Looking the Other Way: The (un)Ethics of Accepting the Destruction of a State Park
Trite observations and ignoring the truth isn't going to erase what is happening at Fairfield Lake State Park.
New to On Texas Nature? Today I’m writing about Fairfield Lake State Park, a state park that was leased by the state of Texas for 50 years before Vistra/Luminant, an energy conglomerate, listed it for sale at a price beyond the capacity of what the state could pay for it in 2018. It was sold in early June 2023 to a Dallas real estate developer, Todd Interests, alongside EB-5 Foreign Investors, who want to build multi-million dollar homes in a gated community and sell the water from Fairfield Lake to municipalities around Texas. The property is currently being condemned by the state, but not without a malicious fight from the developer. You can read more background about it here and here and further back in my archives.
It’s been several essays since I’ve written about the plight of Fairfield Lake State Park. It isn’t because things haven’t been happening—they have. They’ve mostly been smaller actions with minutiae that most people who haven’t been following along as closely wouldn’t necessarily care about. And honestly, I’m a bit burnt out. Replying to the same comments of “It’s his land” and “I loved the park but…” have become so mind numbing that I’ll often start a reply on the Facebook group and then delete my reply and just ignore it. Plus, most of the actions that are occurring are beyond the public’s influence at this time as they wind their way through the court system.
Here’s the thing: I really do not care that a smarmy man, one who wheedled his way into the back pockets of a certain portion of Freestone County, “owns the land”. Telling me that means nothing to me as I have no respect for it. He can pretend he’s a legacy landowner and rancher all he wants, but it doesn’t make it so. He’s no different than a company like DR Horton, who comes into a community, razes the habitat, and throws up tract housing, and then leaves. The only difference is there are water rights involved in this and he’s doing it on land and a lake the state managed for half a century. Which makes this smarmy man a highly unethical one as well.
Recently some open records documents were released alongside a Freestone County Times article about Texas Parks and Wildlife’s visit to the Freestone County Commission last month. That meeting was wacky enough I could dedicate several paragraphs here to some of those intricacies but will refrain from doing so for now. In those open records there are text messages and emails between former TPW chairman Beaver Aplin (the Buc-ee’s owner for those not in the know) and Shawn Todd, the developer. This included some detailed texts from early May 2023 between the two with regard to a death in Aplin’s family, friendly banter between the two about life happenings, and some more terse conversations about TPWD trying to make a deal with Mr. Todd before the closing of the property between Todd Interests and Vistra/Luminant in early June. Reading through the texts creates such whiplash after dealing with a summer of intense vitriol launched from Shawn Todd and other people he’s hired to speak for him—vitriol towards Beaver Aplin and Texas Parks and Wildlife. Was all of that in May just superficial niceties, as one does in the business world? Several of us ruminated on this all summer, trying to get a grasp on the psyche of a person hellbent on destroying a state park, seemingly with glee, to make millions of dollars.
The thing is, this man is no different than many others. Just look around at the lack of moral compunction in our society as the rich get richer, clamoring their way to more money in their bank accounts, using their muddy boots to climb over the shoulders of the rest of us on their way to add to their cushion of cash. That’s why the phrase “It’s his land” doesn’t stick with me. He (and really the energy company, too) climbed over taxpayers and gave Texans a big middle finger on their way up. And so did every Freestone County resident willing to carry water for these folks.
It’s really part of a larger downfall in our society of not caring for the greater good. In some of my internet deep dives I found an interesting sub-culture of people who are inherently against public lands. As in, no land should be public. Yeah, it’s weird but that’s the brain rot of capitalism. It hit me how deep this goes when Boyce Upholt touched on an anti-conservation conference in a newsletter from September 29th. The Stop 30x30 Land Grab is a group of people who don’t want to permanently protect 30 percent of our land and water by 2030. Pave it all, y’all!
What’s the saying? “No ethical consumption under capitalism.”
Earlier this week more aerial imagery was provided showing continued clearing of habitat on the park property. We’d seen that imagery from July of what was cleared at that time, knew it was still continuing afterwards, and most of us wondered what the status was more recently since formal condemnation had been filed in court in early September by Texas Parks and Wildlife. In September, we found documents on the Freestone County website that two of the construction contractors working on the property, Houston Heavy Machinery and R Construction, had put liens in with the county against the property/developer/owners due to non-payment. Houston Heavy Machinery filed on 9/14 for $38,617.53 and on 9/15 R Construction filed for $3,089,838.20, stating that $407,657.60 had been paid but the remaining balance had not. Texas Parks and Wildlife (and Todd Interests) came to the Freestone County Commissioners meeting on 9/20. Miraculously, on 9/21 a release of lien was filed from R Construction citing a “claimant mistakenly attempted to assert a mechanic’s and materialman’s lien on the Project...” The Houston Heavy Machinery lien was released on 10/4, no “mistakes” cited, so I assume payment was issued to them.
We wondered if that kerfuffle meant construction had stopped, but nope. It has not.
It’s painful to look at the imagery and know what was living on the ground out there. Perhaps I’m too empathetic, too much of a feeler, absorbing the environmental atrocities occurring out there. A general trend I’ve seen from some of the folks who have supported the developer, and even some who support the park, is that this clearing is good because “it was overgrown”. Or “I couldn’t see the water from my campsite,” so yay, wholesale clearing!
It pairs with the general trend most people have with regard to their lawns and open space—cut it all down, shred the lawn to the shortest inch, no weed or plant must be out of place. Oh, I see people lamenting on local neighborhood sites and forums about the wildlife that is displaced as sprawl expands. And yet the majority aren’t doing anything to counteract it, creating the habitat to replace one tiny percentage of what was lost, or doing any educational work about ecology for themselves. Most of the time I sit incredulously, reading or listening to these comments and want to scream “ARE YOU EFFING KIDDING ME?” into the void.
But someone else said it so much more succinctly than I.
“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”
― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
So, I look at this aerial imagery and I see these wounds. I see the consequences and cringe when people tell me “it’ll grow back” or “it needed to be thinned out”. Our landscape is covered in terribly mismanaged and damaged habitats because the ecologically blind went in and bulldozed without thinking, without planning. With only money or single species management (cattle) in mind. People see a forest and cannot begin to comprehend how the layers work together. They only see a maze of shrubs and trees and forbs where they believe they should be able to walk across unencumbered.
Ah, how selfish humans are.
For weeks I had an article in Esquire by author Jeff Vandermeer open in a tab on my phone to read. I took so long to read it that by the time I refreshed the tab the article was now under a paywall. I checked one of my library’s apps to see if that particular magazine was under one of my Binge Passes and it was, so I flipped open the magazine to read The Accidental Activist.
Jeff is a Florida based writer who in recent years has written more about Florida’s environmental devastation, both in his books and in various articles online. I had followed him on Twitter X for several years but it was his 2022 Current Affairs article The Annihilation of Florida: An Overlooked National Tragedy that really drew me to follow his work more closely. I highly recommend anyone interested in Texas nature to read that article because you can say many similar things about Texas. As a former Florida resident I could only nod my head in agreement to paragraph after paragraph that echoed out from my experiences in Florida but also in Texas. And this was before the state park destruction even began.
Marjorie Shropshire, a lifelong Florida resident active in environmental causes and organizations, sees part of the problem as lawmakers who “do not understand how they fit into nature or how nature works. Perhaps they just don’t care. Many hold the belief that there is no ‘value’ to nature. … If it isn’t ‘improved,’ it’s worthless. There is a lack of recognition of the ecosystem services that conserved lands can provide, therefore it is easy to claim that more conservation lands are not needed, or that they are too expensive.”
- From The Annihilation of Florida: An Overlooked National Tragedy
The word activist means a person who campaigns to bring about political or social change. It’s thrown around as a dirty word these days from usually the far-right but I have seen the left co-opting it to reclaim it or throw it back in the faces of those who try to use it negatively. I’ve heard Shawn Todd/his mouthpieces use it against the TPW Commission this summer. In The Accidental Activist, Vandermeer describes how he became so passionate about environmental and climate causes after writing his book Annihilation, the first in the Southern Reach Trilogy. First he starts paying attention to the wildlife in his own backyard, then becomes entrenched in native plant gardening and ecology, spending time learning about the wildlife and plants growing in his yard. Towards the end he highlights the pain of losing part of a rain garden that he’s worked so hard to steward after a neighbor’s tree is cut down, with the log chunks being left on top of the garden. A contractor came to clean up the tree and what happens after is heartbreaking to anyone who has been in a similar situation, but gets to the source of the greater global problem.
‘I was telling him, “Just leave it, leave it, and I’ll do it.” The guy was saying, “This is my job. I have to do it,” and I was explaining, now shouting, that he could leave it to me. Then the guy said, “You think I’m stupid—I can tell.” Surprised, I said, “No, I don’t think you’re stupid. I’m stupid. Nobody’s stupid. But please, just let me take care of the logs.”
The grabber claw swung, clacking near my head, and the guy kept tossing logs into his truck bed.
“These aren’t weeds!” I shouted.
“You think I don’t know weeds after 20 years of working for a tree company?” he shouted back.’
-Jeff Vandermeer, The Accidental Activist, Esquire, September 2023.
What happens after is devastating, as we see Vandermeer lose ground against someone unwilling to see or listen, an impenetrable wall built around the contractor where information can never seep through. It’s the same thing I hear in the gardening world, what is perpetuated in Facebook group after Facebook group. I often think we’re making progress with educating people about the value of native plants, ecology, and the simple things like “leaving the leaves” and yet I drive around my own town and see people bagging and burning leaves. Then I realize there is still so much work to be done.
I can’t make people believe that what is happening at the state park is unethical and devastating if they aren’t willing to see that the loss of our ecosystems matter. Some Freestone County residents don’t even care they lost a huge public park in their own backyard. Sadly, their priorities don’t include habitat loss or the wholesale removal of flora and fauna. They see a few trees left standing and think that is acceptable.
See? Not everything is gone.
But that’s not how this works. And maybe it is just easier to close a wall off around their heart, to use the refrain “it’s his land” over and over, to build that impenetrable fortress for themselves, creating a space to ignore the truth.
The developer has said many times how much his company considers themselves to be conservationists and preservationists. However, being a land developer in and of itself is antithetical to environmental preservation or conservation. It doesn’t matter if you are plopping down 1,000 middle income homes in a new, expanded subdivision or 50 $3-5 million dollar homes—complete with a golf course and club house, with extensive fertilizer inputs, non-native landscaping and lawns, and then selling the lake and ground water off to thirsty suburbanites who will only waste said water in DFW or San Antonio—neither option is about preservation or conservation.
Make no mistake.
What is happening at Fairfield Lake State Park is nothing short of an annihilation.
“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. It's not.”
― Dr. Seuss, The Lorax
Misti writes regularly at Oceanic Wilderness and can be found on Instagram at @oceanicwilderness. She hosts two podcasts, Orange Blaze: A Florida Trail Podcast, and The Garden Path Podcast.
That quote from Aldo Leopold really does get to the heart of it. I am in awe of your strength and perseverance to act instead of looking the other way. Keep up the fight.
It just mystifies me how people generally do not understand the layers of nature. One recent example I saw was on 5 plus acre lot where they put up bee houses. Then they mowed down all the surrounding plants. 🤷🏻♀️