Hell Begins South of the Red River: Part 1

The costs of Governor Abbott's unchecked economic freedoms.

Photo by Daniel on Unsplash - A photo of the Frisco area, according to Unsplash.

In 2010 my husband and I thru-hiked the entire Appalachian Trail and in 2011 we thru-hiked the Florida Trail. Prior to those adventures we had lived in Florida from 2002-2010 but during the in-between times of our thru-hikes we bounced between my parent’s house in suburban Tarrant County and his mom and step-dad’s house in suburban Collin County. My parents have lived in their house since January 1986 and so their neighborhood had already aged and settled into the surrounding environment by the time 2010 rolled around, and now 16 years later that whole corner of the county is really beginning to show its age. The neighborhood in Collin County, especially in 2010 and 2011, was still relatively new at only about a decade old and new neighborhoods have been built over the last 15 years, too. That continues as the last remaining farm fields are sold to developers and the earth is scraped of its topsoil to make room for fill and concrete and more subdivisions and box stores.

Hiking 3,000 miles in a calendar year tends to make one itchy to keep moving and so I found myself running, walking, and rollerblading in both neighborhoods when I had time. Doing those activities around my parent’s neighborhood mostly brought back memories from my time growing up and living in that area. Many of the homes are older than the mid-80s, some going back to the 50s and 60s depending on where you are in the city. Little inklings of what was once the Cross Timbers shows up in community parks here and there as well as in the lots of some of the homes where mid-20th century developers opted not to clearcut the lots entirely.

Contrasting to all of that, I found my time spent exploring the newer neighborhoods in Collin County to be fairly revolting. I couldn’t put a finger on the feeling then and I’m still not quite sure I can describe it now, but it was some kind of aseptic Stepford Wife vibe that it still gives off today. Sure, 16 years have passed and some of those homes look a bit better as the developer installed landscaping has grown up and filled in but I’m still creeped out by it all. Unfortunately, this aesthetic has infiltrated my parent’s area, too, as the last vestiges of land that went undeveloped have been targeted by developers, and now tightly fitting new homes on zero lot lines sit there, planted with crape myrtles and nandina, and a live oak that will be too large for the lot in 20-30 years.

“Certain attitudes dominate simply because of history and economics: modern Texas was built on the exploitation of natural resources, boom following upon boom with the busts soon fading from memory.” - Ch. 3 - Texas: A State of Neglect from Texas Land Ethics by Pete A.Y. Gunter & Max Oelschlaeger

Published in 1997 by the University of Texas Press, Texas Land Ethics is a book I keep referring back to time and time again since I first picked it up a few years ago. The late Pete Gunter was a well-known advocate for the Big Thicket and often wrote editorials for the Texas Observer. I know less about Max Oelschlaeger other than he is an environmental philosopher and was once a professor, but I am unsure if he is still alive and what he may or may not be working on these days. Much of what was written in the late 1990s in this book still holds up today. The century and millennia may have changed over but the greedy ethos stayed much the same.

“In the United States, and especially in Texas, where the frontier mythology lives on, the rights of private property have been virtually absolute. Yet private property only exists within the reality of historical process: the institution, in other words, is a social creation, first imagined by human beings in particular times and places, and modified through time by successive generations.” - Ch. 5 - Are Land Ethics Practical? from Texas Land Ethics

Two weeks ago my family and I spent a week in northwestern Arkansas. My husband found a fairly remote rental cabin on 40ish acres that came with its own hiking trails, creeks, and waterfalls. There was no cell service, though we did have Wi-Fi, and access to the cabin required a 4WD vehicle to even get to the front door. It was blissful! That area of the state between Fayetteville and Fort Smith was mostly rural outside of those towns, the kind of rural that is slowly fading away in Texas.

To get to Arkansas, we left from Fort Worth after having picked up our son from my parent’s house where he’d been at Camp Grandparents for the previous two weeks. We crossed over the top of DFW via a combination of the various highways that connect and clog the metroplex, including SH 121, now known as the Sam Rayburn Tollway. The late Speaker of the House has both a large reservoir and a toll road named after him; the latter seems more fitting given the location of the highway in conjunction with his residence in Fannin County. Then it was northbound on US 75 through the ever burgeoning sprawl of the northern Dallas suburbs, where McKinney bleeds into Melissa which bleeds into Anna which bleeds into Van Alstyne…and before you know it, with a brief gap between Van Alstyne and Howe of crop fields that are sure to be drooled over by developers in the next decade, you arrive at Sherman and Denison. Then, a brief hop across the Red River and suddenly you are in Oklahoma.

And you are in Oklahoma. The sprawl disappears.

“To locate the mass of Texas’ population in the eastern or east-central part of the state, to encourage massive doubling and redoubling of population, is to court both social and environmental misery. The resulting problem is twofold: vast populations encouraged to settle in one region; and in that region an unchecked tendency toward sheer sprawl, with attendant loss of farmland, forest, and prairie, an explosion of road building and increased nonpoint pollution, and the expectation of a lowering quality of life. If we have stressed the problems posed by the Giant Slurbs in this book, it is not because we enjoy doing so. The size of the ecological footprint created by the mindless sprawl appears ominous to us.” - Ch. 5 - Are Land Ethics Practical? from Texas Land Ethics

I noticed this change on the way through Oklahoma and Arkansas but it didn’t really hit me as hard until we returned to Texas after a week away. By the way, eastern Oklahoma is stunning! I have spent very little time in that state. I have an uncle who lived in Tishomingo for a while when I was a teen and I have a cousin who lives in Norman. A few years ago I went backpacking in the Wichita Mountains. But other than that, I haven’t really seen much of Oklahoma. I really appreciated seeing the Cross Timbers ecosystem in that region as well. It was pretty easy to spot from the passenger seat of the truck as we sped down the highway.

I wanted to leave Texas as soon as we got back to it. The traffic was miserable. The amount of stuff everywhere was overwhelming. It felt gross. It looks gross. That same creepy feeling I got from the Collin County developments came roaring back when we made a stop in Melissa. I don’t usually hate crape myrtles but I was hating crape myrtles that afternoon. Take me back to those Arkansas creeks, and fast!

Graphic from the Texas Water Development Board

I am unsure when this graph from the Texas Water Development Board was published, I’m guessing sometime before 2020 given all of the yellow bars for 2020 and beyond. It’s a steady uphill climb, though, ain’t it? Population estimates via the US Census show that in 2025 it was estimated that there were 31,709,821 people already living in Texas. Surely, we will beat the TWDB’s projected population estimate of 33.7 million by 2030. The World Population Review suggests we are already at 32,101,064. The population in the 2010 census for the state was 25,145,561.

Our governor loves this, of course. A press release from the Office of the Governor for December 22, 2025 covers all of Abbott’s economic, pro-growth, and business driven accomplishments in the last year. “Texas' economy continues to triumph because of our business-friendly climate and common sense regulatory environment," said Governor Abbott. "This year, the state slashed red tape and burdensome regulations to allow free enterprise to flourish and Texans to thrive. As the economic envy of America and the strongest workforce in the nation, Texas offers unparalleled economic freedom and opportunity for all.”

Meanwhile, the Democratic candidate for governor challenging Abbott this November and current member of the Texas House of Representatives, Gina Hinojosa, had several compelling things to say in rebuttal to Abbott’s boisterous claims at the Texas Democratic Convention June:

“...it is the one fight to decide the question of our time. That’s - is this the Texas that is by and for the people or is this great state the billionaire’s world and we just live here? That is the one fight in America and it is the one fight for Texas.”

and…

“Still, while we fought on Greg Abbott’s terms, he was emptying our pockets. Abbott was secretly taking our money to give to this donors, including a billion dollars in no bid contracts to his donors. But let me be clear, that he also openly championed a trickle down economic agenda for Texas where success was defined as investing in global corporations instead of investment in Texans. And too many Democrats in office went along. It’s an establishment politics that has been descriptively named the ‘corporate uni party’.”

as well as…

“Greg Abbott built the biggest data center giveaway in the whole country. The richest men in the world, his donors, are running up your electric bill, guzzling up your water, while you pay for it. And now that I am running against him, he wants us all to forget that he sold the farm for cheap in a fire sale. And nobody believes the arsonist will put out the fire.”

The Texas Tribune reported in April of this year that the state and local communities will need to spend $174 billion over the next half century to even manage the coming water crisis here. Apparently that cost was only $80 billion in 2022. I can’t imagine that number shrinking at this point, given the data center fanaticism and unchecked growth from every major city, including some of the smaller “large” cities in east Texas such as Tyler and Beaumont. I wrote some about the water crisis, particularly what is happening in Corpus Christi back in early 2025! And if you go through my posts about Fairfield Lake State Park, you can see it there, too.

None of this is new, and obviously people like Gunter and Oelschlaeger have been shouting it from rooftops and books for decades. But our governor and most of our elected officials seem to be acting as if we can keep growing without any checks on that growth. Unchecked growths form tumors and we have a lot of unsightly, vicious ones in Texas.

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This essay is already long enough. There will be a part two in the next week or so as I have more to add to this. I want to thank everyone who has been reading along here since I started writing on Substack in the fall of 2022! And I want to thank my paying subscribers, too. There aren’t many of y’all but I do appreciate you! I’ve been a bit quieter here this year than usual but will be getting back to a more regular writing practice now as well as returning to some of those paid subscriber only posts occasionally—those are typically more personal writings. It’s been a while since I’ve run a paid subscriber sale but this month is my birthday month so I’m offering a 20% discount for the rest July for new paid subscribers if anyone is interested. Link is on the button below!

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