"Time is an Asterisk"
Every day it's the same old thing and Texas won't ever change.
“The named world is the world where we take an interconnected wholistic continuum that’s constantly changing and we draw lines between it and we label the pieces. To me that is a trauma that we subject nature to. We carve it into pieces. We chop it up. And then we expect when we name those pieces and talk about nature that the pieces will make the whole again. But once you carve it up, the whole is different. It’s not the whole anymore.”
James Prosek in conversation with Ed Roberson at the Amon Carter Museum
Over the holidays I had the opportunity to go see James Prosek’s exhibition at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth called Trespassers: James Prosek and the Texas Prairie. The exhibit is on through May 12, 2024 and if you get the chance to see it, please do.
Yesterday I was delighted to find an episode of the Mountains and Prairie Podcast in my feed featuring James Prosek. It was an excellent episode to listen to and highly recommend it to On Texas Nature readers. I listened via Apple Podcasts but you can listen on the website and watch the video as well here: Live at the Amon Carter Museum — In Conversation with James Prosek and Spencer Wigmore. I had to pause every so often when they started talking about books and add them to my TBR. I think this will be a conversation I re-listen to again in the near future. I’m also a big fan of Ed Roberson’s bimonthly book email. There’s a never ending source of books to read if you find yourself lost on what you want to read next!
I’ve been thinking about loss a lot lately. This conversation added to the thoughts as well as several books I’ve been reading lately. I’m stuck with writing my Galveston essay(s) and so my mind has been wandering other places, back to nature and destruction, to the Big Thicket, to Florida. It winds back to Fairfield Lake State Park, too, in part because there was no tidy ending. Well, no happy ending. I haven’t reached acceptance yet for that one, but I’m not in anger nor depression. It’s simmering resentment.
And that’s a thought that I think we need to accept on some level. There won’t be any neat, tidy endings that resolve all of these issues in a fashion that is acceptable to biodiversity and the environment when we are talking about habitat loss and ecological changes in this state. The books I’m reading were published anywhere from 14-50 years ago, by Texas nature writers, and the sentences and paragraphs they wrote then could be written today. I’m being vague about the authors and books because I want to dedicate several essays to them later on. Needless to say, Texas is the same as it ever was.
We could be so much more.
The quote by James Prosek at the top jostled me enough that I had to pause the recording and write down a time stamp so I could go back and transcribe it to share here. I hate Facebook but I spent so much time on it last year for the state park that it is now just a reflex to check in on a few times a day. Lately, I’ve been served various news articles about new developments coming to DFW (and sometimes Houston via the Chronicle…oh, there was one on Galveston, too) and so I click through to see where they are located and read the comments. It’s always about sprawl on the outskirts of the DFW slurbs (hat tip to Pete Gunter for that one), farm lands and prairies being swallowed by development. Everyone likes to try to find someone to blame except anyone they voted into office or the local planning and zoning commission. Or even taking a look at themselves.
“We carve it into pieces. We chop it up.”
With each of these new developments comes all of the big box amenities with it. The developers who look out into a parcel of land and only see something they can build on, and none of the remnant prairie species James Prosek painted.
More concrete, less Indiangrass.
Another distributing center. No more Echinacea pallida.
One more massive parking lot. One less purple paintbrush.
And you may ask yourself
What is that beautiful house?
And you may ask yourself
Where does that highway go to?
And you may ask yourself
Am I right?...Am I wrong?
And you may say to yourself
My God!...What have I done?! 1
The problem is too few, and absolutely not the right people are asking “My God!!…What have I done?!” And those of us writing, making art, advocating, and screaming from the top of our lungs about what we’ve done are ignored. Or worse, ridiculed.
Garden designer and author Benjamin Vogt is one who likes to challenge the status-quo with regard to native plants in the gardening world and often writes for far beyond the gardening world itself. A recent post on his Milk the Weed Facebook page stated “Forget Baby Steps. It’s Time for Adult Steps.”2 And I agree. We’re way beyond swapping out pansies for milkweeds as a means to do our part to save nature. We need laws regarding native plantings in new subdivisions, and laws aimed at conservation of prairies, wetlands, and our forests so that we can preserve as much as possible while accommodating appropriate housing needs. We need laws that actually protect the environment instead of loopholes that bend to the will of developers and those seeking to rake in money associated with the bloat of sprawl. We need developers to stop whining about laws on the books that protect the environment for a reason and do some damn due diligence about a property they buy before complaining to the Supreme Court.3
But we’re not going to get that in this political climate, in this state.
And so we write, make art, advocate, and scream.
Time isn't holding up
Time is an asterisk
Same as it ever was...
Same as it ever was...
Same as it ever was...
Same as it ever was...
Same as it ever was...
Same as it ever was...
Same as it ever was...
Late edit here as this just came across my Google Alerts but an absolutely ballsy move by Hortenstine Ranch Company (who brokered the FLSP deal) to write this: No One Sells Large Bodies of Water Quite Like Hortenstine Ranch Company. Simmering resentment is now boiling anger.
1 Thank you David Byrne and the Talking Heads
2 Do check out Vogt’s book A New Garden Ethic.
3 Pity the Sacketts? Not so much. via HCN.
Misti writes regularly at Oceanic Wilderness and In the Weeds. She hosts one podcast, Orange Blaze: A Florida Trail Podcast, and recently retired The Garden Path Podcast.
One more massive parking lot. One less purple paintbrush. My God, what have we done?
This is so sad and frustrating, that is all 😔