Our Lives in Nature - Connecting Texans to the Outdoors
Michael Smith writes the newsletter Our Lives in Nature to engage curiosity and mindfulness in our outdoor explorations.
A few months ago I did two interviews for a series focusing on Fairfield Lake State Park. I enjoyed that so much that I wanted to start doing others here throughout the year. The first in this series is with Michael Smith, naturalist and writer of the Our Lives in Nature newsletter. Michael lives in the DFW area and has a rich knowledge of the ecology of that region. I’m originally from NE Tarrant county and many of the places he mentions in the interview I know of from growing up in the area and have fond memories of, especially the Fort Worth Nature Center. Be sure to check out and subscribe to his newsletter and his books as they are wonderful resources for nature enthusiasts throughout the state!
Tell On Texas Nature readers a little bit about yourself! What is your background and how did you come to start writing Our Lives in Nature?
About 63 years ago, a neighbor girl asked me if I wanted to go snake hunting. We wandered nearby, along the outskirts of Denver, and found a garter snake. I was hooked and still have an active interest in herpetology. While living in Colorado, our family went camping from time to time and those memories are pretty clear. By the age of ten I loved the mountains and wildlife.
When we moved to Texas, my parents connected me with a “natural history club” at the Fort Worth Children’s Museum, and I became a museum brat. I practically lived there and am enormously indebted to a few people there who taught me so much. However, in college my interest in human behavior outweighed my fascination with reptiles and amphibians, and so my career was in psychology. My interest in nature continued in my spare time. That included co-founding the Dallas-Fort Worth Herpetological Society, organizing field trips, and advocating for conservation. When I retired a little prematurely during Covid, the interest in nature was free to become a central preoccupation.
I’ve always loved reading as well as writing, and in May 2015 Texas Parks & Wildlife Magazine published an article I wrote about venomous snakes. That boosted my confidence as a writer and soon I was working on a book. As editor of the herpetological society, I had written lots of short articles and I continued doing so in blogs – most recently Our Lives in Nature.
You visit the LBJ Grasslands frequently. Why did that particular natural area appeal to you so much that you’ve even started the LBJ Grasslands Project?
At least two things drove my connection to the LBJ National Grasslands. One is that there was a wealth of reptiles and amphibians there. Twenty years ago that might have been the most important thing drawing me there, but increasingly I’m drawn to all of it - the plants, birds, how it feels and even smells in autumn, and what it’s like to go for a solitary winter walk there. I love being somewhere in nature that feels big enough to get lost in, offering relative quiet and a sense of solitude. Of course, the grasslands is a patchwork of small or medium-size units and so you’re typically not far from a road. The thing is that it is big enough that you can walk trails for hours and keep finding new patches of prairie, new ponds, and new belts of oak woodland.
And of course I want to write about it! I’ve written blog pieces about walks there, and there are a couple of sections of the forthcoming book Mindful of Texas Nature that describe visits there. It had occurred to me that someone could tell the story of that place, a little of its human history along with its natural history, and that could be a fine book. I talked with my friend Kayla West, a writer and Master Naturalist, about such a project and perhaps we’ll try to tell that story together.
But meanwhile, we wanted to introduce people to the grasslands, take them out for a walk and hear what they have to say. The LBJ Grasslands Project (as a Facebook group and also a website, http://lbjgproject.org is a way for us to interact with people and invite them to come explore with us. We’ve encouraged them to write about their experience, and with their permission some of their stories might become part of our writing about the place.
Another topic of interest for you is mindfulness. How does being in nature aid in helping us work towards being more mindful humans? Do you have any tips or exercises for people to use when trying to be mindful in nature?
Being in nature takes us out of the often noisy and distracting “built” world and puts us somewhere we can handle with less stress. It is easier to quiet our minds in most natural settings. There is a body of scientific research that shows how settings in nature result in lower blood pressure and stress hormones, fewer depressive thoughts, and improvements in a number of other indices of physical and mental health.
If mindfulness is paying attention to the present moment in a nonjudgmental and accepting way, then being in a place that eases stress and anxiety should make that easier. And there is reason to believe that the sense of awe that we find in nature is related to mindfulness (see Dacher Keltner’s book, Awe). It’s an experience in which we lose ourselves a little, with focused awareness, acceptance, gratitude, and the like.
Practicing mindfulness might involve setting aside expectations and goals like “I have to get in three miles today” or “let me add to my life list” and being willing to be pulled into whatever experience happens as we walk or sit. It helps to begin with a few minutes paying attention to our breathing, which can’t help but bring us into the present moment. We notice how each in-breath feels or sounds, and pay attention to each out-breath in the same way. As thoughts occur to us – and they always do – we just let them go without getting caught up in them and return to what we are experiencing now, the inrush of air and the movement of our body with the breath. Then we shift our attention to our surroundings, such as the sun on our skin, bird song, a sun-dappled woodland floor, and so on.
In addition to guiding hikes and teaching mindfulness, you’ve written several books, with one more on the way. Tell us about those books and what we can learn from them!
The first book was Herping Texas: The Quest for Reptiles & Amphibians, co-authored with Clint King. He and I had traveled all around the state looking for reptiles and amphibians (herps) and so the book is partly travel writing and partly the natural history of these wonderful animals. We visited each of ten ecoregions, so we wrote about the Big Bend, the coastal prairies and marshes, and other areas.
At the conclusion of Herping Texas I talked with our editor at Texas A&M University Press about their interest in some titles for young people. I wrote The Wild Lives of Reptiles & Amphibians: A Young Herpetologist’s Guide with young teens in mind, the age when I had been a museum kid eager to soak up everything about my favorite animals. The book covers five typical North American habitats and tells the story of some of the herps that could be found in those places. I lay out their predator-prey relationships, reproduction, thermoregulation, and such things by narrating a bit of their lives. The book also includes sections on getting started field herping (searching for them in the field) safely and ethically, as well as a chapter on conservation.
The third book was a departure from the others, covering mindfulness in Texas nature. It is currently working its way through TAMU Press, expected early next year. Photographer Meghan Cassidy and I traveled to places like Muleshoe National Wildlife Refuge, the Big Thicket National Preserve, and other places. I wrote about the experience of being in each place, partly from a mindfulness perspective and also adding some of the natural history of the forests, prairies, snakes, birds, armadillos, and other things we experienced. In the opening chapters I reviewed how nature benefits our bodies and minds, and I describe mindfulness and how it is practiced.
Another facet of your Our Lives in Nature newsletter are the Letters to Nature Kids and Elliot and Zachary series. What are those components and how do they fit into the overall OLIN theme?
I keep going back to kids in nature, because it was such a powerful experience for me and also because we are becoming so estranged from nature and kids are our hope to correct that. Letters to Nature Kids are written in the form of a letter and typically tell about a place I visited and what I experienced there. I’m shooting for an informal and personal style, though maybe I’m not always successful when talking about mistletoe as a partly parasitic plant or why turtles bask in the sunshine. The letters are focused on early teens and above (including adults).
Elliott and Zachary is a fictional story, envisioned as a novel or novella in short chapters for teens. I was interested in telling a story about an 11 year old going through a challenging period in which a patch of woods and prairies offered refuge and healing. Themes from my psychology career worked their way in, so that it became also a story of a desperate runaway kid and the power of compassion, empathy, and that patch of woods and prairies. It has a place under the Our Lives in Nature umbrella because a good bit of it happens among the grasslands, woods and ponds. Such places offer important opportunities for kids – and all of us – to find refuge, to play, interact with friends, and explore.
You live in the DFW area, aside from the LBJ Grasslands what are some of your favorite nature preserves and open spaces in that area?
I have two or three places where I feel at home, places I’ve come to love. The first of them is the Fort Worth Nature Center & Refuge, a place that has pulled at me since it was limited to Greer Island in the 1960s, about sixty years ago. Now it stretches over 3,600 acres, with marshes and wetlands, patches of prairie, and old-growth Cross Timbers woodland.
Another favorite place is Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve in Arlington, very near where I live. It’s an island of wonderfulness surrounded by suburban freeways and streets. The preserve is a remnant of the Eastern Cross Timbers, post oak and blackjack on a hill with an iron-sandstone ridge at the top and a few little prairie openings. Four ponds broaden the diversity of plants and animals – 1,646 species recorded on iNaturalist.
Beyond that, where else do you like to explore in Texas?
I really miss the Trans-Pecos region if I’m away for a few years. I need to get back to the Guadalupe Mountains while I can still hike up to Smith spring, a little paradise halfway up the eastward-facing mountains. I love the Chihuahuan Desert and the Chisos Mountains in Big Bend National Park, and the depth of the sky and stars on a clear night.
The Big Thicket National Preserve has a similar pull on me, on the opposite side of the state and being as different from the Trans-Pecos as it can be. There’s so much to see, hear and smell; the complex life of the sloughs and ponds, the pitcher plant bogs, towering bottomland forests with southern magnolia as well as a little bit of longleaf pine savannah.
There are others, too. The ones I can’t do without are the places that remind me of the vastness, complexity, beauty and generosity of nature in places that we haven’t tried to tame and domesticate. Such places offer refuges from the grinding, droning mechanical sounds from which escape is rarely possible. When there is no traffic, no pumps or other equipment, and the air traffic subsides, then we can really hear the life of the earth.
Is there anything else you’d like to share with OTN readers about the importance of protecting Texas’ natural resources?
I expect that this is preaching to the choir. But too often we live as though “nature” was another planet somewhere that we watch remotely, or a resort that we visit once a year. All that stuff about photosynthesis, where clean water comes from, the importance of biodiversity, seem to be disappearing from our culture. (On a related note, see Robert MacFarlane’s and Jackie Morris’s The Lost Spells, poems and art to bring back things fading from our language and experience.)
We come to think of ourselves as depending only on ourselves and our technology. We have bought enough time to live as if this were so, even as climate change catches up with us. And so I think that the chance to address the crises of climate, biodiversity, and other problems depends on treating the environment as if it had a truly important role in our lives. It depends on rediscovering where we came from and reconnecting with nature.
That will require all our voices and all our efforts because business and the unrestrained conversion of wild places into “product” definitely have the upper hand. The more we get to know the natural world and spend time in it, the more we bring that into the cultural dialogue. As we share our experience with others, “nature” comes to include nearby wetlands and prairie remnants, not just exotic places on TV. It becomes a meaningful part of our lives. The more we bring our children into nature, the greater the chance that they will become nature-fluent and nature-competent, understanding enough about wild places and wildlife that they will love it and want to conserve it.
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.