July 1973
The Big Thicket Tangle
Politicians, lumber companies, and even Time, Inc., are maneuvering to tell us what kind of park, if any, we'll have. That is, if there is any Big Thicket left by then.
MIKE BUCKLEY IS READING Sports Illustrated. Strictly business. He had glanced through this particular issue before, but it had only been a cursory look. As a corporate officer of Time, Inc., the publishers of Sports Illustrated, he feels he needs to know what it's doing; he doesn't take the time to read very much, but feels uncomfortable at board of directors meetings if he can't talk about the magazines like everyone else. When this issue first came in, he hadn't even noticed the article that now engaged him more completely than anything he had read in years.
The Union Camp Paper Company, said the article, had donated to the federal government 50,000 acres of Virginia's Great Dismal Swamp to be used as a park. Sports Illustrated lauded the company for their generosity and environmental consciousness and, it seemed to Buckley, provided them a wealth of free publicity. Besides, he surmised, they could probably write off the donation for more than the land would be worth if sold outright. It seemed like The Answer, a grand-slam solution to the one great nagging problem that had been looming over his shoulder for a decade.
Mike Buckley is the president of Eastex, Inc., a timber, pulpwood and paper company that is one of the largest single landowners and employers in Southeast Texas. It is, as well, the most profitable subsidiary of that same Time, Inc., that publishes Sports Illustrated, Fortune, and Time. He is 63 years old and has spent the bulk of his life in the timber industry, transforming Texas pine trees into what must by now total a half-million houses and a billion tons of plywood, newsprint, cardboard and all the other incarnations of cellulose. He loves the woods and the outdoors, hunting and fishing, and he is proudly convinced that his company is doing its level best to preserve that environment, to utilize its recreational potential while harvesting its trees. In the years he has been in the industry he has helped to introduce modern techniques of hybridization, conservation, tree farming, game and forestry management, that seem to him a perfectly American blend of profitable private business and public-spirited concern for a national resource.
That's why he laughed when he first heard the proposal for a Big Thicket National Park, now more than ten years ago. He still hasn't changed that opinion much but he won't say it in public anymore. It just seemed ludicrous to him, to take woodland wilderness and protect it, in its natural state, when those same lands could be used to build homes and the Gross National Product. His friend and fellow timber executive Arthur Temple had called the Thicket a "varmint-infested swamp," and he privately agreed with him, could see no value in maintaining it.
Despite Mike Buckley, though, the idea of preservation had grown over the years, and support for a park had spread well beyond laughing distance. Americans are all caught up in this crazy environmentalism, he thinks, and politicians who ought to know better are scared not to pander to it. It's been steadily closing in on him, this problem of taking a park out of the middle of his woods, and in recent years it has occupied more and more of his time. He has continually given ground, he feels, been willing to compromise, first with the "String-of-Pearls," then this fool moratorium on cutting, other things, and now the board of directors is even willing to endorse a 75,000-acre park. Since the first of the year he has been to meetings in New York, Acapulco, Austin, Chicago, Washington, some of them several times, and at all of them the dilemma of the park has been a principal topic. And now, after ten years of retreat from "a silly idea," virtually on the edge of defeat, he sees in the article a solution.
Mike Buckley hurriedly makes phone calls. New York, Washington, Diboll, Houston. Support from other timber companies is quickly secured. He calls in Ollie Crawford, his right hand, the front man for the timber industry, and prepares to dispatch him to Washington to confer with the National Park Service. About 30,000 acres, they finally decide, just given to the government for that crazy park. He can see it, a last-gasp come-from-behind victory over those damned conservationists. (Jesus, Sports Illustrated will have to give us a story like that other one; we're both owned by the same company…)
Buckley writes letters, one to John Tower, the one U.S. Senator he knows he can count on (and a Republican, to help grease the rails with the Administration), and to the two congressmen he feels will aid him, Charlie Wilson and Jack Brooks. He xeroxes copies of the article and sticks them in the letters.
In Washington, Fred Bonavita, the bureau chief of The Houston Post, gets wind of the deal…
IT COMES ROLLING IN FROM the north and east, a great green cloud welling up from the gray sandy soil, rich green tiers billowing up one upon another, then cascading down again, occasionally gathered in the shape of loblolly pine or sweetgum, maple or beechwood, a soft, thick foam of green, chlorophyll gone wild. Pin oaks and massive yellow pines strain for release from the dense, dark underworld of laurel, yaupon and magnolia while the world's greatest cypresses march jaggedly, like the soldiers of Oz, down the banks of secret streams past baygalls and palmetto bogs.
Within the soft ambience of the Thicket exists an encyclopedic range of nature's permutations, botanical anachronisms found little or nowhere else in North America, refuged in a whirlpool of green. And, perhaps, nested somewhere in the recess, lives one of the world's rarest creatures, the ivory-bill woodpecker, its staccato pleas in prophetic harmony with the dread cries of the Southern Pine Wolf, the Caddo and the Tonkawa Indians, the Tennessee trappers and Alabama emigrants, all those who sought to live in the Thicket's green fastness.
Resting hard on the western edge of the Southern Pine Forest, the Big Thicket has been called "the biological crossroads of North America," the intersecting point of eight wholly separate ecological systems, the only spot on the continent where subtropical and temperate vegetation overlap. The National Park Service has described it as "containing elements common to the Florida Everglades, the Okefenokee Swamp, the Appalachian region, the Piedmont forests, and the open woodlands of the coastal plains." Characterized by one writer as "a biological Noah's Ark," the area has spawned the world's largest specimens of a score of different trees, three dozen varieties of wild orchids, ferns, flowers, mosses and fungi found nowhere else, and four of America's five carnivorous plants.
For generations the Thicket has been a Woodlands Mecca for Thoreauvian disciples; botanists, zoologists, ornithologists, herpetologists, all of biology's footsore specialists have made the pilgrimage and announced their wonderment. Tom Eisner, a biology professor in the distant marble sanctum of Cornell University, helps oversee Save the Big Thicket Committees on a hundred American campuses.
For an equally long succession of generations, men have sought in their various ways to exploit the Thicket's incredible fecundity and regenerative powers. The Alabama and Coushattas, migrating west, displaced earlier Indian occupants in their search for a home that white men couldn't subdue, and peopled the Thicket. Even the railroads, rumbling precursors of Industry, found the region an impenetrable tangle of vines and swamps, and detoured to the north and south. For five generations the only white settlers were prairie iconoclasts, late-coming homesteaders, Civil War deserters, smugglers, rum-runners, trappers and hunters.
Then finally came Industry, timber and oil companies who rode technology into the Thicket and came out with riches. The oil companies spilled their wastes in the streams and bogs, lumbermen scythed relentlessly through virgin woods and, acre by acre, the Thicket shrunk. The ivory-bill hunted solitude in the deeper reaches while the buzz-saw chased after it. The Big Thicket, by the middle of this century, was little more than a metaphor for the 3 million acres it had once been, and conservationists became alarmed. The only answer, Lance Rosier felt, was a Big Thicket National Park.
Known in his last years as "Mr. Big Thicket," Rosier was a self-taught naturalist, a man who struck with Nature a Faustian bargain, trading comfort and companionship for the Wisdom of the Woodlands. He catalogued hundreds of species of new plants, discovered specimens of life forms thought extinct or anomalous, learned the secrets of the Thicket in a way few men know themselves. In 1962 he helped found the Big Thicket Association, dedicated to the preservation of the area and intent upon creating from it a national park.
In 1966, Ralph Yarborough, who had grown up in a Huck Finn jumble of home-made rafts and barefooted wanderings down the Neches River, introduced in the U.S. Senate the first Big Thicket National Park bill. An introspective, sentimental man, who rummages deep into his East Texas roots for the populist energies that still keep him going, Yarborough was the first great champion of Texas conservationists. He was the Big Thicket's first martyr.
He was defeated for reelection in the 1970 Democratic Primary by Lloyd Bentsen, who went on to win the general election and occupy the Yarborough Senate seat. In the lame duck session of the 91st Congress, largely as a personal tribute to him, Yarborough's Senate colleagues passed the bill he had introduced and fought for through four years: the creation of a Big Thicket National Park of "not more than" 100,000 acres. The House of Representatives did nothing; Colorado Rep. Wayne Aspinall, then Chairman of the House Interior Committee and a feisty opponent of environmental matters, declined to return to Washington for the session and his committee never met.
Bentsen, now the Democratic nominee to replace Yarborough, promptly surprised the timber industry, which had avidly supported him in the primary, by endorsing the notion of a 100,000-acre park. Houston Congressman George Bush, the GOP nominee for the Senate seat, upped the ante by calling for a 150,000-acre park and introducing a House bill to that end. Political expedience clearly spoke in favor of a Big Thicket National Park.
