I have started hand watering several Mexican plum trees (Prunus mexicana) that my husband and I planted a few years ago at the two small city parks in our community. We planted them to replace the original, long dead crape myrtles that had been planted as memorial trees for former residents who had been involved in the community. The signs with the resident’s names stood forlornly for years without a designated tree so we took it upon ourselves to move forward and get new, native trees planted in their place.

Even the most well-established native trees or plants still need extra water during these scorching days at the end of summer when the rain disappears from the forecast for weeks at a time. And despite the plums being semi-established for several years now, they are young enough to easily succumb to this late August heat. So, last week I started walking over to the parks with 5 gallon buckets, carefully inched to the edge of each of the two ponds I source the water from (which are showing signs of our parched circumstances), and tediously walked back and forth from pond to trees, again and again, until I got tired of doing the task. They could use several more gallons than what I want to deal with but at least they are getting some water. About 5” of rain would be better.

On Fire

In the news this week is the Ross Fire in Jack and Palo Pinto counties, west of Mineral Wells and east of Possum Kingdom Lake. I had seen news come across social media on Tuesday but didn’t think much of it other than, of course there’s a wild fire! Have you been outside? As of this morning, it looks like that fire has burned over 85,000 acres and was at 21% containment. I called my mom on the way home from work on Tuesday evening, as I usually do, and she tearfully told me that the historic Worth Scouting Ranch had suffered heavy damage in the fire. I have never been to the Worth Ranch but my brother and dad went there during their years in scouting and my brother’s kids also went there—even at some point this year! Even though I have never laid eyes upon that property, mom reminded me that that was the place where my dad and brother had been driving to one spring Friday evening in the mid-90s, in his old, blue F-150, when there was a hailstorm with baseball or softball size hail that battered his windshield. And that’s where my dad had his “cardiac event” back in 1994 that led him to a quadruple bypass at 38 years old.

I pulled up the images on my phone as I sat in my car finishing up the conversation with her and yeah, the historic buildings are pretty much gone. The vegetation around is also charred and will take significant time to rehabilitate.

This pendulum of bone dry to sopping wet makes living in this state difficult. I get twitchy when we get to either end of the spectrum. This dichotomy hit home when yesterday I saw Harris County Precinct 4 post photos from nine years ago when Hurricane Harvey flooded southeast Texas.

The Neches River

Last weekend we drove to Beaumont to see a screening of The Neches River: Wild Heart of East Texas. Produced by Ellen Temple, with associate producer Adrian F. Van Dellen, this hour long documentary covers the river that bisects much of the Big Thicket region and is the heart of several of the Big Thicket National Preserve Units. In person screenings are taking place throughout the state with Austin being up next. I recommend going in person just to listen to the Q&A session at the end and to talk to folks before the movie, but you can watch online or on your local PBS station.

Several years ago I attended the Woodville Harvest Festival at Heritage Village to staff a booth for the Watson Rare Native Plant Preserve. Adrian Van Dellen was a few booths down from us selling copies of his book, Let the River Run Wild!, of which he was the photographer. The writer was the late folklorist Francis Edward Abernethy. I bought a copy of the book to give to my husband for Christmas that year. When I saw who all was involved in getting this documentary off the ground and into the public’s viewing, I knew it would really show the essence of the river, and in some ways, the Big Thicket. As much as I was there for the biological aspects of the movie, the cultural components were just as fascinating and important to the movie and the river.

The Q&A session was cut shorter than I would have liked because I did have one question that came up for me in the movie. The documentary showcases the entire river and takes viewers to the private properties where the headwaters are formed in Van Zandt County, from the groundwater that flows up from the springs on those properties. The landowners claimed that the springs had never stopped flowing, even during the driest periods this state faces. I couldn’t help but wonder what Kyle Bass’ groundwater extraction plans over the Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer would have on these springs and thus, how it would threaten the flow of the Neches in the future. Of course, this would extend to any creek or other tributary, such as the Angelina River, that flows into the Neches.

The lower Neches also faces saltwater intrusion that is slowly converting habitat in the Beaumont Unit, which necessitated the need to create the Saltwater Barrier in that area north of Beaumont. The last thing the river and associated floodplain needs is a reduction in freshwater flow, too.

Side note: I can’t find much information online yet to direct you but I did see videos being shared on Instagram this morning about another documentary that is forthcoming, a much bigger production because it is narrated by Jon Batiste, called American Amazon, which will cover the vast wetlands of the southeastern United States.

Big Bend

I can’t end this newsletter without mentioning the terrorization of the Big Bend region by our federal government and its contractors this month (and on-going) in pursuit of various border wall/border protection features that they want to build. All of this despite the region featuring the lowest migrant border crossing rate along the US/Mexico border. I actually had to stop watching videos and following the story for a few days as the imagery from around Santa Elena Canyon was vomit inducing.

The TPWD Commission quarterly meeting was last week and I saw many videos come across my feed from guests standing up to speak about Big Bend and its meaning for them, including several well-known Texans who have been involved in conservation or even TPWD over the years. It has been hard for me to watch all of this because I know I can’t do anything about it and writing to my legislators is tantamount to sending a letter to myself about the issue at this point.

I saw that GLO Commissioner Dawn Buckingham issued a cease and desist letter to the federal government about this for trespassing on state land and there were two things that came to mind when I saw that—1: Cease and desist letter? Really? Dawn, I’d like to see you protesting in person, maybe tie yourself to a bulldozer or something. Put a little effort into this thing…and 2: We coulda (and shoulda) had Jay Kleberg in that position. sigh

And while we’re talking water pumping and Big Bend…the Big Bend Sentinel had an article a couple of days ago that the Jeff Davis Underground Water Conservation Board approved a request by Jim Dyer, a landowner and member of the same board, to have a second production well permitted on his property and to meter his existing well for production, which will now allow him to pump a total of 1.3 billion gallons of water out of those two wells. The reason? “Unspecified construction.” A little suspect, don’t you think?

More deep sighs

I recommend following Laiken Jordahl on Instagram for information regarding the border construction in Big Bend.

Stay cool out there in these last days of August. Hopefully we’ll get some respite from the heat with a little rain and maybe a cool front that will drop the temperature to the low 90s at least.

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Based on the content I typically see and the chatter I have with online acquaintances and IRL friends, I would like to say we’re reaching some kind of point where things might be breaking a bit with AI but in reality I know we’re nowhere near that. What I see is part of a bubble, after all. However, there have been several big stories out in the last week to month regarding AI that I think will start pushing some people to pause and reflect on the content they are consuming that is obviously created with AI in some capacity. The biggest story in the last few days is that of Hank Green announcing how much he has relied on AI to create content for his YouTube channels, particularly since his cancer diagnosis, treatment, and recovery a few years ago. I think some people had suspected his use of it long before now but others are dismayed at the depth his reliance on it has reached. And that’s not even talking about the realities of AI psychosis, a phenomenon that I believe we will only see become more prevalent in the next few years. In Hank’s case, the easy answer to avoiding AI here would have been to pull back on his end of creating content while in cancer treatment and recovery, to take time off and rest, instead of continuing to feed the round-the-clock content machine in an effort to keep capitalism going.

In the publishing realm, Brooke Warner writes about the publishing industry’s lack of AI guidelines or cohesion about the use of any kind of AI content and it is causing all kind of issues for writers. And even Substack has rolled out a feature, that writers here can disable, that allows people to check for AI content. Regarding the latter, I have noticed or suspected AI use on many of the articles that I end up seeing in my “For You” section on Notes. There’s a rhythm to the writing and they all eerily have the same voice. That, and how many times a week can you publish multiple, thousand-plus word essays? I remember in the blogging heyday where some food and craft writers would publish multiple times a day but that was a typical microblog + photo post, not longform content. And I’m over here beating myself up for not having the time or capacity to get to all of the essays I need/want to write that I tell you readers that I will “write next week!”. No, these people pumping out essay after essay are most certainly using a LLM to get the work done in some manner and there is no transparency about it.

Then there are the AI detection programs. The problem with those programs, as Warner writes about in the link above, is how accurate are they? How many false positives are they throwing? Are we about to enter a realm entirely of AI made content, with or without real human creators behind them? I’ve already seen people positing that we’ll have a whole sector of non-AI derived content, whether that is art, writing, scrolling-to-zone-out-videos, or movies, that is sectioned off and paid for at a premium for everyone wanting to opt out of the AI we’re being forced to swim in.

I have used ChatGPT one time. Back in 2023 when I was working on trying to save Fairfield Lake State Park, I and several others had spent so much going down rabbit hole after rabbit hole on the internet chasing down any kind of information we could find on the developer and anyone associated with them, from elected officials to the water development boards and beyond. I used the Wayback Machine, many county appraisal districts, news archives, obscure Vimeo accounts, you name it, to find information, much of which never saw the light of day because it didn’t really break any kind of particular story but really only supported the one narrative, which was that money and power wins. And the rich have connections everywhere. At this point chatter about AI and ChatGPT was just starting to break into the mainstream narrative and I thought, well, I keep hearing about this miracle of AI, maybe it will be able to pull up something I had not been able to find. Reader, it did not. In fact, I knew far more information than what it spit back out at me, which was a parroting of the most recent news headlines. I closed my account a few days later and realized what a farce it was and have never looked back.

The only other capacities that I use AI knowingly and willingly is through the now default AI search results at the top of Google and through my use of iNaturalist.1 (I’m sure someone will be able to point out some obscure way I’m not thinking about—please do!) On the former, I use it with a heavy dose of skepticism. I typically scan what it says and then scroll down to real search results, and depending on what I’m looking for, half the time I end up on Reddit looking for answers from people over there. Often, I find, what the AI results suggest on Google are not the full truth or even what the link they use to backup their claim actually says. The AI results may say, “XYZ was first made in Paris in 1745” but you click the link (which is usually also in the main search results further down if you actually scrolled beyond the spoon-fed AI results) used to support that statement and find there’s absolutely no statement within that page to back up that “XYZ was first made in Paris in 1745”. And once you dive into it further you find out that actually “XYZ was imported into Paris in 1745 but had its roots and beginnings in Medieval Germany in 1388” or some other such nonsense. You don’t have the full story with the AI synopsis and so, so many just people stop there.

On the latter, iNaturalist, I see this as one of those intended uses of AI, though I do think it has its problems too, as the vast majority of people using iNaturalist and its sister app Seek, are not using it to its full capabilities. By and large, most people start using iNaturalist to identify a couple of things in their yard or on a nature walk, upload it via the app on their phone, click whatever suggested identification that it brings up, agree that maybe that’s it, and hit upload, only to never return to their account after the fact to double check if it is correct or to see if others have corrected the observation to its rightful classification. It is very beneficial to log onto the computer and re-look at your observations because the suggested species may actually change on the computer compared to what was suggested to you on your phone (iNat sometimes throws errors on the phone for whatever reason) and there are also many avenues to filter through suggested species, even by county checklist, to deduce what it is you even saw. The vast majority of the public isn’t going to do this unless they become iNaturalist nerds, though. I am an iNaturalist nerd and spend a lot of time IDing observations for people and that is how a lot of my flora and fauna knowledge has expanded over time. Paired with field guides, online and paper taxonomic keys, herbarium records, and communication with other iNat users, this is where the real gold is found with using the program. Yeah, the “computer” has slowly learned over time how to identify something in a photo, but it is based on humans identifying and correcting identifications to accurately identify that photo someone uploads via the app. And sometimes the computer is wildly wrong because subspecies exist and photos are poor and sometimes it takes a human eye to look at a geographic location and habitat to realize that what another user uploaded was identified incorrectly. And even then, someone who thinks they know better will still argue with you about it!

There’s clearly a difference between what we used to call computer generated or computer assisted tools and AI as it is being promoted and used today. Computer generated codes or programs that would run an algorithm to analyze results or maybe even transcribe something to be edited by a human later, to me, are vastly different than a would-be writer typing into an AI platform a potential idea for a novel or essay, adding a few descriptors to personalize it with the human’s own thoughts, and then copying it into a newsletter or Word document and passing it off as if that person had spent hours (days, weeks, months, years) doing research via reading or interviews and writing it down themselves. It’s the same as every writer on here (and elsewhere) who uses an AI image to illustrate what they wrote—why isn’t a photo you took on your phone worthy enough to illustrate it? Heck, there’s free stock imagery available here and plenty of free Creative Commons licensed imagery on the internet if you took even a sliver of the amount of time you used to prompt an AI LLM to produce some abysmal image to attach to your essay. Better yet, why not let your non-AI writing stand for itself? After all, open a novel and tell me how many photos and illustrations are in there! (Graphic novels not withstanding, of course.)

At the heart of this all I see is consumer culture. “Creating” more = more revenue in some capacity, whether that is just more eyes on a document or paid subscriptions to a newsletter, or if on a photo/video platform more followers and views which can entreat advertisers to solicit brand deals to people who have become their own brands as they create more and more content. The Hank Green Issue. We already can’t keep up with the amount of content being created and I certainly do not (and cannot) read every single newsletter that is posted that I subscribe to. The more time we’re watching the latest Reel or reading the third AI derived essay this week from the Hot New Writer, the less time we’re taking to read actual books, journal articles, or highly detailed blog posts by writers who have spent their time researching their topic of interest and dedicated the time to synthesize the material in a way that our brains were meant to absorb and learn knowledge. We’re also not doing the work of creating the work ourselves by teaching ourselves how to make our own art and improve our skills. Sometimes it is the act of doing something that is more important than becoming the best at it.

Y’all, I don’t even use Siri. I can see how that technology is incredibly beneficial to those with disabilities who need to use that to make their lives run more effectively. But what about when people who can certainly set their own alarm or reminder begin offloading their brain onto services they were never meant to be using, what is that tech doing long term to our cognitive skills? Most people don’t even remember phone numbers anymore because they are saved into a contact list in our phones! Forget AI psychosis, what kind of tech related dementia will we be looking at in 10-50 years? I know I experience a return to “normal” when I spend a considerable amount of time off my phone from just scrolling Instagram—what about everyone who is tied to using AI for asking basic questions or who are stuck in a loop having conversations with a computer? What about all of the kids going through school now and who will enter the workforce over the next decade who have been served AI on a platter and find themselves faced with having to use their own brain for decision making and are unable to do so?

I’m perplexed by this issue. I have spent too much time lately thinking about this, namely because I put a lot of literal brain, sweat, and tears into writing my book, but also into these essays. I’ve taught myself other creative skills over the years by reading how to do it, or more rarely, watching a YouTube video of an actual human doing the thing I want to learn—not a computer generated/AI derived video of how to do it. Or by having someone in person show me how to do something and then learning by making mistakes and trying again.

I think about our increased use of GPS and how many people now struggle to navigate without it, even to places they have been to hundreds of times. Of course there are always going to be people who may be directionally challenged and I’m not discounting any real issues like that, but I think the research shows that for most people, there is a real decline in spatial memory with dependent use on GPS, even in people without inherent spatial issues. I think back to my time working for a tribal government in south Florida for six years and how many tribal elders navigated the Everglades by airboat without a GPS. They knew how to read the land and where they were in relation to one tree island from another by spatial memory. Eventually I got better at knowing where I was without a GPS, too, though I certainly wouldn’t have been able to navigate the 15-20 miles through sawgrass and recall every single airboat trail because I wasn’t doing it every day and didn’t always drive the airboat. I wasn’t making the mistakes and learning to embed it into my brain.

We aren’t learning from our mistakes and embedding it into our brain when we default to using AI to write or brainstorm or research. How are you managing to grasp what you are reading if you are only catching a synopsis and summary instead of the full details of the information. There is article after article coming out right now about the rising rate of illiteracy and how “no one is reading”—they aren’t reading but really, they aren’t thinking critically either, which is a huge part of literacy. If everyone is letting ChatGPT or Claude (or whatever LLM is out there you may use) tell them how to outline and brainstorm an essay, basically hand feeding them the information without using the skills they probably have to do the work themselves, what are they learning in the process? Not much. So then, how are they able to discern when they are being fed a bunch of bullshit? They aren’t. And it seems, even smart people like Hank Green are falling prey to this because the tech oligarchy is making it easy to do so.

I’ve been learning a lot about my brain in this last year since my ADHD diagnosis, understanding how much I think in an associative way. It has always made sense to me and I know it probably drives people insane when I really let loose and set the ADHD free as I’m talking—it’s something I have learned to keep under wraps over the years for most people, so it doesn’t always come out. But, I can’t help but think this heavy push for generative/lazy AI in schools, in work places, across social media—this quiet acceptance that it’s normal and ok for everyone—is tied to the sudden explosion of Flock cameras and surveillance tech, to this decrease in literacy, to the push for data centers in rural areas where thereby roads will be expanded and/or created new, the increase in residential and commercial development into these areas, the reduction in environmental regulations associated with this construction, new pipeline and transmission corridors into these places, and eventually water, water, water—the commodification of water and draining of our aquifers.

It’s all intentional.

Of course, there will be someone who may comment here about how they use AI in some some manner and it absolves them of any negative consequences for some reason or another. Someone else will inevitably point out how we’re all hypocrites because we drive cars, we are consumers who shop at Big Box Stores, we eat meat, insert additional grievances here, and if we wanted to be purists maybe we should move to the bush and live off the land. That’s not something worth arguing with someone over because it is only a distraction to the issue. But also, yeah, please drop me off in a small commune in the middle of nowhere that at least has clean water but definitely no cell service.

I’m only half joking.

Yes, societally, we have a choice in many of those options. Some, we really don’t, even if we are given the illusion of thinking we have a choice. But I feel like this recent push to infiltrate AI into every fiber of how we operate as a society is certainly a choice we have right now. Which way are we going to go? Are we going to allow the tech oligarchy to continue to push AI on us and blithely accept the use of these platforms in very dumb ways that result in more data centers being built, more electricity being generated, more ecosystems being destroyed? In a discussion with my friends in our group chat yesterday, one of them brought up that they had recently read about how China was testing out building data centers underwater in the ocean as a means of keeping the infrastructure cool, instead of using ground or surface water to do the job. Ok, so, what happens when there are thousands of AI data centers in the ocean globally? They do increase the water temperature where they are located and I am sure more conglomerated in a region will only increase it further. Not to mention the sound generated by these data centers and how that will potentially impact marine mammals that are already sensitive to human generated sounds like shipping traffic and seismic exploration. What are we even doing here? Is all of that worth Hank Green or any other so-called internet creator having constant access to ChatGPT spitting out information that may or may not be correct for those creators to constantly be churning out content? Sorry whales, you can’t migrate this year because we needed to make sure ChatGPT could outline our latest YouTube video. And that’s to say nothing about what happens if that equipment starts leaking into the water. Don’t worry, the University of Florida already found that this method is already highly subject to cyberterrorism!

Jumping back to iNaturalist for a minute before I wrap this up, because I did mention choices. I did look into iNaturalist for a minute to see what was out there regarding their digital carbon footprint. It certainly isn’t going to be the same size as all of the other generative AI platforms but it isn’t nothing either. I couldn’t find much but there are several threads in the forums about it, such as this one from 2020 that talked about the carbon footprint of iNaturalist. I am sure those numbers have changed in 6 years. I could certainly delete my iNaturalist account. Maybe even better would be for me and everyone else to delete old emails we don’t need and to take excess items off the “cloud”. And even then the comparison between the server data storage we’re already familiar with and what is needed and used for AI computing is on an entirely different scale. So, deleting emails and taking photos off the cloud is really just a drop in the bucket.

I offer no real solutions here because I am not in charge of the world. All I can say for myself is that I will resist generative AI as long as possible until it is foisted upon me in some work platform I use with no way out—which may be an inevitability the way things are going. I know this is an incredibly judgmental piece and that many people who have used or played around with AI in completely frivolous ways may be upset about it. This isn’t meant to hurt anyone’s feelings or lay blame at anyone. You may not know about the impacts or implications. Or maybe you do and are ok with it. I doubt I’ll change your mind and vice versa.

We are at a very interesting and odd time in technological development, just like other big technological developments in the past that had major consequences for the environment. This one also happens to affect our cognition as well as a whole host of other things, including intellectual property.

I’m not willing to let it unfold and happen to us without putting up a fight, though.

If you made it this far here are a few things to read/watch.

• “I’d go so far as to say that without social media — or, rather, the need to compulsively post on social media, to be digitally productive — there’d be almost no reason for generative AI to exist at all.” - Hank Green’s anti-AI AI psychosis via the Garbage Day newsletter. H/T to for the link over on Notes.

• I read the techno-dystopian novel The Circle by Dave Eggers last fall and loved it. Despite being written in the early 2010s it was right for the moment. This is a great interview with him on NPR about the use of AI in writing.

This is a bit last minute as I intended to send this email out earlier in the week but time got away from me after I started drafting it. If you have a few minutes before the end of the day (7/31/26), please contact TxDOT with your concerns about their plans for building yet another highway in the state that will only expand development, and in this case, also encourage flooding.

I’ll keep this brief today but next week I’ll discuss the Katy Prairie in more detail.

TxDOT is proposing a new highway, 36A, which has North and South components. The south component has already had scoping meetings and news chatter since 2024 but the north component is really only hitting the news this month as the comment period ends today. Both components are problematic for coastal plains ecosystems and rural demographics. Roads beget development and Houston is no stranger to unregulated growth. I say “Houston”, even though much of this isn’t Houston proper, because at this point where does it really end? Anyway, don’t take it from me, here’s what the West Houston Association said in 2024 regarding planned roadway growth in western Harris, Fort Bend, and Waller counties:

“The expansion of toll roads and highways in Fort Bend County fosters development, enhances connectivity, and drives economic growth. Planned investments such as Grand Parkway Segment C, Missouri City Park and Ride, widening of US-90 and IH-10, extension of Westpark Toll Road to Fulshear, extension of Fort Bend Parkway Toll Road eventually to SH-36, and continued evaluation and planning of Highways 36A, are synergistically bolstering the greater Houston region and enhancing our economic vitality. These expansions facilitate access to new land for housing and commercial developments, improve connections to existing employment centers, and enhances social integration by linking diverse communities, ultimately contributing to the county’s prosperity and quality of life. Connecting Communities will feature a discussion on the development these projects have enabled, and how they are coming together through financing, interlocal agreements, and operations and maintenance.” - West Houston Association - bold emphasis mine.

Here are the proposed alternatives. The Coastal Prairie Conservancy, formerly the Katy Prairie Conservancy, is asking people to submit comments to TxDOT supporting Alternative 2 if this highway must be built as it would have the least impact on their currently protected properties. Of course, feel free to tell them not to build it at all, too.

I have seen what SH 99/Grand Parkway (Houston’s THIRD loop!) has done in the last decade+ since it opened and all it has done is rapidly encourage development in every area it was built in, including western Harris county.

Ah, and I see there is a Highway 36A Coalition where this project looks like it probably dates back to at least 2013 in the “Hmm, we should built a highway here in 20 years” dreams for the counties and developers involved.

For more information:

• TxDOT’s 36A planning website

• Coastal Prairie Conservancy - Check their News section for information about their position.

• CPC’s template letter

• Community Impact article about the project.

Contact information for comments:

36ANorth@txdot.gov

TxDOT Houston District
7600 Washington Ave.
Houston, TX 77007

713-802-5076

I doubt we can change having this highway built at this time but we might as well slow the process down and force a least impactful alternative, for now, because sprawl will come anyway.

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Over the July 4th weekend my husband dug out the inflatable kiddie pool we’ve had for a few years now. He then aired it up and filled it with water for our 11 year old son to splash around in throughout the weekend. During the late spring and summer of 2020 I spent a lot of time in the backyard with my son who was then 5 years old, watching him swim around in a different inflatable pool (that one developed holes eventually) as I attempted to work on my laptop at the picnic table a few dozen feet away. Of course, I spent time in the pool myself that summer, and the next. Thinking back, I realize just how difficult March 2020 to April-ish 2021 really was, not just on me of course, but on everyone around the world. Millions of people were dying or sick and many of those who weren’t were struggling in a variety of other ways from social isolation to economic reasons and beyond. I look back on that time and see how much we were all trying to cobble the pre-COVID life together, to keep things functioning as if a pandemic wasn’t happening, because at the end of the day we were being told Capitalism Must Keep Going.

Imagine if we’d all been able to work slightly less, to release deadlines from our tight grasp, even just a little. So many of us were suddenly continuing to attempt to work 40+ hours a week while also pulling double duty full-time as parents or as adult caregivers, and later as teachers, too, when kids began returning to school/online learning. Add all of this into the mix and then throw being sick from COVID or any other illness on top of that and it shows just how painful and difficult it was to deal with it all. Honestly, it was far more traumatic than I think the world wants to let on.

On that July 4th weekend, my son spent time playing in the pool while I worked on removing taro on our portion of lake shoreline while listening to an audiobook. The area I was working in is mostly shaded but that didn’t stop the sweat from pouring down my face. I was a muddy, filthy, sweat-drenched mess by the time I was done for the day in the late afternoon. My son had already been inside cooling off for a few hours, his first round of splashing over and done with. But that water was beckoning me to climb inside and pretend I was in a much deeper pool within view of a beach.

I rinsed off at the hose as best as I could, dried off with another towel, and went inside to change into my bathing suit and drag the kiddo back outside to play and hangout with me for a bit. His interest in being in the pool a second time went by rather quickly but I found myself wanting to soak longer so I went inside and grabbed some magazines from the pile of ‘zines I never seem to read because I can’t sit down long enough to flip through them. After I had seen enough of a back issue of Texas Highways I put it down and stared across the yard as the late afternoon sunlight filtered across our weeping bald cypress on the north end of the lake shoreline. This is when I took that trip down COVID memory lane.

Then I looked up.

At first I thought I was watching vultures swirling on the thermals high above but as the birds turned I saw the telltale signs of a forked tail. Swallow-tailed kites! We typically see them on our lake every year but not always during the same season or month. I first wrote about swallow-tailed kites on this newsletter in June 2023. I counted five or six birds alongside, yes, one or two vultures, on the thermals that afternoon in my view from the pool. I tried to recall the last time I’d seen one and the only occurrence coming to mind were two birds we saw west of B.A. Steinhagen Reservoir along US 190 in May 2025. Over a year ago!

I continued watching until the sun became too obnoxious to deal with and my neck hurt from looking up. I forgot about them for a few days until I was out on our recently rebuilt dock one evening and counted 9 swallow-tailed kites flying above the lake. I ran inside to grab my camera and put on my long lens and then proceeded to sit back on the dock for at least half an hour or more as they flew around the lake and then out of sight and back again. I kept hoping they would dip a little closer to me and skim the water but that was not in their plans. Entertain the lady with the camera? I think not.

Eventually they started flying lower, closer to the top of the pine tree canopy and over toward my house. I was going to pack it up and go back inside but when I got to the other side of the pine trees and into an open area between the trees and my house I noticed they were all flying rather low in circles around my house. Much, much lower than they had been on the lake.

I took a few photos of them zooming across, above the backyard, but then moved to the front yard as they had drifted that direction. There was a scuffle in the trees with a couple of the birds for a minute as two attempted to land—that excited me as it meant I might get better photos. The scuffle ended as quickly as it started and the birds flew off. It was a minute or so later that I realized there was a kite still in the tree and the shadows had hidden it from view. I looked through my camera and knew exactly what the scuffle was about it—an attempt to steal this bird’s dinner!

My husband and I watched for maybe 10 minutes or so as this bird ripped its catch into pieces and dined. I was never able to completely tell what it was devouring but when I zoomed in on one of the photos I had taken we thought it was likely to be a baby bird snatched from a nest nearby.

The kite was sitting in a pine tree that is just out our back door, near our compost piles and potting bench, but the tree soars above our house and we can easily see it from the front yard. The angle of the limb where the bird was sitting was best viewed from our position in the front yard. We do have a garden path that runs along the south side of our house, from the front yard to the back, and I slowly took a step or two to get closer. The bird was never fazed and I kept taking photos until it appeared dinner was over.

We don’t usually see the swallow-tailed kites in action this close in our yard, though we do tend to have seasonal fluctuations of other raptor and bird activity on the lake. For what seemed like most of June we had a hawk living and hunting in our yard. I frequently saw it perched on the posts of our fenced in vegetable garden when I would leave for work in the morning. One evening after my husband had mowed the lawn, it followed behind, foraging in the grass for insects that had met their demise in the blades of the mower. Bald eagles come through in late winter and early spring and will perch on our trees closer to the lake or, most typically, across the lake. We see the ones in our yard while we are inside and from our dining room window. In some years, roseate spoonbills will wade in the upper, more vegetated areas of the lake. Even more rare are the wood storks that will land for a few minutes and then take off before I can run back out with my camera for good photos!

Even with all that is going on in the world, it is always good to get back to the basics. The nature watching, the sitting and noticing. Disconnecting and listening to the world around you. Understanding that what you have now is not what used to exist—there were more insects and birds and other wildlife 10, 20, 30, 100 years ago than there are today. And what we have now may not exist in the future.

The swallow-tailed kites disappeared for a few days, or maybe I was too busy with life to notice if they were still flying around, but they popped back up earlier this week. I’m not sure if they are the same individuals or not as migration back to South America should already be beginning to get underway.

And it may be another year before I see them again.

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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!

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.

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!

Birthday 20% Subscriptions

In The Weeds

Misti Reads Books

Right this moment I’m resisting the urge to do exactly what I wrote in the first two sentences.

What I have been doing, some of which I have written about in these sporadic posts the last few months, is reading a lot. I like to keep track of how much I read each year and participate in the yearly Goodreads challenge, and so I am at 26/60 books so far. Are a significant portion of them audiobooks? Yes. My piles of paper books practically scold me as I walk by them every day and yet I can’t seem to force myself to slow down enough to read them.

I’m also reacquainting myself with my neglected garden beds and some other greater yard projects. I lost a lot of interest in managing those spaces in the last four or five years and finally feel like I have the capacity to deal with those again. My long term goal for the summer is to remove most of the taro (Colocasia esculenta) along our portion of pond shoreline. It lines the entire pond and will come back eventually because it grows on the creek upstream that feeds into our pond. Whenever we have any significant flows (like Tuesday when we received about 6” of rain in 2 hours) loose plants will end up in the pond and possibly re-root along our shoreline. That, and it requires a shovel and significant upper body strength to wrestle the roots from the sticky mud. Many times I end up snapping off the leaves and the bulb stays stuck in the mud. My energy levels after digging for a while depends on how much effort I will make to dig out the detached bulb or just opt to move on to another plant and hope to revisit that one at some future date. This is a slow process and I have only done about 10’ of shoreline over the course of two nights of 30-45 minutes work each. My husband has tackled this project at least twice in the last decade and it always looks fabulous for a few years but inevitably the taro re-appears and we’re faced with this task yet again.

The other homeowners along the pond, and another pond in our city, continue to want to attempt to take the easy way out and spray the taro and well, just about any other plant that they deem as weedy. They’ve sprayed the spatterdock (Nuphar advena) a few times but, of course, it continues to live on. At least the spatterdock is native and is incredibly beneficial to fish and other aquatic species and I personally love seeing it. The taro are not native and crowd out other native vegetation along the shoreline but also does not always respond well to appropriately applied herbicide and sometimes requires stronger herbicides applied multiple times. I struggle with trying to communicate to my neighbors about the benefits of leaving much of the native plants alone and try to dissuade them from wanting to indiscriminately spray herbicides, particularly when the most of them can’t differentiate between native and non-native plants. Sometimes they listen, many times they lean on the cultural message they’ve all been given for decades: native plants are messy, clean lines and short-mown grasses are desirable. The reality is that the majority of them aren’t going to do what I’m doing, which is manual labor. Everyone wants the easy way out. (BTW: digging, bending, and pulling taro is an excellent oblique workout! ouch)

My other routine is to botanize/iNat several times a week during my lunch break. I’ve taken to hitting up a few select sites repeatedly over the course of a few months to see what is popping up throughout the seasons. I’ve had a handful of cemeteries on my list for several years now but have recently isolated several roadside areas on Google Earth to check out that have proven fruitful.

On one of these roadside trips recently, I created a new loop with a few sites to park roadside and walk. That loop ended with a stop at a gas station for an iced tea and cookie and is down the street from one of these cemeteries. I was last there in April with my husband and we’d botanized behind the gas station, too. There’s another gas station on the opposite corner and behind it was a large field, where on the north end stood a house that was probably from the 1940s or early 1950s. Directly behind the gas station lived a large, spreading live oak (Quercus virginiana) that I loved to look at it but never went to scope out because it was clearly not part of the property of the gas station (and I had also looked on the property appraiser map to verify). There were a couple of large loblolly pines (Pinus taeda) further back in the field and some other live oaks, too.

Imagine my shock when I pulled into the gas station after that little loop a few weeks ago and stood there in astonishment that everything on that property across the street had been razed, including the 100+ year old spreading live oak. I never once saw a For Sale sign but apparently that meant nothing. Fill had been brought in and the elevation had already been raised several feet. I wished I had gone and meandered through that field because spring wildflower season was usually pretty great from what I could see from across the street.

Later that evening my husband told me that the oak tree was a major topic of conversation on Nextdoor, an app that I have stopped using in the last few years because there’s only so much I want to know about the bizarre beliefs of the folks who live in this part of the county. Alas, I re-downloaded the app because I couldn’t resist reading comments about the oak tree and commiserating with fellow lovers of the oak. It only made me sadder, so I scrolled for ten or fifteen minutes before closing the app and removing it from my phone again. I will throw my fist up in rage every time I pass by this corner in the future.

There’s no reprieve for even a relatively old, quite stately live oak that would have functioned perfectly in a small subdivision park when the name of the game is to cram as many homes into a parcel of land as possible.

This is why I haven’t been able to write. There’s been too much to grieve: the past, the current, the future. I can write and document it but then it can easily disappear.

I know I shouldn’t expect anything other than a callousness from humans towards nature. I guess I keep looking for the good, being too optimistic.

So, that’s where I’m at right now. Keeping it tighter, closer to home. Not looking too far out and attempting to not give myself anxiety about all of the environmental catastrophes I cannot control. Which is hard when I drive around this state and see how quickly rural land is becoming suburban. Or how any kind of high-quality wild habitat is undergoing any form of habitat conversion. Don’t even get me started on realizing just how much has been lost due to grazing and drainage changes in the last 50-75 years.

It’s easier to not spin out when I can just push play on an audiobook and start ripping out taro.

Y’all.

I am in the middle of a severe case of writer’s block. It’s perhaps more like burnout from finishing my book in December but then still being in the limbo period of working on edits and supplemental documents that go along with it, as well as being done in my brain with it all. The fact is that I’m actually not done with the book. I think my brain crossed one hurdle and called it good but somewhere a tiny rational part of it knows there are loose ends and it is trying to tell the other 95% of my brain to get going again. I’m getting there, but gah, is it painful right now.

Alas, my brain has decided to stage a protest and isn’t very open to writing in any other capacity. It is a pretty terrible experience. Especially because I am used to getting ideas, then being able to flesh them out in my brain in a few hours, then sit down and write it out, to have something turned around relatively quickly. There are things I do want to write about but find myself becoming disinterested pretty quickly. I actually wondered if perhaps this was a side effect of being on ADHD meds now for 9 months. A perusal of Reddit ADHD forums suggests this is a possibility, though there are just as many saying the opposite. So, who knows?! It doesn’t actually matter what the source of my issue is, the issue is still there. I’m trying to wade through it while also giving myself space to just be but I’m not great at just being. See: ADHD.

In the meantime, I have been out and about botanizing and naturalizing locally, including throughout various parts of north and east Texas, as well as a trip to the Florida Panhandle in mid-March for Spring Break. Outside is really where I’ve been wanting to spend my time, not in front of a screen and writing. I also set my reading goal for 60 books this year and have been mostly accomplishing that via audiobooks (I’ve finished 20 books so far); however, I need to figure out way to make myself sit still long enough to plow through my pile of “actual” books, too. I’ve been leaning heavily into romantasy as a way to cleanse my palate and get back into fiction after reading a lot of non-fiction in the last few years. A friend and I started with Fourth Wing, well, she had already been devouring romantasy since last fall but I had been hesitant about the genre after listening to ACOTAR years ago and hating it. So, I decided to give Fourth Wing a try and well, now I’m hooked. I just finished Silver Elite by Dani Francis, a dystopian novel that has Hunger Games vibes but actually reminds me more of this book I read in the 90s called Invitation to the Game, which is a YA sci-fi dystopian book that I loved in middle/high school. There’s BookTok drama around Silver Elite because Dani Francis is a pen name by an established author and the rumors are wild about who that potential author is—from a current female romantasy novelist who wanted to write something under a different name to, shudders, JKR, to maybe it is a man and it will end up being Stephen King! Alas, the real issue that I appreciated, as outlined by Michelle Schusterman here is that the publishing company did all of the marketing and not a single thing was done by the author themselves (that we know, I suppose).

Whoever Dani Francis is, they have done zero marketing for this book that they’ve had to put their own name, words, and face to. No TikTok. No newsletter. No carefully curated Instagram grid. No BlueSky memes. Nothing.

And yet—Silver Elite is selling like hotcakes.

Why?

Because the publisher decided to get behind it. Full stop. - via The REAL Silver Elite Controversy

The other romantasy/dystopian series I have read is Shield of Sparrows and Rites of the Starling by Devney Perry. I will say, through all of these books I continue to hit on the reality: the dystopia is already here. It’s been here in some capacity for a while. When I re-read Fahrenheit 451 last year it was abundantly clear that it was a prophetic book coming true.

I can’t read any news headline or summary on social media without running into a story about AI or data centers and what is coming for rural communities, at least in Texas and parts of the south. Things are going sideways very quickly and while the pushback is enormous it is still being forced on upon us. Many of these things are quietly happening under the radar, paired with other tech projects that might seem innocuous on their own but they are often paired projects that will end up benefiting each other. Last week I started drafting an essay on the the proposed SpaceX TeraFab plant for rural Grimes County. I haven’t finished it yet (see: writer’s block) but more is developing on it by the day and it is catching the attention of politicians.

I’m hoping to finish that essay this weekend and get it published early next week and that it will help me get my writing groove back.

The problem with all of this is that there is so much to cover right now. The Big Bend border wall issue is still on the table and is constantly changing, which is throwing citizens and media into a frenzy with the vague changes that too many people are incorrectly interpreting as no wall will be built or no impact will occur, which isn’t true. Then there’s the expanded hunting directive on Department of Interior properties that was issued earlier this year and is in the process of being enacted. And then yesterday I see that Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy has a proposal to transfer 140,000 acres of Kisatchie National Forest from USFS jurisdiction to Grant Parish jurisdiction in some capacity, despite there being little support for it locally. That reeks of something from the playbook of Utah’s Mike Lee, to transfer public lands from federal management to state or local management with the ultimate goal being natural resource pillaging or development. For Louisiana I see this as being something in the combination of timber sales, development (data centers), and/or oil and gas related—most likely carbon capture projects.

Oh, and hey, did you hear about the subsidence issues happening in Katy, northern Harris and southern Montgomery Counties??

Is it any wonder that I just want to enjoy what’s left of nature before it is gone? If I write about the issues, I actually have to face them and can’t pretend otherwise. If I don’t write about it then no one knows what is happening and we can’t attempt to stop it.

The conundrum.

The reality is we’re living the dystopia right now. Most dystopian novels have something good about life in them, just like reality does. Unfortunately, those books don’t always end in a tidy fashion, with happy, clean endings. In the here and now, data centers will be built and public lands will be lost or destroyed—but maybe we’ll manage to save a scrap of something for later.

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“Rice’s whales—like many marine mammals—are subject to various human threats. Vessel collisions and noise, and activities related to energy exploration, development, and production are high on that list. These whales suffered substantial impacts at population-level as a result of the 2010 oil spill, as described in the comprehensive Deepwater Horizon Trustee Council’s Final Programmatic Restoration Plan. It is estimated that 48 percent of the whale’s core habitat was exposed to surface oil, 17 percent of the population died, 22 percent of females had reproductive problems, and an additional 18 percent suffered adverse health effects. Scientists estimate the population declined approximately 22 percent from their pre-spill population size and it will take 69 years for the population to recover from these losses.” - Trophic Interactions and Habitat Requirements of Rice’s Whales via NOAA

Another week, another environmental atrocity.

The hits keep coming and they will continue until regime change and even then…I have my doubts significant course reversal will happen for quite a while.

Here’s the reality: enough people simply do not care. My preferred choice of words would be “give a fuck” because I do think that’s the reality. Care implies one meaning, in my opinion: A tone, a feeling of gentleness, of overall concern and interest. You can not care about something but, perhaps, also don’t necessarily feel significant animosity towards the thing you don’t care about. It can be a neutral term. But not giving a fuck? There’s a negative connotation to that phrase. I think that’s where a significant portion of the population is at when it comes to environmental policy and certainly where this federal administration lands. It’s goes beyond not caring—it’s a strict animosity and their priorities and concerns outweigh the overall health and well-being of not only their neighbors but the environment around them.

You can see this with some of the comments last month regarding the proposed border wall that was to be (and still might be) constructed through Big Bend: nothing is more precious and worth preserving, even ecologically or culturally sensitive, than addressing the perceived threats that only they deem important. And in that case, a mythological amount of immigrants crossing the border through the Big Bend region. It is likely that a significant number, if not all, of the proponents who want the wall through the region have never actually been directly negatively impacted by immigration, illegal or otherwise. At this point, these protestations appear to be reflexive and habitual.

"We cannot allow our own rules to weaken our standing ​and strengthen those who wish to harm us," Hegseth said during the livestreamed meeting. "So for these reasons, exemption from the Endangered Species Act in the Gulf ​is not just a good idea, it is a critical matter of national security." - US exempts Gulf of Mexico drillers from endangered species rules via Reuters

Last Tuesday (03/31/2026), the Endangered Species Committee met to discuss granting exemptions to the Endangered Species Act and subsequent requirements through NEPA processes for oil and gas operations in the Gulf of Mexico under the guise of “national security”. That committee was created in 1978 and is made up of the following people: Secretary of the Interior (Doug Burgum), Secretary of Agriculture (Brooke Rollins), Secretary of the Army (Daniel P. Driscoll), Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (Lee Zeldin), Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Neil Jacobs), one person appointed by the President, and a representative of the affected state. It appears Pierre Yared, Acting Council of Economic Advisers, was also on this list and I presume he was the one person appointed by the President. The Gulf of Mexico isn’t a state, so it doesn’t get representation, apparently.

Obviously, none of the people on this committee are at all friendly to endangered species:

• Doug Burgum is a business man, venture capitalist, and former governor of North Dakota, who is very much pro-oil and gas expansion and US energy independence. He appears to have a net worth somewhere between $100 million and over $1 billion, according to the few articles I was able to find. No one can seem to pin a number down.

• Brooke Rollins is a Texas gal, hailing from Glen Rose. She’s an Aggie with an ag degree and, props to her, was the first woman to be elected student body president at A&M (credit where credit is due! It does appear in the 30 years since, there have only been five other women to serve as SBP…not great, A&M!) Alas, Brooke took her ag degree and got a JD from the rival university and joined a bunch of think tanks and was the instigator of eliminating the Roadless Rule in the USFS last summer.

• Lee Zeldin, who is somehow my age/school cohort, is running EPA. Lee doesn’t have an environmental background, shocker. He has a political science degree, a JD, served in the military, was elected to the NY State Senate and then to the US House, and then tried to run for governor of NY in 2022. Most of his political work is not tied to the environment at all and he’s had dubious statements on the environment that were somewhat walked back during his congressional hearings to be head of EPA. His tenure at EPA has drastically changed the way the agency is run and the rules the office has implemented for decades. He may be the next attorney general if the news rumor mill is correct.

• I was annoyed at Zeldin’s age but Daniel P. Driscoll was born in 1986 so, I guess I’ve reached that age where it seems far-fetched that millennials should be running things. He is the youngest U.S. Army Secretary, so, maybe my instincts aren’t wrong here. Alas, that doesn’t really matter because while Driscoll has a military background and a JD, it seems more important to know that he is friends with JD Vance.

• Neil Jacobs is the most science-based person on this committee, with a PhD in atmospheric science but had primarily worked in research and business development in the private sector before he worked for the first Trump administration. Despite the science background, he has mostly worked as a Trump administration mouthpiece without a lot of backbone and the Union of Concerned Scientists didn’t even like him during the first administration either. Of note, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) or NOAA Fisheries, is of course, under NOAA. NMFS manages marine mammals under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

• Pierre Yared is a Lebanese-American economist with an interest in macroeconomics, heavily focused on debt. This statement from his wiki seems to sum up his presence on this committee: “Yared is described as committed to fiscal restraint and central bank independence, while also supporting U.S. military spending to promote U.S. geopolitical hegemony and financial dominance.”

So, we have a committee of what appears to be people who should never be involved in the decision making surrounding environmental policy, much less policy regarding endangered species. Nary a biologist of any sort on this panel. Sure, Rollins can probably talk cattle and horses, but beyond that?

"I want to highlight that the agency action under consideration — all oil and gas activities in the Gulf of America — encompasses the full suite of actions including various protective measures for the Rice's Whale," said Jacobs. "I will be voting to grant the exemption." - U.S. exempts oil industry from protecting Gulf animals, for ‘national security’ via NPR

It appears that Dr. Neil Jacobs read the documentation produced by his own agency and thought that Rice’s whales were worth the sacrifice while we instigated a war and threatened our own economic stability along with the rest of the world’s because we elected a madman for a second time.

Elections have consequences, we all know that. Yet, it seems most people keep thinking someone else is going to right the wrongs or prevent the worst of the worst from happening and yet, here we are. Someone else is the electorate and the electorate continues to fail to do their job.

I will say, I am witnessing a very dumb mayoral election in my own tiny city. We haven’t had one in years because it is generally uncontested and finding anyone who wants to take on that role has been difficult. But I’ve been watching it play out on Facebook (yes, I know) and the amount of people who don’t even bother to do basic research astounds me. The same playbook on a federal and state level is just copy and pasted onto the small town level and at least one candidate is just letting a lot of the open ended questions and insinuations posted by residents lie, which leads to gossip/rumors and festers discontent—because well, we’ve let our higher offices get elected in that manner without accountability, so why not replicate it here? It’s gross. Is it any wonder why the electorate failed in the first place?

Gas prices are going to continue to rise for the foreseeable future and impact our daily lives across the board, some in ways we’ve already identified but haven’t wanted to come to terms with, as well as in ways we can’t even begin to fathom. In the meantime, the “God Squad” is putting the lives of species with tenuous populations on the line in the name of economics because of intentionally bad decisions made by the leader of this country. Some of those species were listed in the first place because of economics (sea turtles, whales) - the fisheries industry had decimated oceanic wildlife populations over the last several hundred years because of greed.

And now greed continues to be the biggest threat to endangered species in the Gulf of Mexico.

I’ve been drafting essays in my brain the last few weeks and this one I started, stopped, and floundered around with because there was more bad news last week regarding the USFS closing many of its offices and relocating to Utah. At some point I’ll catch up but by then there will be something else bad to write about. I’ve written about the water crisis here in Texas before but more of that is coming home to roost with the news that Corpus Christi is facing dire water issues and Kerrville is looking to start reclaiming wastewater and treating it for drinking water due to the on-going drought and increased population in the town. And almost daily I see a news story regarding data centers, not just in Texas but throughout the country.

We’re in a pinch-point between cultural, economic, and environmental change and one day we will look back and be able to see the 2020s, and even the mid to late 2010s, as the turning point for some dramatic global upheaval.

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On Monday, Governor Abbott posted to his Instagram account (and I presume other social media outlets) this image and sentiment marking Texas Independence Day. I’m not even going to get into the extreme lack of nuance and truth in his first statement but will direct you instead to the real meat of the post, which is the delusional belief that a/the border wall will somehow make Texas safer—“to keep Texas, Texas”.

Approximately a month ago, news began trickling out that the Big Bend region of the state was very likely going to end up getting a border wall soon, something that’s been discussed for the last decade. It’s very telling to me that the Governor chose to mark Texas Independence Day with this particular photo and to discuss the border wall on the heels of this news. Sure, the primaries were the following day, but looking at the results for his primary, he certainly had no reason to worry about losing his spot on the ballot in November by kowtowing to his far right constituency. So, why choose this sentiment and photo for any other reason than that he very likely supports the destruction of what makes Texas, Texas—that he’s ok losing the cultural and environmental beauty of Big Bend National Park and Big Bend Ranch State Park and the other associated border areas in the region in favor of defending a so-called frontier?

The flip side of this is that I saw that the Texas Parks and Wildlife Foundation re-posted a Reel from Grahame Jones, Executive Director of the Texas Conservation Alliance regarding the proposal. I learned enough when Governor Abbott let Fairfield Lake State Park go to a developer that a lot of the Governor’s opinions and real thoughts were usually weaved through backchannels and advocacy groups. Even so, his heart was never completely in it and he lost Texans an entire state park! He seems willing to do the same right now in the Big Bend, by act of desecration, because it appears he has no spine to challenge the President or most of his constituents. Even some of those constituents are appalled by a completely unnecessary border wall through Big Bend.

So, which is the real message? The one on social media repeating party mantras or the one that may be filtering out via other mouthpieces? Is he so chickenshit that he can’t say what he truly believes or wants to our faces? Tell us the truth Governor Abbott, do you want a border wall through Big Bend or are you just trying to appease Certain People by being coy? Either way, you are up for reelection in November and we’re going to remember your legacy which may very well be one that includes “The Governor Who Destroyed Big Bend”.

Since my essay last week didn’t include Big Bend photos I decided to dig out my photo album from that time and flip through to take a few photos of those photos. Ah, the era of choosing from 24 photos on a roll of film instead of 100+ on a phone camera roll library! But those 24 photos captured the essence of that trip and the freedom of being 19/20 years old and in college in an era where you could truly disconnect from everything.

Those photos showed me just how little of the park we were able to explore during our time there. We hiked to so many great places including one I wasn’t able to recall the name of until I pulled the park map up because I only knew of it based on its location on the map in my brain—Ernst Tinaja. I have photos of the tinaja, too, but didn’t end up choosing those to share here. Looking at the information on the park’s website on how to get to the tinaja, I now wonder how we even managed to drive the road in the vehicles we had at the time! I was also able to figure out that the campground we stayed at was the Rio Grande Village.

I tried digging around for historic records of Governor Abbott’s statements on the border wall through Big Bend and some of the earliest sentiments I’ve seen reference him being “publicly opposed” to a wall in Big Bend, such as this article in the National Review from 2017. 2017 feels like a completely different era in terms of politics or life today. However, one sentiment still seems clear now as it did in 2017:

“Big Bend’s wild, dry, imposing terrain poses its own natural barrier: In 2016, Big Bend had the fewest illegal border crossings “of any sector along the Texas border,” according to the Austin American-Statesman.”

A recent report from December 5, 2025 on the Customs and Border Protection’s website says that illegal border crossings in the Big Bend Sector had fallen significantly in 2025, a decline of 74% from two years prior. I’m leery of trusting data points from any government agency right now, especially one trying to compare numbers from this administration to the previous one, but I’ll use it here to back up the statement from a decade ago.

And here’s a great story from NPR from 2019 with a lot of graphics, including a chart showing just how few illegal border crossings occur in the Big Bend region compared to the rest of the US/Mexico border. And at the heart of this article is the reality: that much of the “illegal immigration” happened by people who came to the US via proper, legal channels and just overstayed their visas.

Building a border wall or fence through the Big Bend region makes no feasible sense other than to make a political statement by the people running this current federal mafia state. Governor Abbott was apparently publicly opposed to a border wall through Big Bend a decade ago and this week he’s posting rhetoric that contradicts those statements. And as legislators from both political parties have been putting out statements of opposition, Abbott has remained silent and unwilling to put forth any real statement on his true thoughts on the issue.

Texans want to hear it from your mouth, Governor Abbott: Do you support building a wall through the Big Bend region or not? You owe us at least that much as the current leader of this state.

“The Texas Revolution began in October 1835 with the battle of Gonzales and ended on April 21, 1836, with the battle of San Jacinto, but earlier clashes between government forces and frontier colonists make it impossible to set dogmatic limits in terms of military battles, cultural misunderstandings, and political differences that were a part of the revolution. The seeds of the conflict were planted during the last years of Spanish rule (1815–21) when Anglo Americans drifted across the Neutral Ground and the eastern bank of the Red River into Spanish territory, squatted on the land, and populated Spanish Texas. More alarming than these illegal residents, who only wanted to “settle and stay,” were filibusters such as Philip Nolan, who commandeered portions of Spanish lands for personal gain and political capital.” - Eugene C. Barker and James W. Pohl, revised by Mary L. Scheer via the Texas State Historical Association.

Further Reading: We Were Illegal: Uncovering A Texas Family’s Mythmaking and Migration by Jessica Goudeau - I also recommend her newsletter.

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I debated using the word chickenshit to describe Greg Abbott but then someone told me WWMID—What Would Molly Ivins Do? and that sealed the deal for me. I’m no St. Molly, but we could certainly use someone like her pushing buttons in today’s political climate. Anyway, if the word fits…

The come down from book writing has finally landed me in a place where I can be creative again. I’m still stuck on completing most writing, however, but have been able to start doing other creative projects to restart my brain. One of those has been junk journaling. I’m one of those people who has a hard time passing up a good journal or sketchbook so I have a small pile that have gone unused over the years and they have found use in the last few weeks for this little project. My years of dedicated scrapbooking in the 2000s left me with an ample stash of papers and ephemera which has come in handy, too. I find limiting myself to a certain amount of supplies prevents overwhelm. This applies to magazines as well. You only need a few, less than 5, to really choose words and associated photos to throw into the collage. So far my favorite magazine has been Magnolia Journal, of which I only have one issue to work from, due to its wide range of font styles throughout and its general positive affirmation tone to pull phrases from. The best place I’ve found to find magazines is my Friends of the Library sale rack at the library, where magazines are 10 cents each. It’s been a great place to find issues of Texas Highways because I don’t necessarily want to cut up my own subscription issues but will certainly cut into a second one I bought for next to nothing.

Taking the Scenic Route is on my mind this week as I’ve been hearing the news coming out about the border wall expansion into the Big Bend region. It’s vomit inducing, like just about anything having to do with this administration. I have only been to Big Bend National Park once, back in the spring of 2000 for Spring Break during college. Six of us drove from Galveston to the National Park in two different vehicles. People had cell phones back then of course, but I don’t know that anyone in the group beyond my husband, then-boyfriend, had one and we certainly didn’t have the foresight to exchange cell phone numbers before we got on I-45 North to head out of town. Our two vehicles stayed together until around I-610 South when the other car exited (to loop around to I-10) and we kept going north through downtown to get on I-10 there. I have a vague recollection of the three of us in Chris’ car (me, Chris, and our friend Rosemarie) shrugging and hoping for the best that we’d just meet up with them at Big Bend.

We drove all day and finally arrived at the park entrance some 12+ hours later to find no sign that the others had arrived. I don’t even recall if we had a reservation or if that was even a thing at that point in time. Given that we didn’t even exchange cell phone numbers, if even the others in the group had one, I’m going with the story that we likely winged the whole situation and were hoping we’d find a campsite once we arrived. Alas, pay phones still existed (no cell signal in Big Bend in those days, I wonder if that’s changed?) so I called my parents to let them know what was going on and then called the dorm room of two of the girls in the other vehicle and left a message on their phone. There happened to be a private campground outside the park that we were able to stay at for the night and the next morning our friends showed up. They’d driven as far as Seguin the first time but turned back to Galveston having worried we’d turned around once we’d split up. Once they got our voicemail they drove through the night to meet us out at the park. Ah, the days of college adventures and poor planning that still managed to work out in some manner!

We spent the rest of the week camping and hiking around the park and even crossed into Mexico the old fashioned away, by paying some Mexicans to ferry us across the Rio Grande. We walked into Boquillas del Carmen with the other American tourists and I can’t recall if we did anything other than walk around and sightsee once we got to the village. This was pre-9/11 so we’re talking minimum to no security. Certainly no passport was needed. None of my photos are digitized and I didn’t feel like scanning any for this essay. Honestly, when I sat down to write this I had no idea how it was going to even come out.

I’ve wanted to return to Big Bend National Park ever since but have not made it happen. Big Bend Ranch State Park has been higher on my list to visit than the National Park but our forays into west Texas in the last decade have always taken us to the Davis Mountains and we enjoy that area so much we haven’t expanded beyond there.

“A prevailing notion across the land was now that industry and industry allies carefully placed at the regulatory agencies should take pride in getting away with it. There seemed to be a schoolyard belief that because one side of the political divide has made it a point to protect the land and water of the commons, the other side ought to make it a point to exploit, abuse, and even despise the commons. And the glee over their many “victories” was repulsive to me.” - Jay Erskine Leutze in Stand Up That Mountain

The Appalachian Trail is a National Scenic Trail, primarily administered by the National Park Service in conjunction with a plethora of other federal, state, and local agencies where the footpath crosses. At approximately 2,200 miles long, its protected width varies depending upon the public land it is passing through at any given time. In some areas, particularly in Virginia and the mid-Atlantic states, the trail may be confined to narrow mountain ridges where viewpoints extend down into valleys below where hikers generally get extensive glimpses of farmland or small towns nearby. The AT is crossed by transmission lines and pipelines as well as roads throughout its corridor.

After the many decades long effort to secure a permanent and protected trail corridor, the Appalachian Trail Conservancy has been focusing on the trail’s viewshed which is just as important as protecting the footpath itself. Who wants to come to a view along their hike to see a massive mining operation or trash dump instead of miles of pastoral or mountain scenes? No one.

Published in 2012, Stand Up That Mountain by Jay Erskine Leutze chronicles the fight to stop a gravel mine from destroying a mountain near the Roan Highlands in western North Carolina. Not only was this mine going to affect the quality of life and health of locals but it was going to severely impact the viewshed of the Appalachian Trail. The views and trail itself of the AT are already impacted in some areas, the most notable being the area around Palmerton, PA in the Lehigh Gap where decades of industrial zinc smelting led to the impacted areas being declared a Superfund Site. The trail traverses this area and while the pollution impacts are slowly being mitigated, it will take centuries for the environment to be healed here.

Viewsheds aren’t just important to trails. It’s why we have NIMBYism for all sorts of projects around the country. No one wants massive condos being built in what were formerly early to mid-century residential streets in urban areas. It impacts lighting and shades out neighboring homes and often destroys older growth trees. Who wants a new power plant built half a mile from their home? No one.

Protecting the scenic view of areas is so important we have the Dark Sky program because we’ve deemed seeing stars at night is of greater importance than lighting up the landscape to see during a period of time we weren’t meant to have light. Even the Bureau of Land Management has a Visual Resource Management component to their agency.

So, why are we building a border wall through some of the most scenic and remote areas of the U.S./Mexico border? (To be clear, I hate the wall as a whole as you’ll see below. In my daydreams where I become the first woman President, the first thing I do is my own version of “tear down this wall.” Alas…)

I don’t really spend any time around the Texas border. I would like to visit more often as there are several refuges and parks along the area that are home to some unique plants and animals, particularly migratory bird and lepidopteran species that come into the area from south and central America. In 2022 I saw the border wall/fence for the first time. It’s ugly. Let me rephrase that: It’s ugly AF. And of course it doesn’t follow the actual border of the U.S. and Mexico because that border in Texas is the Rio Grande and the river isn’t straight; therefore, the wall is placed quite a bit inside the U.S. and you have to go through the wall in some areas if you want to access the area behind it, which is still the United States.

Sabal Palm Sanctuary is located southeast of Brownsville and Matamoros along the river. We had to pass through the wall to get to the sanctuary and the little sign in the photo above really has to reassure visitors that indeed you are in the right place despite the Big Scary Wall and your phone dinging to tell you, “Welcome to Mexico. These rates may apply to your plan.” But I’m not in Mexico!

As you can see, the wall is ugly and intrusive, even in the most benign and not-so-scenic-to-most-people locations outside of Brownsville. It is miles of tall metal fencing that obstructs the viewshed and disrupts the migratory pathway of wildlife. The viewshed here may be a patchwork of farm fields, rural homes, or natural areas, certainly perhaps nothing that might compare to the distinct desert landscapes of the Big Bend region—but it’s also not nothing. The viewshed here matters, too.

But take all of this I’ve shown you above and imagine it in Santa Elena Canyon. Or Big Bend Ranch State Park.

If those places aren’t sacred, then nothing is.

And we’ve seen enough from this federal administration and its previous incarnation that public lands in general are not sacred to any of them.

I’m not sure at this point in time protesting does much of anything. I’ve written to state and federal representatives time and time again, only to get nowhere. I have no faith in my own Texas legislators to do anything because they are bootlickers to this administration. That said, I still email to at least have my opinion on record.

I suggest you do the same.

In Texas I like to use this link: Who Represents Me? for easy access to all of my legislators. Even if you aren’t in Texas, please reach out to your representatives because Big Bend National Park is federally managed and is visited by people throughout the country and world. Your opinion matters.

More information and to get involved at No-Al-Muro.com.

Watch: The River and the Wall documentary.

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Hercules' Club (Zanthoxylum clava-herculis)

My husband, son, and I went for a hike at Stephen F. Austin State Park in San Felipe yesterday afternoon. It was quite chilly and I don’t like being cold so I was bundled up in several layers. However, the sun was out and the light was fantastic and despite the cold it was a gorgeous day to be outside. I’m still slightly burnt out from hiking in the Big Thicket right now so it was a delight to be in a different habitat, one that had a lot of Hercules’ club trees on the landscape. Their distinctive bark makes them easy to identify, though, there were also a lot of sugar hackberries (Celtis laevigata) at this state park and they also have growths on their trunks, however they are more warty and less sharp than Hercules’ club trees. Still, both sometimes resemble each other in less mature trees and can trip up those who aren’t as familiar with either plant.

Common Script Lichen (Graphis scripta)

I have been trying to get into lichens the last few months, well, in reality for a lot longer than that. Winter’s lack of vascular plant blooms make looking for non-vascular plants and fungal/algae/cyanobacteria symbiotic relationships like lichens much more interesting right now. Unfortunately, I’m not very great at identifying a lot of them yet because regional books are scarce and I’m generally too lazy to look at things under a microscope (mosses and liverworts). But I’m still out there taking photos of lichens and uploading them to iNaturalist in hopes I will eventually get around to identifying them correctly. One that I do recognize pretty well these days is common script lichen. Sometimes I don’t realize what it is until I’m up close taking a photo with my phone and then I’m delighted to realize how much of it is covering the particular tree I’m looking at. I find it hard not to stop by trees now when I see anything growing on them because you’ll quickly find a lot of different species growing on their trunks!

• Swamp Azalea (Rhododendron viscosum)

  

  I’m not sure this is a totally a good thing given that these were blooming 4-5 months out of their typical season, but it was really nice to see swamp azaleas blooming at the Watson Rare Native Plant Preserve a few weekends ago when we were having a work day. And speaking of WRNPP, I have recently taken over as editor of the newsletter for the Preserve and you can subscribe to it here if you’d like to keep up on what is happening there!

I would love to hear what is keeping you going as we kick off February. Share your delights from January whether they be books, music, plants, wildlife…let me know!

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It’s amazing how quickly my optimism at returning to writing here on a semi-regular basis was obliterated once the weeks started ticking by this month. Because, wow, were we expecting 2026 to start like this?

My mental state, for a variety of reasons, has been all of over the place. I find the twinge to write but don’t have time. Have the time, but don’t have the twinge. Repeat ad nauseum. The world is crashing down around us and all I want to do is poke around outside on a trail, walking very slowly, to look for little bits of nature to iNat or take photos of. I have no agenda other than being quiet. I do not want to think (which is very difficult when you have ADHD and your mind is never quiet except for a few precious hours when meds kick in) and just want to see. Puttering.

I’m still coming down off of the frenzy of finishing my book. I have a pile of accessory documents to finish and am hoping that holing up in the house this weekend for the winter weather that’s predicted will knock a significant chunk of that off my to-do list so I can move forward with being able to do other things. I never want to think of this book again once I finish what I need to do. Which is a problem because it will be published eventually and then I will have to market it so I can sell it. And I will. But I need to wade through the burnout first. Do other writers have this problem? Working on a project for so long that eventually they want nothing to do with it? It’s not like I hated the subject or even doing the work itself but it took up so much space in my brain that looking at it now kind of makes me turn my nose up to it all. I just thought of a metaphor: I tend to get fixated on certain foods for long periods of time and then bam it becomes disgusting and I want nothing to do with it. Of course I’ll come back around to it in like six months to a year, though sometimes I never come back to them. (I’m looking at you Knorr rice and pasta sides…I never want to eat you again. Thank you thru-hiking!)

Digression aside, things just feel and are hard right now and I don’t think I’m alone in that notion. I’ve been filing away items I’ve seen the last few months to write about: AI data centers and the associated powerline and pipelines that are being considered to power them; public lands; sprawl; book reviews; naturalist interviews; conservation as a long term strategy; normalcy bias…and on. Where do I even start?

One thing I learned about the Big Thicket and the conservation around that is the work is never ending. It took several decades of dedicated work to see results and the results were only a sliver of the intended goal. At least we got the sliver because it would absolutely all be gone if nothing had been done. The effort wasn’t a one person job. It took someone(s) to write strong editorials in magazines and newspapers condemning officials for impeding progress on the project; others to be vocal in public meetings or at legislative sessions; quieter folks to coordinate with landowners and public officials behind the scenes; elected officials who acted with integrity and empathy to conservation efforts; and countless volunteers who came to meetings, led hikes, organized protests, letter writing campaigns, and talked to neighbors to sway opinions.

Conservation of the Big Thicket did not come without strife from opponents and that carries across other public land conservation efforts to this day. We lack significant science and environmental education in this country and honestly, throughout the world. The last few weeks Joey Santore of Crime Pays but Botany Doesn’t has been ranting about issues he’s facing in his Lower Rio Grande Valley town just because he wants to plant a native tree in a hellstrip to eventually create shade in the neighborhood to counteract the urban heat island effect in his community. He’s run into problems from neighbors seemingly being afraid of the tree because the leaf litter it may produce is considered “dirty” to them, to local law enforcement zoning out moments after Joey starts talking to explain the real issue, and town officials getting grouchy about him even wanting to do this at all because, well, it is counter to how things operate in cities in general.

So, you have Joey wanting to plant one tree and getting so much flack for it, meanwhile we’re facing environmental destruction from AI data centers and more. While there are people upset about the data centers, government agencies are rolling over and letting it happen because, well, who cares if habitat is destroyed, water resources are depleted, and new power plants are being built near neighborhoods just to power these data centers. One tree = the world ending and such a difficult ordeal. Destroying ecosystems = good for business!

This is what we’re up against. The cognitive dissonance is LOUD.

How do you counteract such ingrained cross-cultural disdain for the environment? It takes upending the systems we are living in, which is capitalism for sure, as well as other anti-nature systems that promulgate this ethos. Unfortunately I won’t see this reversal in my lifetime and neither will most (any?) of y’all reading this.

Which is why I’ve just been puttering. Because crouching down to look for liverworts, lichens, and tiny little plants has been far more regulating to my brain than trying to figure out how to write about all of this.

The last several months since I signed off from here were a whirlwind. I signed off from writing but I also stopped reading newsletters completely. My brain had no room for anything but 1: my book, 2: my family, 3: work, 4: friends, 5: the collapse of the world. That’s it. Which, is A Lot.

Bleary eyed, I sent off my manuscript to my editor at 2:15 am on New Year’s Day after spending the prior 72 hours writing furiously. I swear this book grew more difficult with every word I typed. It was, pardon the terrible imagery, like a piece of food you keep chewing and chewing and somehow you just can’t manage to swallow it because the food keeps growing in your mouth. Yeah, yeah, I know. But really, that’s how it felt. The other metaphor was about moving, how when you are moving houses and you see all of the boxes you’ve packed up and you think you are really almost done, and then you look around all the rooms at the random crap still strewn about and you realize just how much is left to pack. Then you start throwing it in random boxes just to be done—you’ll deal with it when you unpack later. Of course, behind all of that is cleaning up! It feels never ending, you are just never going to move! Or, in this case, I was never going to have some kind of finished product, despite the fact I had seen the finished product in my mind for months already. I knew how it was going to come together but it had to get out of my brain first. Which felt unimaginable until the moment I was done writing.

The cleaning up part, well, I had done most of that as I went along but there are some minor formatting issues I do still need to deal with, unfortunately. Of course later that day I thought of some things I wanted to add to clarify a few points and I’m pretty sure I should have added photos into a few spots in the introduction.

Speaking of photos, did you know what a huge pain in the ass it is to format placeholders for photos and maps? Wow, did I learn a lot about that. I’m still unsure if I did it right. At 9:00 pm on December 31st I turned my focus to this “last thing” I needed to do, the photo placeholder labels, thinking, surely it won’t take me three hours to do…I’ll be home before midnight! No, it took me almost 5 and I slept in the floor of my work office for the second night in a row. That’s the thing about this book: I could not accurately determine how long something was going to take me to write or finish at any given point in time. It all went so much slower than I was thinking it would.

The maps…oh, the maps! Don’t get me started on that. I had been working on them steadily since late July, reformatting some of the ones I had begun to work on a year before when I was just starting out on all of this. I didn’t particularly like what I’d come up with for my proposal, especially after I had started collecting data. GPS points for things like bridges would not line up with waterways or wetlands I could pull from public agency sources that I was relying on to use. I quickly realized I could not be placing a bridge over a creek that was significantly off in any capacity. And I couldn’t just move the bridge because then mileage wouldn’t add up. So, I started drawing in waterways using aerial imagery and LiDAR. Maybe one day I will get into the amount of work I put into gathering background data for this but it was extremely time consuming to download and then mosaic together and then toggle back and forth between layers. I use GIS for my day job so making maps is part of what I do as a career but this was much more than what I was anticipating. And my perfectionist tendencies took the driver’s seat many times. I could have probably slapped the trails down on a USGS topo map and called it a day but in the end, and knowing what I’ve seen of topos over the years, they sometimes suck and don’t provide much information, especially on short trails. And in this part of Texas, everything is flat.

That was the maps. Then there was the writing, which I didn’t start doing heavily until November after I’d finished hiking my last trail in late October. I already had my outline and sample hikes from my proposal, plus had been writing in my brain for more than a year, so I knew how it would come together. But between finalizing maps and toggling back to writing, wow. So many bits of information to source, a lot I already had but then I had to dig around for more things. This is where I know I ended up jacking up some on the consistency in some areas which I will start fixing next week while I wait for my editor to get back to me with edits on his end. My least favorite thing was trying to describe the terrain for a trail or park. I don’t know, there’s dirt and mud, sometimes, and vegetation…it’s flat. What more do you want to know? It’s a trail in the woods! Come on! I know that stuff is beneficial, I just could not describe it well at all because it was so boring to me.

So, that’s out of my hands for now. I received an out of office reply after I submitted, which I expected given the holiday season. I still have some things I need to wrap-up, including a photo caption sheet and apparently an alt-text photo sheet (a new addition I just found out about), which should be Lots Of Fun given I had 136 photos.

I’m looking forward to writing here again. I have a lot of commentary that I’ve been holding onto the last half year. I have many thoughts about what I have learned about hiking the places I hiked the last two years. I may hold off on that part for a bit because I am formulating at least one other book in my brain about it all. I will say, I don’t think we’ve learned many of the lessons I thought we had learned from the past. I believe a lot of us tend to look at some of the conservation movement of the last 60-70 years with rose-colored glasses, when in reality things were and are a lot starker than we realize.

Be back soon with more writing!

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Hello out there! It’s been almost two months since I’ve cracked open Substack to write. I’ve opened the app and desktop to glance at Notes and read a newsletter or two but I’ve not done much reading or writing on Substack since early September. I’ve had my head down and nose to the ground hiking the last two months, finalizing the last areas I needed to finish for my book. Floods and hurricanes in 2024 really wrecked plans to visit some of these places which is why they were held off until last. Thankfully no hurricanes this year and a late summer drought made some of these areas much more accessible to hike.

I’ve been mostly working on maps when I’m not hiking, though not as much as I should have been doing. I’ve gone through several incarnations of maps before I finally settled on a format I liked and that a few reviewers appreciated, too. Next stop: writing my way to the finish line. NaNoWriMo doesn’t exist anymore, at least the capacity writers knew of for years, but I plan to basically use November as a NaNoWriMo to get this book finished. The good thing is, I already have a template based on my proposal and have been writing in my head for nearly two years now, so I already know what to say.

The Big Sandy Trail in the Big Sandy Creek Unit of the Big Thicket National Preserve was my last trail to hike. Coming in at around 15ish miles (actual mileage tbd as I compile my GPS data), this one is relatively tame terrain-wise due to it being on old, graded logging roads. It is the length that gets you and it is one way in, one way out, generally. I say generally, because there are a couple of alternative two-tracks that are still accessible and would offer up other entry points into the Preserve if the NPS maintained those. I digress, but will absolutely be writing more about everything I found and thought about our public lands while hiking the last two years.

I had no desire to do an overnight backpacking trip or a really long hike for this one so my husband and son came out with me and they meandered down the trail and drove down one of the dirt roads in this unit while I biked my way deep into the Preserve. This is one trail in the Preserve that is open to bike users and I was going to make use of that to knock these miles out. To say that I am burnt out is an understatement. I am ready for some slow ambling. To sit in a small perimeter and watch butterflies.

All of this is to say, I have many things to write about but have this priority first. I’ve had a number of new subscribers plus a couple of paid subscribers so I didn’t want to leave everyone hanging without writing for four months. Consider this a little nugget of writing to get you through until the end of the year. And hello new subscribers! Thanks for reading!

I’ll be back in January with more essays.

Oh, don’t forget, election day is November 4th. There are a number of propositions on the Texas ballot, including one regarding funding for water resources infrastructure. I had a lot of conflicting thoughts about that one and even the environmental orgs I follow were somewhat conflicted. We need vital upgrades to much of our water infrastructure in the state but this funding was paired with potential projects like more desalination plants and reservoirs, which are complicated issues that come with a whole host of their own environmental issues. I went ahead and voted for it, hoping we could just fight any unsavory projects as they came. I’m not sure what the answer is here, other than revising how propositions are written. Because I don’t know about you, but what our elected officials give us for propositions is atrocious. Of course, that’s by design, though it shouldn’t be.

Alas, until January!

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Hello dear readers!

Let’s have a little catch-up, shall we?

I thought about throwing this one behind a paywall but opted not to. It will be a little more personal than usual, which was the point of starting the paywall situation, but eh, sometimes you might as well overshare with everyone and let the thoughts flow freely.

First, some programming notes for the rest of the year. While I generally post a few times a month, sometimes on a weekly basis, I don’t typically have a schedule. Sometimes life gets away from me and I go a month without writing. That said, whatever schedule or non-schedule I’ve had, for the rest of the year expect only two newsletters a month. Why? Well, it is crunch time for my book.

If you are a newer subscriber and missed it, I’m writing a Big Thicket region hiking guidebook and my manuscript is due by the end of the year. I’ve been doing hikes since late 2023 and still have a couple left to finish up. These are hikes that are harder to deal with because of either length (18 mi), or hurricane/storms (the 18 mi one was closed for quite a while and others were flooded), and summer + mosquitoes. Also, I’ve been dealing with killer plantar fasciitis for several years now and so my ability to do sustained hiking multiple days or weekends in a row is low/uninteresting to me sometimes. I heading back to physical therapy after a stint in 2023 due to a hip impingement. Turns out, my hips still have mobility issues and, well, body parts don’t work separate from each other. While my hip issues aren’t what they were in 2023 they are still informing how my feet function in 2025. Pair this with being 45 and in the throes of perimenopause—it’s all great. Like, I expected my body to break down at some point, just not this soon.

So, yeah, the book has to become my priority, writing-wise, for a few months. I am actually very excited about it, finally. I went in cycles of being excited about it to then terrified about it. Thoughts have ranged from, “Why did I come up with this idea?” to “This is going to suck so much.” to “I’m not capable of doing this.” Like, why didn’t I stick with writing fiction? Hah!

I will say, some positive feedback I’ve received from a few folks regarding the maps I’ve made has given me the confidence boost I was looking for to continue onward. That’s what I’ve been focusing on recently, making the maps. They’ve had several incarnations from the proposal in late 2023 until now and I think I’m finally in the place where I have a format I love and that is functional to use going forward. The writing part will be easier to do, I think, just recalling the sample hikes I put together for the proposal. I’ve talked myself out of some of the more intensive writing and research I had planned to do for this book and am already planning to work on another proposal for a secondary (non-guide) book about the Big Thicket after this one is turned in. I’m actually finally invigorated about this project and the future project as well as some other fiction writing I want to work on in 2026.

And all of that is in part to my new friend Vyvanse.

Turns out, I have ADHD. Well, I’ve thought I’ve had it for a few years now, thanks to social media and a few online friends, as well as a couple of real life friends who have had late ADHD diagnoses in recent years. When those women shared their stories and I looked at their personalities and was like, well, we’re similar, what do you mean you have ADHD??? I do that too…Ohhhhhhhh, hmmmm. After some reading and podcast listening over the last few years, and finally a conversation with a psychiatric nurse practitioner late this past spring, I found myself in front of a psychologist to have a full neuropsych evaluation. Which, honestly, is quite terrible. Digging out some of the worst parts of yourself, habits, thought processes, and things from childhood just so you can get legal access to a controlled substance that will help you better function in life isn’t something I really recommend doing unless you have to. Alas, I went through it and learned a lot about myself in all of that reflection. Turns out, women and girls, and non-typical presenting boys, were really screwed over in the 80s and 90s. I very clearly see the ADHD in my childhood self now.

Which brings me to: the book and writing. It’s crunch time. I don’t fit some of the ADHD stereotypes but a few of them I do. I don’t procrastinate on everything but there are times/items that I do, and I have done some procrastinating on this project. I told myself when I did the proposal for this book that I was going to work on it as I went. I mean, I did. I downloaded data and edited GPS tracks as I went, as well as edited photos. I’ve been reading books and doing a lot of thinking about the book, reformatting in my head. But I did not do any writing or much map making like I had planned. So, of course, here I am, four months out from deadline and the crunch is crunching.

Where that leaves me here: less writing. My plans for that include: I have two people lined up who were interested in doing a Q&A interview about their own interactions with Texas nature and will be getting those out in the next few months; re-purposing some older writing from this newsletter or my blog; and shorter informational PSAs that need action, such as the upcoming potential that our government will rescind the 2001 Roadless Rule from our National Forests. This would be Very Bad. Comments are open via that link, but I’ll be writing more on that next week. I won’t have time for the longer essays I typically write, though who knows, I may get a wild hair and get one written when the mood strikes.

Thanks for hanging in there until January; though we all have too much vying for our attention these days, I’m sure one less item to read will be good for everyone. I’m really excited about this book and want to make it look great so that people will want to explore the Big Thicket! Exploring the Big Thicket means a greater chance of wanting to protect and expand it, too.

Until next time…

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“New” is a bit of a misnomer: this plant has always existed and was not actually recently “discovered”. It wasn’t lurking about in some remote corner of Texas where botanists rarely wandered—it’s been in plain sight and visited by naturalists for years. What’s new about it is that for several years now, possibly longer, botanists and naturalists have been scratching their heads at this species wondering if it really should be keyed out to Asclepias tomentosa, velvetleaf milkweed, or if it was something else entirely. Two weeks ago, research finally came out defining this cryptic species as something separate from A. tomentosa.

Why, you ask? Well, let’s look at the distribution of A. tomentosa over on iNaturalist.

Florida is the epicenter of A. tomentosa with sightings fairly thick in the north-central portion of the state. There’s a smattering of sightings in Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. And then alllll the way across the coastal plain, crossing the Mississippi, there’s our population in east Texas. Disjunct plant populations aren’t that uncommon but they are headscratchers to be sure. I know of several species we have in Texas that are absolutely considered to be native and yet some of their nearest populations are in South America. And not the northern part of it, either. How? Why? Good questions! I suspect, like our “new” milkweed species, if you did genetics you’d be able to differentiate the disjunct populations for some of these species.

Focusing in on A. tonkawae here in Texas, by and large most plants can be found at Gus Engeling WMA. The WMA is a spectacular botanical gem that primarily sees visitation by hunters with supplementation by botanists and naturalists. It’s such a fascinating habitat with deep sand post oak savannas, pitcher plant bogs, tannin rich creeks, and bottomland hardwoods. I’ve been meaning to start working on public land profiles here and GE WMA was one of the first ones I had planned on doing. It’s time to get around to that, I think.

The other plants shown on this map are mostly on private lands.

Which means there is a high likelihood more plants are hiding away on other public and private tracts in the region where there is suitable soil and habitat. Most private landowners aren’t managing for any kind of natural habitat and land tends to be degraded by running (too many) cattle or by lack of fire management. Neglect and general obliviousness to what is even growing on your own property lends cryptic species like this to hide in plain sight. Or disappear without anyone ever knowing.

“One major problem in biodiversity science is determining the number of species in any taxonomic group. “Cryptic species” which are species that exhibit low morphological differentiation but exhibit considerable genetic differentiation from other closely related species (e.g., Smith et al. 2006; Bickford et al. 2007; Burns et al. 2008; Janzen et al. 2017), may contribute to the problem.”

“A. tomentosa and A. tonkawae are sister species (Figure 3). A major question is where the ancestral species originated and how these disjunct sets of populations arrived where they are. Dispersal theories must be considered because milkweeds have wind‐blown seeds. If “sweepstakes” dispersal events occurred across 1,000 km via wind‐blown seeds, then we would expect more intermediate populations of A. tomentosa or A. tonkawae on sandylands in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Eocene sands are present in northern Louisiana. They have received attention from botanists who are familiar with A. tomentosa with negative results (MacRoberts and MacRoberts 1995).”

The authors go on to state and hypothesize that there are other deep sand floral and faunal species that are endemic to these deep sand areas in Florida, the Carolinas, and Texas, which suggests the possibility of a “trans‐Mississippian sand bridge at some time in the past.” Another hypothesis put forward is the potential of population movement when the Gulf of Mexico was lower during the Pleistocene and sandier habitats were above the current water sea level, allowing for movement with wind dispersal between Florida and Texas.

I want to point something out here, Dr. Godwin’s note of the Carrizo and Sparta Sand habitats that this species lives in, which leads to the following image.

This is generalized map showing the aquifers of Texas. I have a Google Alert set for the Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer and I get hits on it every week because it is constantly being referred to in news articles as a source of water for thirsty central Texas cities. Then there’s the deep wells at the former Fairfield Lake State Park. And more recently, making even bigger news, Kyle Bass’ plans to pump 16 billion gallons of water out of the aquifer every year. I’ve been meaning to write about that for a couple of months now but haven’t got around to it. It also plays back into Fairfield Lake State Park. Soon.

Which brings us back to A. tonkawae. The authors of the paper in conjunction with Texas Parks and Wildlife have assigned the milkweed a NatureServe Global Conservation Ranking of G1S1, which means it is critically imperiled both globally and within the state and at risk of local extirpation or extinction due to its restricted range and unique habitat requirements.

“Threats include extensive habitat conversion to non‐native pastures (coastal Bermuda and Bahia grass pastures); housing expanding in Tyler, Athens, Palestine, Quitman, Mineola, and other areas; conversion of habitat to monoculture pine; herbicide spraying to benefit grasses for grazing; natural fire regime highly reduced to non‐existent; and extensive land fragmentation.”

It doesn’t take much to realize what is likely to happen if there’s a water war on the Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer in conjunction with expansion of development in the region.

Let’s take a look at Gus Engeling WMA and the surrounding habitats for a second.

GE WMA is that dark green north-south rectangle in the center of the map. You can see cleared pastures all around and some streamside management zones with hardwoods that weren’t completely removed by landowners. The stark difference in habitat quality is distinct when on the ground, however. That brown, sandy area on the north end of the WMA is one of the areas of deep sand and is high quality habitat with a lot of very interesting species. Every time I visit I look across at those pastures before we get to the WMA and am almost sick to my stomach at what was destroyed decades ago.

What could have been.

What was.

Habitat fragmentation is brutal. It may look “green” on the ground but a cattle pasture isn’t an unaltered oak savanna and the species richness and biodiversity are drastically different.

I can only hope that as news of this “new” species comes to light, landowners in the region might take note and consider looking for it on their own property. Instead of seeing it as a threat, see it as a bright spot of biodiversity on their land. I know this is not the mainstream thought process but it is one I wish a few people might take to heart. If you want to see Asclepias tonkawae yourself, GE WMA is the best place to see it on public land for now. As always, plant poaching on public lands is a No No. Take all the photos you want, leave the plants and seeds.

It is likely in the next year or two we’ll get news that the genetic work for the Georgia and Carolina populations are also different species. I’ll update when I hear about those.

I’ll end with two other recent discoveries due to genetic work for faunal species:

• Everyone’s favorite coastal friends (haha) the Portuguese Man O’ War, Physalia physalis, aren’t one species, they are at least four different species! This work was initialized via citizen science submissions on iNaturalist! If you are out there noticing nature, even if you don’t know what something is, someone else does and you may be contributing to the expansion of scientific knowledge!

• A third manta ray species, Mobula yarae, the Atlantic manta ray, was recently described after years of work by Dr. Andrea Marshall and other colleagues around the world. Dr. Marshall also did the work 15 years ago in doing the initial split from one manta ray species into two.

I hope all of this goes to show that there is still plenty to discover in our world. We just need to pay attention and notice and hope like hell there’s funding to do the research to describe these new species in the future. And hope conservation and caring from the public catch up in the meantime.

Full milkweed article: Phylogenomics Reveals Deep Divergences and Cryptic Species within a Rare Sand-Dwelling Milkweed, Asclepias tomentosa Elliot.

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My parents live in suburban Fort Worth and have been at this house since, well, it was either NYE 1985 or NYD 1986, I can’t recall which one is correct. I was five and in kindergarten when we moved into the house and I remember how little tree cover and vegetation there was at that time, pretty much an indicator of any new development in Texas, then and now. My parents planted out pecan and elm trees, little twigs that are now full-fledged trees that host squirrel families who pilfer pecans every year. Seeing the subdivision age over the last 40 years has been an interesting process as wildlife began really coming back into the picture in the last 15-20 years. There are reports of foxes and coyotes running the streets, hiding out in whatever lots are still undeveloped in the area, a common story across the country. And now raptors like Mississippi kites perch in those mature suburban trees planted by homeowners back in the 80s and early 90s. My mom took an interest several years ago to a few of those kites who would hang around for a while during migration and they became “her” birds every year when they passed through.

Part of me wonders how much of all of this was quietly existing in the suburban areas at that time but went unnoticed by me and everyone else, and the other part wonders how much was wiped out but has slowly been re-establishing in the decades since development. Starting in the early 90s, I was generally an environmentally conscious kid; there were a lot of Earth Day programs and proactive discussions about recycling and greenhouse gases back then. However, I was also terrified of spiders and insects and was typically in my own world, either reading books inside or, when I was outside, playing baseball in the front yard with neighborhood kids or riding my bike up and down the street. When I became a teenager I was in my own head and wrapped up in friends and crushes on boys; noticing Mississippi kites flying overhead wasn’t anywhere on my radar.

But, when my parents start finding interesting natural history bits in their own yard, my interest is always piqued. Take this yellow garden spider, Argiope aurantia, my dad found a few weekends ago when I was up there visiting. He came in from doing something outside and mentioned a large spider out front. Based on his description I immediately knew it was likely this species but went outside to check later just to be sure. This species did not exist in my parent’s yard from 1986-2002. I know it didn’t because I would have been terrified if I had seen it during that time period. A giant spider?! Someone kill it, please!

I recall, as a child, entering the hallway that led to all of our bedrooms and seeing a giant (to my child-sized eyes) daddy long legs spider on the wall and freaking out. I’m 100% sure my dad came in and killed it with a shoe or the newspaper. In hindsight, that scary spider was probably an Eastern Harvestman, Leiobunum vittatum, which are harmless arachnids unless you happen to be plants, fungi, and smaller arthropods.

Over the years, somehow I went from being terrified of insects and spiders (the annual spring crane fly explosion was also a traumatic event in our household) to having little chats with the jumping spiders that take up residence in tiny corners of my house. Sure, little friend, you can stay there, just let me sweep up this dust right here, I promise you can stay. And I talk to the spiders in the garden, too. Sorry, ma’am, just need to pull these weeds. Oops, didn’t mean to mess up your web!

Now, do I necessarily want Ms. Argiope Aurantia walking on me? Nope. I walked into many webs of her cousin(s), the Madame(s) Trichonephila Clavipes, when I lived in Florida. It’s the luck of being the first person to break a trail in the morning. When the light is just right sometimes you can’t see the web until it smacks you in the face. Next thing you know, you are laying on your back in the middle of the trail, stuck like a turtle with your pack on your back, flailing about and freaking out about a spider possibly crawling on your head!

There can be an evolution in understanding, going from the instinct to kill every insect in sight to befriending them, well, at least some of them. Is anyone really cozying up to mosquitoes and ticks? And alongside that evolution, we come to notice the natural world more, to see its interplay in our own backyards, whether they are suburban subdivisions or rural cabins.

The little bits of undeveloped land around my parent’s house are slowly being developed. A lot that had been empty for decades was cleared this past spring for townhomes. I’m biding my time to go up for a visit one weekend to find a gas station on the corner of another lot. Even if these empty lots aren’t truly wild in the way we imagine nature to be, they still serve as places for rainwater runoff to filter through before heading to the nearest creek, or serve as pollinator habitat with the mix of native and non-native wildflowers that pop up in the spring, if they aren’t mowed down before peak bloom. These edge spaces fill a niche, mini-wildlife corridors shuttling fauna of all shapes and sizes through to the islands of nature existing in the nearest cul-de-sac.

Eventually they bring in yellow garden spiders that build webs outside the childhood rooms of adults who love nature.

“The genus name Argiope was taken from Greek mythology and means “of the silver face,” while the species name aurantia basically means “overlaid with gold.”

Even though these references relate to colors, rather than precious metals, in my book Argiopes really are as good as gold.” - via Good Natured

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Gratitudes + Delights is a monthly-ish series for paid subscribers. Consider becoming a paid subscriber to read the series and other more personal writings I may share here. All other nature-related writings and important news will always be free to read. Paid subscriptions are currently 20% off through August 2025.

Monthly Art

No art from me this month. I’m trying to tap into my creativity by force at this point: I recently bought a pre-drawn scratchboard and a beginner cross-stitch from Michaels to override my long creative drought. I’ll get there somehow. I really did enjoy this exhibit at the Húsavík Whale Museum last month. I took several photos from the art exhibit that was on display there and really appreciated the work put into the exhibit.

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I did not want to get out of bed Sunday morning. We came home from Iceland a week ago with a non-covid virus that morphed into a sinus infection that has since evolved into something that has decided it never wants to leave my body and thus continues to drip snot from my nose and rattle around phlegm in my upper lungs a few times a day when I attempt to hack it out.

NyQuil seems to keep it at bay at night, long enough to let me sleep without feeling like I’m drowning in my own sinus secretions. The downside to that medicine is that you tend to wake up feeling like you slept with a ton of bricks on top of you. Groggy is an understatement.

But awaken I did, because we had a lineup of adventures to maneuver in the Big Thicket. I haven’t done any hiking for the book since mid-June and seeing as I’m coming up on five months left to turn this book in, things are about to get real. I don’t have much left to hike, in all honesty. The downside is that most everything left is in a mosquito haven that I have zero interest in being in at the moment. September can’t come soon enough.

We made a rotation starting at the Lance Rosier Unit of the Big Thicket National Preserve. We did not see any of the orchids featured in this post there, though I have no doubt they exist somewhere—there’s habitat for them out there. The Lance Rosier Unit is for rugged explorers of the Thicket. You will want mud boots, a backpack filled with water and food, and a GPS before you head off into the wilds of that unit. Trails? What trails? Honestly, this kind of exploration is my favorite but not in late July with deer flies, heat index warnings, and a dripping nose. This was a checklist trip. *check, done* The Lance Rosier Unit has been visited. The reality is, I will definitely make another trip to this unit before the book is wrapped up but I needed a cursory visit in order to do my write-up for this section.

Next, we had a short side excursion to visit a population of Asclepias lanceolata, fewflower milkweed, for seeds—not in the Thicket…Top Secret Location. Said Top Secret Location was scorching and out in the open and I regretted agreeing to visit the site almost immediately. I stuck it out but resolved never to return this time of year without a hiking umbrella. Lots of stops for sips of Gatorade were had. My bandana was filthy from snot and sweat by the time all was said and done.

Respite was found in the confines of the truck after, with the a/c blasting as we made our way toward the Big Thicket headquarters and a restroom break before hitting up the Watson Rare Native Plant Preserve for a quick tour. I’m on the board of directors for WRNPP but haven’t been out there since late April or early May. Summer always brings its own chaos and out there was no different. All of the rain we had in spring and early summer brought abundant growth and so many different delights of blooms could be seen from the trails at the preserve.

I haven’t been at the preserve when the Chapman’s fringed orchids were blooming in several years so my sluggish brain woke up when I rounded a corner on the boardwalk and found an orchid in bloom, and then another, and another. And so on down the boardwalk. Chris and I quickly assessed that we absolutely needed to burn further down the boardwalk next fire season than we did this year. The orchids are being choked out by shrubby vegetation. It happens so quickly, too. A year or two without a good burn in a certain area and the shrubs (really, the problem is ti-ti, Cyrilla racemiflora) take hold and start shading everything out.

My time at WRNPP is never long enough. It’s either a volunteer work day or a wildflower walk for a few hours and then lunch in Warren and off to adventures afield in the Thicket, or driving the two hours west back home in Houston. Some day I would like to manage to spend the day and do some plein air painting or reading a book on the cabin’s back porch. If you are interested in seeing the Chapman’s fringed orchids yourself, you can always drop by any time (free!) this week or next for peak blooming but we do have a wildflower walk hosted by orchid botanist and author Joe Liggio this Saturday, August 2nd, at 10:30 am. 527 Co Rd 4777, Warren, TX 77664 Bring a hat and some water!

Finally, after lunch in Woodville, we made our way to our final stop for the day. Thunder rumbled in the distance and the sky grew blue-gray and heavy with rain. The radar showed passing thunderstorms that we managed to dodge before arriving to the plant I’ve been trying to see for a few years now, Platanthera cristata, the crested orange bog orchid.

Several years ago we found leaves and plants in seed at this location while viewing another rare plant in this same habitat. I managed to figure out which orchid species it was and put together the phenology for bloom times, very late July, but could never get my schedule to coincide with a free weekend to come out to see them blooming. This year I made it a priority because I wanted them in my book.

All of the older literature for the Big Thicket refers to so many different rare and uncommon species that have only become even more rare and uncommon since the creation of the BTNP in 1974. Some species were only very rarely seen in some units anyway, not across a wide swath of the region. It’s been tricky to balance what flora and fauna to showcase for each trail/park/tract within the book. I tend toward wanting to share all of the oddball stuff, the things only die-hards are going to want to see. But the reality is that a lot of the common stuff is just as interesting to see to every day hikers.

Summer adventuring in Texas isn’t for many people. Sometimes I don’t even know if it is for me anymore. Summer used to be my favorite season. My all-time favorite season is still winter in south Florida, though. Oh, to be able to make that happen all year long.

While I wait for it to cool off, I’ll take the micro adventures where I can, enjoy the orchids blooming, and donate some blood to the local mosquito and deer fly populations.

And bide my time until goldenrod season. It’s coming!

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Like last summer, we escaped the humid July heat here in Texas for a milder, cooler climate. Instead of going south to the equator and Andes, this time we went northeast and came close to the Arctic Circle. When I looked at the forecast for Iceland a few days before we left all I saw was a week + of rain and 40s and 50s temperatures. Turns out, that’s the default forecast because Iceland is one of those places where the weather does truly change minute by minute, hour by hour. In fact, right before we left I pulled out a pair of fleece lined pants and a heavy long-sleeved Henley and put in a few more t-shirts. I should have done the same with other sweaters because it felt like late March in Texas last week in Iceland. When I unpacked last Sunday afternoon there was a pile of long sleeved shirts I never even touched during the trip. Alas.

This was my first visit to any European or European adjacent country so I knew there would be a bit of a cultural difference compared to traveling to central and south America, which is where all of my international travel has been up until now. Iceland is split by the Eurasian and North American continental plates, hence all of that volcanic activity. Geologically split, culturally European, and yet, something all its own.

And just like last year, I really didn’t want to come back home. Last summer the US was in the middle of a purported assassination attempt and President Biden stepped out of the election race in favor of Kamala Harris. Things were chaotic but somewhat optimistic. This time…well, it was grim.

In Ecuador, there were TVs in the restaurant the hotel we stayed at in Quito and I’m just now realizing I saw zero TVs playing in any restaurant or hotel we visited in Iceland—heaven! I think my son popped on our room TV once to hear some Icelandic chatter and flipped for a few minutes but quickly turned that off. I managed to stay pretty oblivious to any major news coming out of the US unless I saw someone posting it on Instagram. When I left Texas everyone was still focusing on the flooding in central Texas and the tragedy associated with it and by the time I returned I saw that PBS and NPR has been defunded, Angela Paxton had filed for divorce, and you know, I’m sure there’s more but I’m trying not to care.

What I did pay attention to was the stark difference in culture in Iceland compared to the US. Listen, I’m not naïve enough to think that other countries don’t have their own issues but it is fascinating to see the contrast between the US and a small island country in the far North Atlantic. My FYP on Instagram managed to morph into Euro travel accounts at some point during the trip, which was a fun diversion. I think all of us Americans are in agreement that indoor air circulation of some kind is needed in Europe…a fan, please, something. Windows are frequently open during summer months in Iceland, which makes things pleasant, but it isn’t enough for sleeping when the building heats up into a greenhouse during the day. Me, a perimenopausal woman, has a hard enough time sleeping here in the summer in Texas, so I thought, perhaps, I’d be graced with chilly temps to soothe my sleep. That was not the case. At least the pure exhaustion from the jet lag and constantly being on the go let me pass out uninterrupted for 8-9 hours every night. This, despite being in the land of the Midnight Sun, which absolutely made itself known between the edges of the curtain and wall every night.

What struck me most during this trip was how many things were reusable or put in typical, non-disposable containers. I can’t even tell you exactly where we were and what the river’s name is (there doesn’t seem to be one on Google Maps) but even in this one remote location while white water rafting somewhere south of Varmahlíð, when our group took a 15 minute hot chocolate break on the side of the river, the guides pulled from a large plastic drum reusable cups to make the hot chocolate. The boiling hot water was pulled from the side of the river where it was erupting from the earth, merging a few feet away with the glacial river water flowing north towards the Arctic Ocean. Can you imagine reusable mugs being used in this situation in the US?

For the most part there was very little roadside trash and debris. I did see some plastic trapped in barbed wire a few times, mostly coming from old plastic on farms where hay is baled and wrapped for winter storage. Our tour guide made a crack at one point exclaiming, “that’s where marshmallows are grown!” because the white bales of hay absolutely looked like super sized Jet-Puffed mallows! But cans of beer or cigarette wrappers on the roadsides? Non-existent. Even within Reykjavík.

The one thing I was concerned about was the pressure of visitor usage at all of the main natural areas we visited. Most of them are already very well roped or, in some areas, trails paved for access. That said, while there were crowds at most of the waterfalls, it wasn’t nearly as packed as some of our national parks here in the US. If you can make it through a trip to the Smokies or the Grand Canyon, this is a breeze. For a country of about 400,000 people where tourism only became mainstream around 2010, increased tourism will certainly have an impact on pollution and foot traffic in natural areas in the coming years. Perhaps Iceland’s pricier cost of living/tourism will continue to deter rampant tourism in the future but maybe they will just be able to manage it more efficiently than other tourist locales. There’s something to be said for being frozen and dark for a significant portion of the year in your ability to prevent massive throngs of people from overrunning your country.

Another thing Icelanders were really good about is separating out recycling, even in restaurants. There were often multiple bins for non-recyclables, plastic, paper, and then food waste, which is often turned into compost. The ability and desire is there. We could implement the same on a large scale here if we wanted to.

Back in the US, chaos continues to reign. If it isn’t one assault on the environment, it’s another. I know I’ve written multiple times this year about being unable to focus on any of it and that is continuing to stay the same since arriving back home. I thought a bit about this while I was gone, how to bridge this inability to focus and even find any care about it all. The only thing I’m able to do is continue to go hyperlocal. If it doesn’t focus on my book (SE Texas/the Big Thicket) or more broadly Texas (and even then, that seems like a lot), it is going in the Mere Curiosity pile in my brain. Anything more is Too Much and only brings grief. Not that grief isn’t wrapped around the Big Thicket, it is just more tenable.

One thing I would like to figure out is how to bring the culture of caring and support back to the US. Did we ever have that here? I think there are pockets but generally it’s every person for themselves, that rugged individualism we tout. It’s our downfall.

We have choices. It seems the US tends to make really bad ones.

How about all of y’all? How are you holding up in the last six months with this administration? I noticed yesterday that a prominent environmental writer that I looked forward to reading has disappeared from Substack. I find myself skipping over other broader articles about the assaults on agencies and parks and going to writers who are out there poking around in the woods, sharing their flora and fauna finds. It is easier to take in, to be reminded of the “why” behind it all.

Let me know how you are holding up in the comments below or hit reply via email!

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