ABSTRACT
To the frontier mind, the land and its resources are in endless supply — but time is wasting, others are coming, so the choice is to maximize profits today or share the bounty with others tomorrow. Individual initiative searched for opportunity and seized on it when found. With small government, low taxes, and light regulation, opportunity time and again produced feeding frenzies that burned out the resource before its time. Robert Calvert has written that, “Intruders into the frontier often recklessly ravaged the natural resources of the region. This resulted in the decimation of the great buffalo herds, the overgrazing of the range, the stripping of timber lands without regard for the future, and the pollution of rivers, streams, and the Gulf.” 2
While Texans have always enjoyed the beauties of nature, the urge to preserve nature for its own sake has been suspect. John Graves, author of the iconic Goodbye to a River (1960) and of the quotation above, explained that his beloved Hill Country land, now mostly limestone and scrub cedar, once was covered with three or four feet of top soil. But two generations of intensive cotton farming scraped it down to rock and left him dreaming about what it once must have looked like. What makes Graves, at 92, a Texas treasure is that few Texans, then or now, have taken time to protect the landscape, let alone dream about what it looked like when it was pristine.
