INSIDE FISH & GAME by Roy and Ardia Neves
TEXAS FISH & GAME Staff
October 25, 2022
INSIDE BACK COVER: Sealy Outdoors
October 25, 2022
Habitat for Migrant Hipsters
LAST ISSUE, WE WROTE about the impact that climate chaos has had on fish and wildlife in Texas and beyond. “Climate chaos” may be a more palatable label to some. It avoids the politically charged baggage of Climate Change while still acknowledging the damage done by whatever is happening—no matter what, or who, is to blame.
As if Mother Nature weaponizing the climate were not bad enough, Texas’s wildlife habitat is also under attack on another front, and there is no denying the fact that this threat is man-made. If you live within 100 miles of any major Texas urban center, you have a front-row seat to the lop-sided battle between natural resources and the juggernaut of progress.
Since the 2000 Census, the population of Texas has grown by 50 percent. New residents are streaming into our state from every direction. There may be a border crisis along the Rio Grande, but caravans of USA-born-and-bred immigrants are also pouring across all four of our state lines. This population surge has fueled a land rush that is slicing and dicing its way through an ever-expanding path of undeveloped acreage.
When Texas became a state in 1845, it retained all its public land—hundreds of millions of acres of it. In all other territories, public land stayed under federal control when they gained statehood. But since Texas was—and is—the only state annexed as a previously independent nation, the public land was never under U.S. control prior to statehood. So the new State of Texas kept it. The public land exception was also influenced by the debt Texas incurred during the decade it existed as a republic. The U.S. government at the time of annexation figured that Texas could use its massive land holdings to retire the debt. And the new state did just that. Big time. By 1900, most of the public land in Texas had been sold off by our Lone Star forefathers to private parties.
ADVERTISEMENT
As a result, less than two percent of the land in Texas is owned by any federal, state, or local government. The rest… an area bigger than most European countries and every other U.S. state but Alaska …is in private hands.
Private ownership means that, for generations, the treatment of all this land has been left to the needs, desires, whims and schemes of countless individuals, family dynasties, and corporate entities. Much of the land never crossed into the boundaries of incorporated municipalities, so the disposition and use of it has been governed by few, if any, restrictions. Regulated only by liberal free market forces, the open lands of Texas were caught in a churn of wilderness-taming development that has never stopped, rarely slowed, and is now gaining more momentum than ever.
Anyone who’s tried to get on a decent deer lease lately knows that they are getting harder and harder to find, and more and more expensive. Bird hunters lament the fate of prime waterfowl fields west of Houston—they are now covered by square miles of asphalt in the form of tract-home rooftops and strip center parking lots. Lakeside cabins, once a very realistic dream for anglers of even modest means, are now scarce. Waterfront developments have encircled most of our prime freshwater impoundments, reserving lake-front and even lake-view lots for the Tycoon demographic.
In the face of this increasing demand for raw acreage by the waves of humanity pouring across our borders, we in the outdoors should double down on our own efforts to either acquire and manage more of the forests and wide open spaces that remain, or make sure our state, county and city leaders wake up and exert more control over the slicing and dicing.
If we don’t, even the most rugged landscapes of West Texas could wind up as habitat for migrant hipsters rather than mule deer and wild sheep.
E-mail Roy at rneves@fishgame.com and Ardia at aneves@fishgame.com
