Dede Armentrout Interview, Part 2 of 2

DT: We were talking earlier about harmful decisions in Texas from an environmental standpoint and I was wondering if you could run through some of the others that you've had the pleasure to...

DA: That I've had the distinct pleasure to observe. The bad decisions, bad policy decisions, in Texas would fill volumes

but one of the most recent ones has been the continued grandfathering of polluting industries, particularly air polluting industries, in the golden triangle area over in East Texas.

This Texas produces 2/3 of the nation's carcinogenic air emissions. It's a huge load. And yet, we grandfather industries and don't require them to meet the same high air quality standards if they were polluting at the time that the Texas Clean Air Act passed.

There were promises made when that first act passed that these companies needed to be grandfathered in and given a little extra time because if they had to implement immediately the kinds of technology that were required to meet Clean Air Standards,

they would make the decision to move out of the state or out of the country rather than continue in Texas because they couldn't afford to retrofit their companies.

But this grandfathering and the threat of going out of business or moving away has drug on and drug on for literally decades.

And these same companies are still making the same claims that they can't afford to do it while new companies come into Texas and build their buildings and hire their staff and somehow manage to meet the state clean air standards.

Just this year, we had another go round in the legislature in an attempt to remove the grandfathering of these old industries and our governor saw fit to give them one more chance to initiate a volunteer program of air emission reductions.

And those of us who have watched the air steadily decline really are not enthusiastic that this volunteer program will result in anything in good.

When I was in high school, I had a chance to go to New York to New York City and it was the most polluted city in the United States at that time. And I thought, how can these people live this way? How can they tolerate it?

And after that Los Angeles, of course, passed New York City and there have been several days the last year when Houston, Texas has passed Los Angeles.

So the town that I called my hometown is now one of the worst polluted cities in the nation and our governor still allows the industries that create that pollution to be grandfathered in under some veiled threat that they might leave and my view is good riddance.

I think there is room for cleaner neighbors to come in and take their places. I think that was a terrible decision. They're going to have to bite the bullet one of these days and clean up Texas or it's not going to be a fit place to live.

Were having real respiratory illness problems in those counties. An increase in cancer rate, although not as high as you'd expect for the pollution load that those counties take. But it's too much of a human price to pay and it's unnecessary to pay that kind of price for progress.

DT: Could you touch on the recent efforts for privatizing some of these parks, trying to get them more in an entrepreneurial, self supporting mode?

DA: Another trend in Texas that's disturbing to me is privatization of Texas natural resources in two respects. There's a real movement to privatize wildlife in Texas.

It's a real aggressive movement, especially among some large landowners in Texas, to essentially own the wildlife that exists on a ranch. And the privatization of wildlife is really dangerous.

It's biologically dangerous because people begin to breed for certain characteristics that may be desirable from a hunting standpoint or some kind of fad aesthetic principle

but as people begin to manipulate the genes of wildlife, they begin to make the wildlife less fit to adapt to its own environment. And I really strongly dislike the idea of privatized wildlife and manipulation of the genetics in wild populations.

And of equal concern to me when I look at Texas and I look at the destruction that's occurred, that has destroyed wildlife habitat, and put categories on the causes of destruction,

I would say that roads, utility corridors, a shift to either industrial or municipal developments, real estate, residential real estate developments and large recreational amenities that aren't environmentally friendly such as golf courses, soccer fields, baseball diamonds, football fields, water parks, those kinds of things, are really very destructive.

And Texas' system of parks has been a real necklace of jewels for Texas, a system to be very proud of even though acreage per capita, it's very modest for a state this size and this population.

We're somewhere about in the middle of the nation on acres per capita of parkland and when you consider that 240,000 or so acres is Big Bend Ranch in one part of West Texas, our acres per capita come way down when you talk about the acres that are really accessible to a large part of the population in Texas.

And yet, the State Park System, in an effort to wean itself from public tax money is trying to encourage entrepreneurialship among the park managers and to develop additional sources of revenue on state parks to help fund those state park operations.

And the people who are developing these revenue opportunities on state parks are not looking any more imaginatively than the kind of developments that have harmed habitat on private land for years.

So we see more roads going through state parks. We see golf courses being developed on state parks.

We see things like the herds of longhorn cattle showing up at state parks because they're neat and not because they bear any relationship to the environment or the history of the area.

And oil and gas leases being given, not just to simply cut across the park and then repair the habitat, but actually pump jacks and oil exploration and development on state parks.

Hotel concessions and there's more and more satellite TVs on park RV hookup pads and all kinds of things that may generate money for the parks

but they also generate the same kind of urbanization that's cost us and has caused the lack of habitat in a concentration of people that's created the situations that caused people to want to go to a park and get away from it.

So I think it's just a terrible trend. I think that it's wrong headed for our Parks and Wildlife Commission and the administrative leaders of Parks and Wildlife to go that route rather than going to the public

and getting what has always been broad public support for taxpayers monies to pay for parks and for park management. I think it's just tragic.

The Bastrop Golf Course is a pet issue of mine. I think it was a tragedy to take a very nice, old 9 hole golf course and expand it into endangered species habitat to create a very mediocre 18 hole golf course.

And in so doing destroy a tremendous amount of habitat and have potentially adverse effects on all the rest of it or much of the rest of it from the management of the golf course,

the kinds of things that are needed to keep a golf course from getting too moldy if the rain is high or from getting too dried out and diseased in other ways if the rain is too low.

I just I think Texas' parks in the past have been natural areas and places where people can go and become restored and renewed and get back in touch with the land and the resources that have a real calming and renewing quality to people.

And when they just become more theme parks, more areas of crowding and frenetic activity they no longer serve the purpose that they would have served and in so doing, they also destroy wonderful habitats.

I would never have supported the state owning Bastrop if I had thought that Bastrop was going to double their golf course and wipe out Houston toads in the process.

The same thing for a lot of other state parks. I was a real supporter of park funding and of Texas buying the best from willing sellers, getting the best areas that were for sale.

And now I really second guess that support because if the best that's left goes to Texas Parks and Wildlife Department only to be turned over to entrepreneurs who would put in a hotel and a swimming pool and a golf course and a soccer field

and be able to do it even cheaper than they can do it on private land because they don't have the capital investment of the land, I just think that's tragic.

I hope it doesn't happen. I hope that a more forward looking commission and a more forward looking leadership would change that trend quickly.

DT: Would you talk about some of the other movements that you see, I think one that you mentioned was the move from clean to acceptable risks?

DA: One of the trends that I've seen in kind of an anti-regulatory direction in the State of Texas and nationwide has been a change in the goals

and the expression of goals from agencies that deal with polluting industries, pollution.

There was a time that the goal of pollution control was to get as clean as it was technically possible to get and to continue as technology improved, to continue to get cleaner and cleaner and cleaner.

And that was an appropriate goal after industry had worked for centuries in ways that made our state dirtier and dirtier and dirtier.

But there was a change that occurred and in some respects, I can understand the justification.

The argument from the industry side was if it costs us 100 million dollars to clean up 99% of this problem and it costs us 200 million dollars to clean up the last percent, is that a good expenditure?

And that kind of characterization of the issue makes any normal person think no. It's not worth it to spend twice as much money to clean up one percentage point.

But the evolution of that attitude was to get to what was called acceptable risk. In other words, how dirty can we be before the public refuses to accept the risk?

How many people can we kill with increased respiratory diseases, increased cancer rates and premature deaths due to combinations of environmental effects before the public rebels against it.

And that evolved into conversations that occurred at EPA on how much a human life is worth.

So if an industry was going to kill 6 people you know, 6 very vulnerable people maybe with respiratory disease or older people or babies by continuing the pollution load,

but they were going to create or generate a certain amount of revenue in their community, if a human life is worth 20 million dollars and they're going to kill 6 of them, then if they made more than 120 million dollars in revenue, that was an acceptable risk.

It put a dollar value on human life. It put a dollar value on what it ought to cost to protect a human life

and it changed the whole evaluation process from hey guys, we've got to clean this up to hey guys, how dirty can we get?

At the same time that this movement on acceptable risk was rolling through the EPA, there was also a tendency to regard people who were vulnerable to environmental insults as losers.

There were a lot of analogies made to natural selection and, you know, how that you may get rid of these people but maybe they deserve to die anyway

because they don't have the genotypes sufficient to stand up to these environmental pesticide loads.

And there were some real heartbreaking conversations that occurred at EPA.

There were people, idealistic young people who went to work for EPA thinking that they were going to clean up Texas who sat in on conversations with the administrators of EPA and industry

and tried to come up with, you know, what is the number where we agree to kill people and how many people do we agree to kill with this industry.

And a lot of really good, idealistic, and bright scientists just walked away from those jobs, just didn't want to play the acceptable risk game anymore.

The way that acceptable risk came about was also, I think, very, very scary because industry would couch acceptable risk in terms like this.

It's less likely that you'll be killed by my pollution than that you'd be hit by lightning on a golf course.

It's less likely that you'll be killed by this new plant going in than that you'll be killed in an automobile accident in your life.

And the assumption was that people accept risk every day and some accept very high risk, getting in your car and driving to work and home is often a real high risk behavior.

And if you can accept that risk then you ought to be able to accept all these pollutants that also put you at risk.

And if it gets you then you should have been eliminated anyway because you don't have the right champion genotype and you should be eliminated from the population.

These things were really scary and they also denied the fact that the risk of your getting hit by an automobile was not lessened by the fact that you were also breathing polluted air.

And this risk was additive on top of all your other risks. And the fact that every single polluting industry that came in with every single pollutant with lower standards was adding another so-called acceptable risk.

And how many acceptable risks can a person take before we're all done in and done in prematurely by all these pollutants.

So that's a issue that's really bothered me, continues to bother me today. And I think we need to get away with it.

I think there's some ground other than saying everything has to be 100% clean but I think the acceptable risk approach is a head in the sand approach and lets industry off with far less responsibility.

It also externalizes the cost of pollution. If the cost of pollution is my life and my industry has decided my life is worth 20 million dollars, then I want my heirs to get that 20 million dollars.

The expense of their cleaning it up is my death. In order to avoid cleaning it up, they agree that I get to die. And that's an externalization of expenses that I don't like.

And I think people need to understand the risk that they're being put to and to get behind some of these efforts to clean up pollution and to change EPA's thinking.

DT: Shifting costs and benefits around, I think you've seen one alarming trend, the mitigation approaches that have been sort of distorted.

DA: Yeah, wetland mitigation. Well, another trend that bothers me and disturbs me and especially as a biologist is the trend toward applying mitigation. And what mitigation actually means.

DA: Another tend that's disturbing to me with respect to environmental deterioration is some new and fairly creative ways of interpreting mitigation.

In the past mitigation was a principle that said essentially with respect to wetlands at least,

if you destroy so many acres of high quality wetlands, then you're obligated to create some high quality wetlands somewhere else to offset it.

And that idea of mitigation might be characterized as 4-2+2=4. If you take away something but you put something back, you come out even, not net loss of wetlands as our once President Bush said.

But the idea of enhancing areas or creating new wetlands to offset the ones you destroy evolved into saving a wetland from future destruction by buying it.

So if you had a 100 acres of prime wetland and you were going to destroy that, you could go buy another 100 acres of prime wetland

and give it to the Nature Conservancy or the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department or the Fish and Wildlife Service and that would mitigate the 100 acres you lost. Now that comes out to 100-100=100.

That doesn't work. When you save a wetland by buying it, you haven't added any new acres of wetlands, you still have a net loss of 100 acres of wetlands and all you've done is you've said,

they won't get to make that deal over here cause we've locked this one up. In my view, that's not true mitigation.

The next step is that 100 acres has already been bought and is held by the Nature Conservancy or Parks and Wildlife or Fish and Wildlife

and this industry wants to destroy 100 acres of wetlands but they're going to pay the Nature Conservancy a little more money to help them manage their wetland.

And that's, in my view, even worse. There's no mitigation that's occurring there. The obligation that the Nature Conservancy or Parks and Wildlife or Fish and Wildlife has is to appropriately manage this area.

It's supposed to already be mitigation land and to justify another loss by paying some operation and maintenance on this new area seems to me just the broadest, the next to the broadest, distortion of mitigation.

The broadest distortion of mitigation is to just pay some organization that's trying to save wetlands and pay their administrative costs and the money's not even tied to a particular wetland or a restoration effort or an enhancement effort.

If you tie all of that in to the fact that, in Texas, when the Corpus Christi State University studied mitigation in Texas, they found that 75% of mitigation didn't work in Texas.

So even when you're trying to mitigate projects, they're not being mitigated. The main reason that 75% didn't work was that 66% of the efforts, the mitigation wasn't even attempted.

The industry agreed to mitigation and then never applied it. And there was never any enforcement that required them to do it. So mitigation is kind of a myth.

It's a perception of balance, mitigation as applied today, is a myth and a perception of balance where no balance exists.

There's another trend in mitigation where small acreages of wetlands are allowed to be destroyed and the money goes into a pot to buy some large and significant area of wetlands that you don't destroy.

That's better than nothing but its still 4-2 doesn't equal 4. Unless you're enhancing wetlands or creating new wetlands of equal value to the ones you destroy, you haven't mitigated and the term mitigation is a misnomer.

DT: You mentioned the distortion of the balance. Maybe you can explain what you mean.

DA: There's an attempt to justify additional habitat loss and environmental insults by stating that especially from the standpoint of the person or the entity that wants to destroy habitat to say,

there are these benefits that I'm going to create from this destruction and I'm going to also gain some benefits myself from this destruction.

And sure it's a bad thing to do but we need a balance between this absolute protectionism, on one hand, and this absolute destruction on the other. The problem with that is that every generation makes their balance.

So when my great grandparents settled in West Texas and they gave up half of their wetlands in West Texas and gave up half of the native mid grass prairie in West Texas in the name of economic balances,

the half that remained was supposed to be the balance that in my grandparents generation,

they gave up that half for more economic advantages and more attraction of people there to have a growth industry and so forth and my parents came along, there was another half gone.

In my generation, there's another half gone and if every generation in the name of balance gives up half of what we have left, that's not a balance.

We're at the point now with Texas having lost so much of its hardwood forest, so much of its wetlands, almost all of its mid and tall grass prairie, you know, tremendous, almost all of it,

South Texas, Palm Forest, from 40,000 acres to 39 acres of contiguous Palm Forest in South Texas as an example.

So much of our coastal plain that anything that justifies itself by balance has to be something that strictly puts things back the way they were.

There's no way you can destroy habitat in Texas and call it a balance anymore because the balance has shifted way, way over on the side of destruction and development.

DT: In seeking to restore or keep some measure of balance, I think you've worked with a lot of non-profit groups and certainly Audubon.

But also (?) Conservancy and (?) and if you could mention some of the things that interested you there, I'd appreciate it.

DA: Well I've worked with other environmental groups. Before I went to work for Audubon,

I was active in the Texas Committee on Natural Resources and the Texas Committee of Natural Resources actually spun off the Texas Organization for Endangered Species or actually it was another Ned Fritz led drive along with some key scientists around the state.

The was an effort to generate a community of scientists who were truly studying these species and could give us a heads up on, not only things that were in trouble right away,

but monitor populations of species and see what was happening, what trends developed as Texas continued to grow economically and in population.

So Texas Organization for Endangered Species was predominately populated by scientists. It was not real strongly policy oriented.

It was more accumulate solid, scientific facts about what's happening and then hand those facts over to entities that wanted to use them.

And I think it was a good, solid scientific organization. It created lists of species that appeared to be in trouble or at least appeared to be in decline. And I think had and have a lot of credibility.

The organization has leadership problems. It's just like any other non-profit organization.

The biggest burden in an organization like that is continued unpaid leadership and it's really difficult to keep it going and keep the energy up.

Ned also helped start the Texas Nature Conservancy and I was involved in some of the early forming meetings of that.

As true to Ned's nature, it couldn't just be the cookie stamp state organization just like the Nature Conservancy but in Texas.

It had to have its own state constitution and bylaws and have a certain level of independence from this big national megalith that was going to control it.

I think eventually it evolved into a very similar office from the other state offices.

But originally it had an identity somewhat different because of Ned's leadership and his both interest and paranoia about the way institutions operate. It may not be paranoia if it really happens, I guess.

The Nature Conservancy was important in Texas as T.O.E.S. was, Texas Organization for Endangered Species, created a database of information about endangered and threatened species.

The Nature Conservancy created a land acquisition opportunity in Texas and also a brokering opportunity where land could be bought opportunistically from willing sellers

and then brokered to the appropriate agency or other private owner at the appropriate time so that really pristine areas could be acquired when there was an emergency, when they were available

and the other acquisition alternative might have been destruction or reduction of the value or elimination of the potential for the public to enjoy some of these areas.

So I think they played an important role and continue to play an important role.

They are also, they carry more of a halo with industry and with some of the more affluent power brokers in this state because they're not conspicuously activists on policy issues.

And it helps to have, I think it helps to have a diversified environmental community.

One of the things that I think has been unfortunate in Texas in the environmental community is a perception that we're a monolithic community

and that, at least in the old days when I was a professional member of the environmental community that if they called me and got my opinion on some project that I spoke for everyone in the environmental community.

Or conversely if they called and talked to Ken Kramer who headed up the state chapter of the Sierra Club, that if Ken Kramer made a pronouncement on some environmental issue that all the rest of us would fall in lock step because we all believed the same thing, the same way.

And that was never true and it was, I thought, never a strength for us to be perceived as monolithic.

One of the things I tried to do as an environmental leader was to make sure that Audubon had its own separate identity

and was understood as being separate and peopled some what separately from the other environmental groups and conservation groups in Texas.

Because I felt that got us, gained us more places at the table and I thought we deserved more places at the table.

We're not the same people. We're not all the same people just carrying different membership cards. In fact, our memberships are quite different.

DT: Speaking of things not being so monolithic, one of the more interesting things I've heard that you've been involved with is Plan-It Texas where you took people from many different perspectives and drew them together to manage a piece of land.

Can you explain more about how that came about and what sort of success you had?

DA: Plan-It Texas was an effort I was invited, it certainly wasn't my brainchild but it was an effort I was invited to participate in.

It wasn't named that at the beginning but a group called Holistic Resource Management of Texas which is an agricultural group with with a more holistic approach to agriculture

found it discouraging that the environmental community and the ag community were so often at odds and so often in acting out their activisms in their two communities, spent an awful lot of money and an awful lot of energy and time

and neither group really won or was particularly satisfied with the outcome of a lot of political battles.

And HRM of Texas leadership felt that we had so much more in common among our issues that there ought to be a way of creating some dialogue between the environmental and agriculture communities

and at least working together on the things that values in the areas where we agreed.

So they pulled together the leaders of agriculture and the leaders of the environmental community and began to generate some dialogues on what was important to us and what we feared, what we cared about.

And I think they did a good job in getting a good mix of people. There was certainly a lot of suspicion and paranoia and no small amount of people thinking,

I've heard this all before and I know exactly what he's going to say and I know exactly who he's thinking about when he says certain things.

But many of us, to give credit to the group, attempted to do this, to try to bridge with alternative communities, predominately agriculture and environment

but we also had state and federal agencies involved that were involved in either ag or environment but the state agency and federal agency prospectors are somewhat different from the advocacy groups in those communities.

And the focus of this issue was endangered species.

There was a time in Texas when it was a very volatile issue and there was an awful lot of heat, more heat than light being generated on the subject of endangered species.

The agriculture community was maintaining that, in the first place, the Endangered Species Act and other protective policies were in their way

and that they couldn't engage in profitable agriculture endeavors with this Endangered Species Act hammer hanging over their heads

and yet, by the same token, they also believed that they had endangered species on their land because they were doing something right.

They wouldn't have endangered species if they weren't doing something right.

So the environmental community was wrong to judge them or attempt to regulate them because they could engage in ag practices without harming endangered species.

And the environmental community came to this debate with the position that, that was probably true,

that you could probably engage in a lot of different agricultural practices and not hurt endangered species and if you did that, the Endangered Species Act wasn't a threat to you.

That all it took was a little planning and and some knowledge, some scientific knowledge about species needs to be able to work this stuff out.

So, as we started talking, someone came up with the idea that we ought to put up or shut up.

That we ought to manage. that all of this was sort of armchair pontificating on the part of leaders that weren't involved in land management on either side.

They were just the talking heads of these activist organizations and that if we really wanted to demonstrate that, let's get a ranch that has endangered species on it

and let's manage it and first let's see if we can produce a profit using the best expertise of all these ag leaders and all of their, all the multiplier effect of all the knowledge within their communities

and let's see if we can't protect endangered species using the mirror expertise in those organizations.

And let's see if the act, the Endangered Species Act and other regulations get in the way. And the environmental community was saying, trust us, these acts are not going to get in your way.

If you do this thing right, I mean, if you're sincere about wanting to protect species, you can do it anyway. And the ag people were saying, trust us, there will be a bother. They'll be in the way.

So we made an agreement, sort of a gentlepersons agreement at the onset, that if we found out that laws got in the way and the laws could be revised,

that the environmental community would join with the ag community to make some needed changes.

Not to lessen the protection on the species but to alter the law so it was more reasonable and more workable for the ag community.

And the ag community that if, in fact, the laws didn't get in the way that they would publicize that to their members and reduce the level of paranoia within their community.

So we put the word out that we were looking for a ranch to manage and, to our surprise, got lots of offers

and constitute a committee to go around Texas and look at a variety of these ranches and try to pick the one that might best represent what we hoped to accomplish.

And we ended up picking up the Red Corral Ranch just outside of Wimberley between Wimberley and Dripping Springs.

And we managed that property for about 4 years. We had a, we shifted from a stocker lease to a cow calf lease.

We shifted from just continuous grazing to a high intensity, short duration grazing system

and we also began to develop other economic opportunities on the ranch that used the presence of endangered species as an asset rather than a liability.

The landowners had some little cabin in the area where the golden sheep warbler was the endangered species involved, where the golden sheep warbler was nesting

and so we began to market weekends in the cabin as a bird watching and get back to nature experience

and later this whole marketing effort evolved into a bed and breakfast operation that brought the ranch more revenue than they got from their entire cattle lease.

We also suggested that they modify their deer hunting lease from the lease that they had to a lease that was more sustainable, that created a higher quality deer herd.

There were just a lot of modifications made and we grappled with the whole endangered species issue and also grappled with clean water issues, wetlands conservation

and ran some workshops on the ranch to show what we were doing and how we were doing it so we had an education spin-off effect from that.

And ultimately wrote a book about managing central Texas land that had endangered species on it. And that book now is being distributed by all of the organizations within Plan It Texas.

So it was effective in that we did manage to provide additional revenue, quite a bit more revenue flowed to the ranch after all this brain power worked on it for 4 years.

And the ranch is much more of a holistic ranch.

The people that are running it are running it in a way that's much more planned and includes inventories of the natural resources that they have, as well as the ag resources that they have and plans to protect both.

The organization also evolved in the meantime though and the people who were there representing environmental organizations,

I think in every case, ended up changing jobs and moving on so they remain connected to Plan-It Texas but they no longer have, they're sort of ambassadors without portfolio.

They no longer have the direct connection to their environmental organizations. And much the same happened to several of the members in the agricultural community.

So now the organizations trying to go back and invite the current leaders of the ag and environmental organizations to come back into this and sort of provide the organizational connections that it originally had.

The effort was good. The individuals who learned to work together and trust each other and appreciate the expertise of the two communities worked out really well

but the organizations really didn't dramatically change style and change their normal way of handling these issues

or I would daresay you'd be hard pressed to find a difference in the literature of either the Cattleman's Association or the Audubon Society before and after Plan-It Texas.

I mean, the local groups were somewhat different but the national groups were not really changed by this effort.

But I think it was a good start, a really good approach and I think it's a model for a way to deal with disputes and to test assumptions with respect for both communities

and with respect for the expertise that exists in both communities.

DT: Could you go from your description of the Plan-It Texas and talk a little bit about your work in organic peach farming business where you brought in a viewpoint of agriculture and the environment?

DA: Well one of the practices, one of the spin-offs for me for Plan-It Texas was a closer connection to leaders in the agriculture community

and a connection with the information that's available in the agriculture community to do a better job.

Texas is doing a lot better job in organic farming and in minimizing use of pesticides and has a whole department within Texas Department of Agriculture that's dedicated to organic farming.

In my other life, besides my public professional, environmental life, I had bought into a small ranch in between Austin and San Antonio.

Bought into a partnership in this ranch and it had a small peach orchard, about a 3 acre orchard with around 90 trees when I first bought into the partnership.

And we talked about changing that, we're real near Fredericksburg and there's a huge peach market in Fredericksburg and what a 3 acre orchard could do for the owners or for anybody else was somewhat arguable.

But there was a niche in organic peaches and, in fact, when we began to discuss getting into organic peaches, shifting the orchard over,

my partners had not applied pesticides or fertilizers to the trees anyway for a couple of years just as a money saving effort.

And we looked at what it would cost us to get into the certified organic program and found it was well within our reach and decided that that was a niche market for us.

That there was only one other certified organic peach orchard in the state at the time so we decided let's go for it. Let's go organic with this peach orchard.

And I was pretty committed at that time anyway to organic food when I could find it and afford it. I just liked the idea that especially after fighting the pesticide industry for decades.

I liked the idea of not consuming their products. And I liked the presumed health benefits of doing that.

So we committed ourselves to go organic and we had the records on the farm and were able to go into the certification program right away

and operated the peach orchard now, I guess since 1991 so we're coming up on 8 years of operating organically.

We didn't get the certification right away but we adhered to the policies and more and joined the Texas Organic Growers Association, some of the other private groups to get information and share information about, not only the peach raising but marketing strategies.

It's been real interesting. It's been a real intellectual challenge to do it and it's been easier than I thought it would be in many respects.

There's a lot of mechanical management that's done with an organic orchard.

You get out and weed eat and mow rather than use any kind of pesticides or herbicides and I shifted over from many days of weed eating to purchasing white Chinese Geese that liked to graze under the peach trees

and help keep the plants low under the peach trees. And, in the process, fertilize the peach trees.

And I also went with a little flock of Indian Runner ducks up in the orchard last year that chased grasshoppers and really made a significant difference in the grasshopper infestation in the orchard.

Unfortunately, raccoons made a real significant difference in the population of the Indian Runner ducks and I'm now out of the duck business for a while until I can outsmart the raccoons.

We protect our peach trees with net wire fencing and hot wire on top on two sides and then hot wire ,7 wires of hot wire, on the other two sides, running 9.1 kilovolts through that fence.

And that keeps out the deer and it keeps out most other species, except in this net wire, the holes are large enough that a small raccoon in a dispersing phase can get in

and so can a ring tail cat and what we tend to do is trap them and release them outside the orchard and give them enough of an unpleasant experience I mean, we're not cruel with them but it's not real pleasant to be in a have a heart trap anyway.

But we hope that it's enough of a hassle that after they've been trapped a few times, they just decide the orchard is not a fun place to be.

And we were still attempting, we have a neighbor who has a pacemaker and we can't go with hot wire all the way down on his side of the fence

because if he should touch that hot wire, it really jeopardizes the functioning of his pacemaker.

So that's our compromise and that's the side the raccoons are coming in right now.

But we're just continuing to grapple with it and try to find effective and creative ways of both raising the peaches and then delivering them to a market that helps us make some money on the operation.

It's been a neat community to be in touch with. The organic growers in Texas tend to be a really mentally interesting, somewhat non-conformist group of ranchers and they've just been a lot of fun to associate with and learn from.

And it's the customers that we have out in the peach orchard have been really great. It's been terrific fun.

We've had grandparents bring three generations of their family out to stand out in the orchard and pick peaches and eat peaches right off of a tree.

It's amazing how many people don't know that peaches grow on trees rather than vines or stalks or something.

So they bring these little kids out to pick peaches and they, in the process, usually pet the horse and chase a goat and have a little farm experience while they're there.

That's been fun to be able to deliver that and fun to watch kids respond to an agricultural effort that we think is living gently on the land.

DT: One of your hats that you wear is being a teacher. What message do you try to instill in your students?

DA: I always thought I was going to be a teacher. I went through, I pursued a college program assuming I was going to teach and, in fact, taught for three years before Audubon lured me away.

And I was invited back to speak at Southwest Texas after I had worked for Audubon for ten years. One of the students in the audience I spoke to the Tri Beta club which is a biology honor society.

And one of the students in the class after my speech said, if you were to come back and teach, would you do anything different?

And I said, absolutely I'd do things differently especially teaching a freshman class because I said,

I've been working up at the Texas legislature and people are so appallingly ignorant about biology and the implications of altering biological habit, you know, habitats for species

that I wouldn't spend five minutes teaching some freshman how to spell platyhelminthes or to know that that's the name given to a group of flatworms.

I'd be spending time telling people when you do this to wetlands, here are all the creatures you hurt and here's why you hurt them and how to find better ways to engage in developments and improvements if you will.

And I'd spend time teaching people that when they park out the land below their trees and create this kind of golf course or English countryside look,

that they've eliminated all the habitat where birds and small mammals hide during storms, not to mention all the berry producing plants and, you know, a lot of the food supply for these wildlife.

Well twenty years later, ten years after that speech, I in fact, left the Audubon Society and was hired to come teach some freshman zoology classes here at Southwest Texas and it was put up or shut up time.

And so I did teach my classes differently. There are a certain number of things that you have to teach.

The students are tested at the end and they have to be able to perform at a certain level so I couldn't completely turn my back on the traditional, academic agenda or curriculum

but I did work in, as much as possible, the kinds of consequences and interconnectedness that we have in our habitat and I really made an effort to do what I said I would do ten years previous to that.

One of the best things that happened to me, after that first semester of teaching, is this student came in, he had done quite well in the class.

He had made either a low A or high B and he came in and said, I just want to tell you that I'm a senior business major and I put off taking this because I hate science.

And I put off science till my senior year and he said, I thought I'd enjoy biology and I just wanted you to know you've ruined my life. And I thanked him for sharing that.

Asked if he wanted to elaborate, he was smiling when he said it. And I said, how did I ruin your life? And he said, well I had my whole business plan made.

I know exactly the business I want to go into and how I'm going to go into it, how I'm going to line up the money and how I'm going to line up the customers, how I'm going to market my product and he said,

now I've got to worry about all these biological impacts. And I've got to worry about factoring in the cost of minimizing those impacts and he said, I've got to start all over again.

And he said, I will never be able to make a business decision in my life without thinking about all these biological consequences. And he said, it's just ruined me.

And I thought well, that's exactly what I hoped. I don't know how many people came away with that same message or took it very far but that was exactly what I hoped to accomplish and I hope I'm still accomplishing that instead of just some simple and sort of esoteric information.

I hope I convey to my students both my own love for the environment, my intellectual appreciation for the propriety of the natural system that we see.

The fact that we're looking at 600 million years of evolutionary wisdom and that we shouldn't be too arrogant when we start tinkering with systems that have been together and tried and tested and proved successful over 6 or 700 million years,

I hope I convey that to my students and convey a sense of wonder and humility to them.

DT: Are there places that you like to go in Texas where you can appreciate nature? Could you describe one or two of those places?

DA: There are a lot of places in Texas. Despite all the gloom and doom and all my concern about the losses that we endure, Texas is still a rich and wondrous place from the standpoint of natural resources.

Big Bend, the Big Bend area of Texas has always been a favorite. Well it's been a favorite since my young adulthood. I had heard about it a lot as a kid growing up because my brother would go out there on scout trips.

And I never saw Big Bend until I was in my early 20s but as soon as I drove into the park, I felt like I was home. There was some just really magical, mystical feeling to me about Big Bend.

It may have just been so much vastness without utility lines and roads and buildings and things that intersected it.

But there's a real rugged honesty about the Big Bend area and a real biological richness out there if you understand it, take the time to understand it,

there's just a tremendous system at work in the Trans Pecos part of Texas. Fort Davis and the Davis Mountains are another area that I think are just wonderful out in West Texas.

My great grandparents settled in West Texas between Lubbock and Amarillo and I went to graduate school, I mentioned I think, in Lubbock and fell in love with that land, the flatness and the vastness of it.

The fact that you could see a thunderstorm coming from three days away.

And just those great prairie vistas were really beautiful and a quite different experience than a girl growing up in bayou country in Houston with the big live oaks and pine forests and that sort of thing.

The Rio Grande Valley was an area that I wasn't impressed with until I went back as an environmentalist and started finding these precious places.

To me, it just looked like a really busy, intensively agriculture and tourist area.

But when I found Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge and then the Audubon Sabal Palm Forest and Bentsen Rio Grande State Park,

lots of these areas just boiling with birds and teaming with wildlife and began to understand the biological crossroads that exist there

between sort of the northern most extension of a lot of tropical species, the southernmost extension of a lot of temperate species and then the western deserts interdigitating with coastal plains.

It's just a biological Disneyland and a wonderfully rich place and I have enjoyed going back there.

Laguna Atascosa on the coast down there is also a terrific place. And I've thought about that in the past.

I've been asked often by people, well we're coming to Texas, what should we see and where should we go?

And I really have to rack my brain, not to come up with sites, but to come up with sites that are close enough together.

Cause there's not a place, there's not a part of Texas that doesn't have its unique beauty and its particular characteristics that are just, that either are quietly renewing or absolutely breathtaking and awesome.

It's hard for me to come up with a favorite. The Big Thicket in East Texas is just wonderful, fabulous, rich area and gives such a sense of prehistory and propriety.

Something that just seems like it's been there forever and ought to be there forever and yet is very, very vulnerable and very fragile.

Those East Texas bogs are wonderful in that way too. So it's almost like there's not any place I don't like except golf courses.

You know, and intensively developed areas. And I understand, we have those. We have to have them.

I just wish that people would put something back for wildlife in every endeavor that they do.

I wish people, whether they had an apartment with a window box or whether they had 5000 acres or 50,000 acres, if everyone would put a little bit back for wildlife

and would educate themselves about what's real and what's really helpful versus what's token or sort of guilt dissuading but not very biologically significant.

I think it would be a wonderful thing. And I think that people really have a connection to wildlife and to land.

It's just that we need to reach out and touch it and touch them with specific information, things they can do. End of reel 2020 End of interview with Dede Armentrout