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Sky Lewey, winner of the 2004 National Wetlands Award for Education and Outreach,
gave the following remarks when accepting her award at a ceremony held at the Capitol
in Washington, D.C., on May 20. Ms. Lewey is the resource protection and public
education associate for the Nueces River Authority, based in Uvalde, Texas.
Thank you. I am deeply honored and equally humbled to be here this evening accepting
such a distinguished award from such a distinguished group of people. Never in my
wildest dreams did I dream of such a thing.
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When I told people back home about it, they gave me the strangest looks.
Wetland? Southwest Texas is Dry Country, on the eastern edge of the Chihuahuan desert.
The Nueces River basin is big, 17,000 square miles and 24 watersheds. Our coastal
wetlands, where the Nueces meets the Gulf of Mexico, are expansive and widely
acclaimed. Conservation efforts have been in full swing down there for years and most
people there understand the term wetland. But in the headwaters country, we have wet
spots punctuating dry land. Water holes, creeks, and springs and spring-fed streams and
seeps have special standing in local history and in people’s hearts and in the lives of
plants and animals. They were the nuclei of native civilization for thousands of years;
they were the chosen spots for Spanish missions in the 1700s and U.S. Army posts a
century later. They were the drawing card for early settlement, and now they are the
centerfold in real estate catalogs, but they are seldom referred to as wetlands.
The rugged canyons of the upper Nueces basin are a desperate land, where life
clings to water; only a fine line separates wetlands from dry lands, cactus from ferns, and
thorn brush from buttonbush. In drought I have watched great blue herons and buzzards
huddled together around drying pothole in the river’s bed, one feeding on the live and the
other waiting on the dead. A few weeks later rushing chocolate floodwaters covered the
same pothole. These are still—mostly still—natural rivers that run and flood and pulse
and have their way with man. They are wetlands, special lands, and a resource I love.
I grew up there, swimming in the Nueces’s green depths, drinking from its
springs, herding cattle from riparian thickets, and rebuilding water gaps on the tributaries,
and I watched the resource suffer from overgrazing, overpumping, and overuse. But the
worst abuse I have observed is an uninformed, unaware, insensitive love. Off-road
vehicle recreation became an overnight sensation in these stream beds. There were
enthusiasts coming from other states and events with over 100 vehicles. And they loved
four-wheeling in the rivers: big rocks, little rocks, cliffs to climb and obstacles to
maneuver, nice swimming holes, water to cool off an overheated engine, shade trees to
8mechanic under, and no people, no law, and no rules.
In Texas we do not like to apply regulation too hastily. And for good reason: it is
a big state; statewide rules are usually not appropriate. Regulations that make sense near
the Louisiana border are often ridiculous on the New Mexico border. When Senate Bill
155 was voted out of committee at 11:38 p.m. on the eve of Mother's Day last year, we
were sure that divine intervention had occurred. The following Monday the Democratic
delegation went to Oklahoma, shutting down the 78th session. They returned just in time
for the floor vote and Senate Bill 155, an act protecting freshwater areas by banning
motor vehicles from Texas rivers, passed with flying colors. It was one of the most
popular pieces of legislation to come out of Austin last year. The rivers are recovering,
rookeries are rebuilding, vegetation is returning, and stream channels are normalizing.
I kayaked over 100 miles during the summer and fall of 2001 to determine the
extent of the problem and build a base for our education efforts. Seeing the rivers from
water level gave me new insight. Awareness is not a possession; it is a process.
The Nueces starts near Rocksprings with an accumulation of spring-fed creeks
and flows through rough and rocky canyons, gaining flow from and losing flow to the
aquifers that lie below.
Out of the hill country and over the South Texas brushlands, once known as the
Wild Horse Desert, it finds its course. Longhorns, mustangs, and free ranging desperados,
characters right out of Lonesome Dove, drank from it waters. Some still do. The river
seems to breed character. My home town of Uvalde has produced some characters, like
Matthew McConaughey, the movie star; Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s vice president,
John Nance Garner; former Texas Governor Dolph Briscoe; Dale Evans, my favorite
cowgirl; and Willis, Joe, Jess and Doc, the Newton Boys, the outlaws.
Neither the desperados, the train robbers, the vice-president, nor the Hollywood
cowgirl would have dreamed that we would have the problems that we have now. The old
ranching families are disappearing and their grazing lands are being transformed into
recreational properties centered around a river view sometimes bulldozed through
riparian forests. When geologic processes that are older than man reconfigure pools into
riffles, backhoes attempt to replace the swimming holes. Public access points are
numerous, but, unmanaged and unappreciated, many have become eyesores and trash
dumps, testifying to public insensitivity. An untrained love of our rivers carries non-
native invasive vegetation from over-landscaped banks and silt from mechanical
disturbances and all manner of other things into the streams. The state senate’s “act
protecting freshwater areas” from off-road vehicle recreation is under attack from those
who seek pleasure at the expense of our wetlands.
We cannot expect people to protect what they do not understand. People used to
learn from the land; often their very existence depended on stewardship. But nowadays
most kids would prefer to remain indoors playing video games 300 yards from a creek,
their water piped into the house, having no idea where it comes from or why it is clean.
The irony is that those living closest to these precious resources know the least about how
to protect them. Instead of dos and don’ts, they need hows and whys. I have been taking
this lesson to people for three years and have reached out to over 6,000. It works best to
take them to the river, but we can't take them all, and they all need to know. We need
help. I hope this award will help—help us find friends and funding to make sure they all
know.
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