Texas Pages

I walked in this morning while Houston columnist Gary Clark was making his presentation. I knew I was in a nature conference because when he flashed slides of birds -- say, a red-headed parrot in the Rio Grande Valley, or wild flamingo flying past an oil refinery -- audience members gasped in delight. But the obvious joy he gets writing about birds, flowers, dragonflies, eclipses and more reminded me that Texas is full of source material for nature writers -- and that the audience for such writing is there, too.

Of course, there are too many people who have not been reached by such writing. Susan Hanson, a writer who helped edit the recent anthology "What Wildness is This: Women Write About the Southwest," related the tale of a cranky student of hers who balked at an assignment by saying: "I'm from Houston. I don't know what nature is."

Her reply: What about hurricanes? What about mosquitoes? Alligators? Birds? Butterflies? The lesson, in other words: Everyone needs to be reminded of the nature all around them, whether they acknowledge it or not. (As one later speaker would say, everybody in Texas knows something about the environment, even if it's just, "Dang, it's hot!")

Keith Bowden had his own chilling tale of disconnected youth. The author of The Tecate Journals talked of students in Laredo who consider the natural world with indifference or fear, if at all. "Most of my students have no desire to take part in nature whatsoever."

Movies such as "Into the Wild" are as close as they get, "And that just reaffirms the idea that anybody who goes out into nature will die." They are fine with the idea that nature needn't get any closer to them than their TV screen, or computer monitor.

That contrasted with his own experiences canoeing the Lower Canyons of Rio Grande (he followed the river from El Paso to the Gulf for his book), which he called "the most sacred place on the planet." (That's quite a statement for someone who has, he says, wandered from the "top of Alaska to the bottom of South America.")

His comments about his students sank in after a remark from the final writer I heard, Texan Joe Nick Patoski. Echoing both previous speakers, he reminded the crowd, "We've got all these kids growing up in Houston" -- and he might as well have said Dallas -- "and they don't have any idea about nature. And they're going to be running the Legislature."

He was focusing on issues of water use, but he might have been talking about the whole mission of environmental writing when he said, "It's my job to make them care."

Because, as he noted, land stewardship is not something to be practiced only by millionaire ranchers. "If you have a backyard, or even an apartment, you're steward of even that tiny stretch of land."

Parts of today's sessions were very writer-conferency. There was a reading of a manuscript, and many random suggestions on how it could be improved. There was the expected, although not inappropriate, reference to John Graves' "Goodbye to a River."

But organizer David Taylor and his volunteers deserve credit for doing their job -- in reminding us of the power of writing. And the importance of making people care.