Dede Armentrout Interview, Part 1 of 2

DT: This is David Todd. It's June 22, 1999 and I'm here for the Conversation History Association of Texas and we're at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos.

And we have the pleasure and fun of interviewing Dede Armentrout who was head of the South Regional office of the National Audubon Society and taught biology and other topics and has made many contributions to conservation in Texas.

DA: Pleasure.

DT: I'd like to start by talking about your childhood and maybe any influences that your parents or early friends or early mentors that you had or your interest in conservation and the outdoors.

DA: Okay. My parents were both first generation off of the farm. My, my grandparents on my fathers side had had a a farm until an injury caused my grandfather to sell the farm and buy a grocery store.

And my grandparents on my mothers side ran a small diversified farm and ranch in Central Texas until they retired, sold the ranch and got too old to run a farm and ranch.

So with that background, my parents were both interested in the out of doors and much of our family recreation revolved around outdoor activities that were not particularly equipment oriented or facility oriented,

just enjoying the out of doors and hiking and doing nature walks and that sort of thing.

So that that was sort of a natural entrée into, into biology and learning more about what I was seeing in the out of doors and then eventually into environmental activism to, to help stop some of the more damaging things that were happening to the environment.

(misc.)

DT: Could you elaborate a little bit about outings that you took with your parents?

DA: Okay. Sure. My, my dad always took the, the family on a big vacation every summer.

It, it was our big outing and he was an historian by, by affinity. He's an engineer by trade but he loved to take us, drag us around battlefields all over the United States. And I always found myself a little less interested in the, the body counts than in the, the nature.

Most, most of the national, national monuments and historic sights have quite a bit of natural habitat in them and I seem to find myself drawn to the, the birds and the lizards and the things in the bushes rather than, the, what I thought was rather, were rather tedious explanations of the battles that went on.

Also, my, I had an older brother who liked to torture me by throwing animals on me. He would catch snakes or turtles or lizards and throw them on me and, and one day he caught a little Mississippi mud snake in the, in Buffalo bayou and he used to... and this is a snake that's shiny black on the back and sides. And a deep red on the ventral scales.

So when he held it up, it was writhing, and he held it up and exposed those ventral scales, it was just stunningly beautiful. And I said, that's gorgeous. Let me see that. And this surprised him because he was about to throw it on me, but now, but now I wanted to see it so he withdrew and said, no you can't see it.

And I insisted on seeing it and he didn't want me to see it and I think, from that point forward, instead of being afraid of reptiles and amphibians, I was fascinated by them and just developed a real interest in, in animals.

I found a nest of baby birds in our garage that had fallen down and I just saw it, the mother wasn't feeding them so I should go to the end of our block and dig worms and feed these babies birds. And I developed a great respect for mother birds and father birds after trying to keep this little nest of hungry pre-fledglings alive and I did not succeed.

One by one, I, I lost them, was not diligent enough as a worm digger but it also interested me to, to think about what effort it took for wildlife to, to constantly find food in an urban environment and gather it and deliver it to the, to the offspring. So those were kind of formative. I, I still remember them.

I'm sure they had a, an important aspect of, you know, making up what I became later as a biologist. When I, I went to high school in Pasadena and South Houston High School and a lot of us would go down to the coast just, we were just a very short drive to the coast and we'd romp in the sand dunes and, and in the water and sometimes off the jetties.

And I enjoyed it. I thought I was a relatively observant person but when I took my first freshman biology class, we were in an honors biology group and we were allowed to go with the senior ecology class down to the same area of the coast in Texas that I'd hung out at the whole time I was in high school.

And we saw all kinds of animals that I'd never seen in my life. We found brittle starfish on the jetties and sea cucumbers and sea hares and little cone jellies that glowed in the dark and all kinds of creatures.

And I was just fascinated that there could be so much life and such complex system right under my nose and I wasnt even aware of it much less knowledgeable about it.

So I think that it was that field trip that sort of set the course in my life to want to learn more about biology and understand more about the world right under my nose especially but, you know, beyond that.

DT: Did you have any teachers or guides that were helpful?

DA: I did, we had, I was involved in scouting a lot and there at, at, in those days, girl scouting had, had a lot to do with outdoor activities and self sufficiency and observation, sort of quiet observation of nature.

And there were a lot of scout counselors who were important to me and, and sort of introduced nature and introduced a, a way of living in nature that was softer and gentler, you know, not so much conquest of nature as an understanding and appreciation of natural things.

Had an exceptional biology teacher when I was in high school and he really believed inin students reaching beyond the sort of standard expectation for a sophomore high school kid.

And he had me doing research. I was doing chromosomal analysis of a, of a particular sunflower that grew native in the Houston area and, and really produced somesome data that was publishable.

That was really exciting and great fun and I think thats where a, a passion for biology kind of ignited, even before the field trip, I was interested in biology and a little bit of research.

And my college professorso, I, I went to Southwest Texas. This was my, my alma mater for my baccalaureate degree. And Southwest Texas, at the time, was strongly oriented toward field biology and more general biology.

Each biology student was expected to be very rounded and have physiology classes and chemistry classes and natural history, taxonomy, comparative anatomy and comparative physiology classes.

So Southwest Texas was turning out generalists at a time when most universities were beginning to hyper-specialize. When I left Southwest Texas, I was very interested in ecology and the, the state school with the most active published, publishing biologists working in field biology was Texas Tech.

So I got on up there and, and had a stronger physiology background from here and connected with Francis Rose, who's now chairman at Southwest Texas

but Francis was in a relatively new field called physiological ecology and it was a field that looked at how animals adapt to their environment from a physiological standpoint rather than from a structural standpoint.

We think of maybe thick hair and short ears as structural adaptations to cold environments. We look at enzyme systems that are adapted differently or blood supplies that are shunted differently and physiological adaptations.

And that was a, a real interesting field for me to realize that there are limits to where we find animals.

And, and there also millions of years of wisdom involved in animals adaptation to their environment and that we, as a human species,

sometimes change the environment in a rather cavalier way and disrupt these millions of years of wise adaptations and physiological adjustments that are real hard for animals to kind of undo and, and reverse. Ask me something else.

DT: There were some graduate school teachers. I think you mentioned Russell, and what sort of influence did he have?

DA: Okay, who were the people during graduate school that were sort of formative in my continued interest in both biology and beginning, or fledgling interest in environmental activism.

One of the reasons that I got interested in environmental activism kind of on my own was due to Ned Fritz who was an attorney from Dallas an activist in Texas who sent out alerts and let people know what was happening on the environmental front.

And Ned had a subscription to his, to his newsletter but if you wrote a letter to your congressman on some topical interest topic and sent Ned a carbon copy of the letter you wrote, he'd, he'd sign you up as a subscriber for no additional fee for a year. And as a struggling graduate student, that was a good price to pay to be informed about Texas environment.

So I got involved in the Texas Committee on Natural Resources as a letter writer and wrote more than my requisite one letter per year. But I got interested in what was going on and would talk with my professors about some of these trends that we were seeing biologically in Texas.

And found, to my disappointment, many professors were, were not interested in using their knowledge and using their, their scientific acumen to, to inform the general public or to speak out against some things that were harmful in Texas.

The exceptions to those were Russell Strontman(?). Dr. Strontman was a, an arachnologist at Texas Tech. He worked on Arctic mites. Had made many trips to, to Antarctica, actually worked on Antarctic mites.

And he did a lot of work all over the world on these little mites that, that occupy very improbable places. And he was such a pioneer in Antarctica that they've actually named a mountain for him in Antarctica.

But Russell was different. He, he would speak out at public hearings and he, he was quite a pedagogue.

He was well informed in all fields of biology and he would speak in a vernacular but he would draw upon a great deal of science and wisdom to try to put in context what the impacts of, of peoples plans were.

And, and he also I think was a great role model and, and having both the scientific discipline to gather ones facts and then the courage and commitment to go ahead and step beyond the role of a scientist and onto the role of an advocate to push for policies that were important.

Our decision makers, in Texas and in general, are abysmally ill educated in biology. And a lot of the decisions that we make, there are a biological basis and biological impacts.

So it was, it was great and it was inspiring to see Russell Strontman as a role model from Texas Tech. Francis Rose, who I worked with was, was active in a similar way and then Clark Hubbs with the University of Texas and Frank Blair with the University of Texas were also two heroes who spoke up for the environment. Fred Galbeau from Baylor was another and Dick Baldoff from Texas AandM University.

Seemed like each university had maybe one or two scientists and their, and their, who spoke for the environment and the rest of the scientists were fairly timorous and somewhat introverted and, and maintained a lofty air of scientific purity.

Didn't want their work politicized but, in fact, didn't allow their work to be used to drive decisions that needed the benefit of their knowledge and their perspectives.

DT: Can you tell us about those outside the scientific community and what their roles were?

DA: Yeah, Yeah I actually came to Texas when I was nine months old. So but when I, when I went to work, when I left teaching and went to work for the National Audubon Society as a, as an environmental organizer and activist, there were, in addition to those academicians whom I already knew and had contacts with, I met, I think, Don Kennard just right way.

Don was a state senator. He had been the author of this, the bill that dedicated sales tax to, to create parks.

And he had been the author of the Texas Natural Laboratory system which was a system of, of finding some of the finest areas of Texas from a, from a biological and archeological standpoint, locating these really important lands.

Many of them, if not most of them, in private ownership and identifying the resources that they held in case these lands might ever come up for sale.

And Don's vision was, if these land are ever for sale, the agencies in Texas that buy land ought to know and ought to be first in line to make some of these areas public parks or wildlife refuges or, you know, special monuments and, and, and areas.

So Don called me thinking Audubon could help in this venture and I immediately could see the wisdom of it and was quite enthusiastic about what he was trying to do.

And he immediately saw I needed a lot of help that, you know, I might, I might be an enthusiastic young scientist but politically, I was really wet behind the ears. And so Don started getting me invited to, to events and functions and he introduced me to many of his political contacts.

And just kind of help me get started in the Texas political scene and, I think, gave me a little bit of validity that I wouldn't have had on my own. Helped to open some doors and gain entrée into some offices that would have taken probably decades or never to, to have gotten into.

DT: Could you run down that a little bit and say something about your political education to...

(misc.)

DT: ...to understand how the legislative process work and agency procedures and the personalities involved.

DA: The, the political education was in, I guess, I was inoculated somewhat by Ned Fritz and his, and his newsletter because he would inform people of what the process was, where a particular, where a particular issue was moving and where the pressure points were.

So I knew, in theory, which agencies were working on which areas and, and somewhat how to get things done but I didn't have the personal entrée into a lot of these offices and I didn't quite know, I knew that Audubon had a lot of potential power in the state but I didn't know how to use the power and what was the most productive way to use Audubons potential and Audubon's a membership organization with a strong national organization.

It's science based and it has a lot of resources but I didn't quite know the best way to use it. And, and between Ned Fritz and Don Kennard and then Charley Callison(?) who was an Executive Vice President of Audubon, I got a quick education in politics and, and especially with respect to political activism and grass roots groups.

I'd, I knew the science reasonably well but I learned quickly that, that there were sort of two expressions of power in Texas that caused heads to jerk up and one of those was a whole lot of money and the other was a whole lot of votes.

The ability to, to control a whole lot of votes or the perception that you had the ability to control a whole lot of votes.

So I learned to cre... to create a system but also to have a system where it wasnt just one person going in and talking to a representative but it was a person from their area who was in connection with some community leaders in those leaders and each of those community leaders might be an officer in several different civic groups

and we began to, to exploit the multiplier effect that we had within the Audubon Society, the kind of community leadership that we had. And, and what I would do is get backup from my leaders in a given community.

They would write letters maybe ahead of time saying, Dede Armentrout is going to be in town and shed like to meet with you. And I hope you'll meet with her on my behalf and then I would have the meeting and then I would report back to the grass roots what happened.

And then they would write a follow-up letter saying, we thank you for meeting with her and we were real disappointed that you didn't vote our way. But that way, we were pleasantly surprised that you did.

But that way people in offices began to develop a perception that it wasnt just me, that it was an organization and that people back home were going to learn what they did and, and would hold them accountable, to some extent, for the decisions that they made. And it, and it worked really well.

And Don just, Don helped immeasurably just by telling me the who's who. Who, that there are personality quirks as, as anybody who's worked in Texas legislature knows, the personality quirks are probably more important than, than the, the dry biographical sheets about these people.

And Don knew who, who cared about what and there might be somebody who was a terrible person on the environment except that they were an avid hunter. So he would say, well, if you use this angle, you can get to this guy because he loves hunting.

If you can relate your issue to hunting you'll, you'll get him. So, you know, Don helped a lot in strategy and helped a lot with just personalizing the, the legislators.

DT: Were there other legislators or agency people that you went up against either as partners or people that were more of an obstacle.

DA: Well, before I answer that as far as other, other people involved, I, I would be remiss if I didn't mention Bob Armstrong, who at the time that I started my environmental work, was the commissioner, commissioner of the General Land Office of Texas.

And Bob had been an environmental pioneer in Texas. And Bob's style was to just do the right thing and then figure out later how to justify it from the standpoint of his legislative mandates and the like.

But Bob did a lot of good. He managed his agency with a balanced mandate between exploiting state resources to generate money for the school revenue fund but also protecting those natural resources.

Bob had a real, had and has a real love for the land and a real love for natural resources, real personal connection to it. And I think he had, he felt a personal mandate that these resources that he treasured so much be around for generation after generation after generation.

And Bob got a lot of things done. In his time, he got things done quietly, kind of behind the scenes and what I would call very soft environmentalism. And I really respected what he had managed to accomplish and how, how he did it, how he set up that agency to become even harder to change as he left.

It was hard for his, for his successors to change the balance that he achieved without, without creating a lot of attention and, and no small amount of gnashing of teeth if, if certain programs were taken apart.

I thought that was really good. You asked a question, I guess, about foes within the system. Well, Texas when, when I started working in the environmental community was under, I would say under sort of a three pronged control.

The petro chemical industry was probably the most powerful lobby in Texas and after that, agriculture and real estate. And itand it was a toss up on any given day as to which of those three was holding the most power and pulling the most reins at the legislature or at the state agencies.

But there was an awful lot of money in those three areas and a lot of power exerted politically.

And often it was very difficult to get anything done at the legislature because the, if you looked at the three areas that, that posted the greatest environmental threat to Texas, you could also say it's the petro chemical industry, corporate agriculture or large scale agriculture moreso than, than small mom and pop agriculture and, and real estate development just because of the population increase in the State of Texas and the amount of land and resources that were being consumed by unfettered growth.

So it was very difficult and, and I don't claim many successes at all at the state legislature. It was a very difficult system to work in. Victories were few and far between and more good was done I think working at agency levels than at the leg, with, with some notable exceptions. But, for the most part, the legislature was, was not the happiest place to work and not the place where one got positive reinforcement for being an environmental activist.

DT: What sort of response did they give to you when you would make an environmental argument?

(misc.)

DA: The, the kind of reaction we would get from the legislature in making an environmental argument against a given bill or in a favor of a given bill was often very guarded and, and dubious.

Sometimes it was downright hostile and sarcastic. In some cases, we didn't even get meetings. We couldn't get on a, a witness list to save our lives, at first.

And, and in some cases, we just got a cordial reception. No questions were asked, no ideas were, were developed and we were just thanked for our input and then the vote came down the, the way that it would have come down without any, any testimony at all.

There were, there were some stars. There were, Fred Agnitz(?) was a wonderful legislator from Dallas who, who did some terrific things. And, as I mentioned, Don Kennard did a lot and there were some bright moments in the state legislator.

But, but for the most part, it was under the control of petro chemical and, and agriculture and, and later real estate. A lot of the key chairmanships were held by people from agricultural areas.

And, and agricultural areas seemed, I think, unnecessarily paranoid about environmental issues and environmental concerns. There, I always regretted the fact that, that I felt agriculture and environmental groups had a lot more in common than they had in conflict but there was just this great concern that regulation would over-regulate their operations and threaten their very livelihood.

There were also some real emotional issues in agriculture, particularly pesticide regulation and predator control. And agriculturists felt really threatened by those two agendas within the environmental community.

DT: Can you tell about those two efforts?

DA: Yeah, predator control was a, was a big issue. It was an emotional issue and it was really a clash of cymbals. When I first got involved in, in Audubon, with, within I think at, the very first year that I was in, involved as a staffer in Audubon,

the Texas governor, Dolph Briscoe, petitioned the Department of Interior for blanket kill permits that would allow anybody in 39 West Texas counties to kill Golden Eagles or Bald Eagles at any time, for any reason, with absolutely no limits.

And I probably hadn't been on the job six months when that one came down the road. And my immediate response was to get our mailing list from those 39 West Texas counties and write a letter to each, each member that we had saying,

when was the last time you saw a Golden Eagle and what do you think would be the impact if anybody in your county could shoot one at any time, for any reason?

And if you don't like this petition, I'd suggest you write Matt Reed who's nec... head of Fish and Wildlife Service in Department of Interior which is the entity that had to improve this blanket kill permit. And we got that stopped.

But the, there was a real misperception about eagles and their impacts on livestock losses. And it, it was pointed out to me as, as this dialogue started, this battle between save the eagle and kill the eagle that ranchers were very ill informed about what was causing their mortality in sheep and goats.

And as a scientist, I had looked at data and, in fact, I had helped, Texas Tech had a contract co-sponsored by the Wool Growers Association, the Fish and Wildlife Service and Audubon to go into eagle nests and pick out all the bones in an eagle nest and analyze all the bones andand try to infer from that what the feeding habits were of Golden Eagles, especially in these high eagle attack report zones in Texas.

And I helped sort bones and did, I didn't do very much in that, just a little bit of help with a colleague but assisted it enough to have taken an interest in it when I was a graduate stu... student.

And, and found it fascinating that the eagles were taking very few sheep and goats, virtually no adults and very few lambs and kids and most of those taken when you could, when you could make any conclusion at all, you had to conclude that they were scavenged and just pieces of, of animals would show up in a nest.

And they would be old enough that it was obvious the eagle wasnt capable enough of making a big kill. So our approach was, if you killed every eagle in West Texas, you wouldn't solve the ranchers problem on mortality on their kids and goats because something else is killing their kids and goats.

And we rocked back and forth a long time with the livestock industry when a forward thinking ag extension agent named Dale Rollins(?) to prove Audubon wrong, initiated a program called Operation Dead Lamb.

And this program, in this program, they brought ranchers in and showed them how to analyze a carcass to prove that eagles killed it. And then they invited ranchers to scour their pastures for lamb carcasses, analyze the carcasses and turn in any that were eagle kill so they could begin to generate the database to prove that eagles were indeed significant predators on lambs.

Well what happened was they got 39 lambs in, in, in a two year study. That wasnt the thousands they expected. But they sent ranchers out to their pastures who really started looking at what was killing their lambs and they started realized it wasnt eagles. And the 39 that came in were necropsied professionally and it turned out that 13 of those lambs were actually eagle kills.

So they began, through their own efforts, to realize that eagles weren't killing a high proportion of their animals, that their mortality problems were from another source and that thats where they ought to put their revenue and their attention.

So it helped a little but for, for us to have the controversy in the first place but, but it was more of a help for the ranching industry to, to take a scientific approach and to learn on its own, without guidance from the Audubon Society what was killing their animals and what might prevent it.

That, that, that exercise really translated into a better working relationship with Audubon and the livestock industry and, and our encouragement of that process and our sort of validation of their efforts, I think created some credibility with us.

That we werent just position based, that we were willing to re-evaluate if their data had shown a different, different outcome.

We also, we also started a different kind of approach with respect to predator problems in acknowledging that ranchers had legitimate problems, that they were suffering losses and that the most important thing needed to get the basic, the basis of what those problems were, what was the real cause of, of their losses.

And then what kinds of behaviors were more likely to alleviate those losses. And what we came up with and what the data showed us was that minor management adjustments and, in some cases major management adjustments, could often stop predation problems even on true depredation problems.

It wasn't necessary to do the sort of panmictic killing of predators to solve problems even when the problems were caused by predators. That sometimes simple shifts like cleaning up carrion from a pasture so that you didn't track predators into the pasture.

Timing the lambing and kidding to come a little later in the year after eagle migration had passed, eliminating poisonous plants in the pastures, watching for sure ewes and nannies with their kids because they tend to have the most problem, they tend to abandon their kids at a higher rate.

Just management adjustments could often stop animals from dying and the, and stopping the dying stopped attracting predators into the pasture, predators that might start out as scavengers but after eating up all the dead prey might, or not prey but the, the carrion might then shift their appetite to live prey.

So what, what we began advocate was a stepwise approach to predator, or to perceived depredation problems due to predators. And step one was to make management adjustments and try that.

Step two was to try non lethal programs that discouraged predators, things like electric fencing, changing pastures, penning animals at night, the kinds of practices that help reduce the vulnerability of, of the prey base, using guard dogs, guard donkeys and, and a variety of other guard animals to discourage predators.

And then third, to, to attempt to focus any lethal effects on a target offending animal rather than on a whole species or, you know, a whole class of carnivores and then finally, a lethal, a broad lethal approach only as a measure of last resort.

And we really never signed off or approved of broad lethal approaches that, that werent target oriented. But we did sign off on target oriented approaches such as the toxic collar.

Its a little poisonous collar that fits around the neck of a sheep or goat so that if a coyote attacks that animal at the neck, it poisons that coyote. It, it focuses in on a coyote thats not doing what it ought to do in its ecological niche.

Its eating a sheep or a goat. Its not eating a rabbit or a rodent and it eliminates that animal from the population but, but it allows other coyotes that are behaving appropriately to continue to occupy territory and defend that territory against encroachment by other coyotes that might be killers.

So I think our, our approach in recognizing that ranchers had a legitimate problem and trying to find some solutions and suggesting solutions also gathered some credibility for the organization.

Maybe demystified us. We werent so scary to them after that. Although I, I can't say we won them all over.

DT: You mentioned another controversy besides predator control, was it pesticide control? Can you talk about how that controversy developed and how Audubon and you dealt with it?

DA: Well the, the pesticides were a big controversy between the environmental community and the ag community because agriculturists felt they had to have certain pesticides and certain other crop additives or they might lose a whole crop or a whole season of crops.

And we were concerned about it both from the poison, both from the standpoint of poisoning wildlife and, and injecting poisons into the ecosystem but also poisoning our own food supply, poisoning us potentially.

So our approach, there were groups that, that wanted to just ban pesticides and, and they may have been right. I mean, we may have saved a lot of trouble if they had just banned the pesticides and we moved on.

But our approach was to minimize pesticides, to coordinate pesticides with other activities called integrated pest management, activities that tended to lessen a plant, a crop or, or an animals susceptibility to whatever the, the villain was, whether it was a disease or a fungus or a competitor or what have you.

What, what I think brought the environmental and the ag community closer together in the pesticide issue was, was twofold. One is that pesticide prices rose.

It became very expensive to apply pesticides and as organic farmers were proving that you didn't always have to go resort to pesticides to make a commercial crop, I think that turned the eyes of some ranchers and opened up their minds to, to alternative approaches.

And then we were seeing a rising incident of soft tissue sarcoma in farming and ranching populations, much higher among farmers, for example, than among people of the same socioeconomic level but in other pursuits.

Even rural people in the same socioeconomic level but in other professional pursuits. And I think that the fact that we were concerned about their health and their, and their needs was, was a help.

I mean, I was invited to serve on some advisory committees and, and to talk about what our concerns were about their health as well as about my own health. And, and our, and our concerns for the health of the planet.

So I think that helped, I, I would have to say probably the economic costs of pesticide application was as big a factor as, as any other factor though. People just stared looking for a better way and less expensive way to raise a crop. And some organic techniques do work.

(misc.)

DT: Do you remember reading Silent Spring early on?

DA: Oh yes, yeah. Rachel Carsons book, Silent Spring was awas a very important book and a real wake-up call for all of us, I think. She was, she was real popular around the campus when, when I was going to Texas Tech.

Every, every biology student had read it and talked about it and thought a lot about what she was saying. Kind of intuitively thought she was probably right. And we were seeing it.

We were picking up impacts of pesticides and, and various petro chemical problems in animals that we were collecting out inin West Texas in the arid and semi-arid areas of West Texas and Eastern New Mexico.

I worked on salamanders and we were saning salamanders out of ponds that had gross tumors and obvious mutogenic problems with multiple limbs and multiple digits on limbs. A lot of those, after I left and way past my research, were traced to a combination of diesel fuel and, and pesticide runoff that was going into some of these ponds.

DT: Tell us about some of the watershed environmental events in your career from planning the National Wildlife Refuges in Texas and the high points.

DA: The, I went to work for the, for the Audubon Society in 1976. And I graduated from school in 1973 with my, I got my doctorate in 1973. So the Endangered Species Act had just been passed.

The Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, all of those things had come up and were passed while I was finishing up my graduate, graduate school work. And then the implementation of all these bills were, were rolling along by 1976 when I came on board.

I think the first watershed event that I was involved in that was kind of a landmark for me was the Alaska D2 Land Settlement Act. And that was the legislation that sort of set aside the National Parks and National Monuments and National Wildlife Refuges in Alaska.

And, and Texas Audubon people were really effective in getting the Texas delegation to vote for setting aside great acreages of land in Alaska even though the Texas Petro chemical industry was fighting some of those designations pretty hard.

And I was really impressed withwith the public support for wild lands and these wide open spaces, wild spaces. So that was an important one for me. Inin Texas, the National Wildlife Refuge System was in place in Texas and yet while Texas was producing through, through offshore oil and gas leases, producing by far and away,

the lions share of revenue that went into the land and water conservation fund, Texas was receiving very little of that money back in the form of natural wildlife, National Wildlife Refuges created in Texas.

And we promoted sort of in a, in a fairly unorganized way, we promoted one refuge and then another with modest success. But in, oh when was it, it must have been the, the early 80s, the Audubon Council of Texas declared the lower Rio Grande Valley as a state priority because it was an area that had tremendous biological richness and its also an area that was subjected to a lot of agricultural development.

Since it was on the border, there was an awful lot of commercial development along the, the Rio Grande Valley.

And our chapter down there did a great job of pulling together the statistics on the biological importance and the economic trends and then the state made it a priority to try to produce a wildlife corridor from the mouth of the river to 200 miles inland up to Falcon Lake and to try to appropriate money to buy important rich areas along biologically rich areas along the river, connect them by corridors of land or strips of land in between in a cooperative effort between private landowners,

the state which had some holding and we wanted to encourage more state acquisitions along there and then the federal government in the entities of the Fish and Wildlife Service, the International Boundary and Water Commission and otherother federal entities that might have lands or manage lands along the river in an international sense.

And it was a remarkably successful effort. At that time, the, the money for acquisition in the lower Rio Grande Valley had kind of stabilized at $200,000 a year.

In fact, a good year was $200,000 of appropriations to make modest additions to a few existing refuges down in the valley. And our very first year of making this an Audubon priority, we sent delegations to congress.

We really worked the Texas delegation showing them here's, the money's coming out of Texas and heres where all the refuges are being bought in other parts of the country and we have a real strong biological need to buy some refuges down here.

We got the business community behind us in thein the Rio Grande Valley. Coincidentally the, the Lower Rio Grande Valley Development Council had commissioned a study on what drew tourists to the Rio Grande Valley and they learned that the number one reason was climate and the number two reason was bird watching.

So the business community got on board really really enthusiastically as our pitch to them was help us preserve this resource that really brings revenue dollars into the Rio Grande Valley and isn't as fickled as peso devaluation and oil and gas international pricing, droughts and freezes that affect the agriculture community.

We have a stable, we have some stable dollars here and we could have more if we had these Wildlife Refuges. Kiki De La Garza was, was the state representative and enthusiastically got on board and really championed his cause in the lower Rio Grande Valley.

And our first year of working this effort, we jumped the appropriation from $200,000 to $12,000,000. Largest single appropriation for a refuge not inin its early acquisition stage. And, and continued high appropriations for the next several years.

I think they dropped from $12,000,000 to 10 to 9 to 8 but considerably more money in thein the millions of dollars and in the first couple of years, the tens of millions of dollars rather than in the $100,000 range.

So quite a lot of the Rio Grande Valley was preserved. Some of the best ranches were available. These were all bought from willing sellers.

These were people who had their ranches up for sale anyway and many people were thrilled to know that their ranches were going to go to, to provide a National Wildlife Refuge and to be held in their current state rather than turning into another trailer park or another orange or grapefruit orchard.

So it was a, it was a wonderful effort. It was a real effort inin creating cooperative units with the business community, the agriculture community. Because we were also restoring ag lands.

We were taking ag lands and planting trees and planting mixed habitat and growing old thornbrush community and can, and grow it in twelve years up to where it was really good habitat.

The, the, the growing season is so long down there and the rainfall occasionally is so good that you can restore habitat within, easily within somebodys lifetime and there's a very reinforcing thing about somebody going out and planting a few trees and coming back in twelve years and they're thirty feet high.

And are housing a lot of birds and, and, and other species that they can see. So it was an, it was an effort that had a lot of sort of built in successes to it.

Private landowners that didn't want to sell their land and didn't want to change their major practices were willing to cooperate in setting aside just a fringe of habitat right by the river and that allowed animals like the ocelot, jaguarondi and Texas tortoise and animals that can't fly from land unit to land unit, to crawl or slither or slink from place to place under, under better conditions than if they had to pass an open field or, or plowed area.

So this wildlife quarter concept was and is alive. Its not finished and NAFTA has created tremendous economic pressures and competition for land. Its raised the land values quite high and it'll be difficult to, to completely finish it but the efforts still alive and, and its a, I think, a real success story in cooperating within a community and within a whole state and even within Audubon.

We got national help too. I mean, I, I contacted my counterparts in other states who had members who served on the appropriations committee in congress and said we really need the appropriations for this and could your grass roots people writer letters saying Texas is a long way away but we fly down there and bird watch and we want to want to see you appropriate money for this effort.

So it was a, it was a terrific effort. It was really good and happy outcome. There it's still a phenomenally rich area and, and an area that has still has the potential for recovery and for rapid environmental restoration.

DT: You had mentioned that some private landowners were able to help out with the project by changing their practices along the river. Can you tell about Proposition 11 and other efforts to keep it involved and to help private landowners do the right thing?

DA: Proposition 11 was awas an initiative that was started wasn't named that, of course, at first but it was started independently by both the agriculture community and the environmental community.

And both the communities recognized the need for a little more flexibility in what's called the agriculture valuation for land in Texas. Land in Texas is taxed at the same rate under the constitution but the value of the land can be set differently and there's a special sort of a special treatment of ag lands in that they're valued by what they produce per year rather than what the market value or the real estate value of the land is.

And they were agriculturists who'd gone through the droughts of the 50s and had gone through a couple of minor droughts since then who were required by their taxing entities to stock livestock at a particular rate that they thought would be harmful if we were entering into another drought.

So they wanted to be able to manage their livestock grazing a little more flexibly. Also the Endangered Species Act potentially could influence whether a rancher could, could engage inin ranching practices in an area right adjacent to say some nesting and endangered species.

At least the ranchers were worried that they couldnt do it legally or if they did it, even if they could do it legally, if it were to wipe out an endangered species, they would feel bad about it.

And a lot of ranchers wanted to protect endangered species on their ranches but if it involved retiring that area, either temporarily or permanently from agricultural practices, then they felt they'd lose their ag valuation on that land because the definition of the ag valuation required them to have active agricultural productivity going on.

So they felt they were in a box. They had they couldn't they thought they couldnt practice ag the way the, the counties required them to practice it and yet, if they didn't do that, you know, if they, if they protected the land, they'd lose their valuation.

So they went with one bill and, at the same time, we were hoping that agriculturists would stop selling out their land to real estate developments and hang onto it if they didn't have this tax problem.

We wanted to see some incentives that helped people on large green places at, at least not be harmed if they chose to manage for wildlife rather than for cows and sheep and goats and pigs and chickens. So the two bills sort of stalled out in the first effort.

The second effort we got together and we passed a bill but it was constitutionally flawed and then the third effort which is what became proposition 11, we passed a bill that allowed agriculturists the flexibility to declare a certain area as wildlife management, as a wildlife management area and manage only for regionally indigenous, native Texas wildlife and receive the same valuation as they would have had they been managing it for agriculture.

This created a situation for the urban environmentalists where they knew that some rancher was, and many ranchers, were taking care of wildlife that they valued and, in fact, the public owns the wildlife.

So ranchers were managing for species that belonged to everybody. And the urban environmentalists were happy to support that effort, to give ranchers and other landowners the, the incentive of managing for wildlife instead of for agriculture and yet not losing, not having to pay as if it was a high price real estate development.

DT: We've talked some about land. Will you comment on one of the other successes that happened on your watch, the end of the massive federally funded reservoir projects?

DA: Oh that was a happy time...

DA: One of the watershed in environmental, environmental (?) in Texas had to do with the elimination of huge federal subsidies for, for water projects federally funded water projects in Texas.

And many of us in the environmental community felt that, that these water projects were tremendously destructive to riparian habitat and wildlife habitat in general and yet didn't, there wasnt an offset that was sufficient to justify their great expense.

They certainly made some people some money but they, the cost benefit ratios on these projects were just horrible. And the Carter administration, because of the Arab oil embargo and, and a number of other economic considerations that were going on

President Carter created a hit list of terrible water projects and decided by executive order that he was going to stop spending money on some of these projects and, and target some of the others that were working their way through congress for elimination or at least modification to where they at least had a one to one cost benefit ratio.

And it was a time in Texas when the environmental community found itself as allies of a group of fiscal conservatives. And we werent often working in the same room and pulling in the same direction with Texas most staunch fiscal conservatives.

But it was a fun time to, to be with them and to pull together onon these issues. It was, at the time, I lived in Brown County and, and my congressman, I, I wrote and visited with some frequency and, and he never voted our way.

Absolutely never. It became kind of a, a big smile. I would go in to get a pass to observe some action on the house of the floor and I would say this is the only thing I'm going to get from you so please give me a pass to observe the action.

But, but, in fact, he voted against a, a whole, a whole laundry list of bad, fiscally bad federal water projects and, and the era really came with that when congress finally killed all of those water projects at once, it ended that pork barrel system that had just rolled along for decades and decades.

It really saved the taxpayers a lot of money and it really saved the state from many more environmentally destructive and very marginally useful water projects. That was a happy time for us.

DT: Talk about some of the less intelligent environmental decisions that you've seen come along and maybe start out with some thoughts about laws.

(misc.)

DA: Okay. Some of the, some of the dumbest projects in Texas I think, I think Wallisville is probably head of the list. This was a water project outside Houston that was supposed to provide supplemental water to Houston as well as, I think, a modest amount of flood control.

But as originally designed, this water would be about knee high and about 200,000 acres or so. I cant even remember the statistics but it was a huge, huge project, a massive lake and the water would all be under 3 feet deep, or most of it would be under 3 feet deep and very, very hot and, and most eutrophic, just boiling with bacteria and algae and the, the least likely place for Houston to really want to go and get its drinking water.

And, and it was just one of those big federal boondoggles of a water project. It was going to make some contractors a lot of money and provide a modest benefit to the City of Houston and, and in so doing, was going to wipe out some really important biological areas, especially some cypress and tupelo swamps and, and, you know, important wetlands on the Texas coast.

Wallisville limped through, staggered through, was defeated in ain a lawsuit and then reinstated through a technicality. And it exists today. It, it's not the massive project it once was and, at one time, it was sort of step one in an effort to channelize the river, I'm blank, is it the, I'm blank on the river, the Trinity River.

Yeah, the Trinity River all the way up to Dallas/Fort Worth to create the largest inland port in North America by having these ocean going vessels steam all the way up the Trinity River to Dallas and Fort Worth.

And, and Wallisville was at the end of the of the stream, so to speak, so if Wallisville couldnt go in or couldnt go in in a huge navigable way then the entire Trinity River project couldnt go forward.

So even though we didn't defeat Wallisville, by scaling it down and limiting its size, we defeated the Trinity River project long enough that, that it couldnt survive the economics of state cost sharing and, and user cost sharing and it, it died.

Although they're bits and pieces of it still alive and there--there are still flood projects and some navigation projects on it but it wasnt the massive and horrible project that it could have been. Wallisville was a real lemon.

Other lemons, I think a lot of the reservoirs in Texas were kind of lemons. A lot of them were built in areas that silted rapidly and, and their, the life of the project is about 20 to 30 years and some of the best ones, Stacey reservoir was another was a lemon. We didn't defeat that one. We kind of held it hostage for a while but it got through.

DT: Tell us about that fight.

DA: Well it was a, it was a fight that was probably, probably should have been defeated on economic. purely economic argument. It was a very expensive large reservoir destined to not hold very much water and destined to, to not provide much in the way of local impacts that were positive but extremely expensive, likely to silt up rapidly and there was an endangered species in the area.

The Concho, Concho River water snake was in the area. And the project was held up due to the Concho River water snake for a while. Senator Benson, who for the most part was a friend of the environment was really not a friend on this issue and just insisted that, that this project go forward and, and essentially it did.

There were some modifications. There were some, I think, bad science that went on, some tizzing and tainting with respect to the science but eventually the project went forward and the water snake was not wiped out by the project.

My opinion, the water snake was certainly an issue in the project but it was generally a badly designed and badly done project that shouldn't have gone forward anyway. There will be people in San Angelo who beg to differ with me on that.

But it, it was, I think another real lemon for the Texas taxpayers and the U.S. taxpayers to swallow.

(misc.)

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 ...