Another Hill Country View

Neither of the two major parties seems to think that their environmental policy proposals deserve emphasis in this year’s elections. The Republicans rest their hopes on culture wars and vulgar slogans. The Democrats as usual fear, with good reason, that sounding like tree huggers will not get them many votes in a state that worships the fossil fuel industry.

This is ironic. On the one hand, the Hill Country sells itself like a picture postcard of Bluebonnet kitsch, a holy land for birders, hunters, tubers, cowboys, cowgirls and steadfast stewards of the land. On the other, feverish developers just sell it as fast as they can, as if they feared the asphalt supply chain was breaking down. Why are there no Hill Country politicians who see this as a terrific opportunity to campaign as saviors of the picture postcard?

Maybe it has to do with the ambiguity of the Hill Country itself. What is it and where is it? The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department includes twenty-five counties in its Hill Country Wildlife District. That seems like a lot. Maps commonly show it as the southeastern quadrant of the Edwards Plateau with some extra territory added. You would think a plateau was more or less flat. So some would confine it closer to the Balcones Escarpment, even though the juniper and deer range much farther. Simple boundaries are hard to assign to a geologic history that refutes Einstein’s response to quantum mechanics, “God does not play dice with the universe.”

Maybe it has more to do with the history and legacy of human activity. It begins with the hunter-gatherers who started coming this way over ten thousand years ago, followed by the tribes that formed later and tended to settle in one region, and then the onslaught of Europeans, especially the Forty-Eighters from Germany, Poland and the rest of central Europe. Yet the region remained a backwater, a Texas Appalachia, for another hundred years because of the geologic legacy of uneven topography, shallow topsoil and unreliable rainfall. Agriculture worked a lot better in the East Texas forests, the coastal plain, and even the sandy red loam south of San Antonio. Besides, then as now, this is not the easiest place to build a railroad or any kind of road, especially if there is no oil or gas to exploit. Even the bold attempts at “progress,” dams on the Medina and Colorado Rivers, left the region behind the rest of the state.

Then something happened. World War II led American strategists to conclude that, if deterrence by a military industrial complex with a nuclear spear failed and the enemy came across the oceans, the first line of defense would be the borders. ( Note that this image still plays a big role in our politics today. In fact, it preceded Trump and Abbott with Jefferson Davis and his line of forts to crush indigenous resistance and make the Southwest safe for plantation slavery.) Therefore, the mobility of modern mechanized warfare had to be secured by an interstate highway grid east and west, north and south. For example, armor could be deployed from Mexico to Canada via Interstate 35.

As it turned out — and many far-sighted planners had expected this more bang for the buck — the roads morphed into “growth corridors.” Like the iron filings in a high school science project, people with their things and places were pulled into line along the corridor. Then they began to spill out, not only along the sides of I35 but also those of the crossing east-west corridor, I10. At last, the Hill Country accumulated real value, what the economists call “rents.” The Hill Country is a valuable, profitable place to put the spill.

Maybe it’s best to keep the political parties out of the lingering resistance to the spill. Leave it to the politically ambiguous organizations like the Hill Country Alliance, who can triangulate issues like loss of water, night sky and open spaces and thereby play both sides against the middle. Or leave it to the Great Springs Trail Project which, when and if completed, will enable me to park my electric DeLorean anywhere along I35 in the Austin-San Antonio megalopolis and hop onto my carbon frame bike for a tour of what used to be.

Or maybe there is still another vision of the future. We have only four national parks in the largest of the forty-eight states: the Big Thicket, Padre Island, Big Bend and the Guadalupe Mountains. Maybe it’s time for the Balcones Escarpment National Park. And Bandera could be the gateway, the Persimmon Gap of the Hill Country.

Tom Denyer has resided in the county since 1979.