Written by: Brendan Gibbons<\/a><\/p>\n Read Article in the San Antonio Report<\/a><\/p>\n Twenty-seven years ago, Deborah Morin watched as the hills, streams, caves, and springs of the Hill Country outside of Austin were being gobbled up by construction.<\/p>\n At the time, Morin was serving on the board of the Hill Country Foundation, where she was involved with efforts to map the watershed for the Barton Springs portion of the Edwards Aquifer outside of Austin.<\/p>\n The vast majority of that land is in private hands, meaning the health of the aquifer and Barton Springs was mostly dependent upon the decisions of private landowners. In Morin\u2019s view, government regulation alone wouldn\u2019t protect these sensitive waterways or preserve the land for generations.<\/p>\n \u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter how many laws, how many rules you have,\u201d Morin told the\u00a0Rivard Report<\/em>\u00a0earlier this month. \u201cYou have to buy it.\u201d<\/p>\n Almost three decades later, Morin, a San Antonio native, is at the head of a nonprofit working to do just that, but on a much larger scale. She\u2019s president of the board of the\u00a0Great Springs Project<\/a>, an initiative to preserve land and stitch together a network of hike and bike trails that will eventually connect San Antonio, New Braunfels, San Marcos, Austin, and smaller cities in between.<\/p>\n The nonprofit group is named for the four major springs in each of those cities that gush forth from the Edwards Aquifer on the edge of the Hill Country \u2013 the Blue Hole, Comal Springs, San Marcos Springs, and Barton Springs.<\/p>\n \u201cAll those cities are here because of those springs,\u201d Morin said.<\/p>\n Preserving water is also a major part of the project. Its goal is to permanently save 50,000 acres over the Edwards Aquifer recharge zone, where water flows through cracks, caves, and crevices into the aquifer and replenishes the main underground drinking water supply for the region.<\/p>\n Morin, who\u2019s married to Whole Foods founder John Mackey, said preserving land along the booming Interstate 35 corridor will take \u201ca lot of philanthropic money.\u201d Working relatively quietly for the past seven years, the group has already made progress.<\/p>\n Earlier this month, Morin and Great Springs CEO Garry Merritt made their pitch for former San Antonio Mayor Phil Hardberger. Hardberger is no stranger to fundraising for big park projects, having raised more than $10 million in private donations for a\u00a0$23 million land bridge<\/a>\u00a0for the public park named for him on San Antonio\u2019s North Side.<\/p>\n \u201cI think you could get public excitement quite easily,\u201d Hardberger told Morin and Merritt. \u201cNobody needs [the trails] more right now than Austin to San Antonio.\u201d<\/p>\n However, Hardberger said one aspect of the project could make deals with landowners a bit more challenging than other land preservation efforts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Great Springs Project Envisions a Network of Trails From Austin to San Antonio Written by: Brendan Gibbons Read Article in the San Antonio Report Twenty-seven years ago, Deborah Morin watched as the hills, streams, caves, and springs of the Hill Country outside of Austin were being gobbled up by construction. At the time, Morin was […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":971,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-press"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatspringsproject.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatspringsproject.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatspringsproject.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatspringsproject.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatspringsproject.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=736"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/greatspringsproject.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/736\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":998,"href":"https:\/\/greatspringsproject.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/736\/revisions\/998"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatspringsproject.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatspringsproject.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatspringsproject.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatspringsproject.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}