026

"Every key indicator is flashing red"
-António Guterres, Secretary-General (CEO) of the United Nations

As warning lights flash, U.N. Secretary Gen. António Guterres calls out a global climate emergency.

03/22/2026

We've got a new announcement! Check it out:
https://mailchi.mp/biointegrity/032226

03/20/2026

Trees & Forests are more Texan than Cows & Cowboys — according to the forgotten eyewitness history of Texas, 1600s-1860: https://open.substack.com/pub/realchrissearles/p/on-the-evidence-texas-was-trees-plains

Why are we sharing this old material?

It proves that wild, vegetated ecosystems don’t need “management”, they are self-proliferating and self-hydrating. In this history, for instance, there’s not a single mention of wildfire, though there are 1,000s of recorded fires — each of them attributed to humans.

So, in other words, over a nearly 300-year period, FIRE was never natural in the cowboy state. In fact, this collection asserts that the Spanish introduced landscape burning, it was NOT a Native American practice in the place we now call Texas. There are reasons shared in the first blog above.

Our Rainmaking with Trees and Strategic Watering work, today, is about rehydrating droughted forest ecosystems, working from the context stated in this history, that:

1) most of our landscapes develop thanks to trees and forests, and that
2) what we know today as “nature”, here in the USA, is actually a de-vegetated biosphere trying to regrow.

People cut down and prune trees to try and prevent drought. The solution to drought is actually the opposite: Trickle-water your trees at your trunk, let the leaves on your landscape proliferate (go wild) — and watch Eden regrow.

It'll cool things down rapidly, too.

Hope you’ll check out Texas’ ecological history — according to the on-the-spot eyewitnesses, before colonization took over.

Here is the history: https://open.substack.com/pub/realchrissearles/p/texas-as-it-was-forests

And here's on the source material: https://open.substack.com/pub/realchrissearles/p/on-the-evidence-texas-was-trees-plains