Bob Burleson Interview, Part 2 of 2

DT: Can you tell us about your other work in the State, outside of West Texas, and particularly about your work to try and stop the shell dredging?

BB: When governor Preston Smith appointed me to the Parks and Wildlife Commission, my appointment was opposed, by

seriously opposed in the because the senate, in Texas, must by a certain margin confirm a governa- gubernatorial appointee to the Parks and Wildlife Commission.

When I was appointed, I was opposed by because of my conservation leanings, I was opposed by the shell dredging industry out of, out of the Houston area.

Most people today don't really know what shell dredging was but but for nearly 100 years, dredges, large floating dredges had been digging oyster reefs out of the bays and estuaries of Texas and using them for two things.

One is a raw ingredient for Portland Cement. There were large cement factories down on the coast near Houston, for example.

And secondly, they were using them for basically road gravel and fill material on county roads and city roads and subdivisions and things like that.

All of that was a dredge, not only destroyed by simply a huge, rolling wheel that dug up the buried or fossilized oyster reefs,

but the, the, the tremendous damage of it, although it destroys whatever it dug, the tremendous damage was done by siltation

because all of the sediment that was stirred up off the, off the bottom of the bay or the estuary by these dredges then floated in a dredge plume from the air

you could see a plume sometimes three and four miles long of suspended sediments that would go behind these, they would go wherever the current took them.

And as they settled out, they settled on the, the very environment that produced the life of the bay and estuary,

the small oysters, the small shrimp, the small crabs, the juvenile fishes and it smothered them.

So these dredges, for every oyster reef that they dug up, they probably destroyed dozens of others by siltation.

And additionally, they, the channel dredging created what's called spoil. Spoil is essentially mud that's been dug up from the bottom of a, of a canal.

Gradually they kind of filter, it filters in and begins to shallow or make the canal more shallow. So they redredge it and the spoil is dumped in a pile.

Those, that spoil gradually is carried out by currents and again, it covers up the, the grass, the, the grass flats and the livelihood of the, of the bays and estuaries.

And, of course, without the bays and estuaries, you got no life in the Gulf at all.

I mean, nearly all of these larval forms of, of sea life develop in the brackish or saline waters of our bays and estuaries.

So, there was one particular very powerful group called Parker Brothers in Houston.

Parker Brothers was a major shell dredging industry and had, I think at that time, perhaps three dredges running.

They had a, Parker Brothers had a very strong lobbyist, a former representative, I believe, named Jill Devaney(?). Jill Devaney was a very strong lobbyist.

And the Parker, Parker Brothers spent a good bit of money opposing my nomination and my confirmation as a commissioner on the Parks and Wildlife Commission.

They just recently, senator, ex-Senator Bill Moore died, the bull of the Brazos. They had him sort of in, in their hip pocket.

And another senator named Jim Bates from down at Batesville, I think he's deceased as well. They had him in their hip pocket.

And so the people that were working for me were Barbara Jordan and Senator Don Kennard and then my own senator, Murray Watson from Waco.

None of these people are, of course, in the, in the senate anymore.

Long, long, this was long ago and, and, of course, Barbara is deceased and, and Don is working in Washington.

But it came down to a very close vote but, thank goodness, Barbara Jordan and Don Kennard and some others got me confirmed.

Well, I mean, before long, the shell dredging issue came before the commission.

And obviously I was one, I was just one of six commissioners at that time. At that time, the commissioner had six people on it.

But we did studies that showed the tremendous amount of damage that was being done. And even more important, although the dredgers always claimed that they were digging only fossil,

that is dead oyster reefs, that no longer would serve as a substrate for the growth of new oysters, the truth is they would dig through anything that was in their path, including living reefs.

And they oftentimes lied about their position. When a, when a vessel is on the water dredging, you can't tell just by eye whether they are

in a permitted section of bay floor that's been surveyed and found to have no living oyster reefs in it or whether they're over in a non-permitted area, okay.

We started triangulating on them with our Parks and Wildlife personnel down there and found out that they were, at night, oftentimes moving their position, getting into non-permitted areas, dredging live reefs and things like that.

Well eventually the sum and substance of it was we made it so hard on them to operate that they shifted to an alternative supply which is they bought a lot of land up in the Texas hill country around New Braunfels

and places like that and started excavating limestone, shipping it by rail to the coast and using that which was environmentally far better for the bays and estuaries.

Again though, like all trade-offs, there's some awful big holes dug around New Braunfels that, that, you know, for quarrying.

But the trade-off, we felt like, was a fair one in that the bays and estuaries were in serious trouble.

I mean, there was there was a definite threat to the, to the sport fishing industry and even the commercial fishing industry along the coast from shell dredging.

And so it's the ending of the shell dredging and then later on constraints on commercial netting and even non-commercial netting.

We started putting in some real good regulations that pretty well put an end to indiscriminate netting on the coast.

It still goes on illegally and you have to fight it all the time but but those regulations were were put in place and basically our department, in the late 60s and early 70s,

the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department became much more conservation and enforcement oriented in terms of preventing damage to the natural resources.

So that was, I was proud that, of the commissioners that I worked with and the the members of the staff of the of the department that did such a yeoman job on pointing out what the dredging industry was doing to our natural resources on the coast.

DT: Can you tell about your experience with the number of dams being built?

BB: I didn't personally have a lot to do, as an individual, with in the dam fights.

What I, what I worked on while I was on the commission was more what, what I would call is remedial action, so-to-speak.

In other words, if most of these dams had already been authorized and were a part of the Texas water plan and had tremendous political power behind them.

Now that, that doesn't mean you can't beat a dam by lawsuits or by politics.

But, and I, but, as a practical matter, if you can get the people who want to build the dam to set aside other tracts to replace, so-to-speak, what they're flooding, you've at least done something.

And so, we, we started a process whereby we were working with and sometimes fighting with the river authorities and, and power plant, power companies and all that

to force them to acquire additional, offsetting Texas river bottoms, hardwood bottom land hardwoods and swampy areas and wildlife habitat that would replace, at least, or preserve an amount equal in value to that which they're flooding.

And that concept has continued to this day. It was new at that time and, and I believe that the, the commission I served on was probably the first one to really press that as an alternative.

If you can't stop the dam, at least make them pay their way, so-to-speak conservation wise by, by setting aside and buying with those same state or governmental funds an offsetting piece that could be protected in perpetuity.

And so we did that good bit in East Texas on some of the lakes that already were authorized and were going to built over our dead bodies probably, rather than get into an outright, head butting battle which we would probably lose politically.

Now other conservation groups were more active and more aggressive and some of them filed suit.

I think Ned Fritz's group filed suit on more than one occasion related to a, a dam on the Sulphur River and there may have been others.

You talk, when you talk to Ned, I'm sure he'll tell you the details about that but, but we worked more in the area of realistic compromise and I had some good, there were some good men on the commission that I served with and

who were really interested in, in preserving the, and adding to the amount of park land and natural area land and wildlife management land that Texas had.

And we, we did a whole lot of that remedial type work while I was there. As far as dams, the truth is, nearly all the dams that really are economically justifiable have been built already.

Every time you build one now, you're building a marginal dam that where the water flow is probably not that reliable and the location is usually pretty damaging.

There's no question though but what's it's still a threat because as Texas population grows and the, and the water crisis which always will be with us, deepens there will be more and more pressure to build marginal dams.

And, and so people involved in conservation cannot casually look at things like the Texas water plan. It basically that's a, that's where the voters have to fight, you know, and, and is to try to defeat those.

Those and some of the plans like the one right now going on to channelize the Trinity even further and build new, new levies and other basically boondoggles is what it boils down to so that people can build in areas where people shouldn't build.

And and that's something that has been a constant fight all along and it's going to continue to be a fight

and as the population pressure increases and the the demands for total utilization of water increases, that's going to be a major battleground forever, I think.

Mickey can probably tell you when you visit with her about some of the efforts of of the current Parks and Wildlife Department to try to gain guarantees of releases of fresh water to make sure the bays and estuaries have adequate inflow.

If you just cut them off, it's, it's a, it's fatal because if they get too saline, if the bays and estuaries become too salty, the life in them just basically dies out.

And and so you've got to have those freshwater inflows and if you're stopping it all behind dams and using it only for economic or domestic or citified city purposes,

and you don't give any, any value to the freshwater flows to the bays and estuaries, everything's gone, you know.

And so she was helping fight that battle along with other people on the present commission.

And she knows more about the current status of it than I do. That's about all I had to do really in in all honesty with related to dams and reservoirs.

DT: Can you touch a little on some of the wildlife, can you tell about the falcon?

BB: The peregrine falcon there basically were two or three populations.

One was kind of an East Coast population that traditionally had been the the falcon had had nested sometimes even nesting on building ledges on New York City but had nested along the East Coast, Northeast Coast for years.

The there was another big population called the tundra population and these birds nested in the arctic and Alaska and Northern Canada, places like that. And then they were highly migratory.

They would come fly every year, in the spring, they'd fly south and go to Central America and and South America and then come back for the nesting season or vice versa.

Anyway, they'd leave there in the hottest coldest part of the year and then come back in the in the spring and summer.

It turned out that populations were dropping very precipitously of the peregrine.

And it's a it's a dramatic bird. If you've ever seen a peregrine up close and seen one take another bird in mid air, right over your head, which I've had that happen several times in my lifetime,

you cannot imagine their their beauty and their grace and their unbelievable speed when they stoop.

Anyway, it turned out that they their hatching lack of hatching success was based on DDT which was causing a thinning of the eggshells.

Fortunately there was a relict population that was non-migratory in Northern Mexico and out in the Big Bend of Texas.

And nobody knew how many of them there were. You know, whether it was really or really what their habits were.

We started taking people into Northern Mexico because of our experience in, in, in Northern Mexico in plant botanizing work and in the Chihuahuan Desert survey.

We started taking, you know, folks that really were cognizant of and really knew and understood the peregrine in there and wed take them into these high mountain ranges and they would survey.

So Mickey and I were on several surveying trips and and some trapping trips where we'd trap and band these peregrines using the the techniques of of the falconry people.

DT: How would you get to their nests?

BB: You you don't have to get to their nest. You most of the most of the studies are done through

like a rifle stock with a telescope mounted on it and you can get you can you can bring them right into the into focus at several hundred yards range.

So you you just find the aeries or the places where they nest and then you watch them through binoculars or telescopes without having to interfere with their nesting and hab and feeding.

But, on at least two occasions, I was really below, several hundred feet below, a nesting peregrine and the male, the tiercel, would come out of the sky with a bird in his claws and scream at the female.

The female would come off the nest and they would make an interchange right in the right in mid air above you and and she would bring thethe bird back to feed the nestlings. And...

DT: Trapeze artist...

BB: Yeah, you can't you can't believe. She just rolls over on her back, he passes over her in the opposite direction and its just instant transfer just like that. And she takes it.

Or occasionally he'll just drop it and she'll just swoop and pick it up in mid air. And they are amazing birds. They're the kings of the air.

Well, being we studied the locations and helped people helped people get into Mexico to study the locations and map the birds

and there was a a viable population there that apparently was reproducing. And that was a major contribution.

The peregrine then was placed on the Texas Endangered Species list also and was given protection in Texas although frankly, the great majority of them lived in National Parks in Texas.

There were some in the Davis Mountains and there were some other places that were not in National Parks and so they were protected by Texas regulations.

We also did a we limited the ability of falconers to take peregrines from the wild.

We we instituted pretty strict regulations on falconry. Not that the average falconer is is a bad person.

It takes a lot of dedication, a tremendous number of hours of training and and devotion to the to the craft to be a falconer but there's that that almost irrepressible urge to own a peregrine.

That's that's like having the the I don't know, Bugatti or something like that if you're a sports car fan.

I mean, they've got to have the peregrine and some of them will cheat to get them.

And some of them will will take mountain climbing gear and go to aeries and and rob them of their nestlings.

And our department has caught them, in the years past, caught them being smuggled in from Mexico, caught them being smuggled in from other areas.

So there was an educational aspect of it with the department of training people to watch for those smuggled birds.

And to watch the Texas coast which is a very easy place to trap peregrines in the spring.

They will come in and and also in the fall in the in the spring, they're coming coming north to their nesting grounds in the arctic.

And you can you can trap them using a lure.

You use a pigeon that's wings are tied and you tie a rope on him and you put a little light weight where he can't really go anywhere

and you drive along and toss that weight and pigeon out on the sand and if there's a peregrine anywhere around, there's something about a pigeon that a peregrine just focuses on.

He'll come down and you have a little vest on the pigeon with tiny loops of monofilament(?) and the peregrine will land on the pigeon

and his toenails or his claws will become entangled, talons will become entangled and you jump out and run and grab him.

And you band him and weigh him and take the temperature and sex it and all that.

And we did that we spent several days doing that, Mickey and I, on the Texas coast

but you have to learn to watch those areas during the migration season or people will trap them illegally and and possess them illegally.

And since they were an endangered species, that would became a very important part of our department's enforcement.

DT: Could you talk a little about start up of the Texas Organization for Endangered Species?

BB: Right. Okay. Again, that was a that was a I wrote a little history, within the last two years, for the TOES or the Texas Organization on Endangered Species,

because I was a charter member of TOES, I wrote a little history from the files I had. I still had my original files of the organizational effort.

I wrote that for their annual meeting and I can't remember if it was last year or the year before.

I'll try to find that and send you a copy of that. I'm sure it's still on the computer disk in my in my office and my secretary can find it.

But I wrote a history of TOES, of the early days, and it gives the names of all the people who were involved.

And I I cannot, without looking at the file, give you all the names

but essentially TOES was created by what was then the Soil Conservation Service in cooperation with a number of conservation groups

and, at first, it was composed mainly of people who were botanist or zoologists or biologists

that were related to governmental agencies or educational institutions like University of Texas and other other major universities around the state.

But many, many individuals joined in on it and it was they had a number of meetings. They had active committees.

It was an important player, you know, in the late 60s and in Texas in terms of pushing toward a Texas Endangered Species Act,

pushing toward regulations that faced up to the the needs of endangered and threatened species.

And that encouraged landowners to protect them on their private lands.

So TOES was a good organization. It still exists. Its not nearly so active anymore as it was for various reasons.

Among which are that there are other competing organizations now and you can only belong to so many.

But we had a real good attendance and a good meeting at sort of the anniversary issue, anniversary meeting within the last year or so.

DT: Was there a triggering event that convinced people to start a group like that?

BB: I think it was I think there were several events that again... (misc.)

BB: TOES as an organization was, no question about it, owed its, you know, it it had its genesis in Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.

That means, that woman's work and her book started nearly every effort that I'm aware of toward really being aware of the unintended consequences of human endeavor.

And, I mean, she certainly was not the only person who ever had those thoughts

but everybody, at that time, governmental government and industry was in a belief in the inevitability that technology could solve any problem.

And during World War II when we did so well with our industrial might and developed so many new technologies, including pesticides and antibiotics and everything else, many of which have their place.

Again, nobody really was looking at the long term consequences. The the unintended consequences of the use of so much of so much of a chemical load being put on the environment.

And she awakened everybody to that. It was difficult in Texas to deal with endangered species because, as you know, Texas when it became a state, it kept all of its private lands for itself.

So we don't have large federal enclaves in Texas. Only a few small national forests. They bought those.

They were not they were not originally federal land and nearly all the the land in Texas that has that really has endangered species on it is is private land.

So you have to deal with the private landowners. You have to respect their rights.

You can't go in there with a sledgehammer and just batter people into doing what they need to do to protect the environment.

So its a big educational effort and TOES, I think, was important in that.

TOES always had people that had enough sense to not publicize the locations of pockets of endangered species and

and TOES was always a cooperative organization dealing with landowners and as a result, usually the members of TOES could get access.

Later that became a problem. It it's still a problem for any biologist or any scientist to get on private land in Texas there's been so much misinformation passed out by some advocacy groups

that landowners are afraid that if they admit to the existence of a of an endangered species on their land that, in some manner, they'll be restrained in their use of their land for their economic purposes.

Most of that is, you know, scare tactics and most of it is not based on truth but but I must admit, there are there are instances where landowners' rights haven't been fairly considered

by governmental agencies under the Endangered Species Act of both Texas and the federal government.

And those every time something like that happens which is regrettable, it usually gets inflated greatly and gets bandied about in the landowner organizations

and you have to, you know, you're set back again in your your efforts to try to conserve some really rare and endangered species on private land.

That's a battle that's still being fought. (misc.)

DT: Can you say a few words on some of the more frustrating episodes youve had or maybe some of the successes?

BB: You know, if you're if you're if you have a reverence in your in your heart for the natural world which my wife and I do and I I know many, many others who do, you know.

If you have that kind of reverence and if if you feel like that your time on earth is is really very short

and that that you don't necessarily have the right to just use up all the resources of the earth for your own personal benefit.

If you have those feelings and, thank God a lot of people do, then you're frustrated all the time at the way humans treat the world around them.

I mean, so frustration is a daily, even depression is a daily feeling of anybody in Texas who's interested in conservation.

On the other hand, you can accomplish things by persuasion and compromise.

I have always been in the on on the side of those who believe you can accomplish more in the long run by

working with the opposition in trying to change them and get a compromise position than you gain by filing lawsuits.

And so I've never participated in or advocated the filing or the confrontational approach approach to conservation.

In that respect, I differ markedly in philosophy from Stuart Henry, the Sierra Club as it now is constituted, and and even my friend Ned Fritz.

Ned is a very controversial person among private landowners and most of them don't like him because he is confrontational and he's aggressive.

On the other hand, I must say to give them their full due, the Sierra Club's lawsuit on the Edwards aquifer was was beneficial.

They did a they accomplished a lot and they forced the other side into some compromise positions by litigation.

I'm sure some of Ned's suits against the Forest Service on clear-cutting and some of his suits related to the Sulfur River Dam and other things like that that I wouldnt even know the details on,

I think those have been probably beneficial in the long run even though I didn't agree with them at the time they were doing them.

It's just a difference in philosophy.

You know, I my wife and I spent years trying to cultivate private landowners and trying to cultivate the West Texas politicians and the West Texas ranchers so that we could work with them.

And we had to because of that we had to forego the use of litigation or threats of litigation as a tool.

And so we never did use that and and never will. That's just not our style.

On the other hand, litigation has its place and it's effectively used and even though I don't favor it in the long run because I think it hardens people's positions and ruins relationships,

I recognize that a lot has been accomplished that way and I would not take away the credit to, you know, particularly in the Edwards aquifer suit.

I think that was, you know, something that did accomplish a lot.

It got it got some conservation measures put in place that, weak as they may be are better than nothan what they had which was the law of capture before that, you know. So that's sort of the philosophical difference.

You will always be, though, occasionally depressed and occasionally really hurt by what's happening around you

because two weeks ago, my wife and I took a tour of prairies that we had plotted and, you know, and studied basically thirty years ago.

And out of all the ones that we went back to, something over twenty, they were all gone except parts of a couple of them.

And even the one one that was remaining had been sprayed and so all the broad leafed the forbs and the lagoons were gone from it.

Others were just had just disappeared. They had been plowed up.

And so when you're faced with that, we became very depressed that day and just finally quit, even though we still had a few more we could go look at

because it was getting so depressing that that what little remnants we knew of of the Blackland Prairie were gone.

But again, it's that's just the price you pay, I guess, for living in a in a free country where where each individual has the right to control their own destiny and use their own resources in the way they see fit.

I mean, overall, its a good system. Occasionally it has, you know, terrible deficiencies.

DT: What are the challenges in the future?

BB: I guess the greatest challenge for the whole world, in the future, is population.

If there's no constraint on population growth, this the entire world will ultimately become a very degraded environment.

The the idea of the oceans as a dumping zone or as a zone that belongs to nobody and is is can take an infinite amount of trash, so-to-speak, is has been dispelled by every study that's been done in recent years.

There's hardly a piece of ice, there's hardly a drop of water that doesnt show some evidence of man's intervention,

even that which is pulled from few thousand feet below our this house in the Trinity Aquifer shows traces of of modern introduced chemicals now.

So humans have impacted the world in just about every way you can and we work, my wife and I work a lot and travel a lot in the third world.

We'll be going to Honduras in August to work down there and help rebuild housing for the for the victims of Hurricane Mitch.

We'll be going in July to Mexico to do work in villages there.

Because we work in the third world, we see how degraded some of that country is already and when you think of the rates of population growth that are prevalent in nearly all third world countries,

you just simply realize that that we're out we're out-breeding our natural world and we're perhaps the only species that can simply reproduce to the point and use the resources to the point where where nobody has a very good life.

And I'm certainly not saying that there's not going to be a way found to survive.

I mean, there's a large number of resources out there that are marginal now that we can always go to and by new techniques and expenditure of greater funds, we can keep on.

I think we can keep on probably for several generations using hydrocarbons from the from the earth, oil and gas and and coal and things like that.

But the problem is that that the price we're going to be paying for that in terms of pollution, in terms of of the quality of human life may just make it a very bad deal.

And but I look at population control and preservation of the oceans and to a somewhat lesser extent, the rain forest, the tropics as being problems that everybody ought to be concerned with.

DT: Is there a favorite place that you can describe that has a certain magic for you?

BB: Mickey and I often have said that that it would have been nice if we had been born to wealth where we could have just acquired all the places that we loved.

But then we got to looking around and we we couldn't get to them if there would be so many of them, scattered so far apart that we really would never even be able to visit our own property.

So, I would just say this, I'll Mickey and I have always loved rivers, especially remote, clean rivers.

And we always have loved canyons and small water forces and I guess that I guess that places in remote mountain ranges and places on long, remote rivers are probably my favorite thing, you know,

that's those are places that I always feel a different person when I when I get there.

And I feel like you can shuck off all the cares of the world and and just relax and and I think Mickey feels a whole lot that way too.

End of reel 2010.

End of solo interview with Bob Burleson.