Rio Grande,
edited by Jan Reid,
U. of Texas Press,
337 pgs., 2004.

The week before I sat down to read Rio Grande, a thick new anthology about the famed river edited by Texas scribe Jan Reid, a strange sight appeared on the actual Rio Grande outside the border town of Eagle Pass, Texas. A fiberglass statue of Jesus was discovered grounded on a sandbar in the river, drawing faithful visitors from both sides of the border to its river-stained robes. Admittedly, little connects the literature of the river and the religious relic that appeared there this fall — except, perhaps, this: the contributors to the book and the worshipers of the statue share the conviction that the river needs a savior.

That’s one conclusion made crystal clear by this literary-minded collection, which pulls together a kaleidoscope of sources into a nearly definitive volume focused not just on the ecology of the Rio Grande but also its history and the cultures that have relied upon it for the last 15,000 years, from natives to conquistadors, cowboys to smugglers, farmers to migrant workers.

Swinging over troubled waters.

Photo: James Evans,
courtesy of U. of Texas Press.

Even if you’ve never picked up a book on the Rio Grande (known as the Rio Bravo del Norte in Mexico), you’re probably aware that something has been amiss with the river and its surroundings for quite a while. In 2001, the region’s water crisis earned a kind of ecological exclamation point when, for the first time on record, the 1,885-mile river ceased to reach the Gulf of Mexico, its ultimate destination. Drought, irrigation demands, and invasive plant species such as salt cedar had literally sucked the river dry, so that when it reached Boca Chica (“little mouth”), the stream no longer had the volume to push through the last hundred or so feet of sand. Heavy rains this year have helped restore the flow, but, as Reid writes in the epilogue, “We have let the Rio Grande become the river that can no longer find its way to the sea.”

My own relationship to the river has been both professional and recreational. In 2002, I drove to Boca Chica, like Reid, to see where the water turns brackish after passing through a tangle of exotic water hyacinth and finally reaches the Gulf of Mexico. I’ve interviewed epidemiologists and health officials concerning the impact of industrial and residential effluent on valley communities, which suffer high rates of birth defects and other unexplained health maladies probably tied to water quality. I’ve hiked the deep canyons of Big Bend National Park, where the stream dries to a trickle during the summer, and ridden in now-forbidden rowboats across the water in wintertime to enjoy home-cooked enchiladas and cheap beer in the dusty towns of northern Mexico. I’m grateful to have had those experiences, because after reading this book, I’m impressed that the river has any life left in it at all.

Car 54, where are you?

Photo: Earl Nottingham,
courtesy of U. of Texas Press.

And yet Rio Grande is no mere compendium of complaints about how humanity has harmed the “great” or “fierce” or “large” river (depending on who’s translating which name). Rather, it’s a sampling of stories from communities that span both sides of the boundary water and its length from the Rocky Mountains of Colorado to beaches at Boca Chica. Reaching back in time, the book includes characters such as the wandering 16th century conquistador Cabeza de Vaca, Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, and a host of not-so-famous Rio Grande fixtures. The book also touches on contemporary politics, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, Mexico’s current water debt to the United States (which remains a sticking point between President Bush and his Mexican counterpart Vicente Fox), and the increased militarization of the border after Sept. 11, 2001.

One notable early chapter comes from crusading journalist John Reed, who covered the Mexican Revolution in 1914, some five years before embarking for revolutionary Russia. In a depressing scene with distinct contemporary reverberations, Reed describes his experience crossing the border to cover the conflict, and the experience of travelers headed in the opposite direction. “Along the main street passed an unbroken procession of sick, exhausted, starving people, driven from the interior by fear of the approaching rebels over the most terrible desert in the world,” he writes. “Then they passed on to the river, and on the American side they had to run the gauntlet of the United States customs and immigration officials and the Army Border Patrol, who searched them for arms.”

As befits an anthology about a river, dipping in and out of this book at different points rewards the reader with different views of the water, the people, and the land. In addition to Reed and Reid (who recently coauthored The Hammer, a biography of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay), Rio Grande offers voices from the Lone Star state, sundry corners of the Southwestern borderlands, and beyond. Included are excerpts from novelists John Nichols’ The Milagro Beanfield War and Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, as well as contributions from Reid’s journalistic contemporaries, including GQ writer-at-large Robert Draper and Atlantic Monthly contributor William Langewiesche, the noted Chicana writers Gloria Anzaldua and Cecilia Balli, and others.

Shack treatment.

Photo: Alan Pogue,
courtesy of U. of Texas Press.

In addition to these diverse voices, Rio Grande makes excellent use of black-and-white images taken by a variety of photographers, including Ansel Adams and other well-known shutterbugs associated with the region. But rather than rely on the Sierra Club strategy of sparking our sympathies with idealized landscapes, Reid mixes in many photos that give a clear sense of the often difficult life along the river. “It is a broken river now, overused, abused, and in peril,” Reid writes. “Yet still it glows emerald-like in a collective imagination. And that mystique is its best hope for salvation.”

That’s a nice sentiment, but it also suggests the main problem with Rio Grande, which studiously avoids prescribing changes in the management of the river. The book addresses ecological problems up and down the Rio Grande, but there’s nary a hint of a solution in sight. Like the unfortunate lack of an index, this absence leaves the reader at a loss for how, exactly, to navigate the text. Rio Grande offers a poetic tribute to cultures and communities threatened and extinguished — but the river is still pressing onward, however meagerly, and thus we might expect the book to be more than just a eulogy. Still, Rio Grande helps remind us what’s at stake, and that may be inspiration enough.

Except for the occasional palm or banana tree, the Himalayan canyon walls look like those carved by the Salmon River in Idaho: The hillsides are brown and dotted with pine groves, and the boulder-strewn banks of the river give way to stretches of white sand. But this is the Bhagirathi River, half a world away from the Rocky Mountains, and I am on what is billed as the last expedition on this stretch of one of north India’s holiest waterways, before it is permanently altered by completion of the controversial Tehri Dam.

Dam site for sore eyes.

Photo: Dan Oko.

Framed by the hulking Himalayas, some 200 miles north of New Delhi, the Tehri Dam stands 855 feet high, making it the fifth-tallest dam in the world — a dubious distinction in this earthquake-prone region. The $1.2 billion hydroelectric project got underway in 1978 and has been the subject of numerous lawsuits, demonstrations, and hunger strikes, none of them successful. When the monsoon reaches north India this summer, the rains will help fill the enormous reservoir where more than 100 villages once stood. One of dozens of controversial hydro projects in India, the Tehri Dam promises to produce power and provide drinking water and irrigation supplies — but at an unknown, and worrisome, social and environmental cost.

Lately, the government of India has been promoting a so-called Garland of Rivers, a multinational river-linking project that would connect 37 major rivers through a series of dams and canals spanning the subcontinent. The project is intended to offset devastating regional cycles of drought and flood, provide rural and urban populations with stable supplies of drinking water, and harness some 34,000 megawatts of hydroelectricity. The scope of the Garland of Rivers, which calls for cooperation from neighboring Bangladesh, Nepal, and Bhutan, is unparalleled in Asia; not even China’s notorious Three Gorges Dam comes close.

In order to understand India’s predilection for dam building on such a staggering scale, you have to grasp the almost equally staggering rise in demand for water from agricultural, residential, commericial, and industrial sources in this developing nation of a billion-plus souls. Nobody knows exact figures, but groundwater supplies, which provide nearly 90 percent of rural drinking water and more than half of the drinking water for India’s major cities, are declining, and industrial pollution has contaminated major rivers such as the Yamuna and Ganges. Meanwhile, the population booms and urban development continues apace. Drought is a major regional concern, and dams such as the Tehri are seen as both a safety net and a down payment on India’s industrial promise. When complete, the Tehri project alone will provide 270 million gallons of drinking water per day, irrigation for thousands of acres of farmland, and 2,000 megawatts of electricity across the region.

Even as the reservoir behind the Tehri Dam fills, however, resettlement of nearly 100,000 villagers upstream remains a topic in India’s daily papers. Questions likewise persist about the project’s safety in this shaky geological zone, where earthquakes and landslides are commonplace.

Activist Himanshu Thakkar of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers, and People acknowledges that India needs to solve its water problems, but he maintains that the issue is resource mismanagement. Large-scale dams and river-linking plans, he says, simply compound difficulties surrounding pollution, deforestation, and wildlife conservation. “Until we have a full evaluation of local water sufficiency,” Thakkar says, “we do not think there is any justification for undertaking these other projects.”

Rapid descent.

Photo: Dan Oko.

Back in the Paddle

The 20 paddlers who have joined me on the Bhagirathi — most of them American expatriates — are only mildly concerned about the environmental impact of the Tehri Dam. In fact, many know nothing about the status of the river. Nevertheless, our first glimpse of the dam site prompts a hush that outlasts any silence brought on by whitewater anticipation over the next three days. In the distance, bulldozers and dump trucks look like mutant insects scuttling across the dust bowl that has replaced the town of Tehri. Across thousands of acres, the lone reminder of the communities that once occupied the area is a single Hindu temple that it seemed no one was willing to tear down.

As we chase the river through slot canyons where hydraulic forces have sculpted huge cave-pocked cliffs, our guides point out where awe-inspiring, boat-flipping waves have been replaced by small technical rapids that require barrel-race type maneuvers rather than the sheer power of strong paddlers. “We’ve never seen it this low,” says our boat captain, Dheuv Rana, who grew up in a village downstream and blames the dam authorities for spoiling rafting on the Bhagirathi.

Nonetheless, close to our trip’s halfway mark, positive energy begins to percolate. On the morning of the second day, the Bhagirathi joins with the Alakananda River flowing from the east and officially becomes the Ganges, India’s most famous and sacred waterway. As we come to the convergence, a series of large waves makes us dig in with our paddles. When the whitewater subsides, I notice increasing signs of settlement on the banks above. Heavy ropes drop into the water, where they attach to primitive nets used to catch thick-bodied carp called mahaseer. From the shore, villagers cheer us on.

Happy rafters.

Photo: Dan Oko.

All smiles, we hit two more sets of waves and a pair of paddlers fall out of the boat trailing ours, splashing merrily. It’s an auspicious place to take an accidental swim, we learn. Hindu people view the natural linking of two rivers such as the confluence of the Alakananda and Bhagirathi as a potent place to wash away sins — and all the more so at the headwaters of the holy Ganges.

The rivers meet at the town of Devprayag, where we find an enormous staircase, or ghat, leading down from a whitewashed temple. Worshippers bathing in the green current hold tight to a chain attached to the stairs; many stare with wonder at the predominantly pale-faced men passing in big blue rafts. We bow our heads out of respect.

Water Over the Dam

It’s hard to reconcile the spiritual significance many Indians attach to their waterways with the emphasis the nation currently places on hydroelectric development. There’s the Tehri Dam project here on the Bhagirathi. In the western state of Gujarat, there’s India’s most infamous dam, the $6 billion Narmada Valley undertaking, scheduled for completion in 2025. Hundreds of thousands of villagers have already been displaced. And if India chooses to ignore concerns over societal and environmental risks — ranging from civil strife to deforestation to mass epidemics — construction will begin on the Garland of Rivers within 12 years.

Hot dam.

Photo: Dan Oko.

Author and water-development expert Ramaswamy Iyer of the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi says that the advantages touted by proponents of huge dam projects and river linking reflect little more than wishful thinking. Iyer argues that conservation and water harvesting, or capturing rainfall, can do more to offset local difficulties than large-scale dam projects, which will embroil all of India in the problems of a few states. “If we forget for a moment the questionable calculus of supply and demand, and look at ‘security’ from the point of view of the ecological system,” he says, “we begin to realize that by building a series of large [water-resource development] projects, we may not be ensuring security but endangering it.”

This line is echoed globally by conservation-minded critics such as Patrick McCully, campaigns director for the California-based International Rivers Network, who visited Tehri in 2002. McCully says that in the Himalayas, where 14 waterways are targeted for Garland of Rivers projects, heavy sedimentation creates an obstacle for dam efficiency (dirt carried in the water interferes with the machinery), while maintenance on older dams often gets neglected in favor of new construction. Dam professionals agree with many of the IRN’s technical assessments. McCully supports water harvesting and other alternatives to dam building.

Monkey Wrench Ganges?

Just as the hydropower debate echoes across the subcontinent even after construction is well underway on dams, so too do we paddlers continue to feel the dark shadow of the Tehri Dam long after the actual structure has disappeared from view.

Still, in a quiet moment, we hear the elaborate song of the whistling thrush. While paddling, we spot four different species of kingfisher, including the pied kingfisher known as the “zebra of the air” for its black and white markings. Even at diminished levels, the river commands our attention; lest we forget the current’s power, the guides refuse to let us remove our lifejackets even in the calmest stretches.

Dead river’s float.

Photo: Dan Oko.

The third day finds us galvanized after having maneuvered through countless rapids, more than a little sunburned, and eager for more action. After two days of nearly relentless rapids, though, there’s not much whitewater left to face, so we gird ourselves for the upstream wind that blows each afternoon. The stiff breeze is not unpleasant, but it hinders our progress, and lunch is waiting. Towns and villages grow more common with each passing mile, and I’m struck by the havoc that would result should the dam fail. With the settlements upstream all but demolished, the dire warnings that the Tehri Dam is built on a dangerous fault line remain a final, if unlikely, reason that the authorities could delay filling the reservoir. Half a million or more lives could be at risk if this dam fails.

I can’t help but wonder if somewhere in India, the world’s largest democracy, the subcontinent’s answer to Ed Abbey’s Monkey Wrench Gang is waiting in the wings. A couple of days after our trip has ended, I even mention the ultimate Abbey solution — blowing up the dam — to a friend of mine deep into Eastern religion. “Nature has its own explosives, doesn’t it?” he smiles. I’m reminded that many Indians hold dear their own destructive hero: Shiva, a god central to Hinduism. He’s often called the Destroyer, and his mythological home just happens to be the Himalayas.

Barton Springs salamander:
charismatic microfauna.
Photo: City of Austin.

But given the real and symbolic importance of the springs frequented by the salamander, the deep-in-the-heart-of-Texas struggle to save the salamander has corollaries with the battles on behalf of the nation’s charismatic megafauna. A pair of pending lawsuits filed by Austin environmentalists to protect the Barton Springs salamander belie the notion that bigger creatures inspire — or deserve — bigger support.

One of the suits targets the U.S. EPA for failing to protect water quality along the creek; a legal agreement reached last December continues to languish without an authorizing signature from the Bush administration. The other suit alleges that a new regional water-supply system planned by the semi-private Lower Colorado River Authority fails to adequately address environmental concerns while encouraging unwanted development.

A Deal with the Devil?

Local environmentalists have not always been so aggressive in their litigation. Nearly a decade ago, well ahead of lawsuits that led former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt to list the salamander under the Endangered Species Act in 1997, environmentalists brokered a deal intended to prevent developers from impinging on the land around Barton Springs. That deal, spearheaded by the Save Our Springs Alliance (SOS) and known officially as the SOS Ordinance, still stands as a watershed event in Austin politics.

Barton Springs Pool.

Photo: Gregg A. Eckhardt.

The hope was that the ordinance would preserve Barton Springs as a source of drinking water in this notoriously water-deprived state, as (in part) a swimming hole where thousands congregate during the summer to take a break from the hot Texas sun, and — not incidentally — as the home of the Barton Springs salamander. The SOS Ordinance limited building along the Barton Creek section of the Edwards Aquifer “recharge zone,” which feeds Barton Springs and supplies most of Austin’s drinking water.

Viewed by some radical voices as a compromise measure, the ordinance nonetheless mitigated the impact of development in a community largely at the mercy of developers and private-property rights advocates. In turn, zoning rules limited the amount of pollution from runoff and created a boundary of 200 feet around the creek within which development could not take place. Unfortunately for wildlife and swimmers alike, recent tests have shown a variety of pollutants continue to find their way into the spring-fed pools.

The listing of the salamander as a federally protected endangered species in turn gave environmentalists another set of tools to preserve the springs. In fact, the two pending lawsuits filed by SOS advance the cause of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service scientists entrusted with ensuring the salamanders’ survival. At the heart of both lawsuits is the question of just how development affects the salamander. Says Bill Bunch, chief legal counsel and SOS executive director, “When the salamander was listed, the chief threat was pollution from urban development. The listing definitely helped, but there’s tremendous economic pressure to keep building. It’s not a pretty picture.”

Well-Connected Hicks

Indeed, Census 2000 data indicate that the population of greater Austin has grown more than 26 percent, one of the highest growth rates in the country. (The national growth rate was 9.6 percent. In Boulder County, Colo., which has also seen a tremendous boom in the last 10 years, growth was 21.2 percent.) “We’re fighting a losing battle,” says USFWS biologist Bill Seawell, who believes that a regional watershed protection plan needs to be put in place if Texans are serious about saving the salamander. “Water-quality degradation from development is still the number one threat to the survival of the species.”

Few doubt that the Bush White House will make it even harder to protect endangered species like the salamander, but you don’t have to travel to Washington, D.C., to see the writing on the wall. In Austin, a protracted fight between environmentalists and Stratus Properties reflects one ongoing threat to the salamander. Stratus Properties is seeking approval from the City of Austin for a 4,000-acre development in the Barton Creek watershed that calls for 1,400 homes, a golf course, and more.

The company’s primary investor, Tom Hicks, is well connected. Hicks made news a few years ago when he purchased the Texas Rangers for $250 million from a group of investors that included then-Governor George W. Bush. More recently, Hicks’s firm emerged as one of the top donors to Bush’s presidential campaign.

For many central Texans, the fight to preserve the salamander and its home springs amounts to a battle for the soul of Austin. But optimism is fading. “It all feels kind of fated,” says Robert Bryce, a veteran Austin Chronicle political reporter who has written extensively on Stratus and can be found almost weekly swimming in the Barton Springs pool with his children. “The pool used to be something that symbolized old Austin, but its profile has been eclipsed by the high-tech sector and Bush, so now it symbolizes all that we have lost.”

This ocelot doesn’t have nine lives.
Photo: U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife.

When the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) decided in the late ’90s to beef up its border operations in the lower Rio Grande Valley, it followed that it would become harder to hide out in the brushy habitat stretching between the small towns of south Texas. But the INS didn’t realize that by increasing patrols, clearing ground cover, erecting fences, paving roads, and shining bright lights along river basins, it would not just put pressure on illegal immigrants and smugglers but also diminish the chances of survival for a pair of endangered wildcats, the ocelot and jaguarundi.

These cats persist in only a few areas of the American West. At last count, there were fewer than 100 ocelots in Texas, most making their homes in the various federal wildlife refuges that dot the Rio Grande Valley, which Johnny French of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) calls “our string-of-pearls refuge,” because, unlike most national preserves and parks, the properties are not part of a complete whole. The housecat-sized jaguarundi may be even more rare than the ocelot: The only confirmed jaguarundi sightings in Texas since the last census nearly a decade ago have been roadkill.

Blinded by the light? A jaguarundi.

Both of these sensitive kitties prefer to roam in thick native grasses that harbor insects, birds, and rodents, the kind of ecosystem that is fast disappearing from Texas and elsewhere thanks to increased development and the conversion of grasslands into cattle ranches. “We’re losing habitat all over the place,” says French. “It’s a private lands issue, and we just don’t have a lot of control over that, but we can preserve more habitat for the cats with the help of the border patrol. It’s not going to be easy, but I’m sure we can find a way to work this out.”

Complicating the already tense situation, French notes, are human rights questions and issues of economic disparity that threaten to dwarf ecological concerns in the region.

Border, Border in the Court

Last year, environmentalists filed a lawsuit accusing the INS of initiating Operation Rio Grande without adequate public comment or environmental review. According to Defenders of Wildlife, the Sierra Club, and the Frontera chapter of the Audubon Society, the law enforcement agency was negligent when it started placing lights along the border, and it had not adequately consulted with fellow federal agencies when it came to the Endangered Species Act.

Defending the INS, assistant border patrol chief Rey Garza says that the environmentalists tripped up his agency on a technicality. The agency’s main failure, he says, was to not make its plans available to the public as required under the National Environmental Policy Act, but he maintains that for three years, the INS had regular consultations with the USFWS over Operation Rio Grande.

Prime kitty habitat along the Rio Grande.

Under the terms of a settlement reached in September, the USFWS and the EPA will be involved in a formal review of Operation Rio Grande and will consult endangered species statutes with regard to the ocelot and jaguarundi. A full environmental impact statement (EIS) will be completed by next summer, and the public will get two months to comment. Until the EIS is completed, the INS will close 11 roads along the wildlife corridor, limit mowing in the Rio Grande floodplain, and refrain from installing new lights, fences, boat ramps, and roads. As the INS looks at future projects along the U.S.-Mexico border, this case may provide a model for what’s acceptable.

The settlement pleases Mary Lou Campbell, a Texas Audubon member, who has been on the ground working with the border patrol to make the efforts of the INS more environmentally friendly. “Sometimes it takes public action to get the federal agencies to follow the law, but we have to be optimistic,” says Campbell. “This is a region of enormous biodiversity. It’s a meeting place between tropical and subtropical ecosystems, and serves as a last frontier for many of these species.”

Garza of the INS says he believes national security and environmental policy can be compatible in the long run. “Of course we believe national security is more important,” he says, “but there was quite a bit of controversy and I think we’ve shown that we can work together and turned this into a positive thing.”

The New York Times ad.

Image: STRP.

As the GOP presidential hopeful prepared to accept his party’s nomination earlier this month, the San Francisco-based Sea Turtle Restoration Project (STRP) ran a full-page ad in the New York Times implicating Bush in the deaths of thousands of turtles that have washed up on Texas beaches since he took office in the state. The ad calls on the governor to support proposed shrimp fishing regulations in Texas that would have the side effect of helping turtle populations. “Will Governor Bush save the sea turtles dying on Texas beaches?” asks the ad.

Concerned over declining shrimp harvest levels during the past two decades, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD) has proposed the creation of a no-shrimping zone extending five nautical miles off the state’s southern coast into the Gulf of Mexico. In addition to boosting shrimp numbers, environmentalists say the plan could spell good news for sea turtles and other marine species harmed by the $60 million-per-year shrimp industry. The department has been holding hearings on its proposal and is accepting public comment until Aug. 30. (Find out how you can submit comments.) The TPWD commissioners will vote on the plan on Aug. 31, and environmentalists think a few words from Bush in support of the proposal could cinch its approval.

A net loss — sea turtle caught with shrimp.

Photo: STRP.

Says STRP campaign director Teri Shore: “The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department wants immediate action to prevent the collapse of the Texas shrimp fishery and deaths of sea turtles, but Gov. Bush remains conveniently silent, hiding behind the election.” Having gained a modicum of fame by dressing in sea-turtle costumes and accosting officials at last year’s World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, Shore and her cohorts hope that public pressure can not only lead to the no-fishing zone but also galvanize a tentative proposal to create a larger marine reserve to protect turtles.

Jumbo Shrimp Problems

Last year was one of the worst years on record for sea turtle strandings, says STRP. A near-record 450 turtles washed up dead or dying on Texas beaches in 1999, according to the Sea Turtle Stranding Network, a volunteer monitoring group; federal officials confirm these numbers. Of these, nearly 100 were Kemp’s ridley turtles, a species listed as endangered. Many people believe these deaths can be attributed to turtles getting tangled up in shrimping equipment.

Tangled up in blue.

Photo: NMFS.

For their part, though, Texas officials claim the turtle population is doing pretty well. According to Robin Riechers, the director of coastal fisheries management for TPWD, proposals to limit shrimping could have beneficial side effects for sea turtles, but those creatures are not the main concern. Decisions concerning restrictions on the shrimp industry are primarily intended to provide a safety net for the fishery, says Riechers, though he acknowledges that nearly half the aquatic animals caught by shrimp boats are non-target species. “We want to reverse the current trends,” he says, “and lessen the fishing pressure on the shrimp both offshore and in the bays. But we’ve got to balance a lot of different priorities; we have a lot of different stakeholders even within the shrimp industry itself.”

Shore claims that the TPWD has been reduced to such mealymouthed explanations because Bush has failed to take an aggressive stand on protecting natural resources — and Texas environmentalists doubt the governor will change his song anytime soon. Brian Sybert, natural resources director with the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club, has been lobbying to rein in the shrimp industry for months but doesn’t hold out a lot of hope for aggressive reform from the TPWD commission. “Implementing regulations is a real challenge for some of these commissioners,” says Sybert. “They’re Bush appointees, of course, so they don’t want to interfere with anybody’s business.”

Life’s not a beach for sea turtles.

Photo: USFWS.

Through the spring and summer at public meetings in south Texas, the shrimp industry has been vocal with regard to proposed rule changes. Fishers oppose not just the controversial no-shrimp zone along South Padre Island where turtles nest, but also any shortening of the shrimp season or changes in equipment that might reduce the amount of non-target species taken in shrimp nets. Industry representatives say the government should look for other culprits in declining shrimp harvests, such as pollution, and they trot out the tried-and-true cry that jobs will be lost if the state sees fit to further regulate the industry.

The Texas Shrimp Association even threatened to sue the Sierra Club for libel if it didn’t back down from claims that the industry was to blame for turtle deaths. The Sierra Club refused; nothing happened. “It’s the same old rhetoric,” says Sybert.

The lone turtle of Texas?

Photo: USFWS.

Still, he believes that some good could come out of the new shrimp plan. “We’ve got the support of all the environmental groups, and we’ve even got TPWD out on a limb. They’ve got the science to back it up. People have been monitoring this for 20 years, and we know it’s during the shrimp season when the most turtles wash up on the beaches.”

Sybert also notes that the green groups have found an additional ally that might just force TPWD to take their concerns a little more seriously. This spring an alliance of sport anglers added their voices to those in favor of stronger shrimp regulations, providing turtle advocates with a teammate that’s worth approximately $2 billion to the Texas economy — and also one to which Bush, an avowed angler himself, might actually listen.