Land That I Love
Bob Eppenauer and other ranchers in the Davis Mountains want to protect their beloved high country from encroaching subdivisions and golf courses. But the only way to save it may be to give it away.
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In a state like Texas, where 98 percent of the land is privately owned and property rights are defended passionately, conservation easements appear to be the only chance to save places like the Davis Mountains. A conservation easement is a legal contract—a binding promise to set aside green space. A landowner may donate the easement to the Conservancy, or TNC may buy the land and resell it subject to an easement. The advantage to the landowner is that by giving up the opportunity to develop the land for its “highest and best use,” he lowers the value of the land and also benefits from lower income and inheritance taxes—and he and his descendants can go on using the easement for ranching, subject to a grazing and management plan worked out with TNC. The Conservancy has used this tool in New England, Florida, North Carolina, and Texas, at Hooks Woods near Tomball and at Dolan Falls on the Devil’s River, but conservation easements have never been applied on such a large scale as King envisions using them in the Davis Mountains.
You may have heard of the New Urbanism, in which planners and city leaders work with developers to accommodate growth while preserving the integrity of neighborhoods and the values that make a city a desirable place to live. King is the face of the New Ruralism. An exceptionally engaging, sandy-haired man of 42 who can make a stranger feel like an old friend in a matter of minutes, he is championing conservation easements as the tool that will preserve rural character and values. In 1998 he moved his family to Fort Davis, changed his title to director of West Texas operations, and opened up a small office in a storefront near the bank. He has talked to just about every rancher in the range, explaining how his organization wants to help preserve all that is majestic about the Davis Mountains.
The Nature Conservancy, which was founded 45 years ago by a group of individuals who bought sixty acres in New York State to ensure natural plant and animal diversity, works with corporations and foundations as well as individuals to save threatened land and habitat. It has purchased and protected more than ten million acres of biologically significant sites in the U.S.—half a million acres in 1999 alone. In Texas the Conservancy has been a major behind-the-scenes player in creating the McFaddin, Anahuac, and Brazoria national wildlife refuges in the southeast; the Enchanted Rock and Honey Creek state natural areas and the Eckert James River bat cave in Central Texas (the home of 6 to 8 million bats); the Barton Creek Habitat Preserve west of Austin; the Mad Island and Shamrock Island rookeries on the Gulf Coast; native blackland prairie in North Texas that’s never known a plow; stands of longleaf pine in East Texas; and wildlife corridors in the Lower Rio Grande Valley.
Many ranchers in the Davis Mountains are not sold on the idea of donating easements to TNC, much less selling their land to the Conservancy, as McIvor did. In Eppenauer’s case, since the 45,000 acres is owned by a bank trust that has fiduciary responsibility to maximize the value of the land, King may be forced to buy an easement at a cost estimated at $4 million to satisfy the trust and the beneficiaries—Bob, his brother, Edwin, cousins Sherry Smith and Mary Bea Howard, and their heirs—and achieve the objective of keeping the land from being developed or subdivided. Still, the conservancy’s plan has found enough favor that more than 81,000 acres in the range are now either part of a dedicated preserve or protected through conservation easements. Even someone as set in his ways as Bob Eppenauer is willing to sit down and listen to what King has to say.
What King hopes to prevent is easily visible from Texas Highway 118. “This land is the Sprouls’,” he says, pointing north of the road and past a row of cottonwoods shading Limpia Creek as he steers an old donated Land Rover out of Fort Davis one crisp morning, headed for the high country. “Mac Sproul didn’t understand the Nature Conservancy. Now we’re working with him to put in a guest lodge that will have little impact on the land, yet provide the family with an income for years to come.” That way, he says, the Sprouls could supplement their ranching operation and give birders and hikers more access to the mountains.
The highway climbs past the Limpia Crossing subdivision, where homes, cabins, and ranchettes are scattered in the valleys and up the hillside. King pulls over a couple of miles later to point south toward a couple of white dots on a ridge west of Blue Mountain, the most visible landmark in the southern flank of the range. “That’s the Davis Mountains Resort, the other subdivision. Homes are crawling up the ridge. That’s what we’re trying to stop.”
Other than the two subdivisions, the Davis range remains wide-open spaces, full of a whole lot of pretty. The question is whether it will stay that way. “We realized for preservation to work here, it would have to take the form of a private land initiative,” King says. “So we have ‘cowboy’ easements—development in concentrated areas only, no subdivisions, no introduction of exotics. We’re not insisting on public access—it’s not written into the contracts. That doesn’t fit in the private-property climate of Texas. That’s a decision left to the landowner.”
Since the sale of the U Up U Down land was completed two years ago, the Eppenauer place has become the key component to saving a sky island, which is how the Davis Mountains Project is being promoted to Conservancy members and corporate and foundation partners. The animals and plants living above the five-thousand-foot elevation in the Davis Mountains are found nowhere else but in other sky islands surrounded by desert, such as the Chiricahuas in southeast Arizona and the Mimbres range in southwestern New Mexico. One thousand rare or endangered species are thought to thrive in this specialized environment, and researchers on the conservancy’s preserve have already sighted a buff-breasted flycatcher never seen before in Texas and a moth not previously known to exist, as well as others never seen before in the United States or Texas. No one knows what else awaits discovery, because before Don McIvor opened his land to biologists, little research had been done in the Davis range. Bob Eppenauer says he used to let a few folks on his family’s land, including Boy Scouts. “But it got to where people would throw trash, leave beer cans, and wouldn’t shut your gates,” he said, and he cut off access. When a biologist found an endangered pondweed on a neighboring ranch, the implication of the Endangered Species Act seemed to be that the owners would be prevented from fixing fences or cutting down cedar or doing anything to their land without permission from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. So property owners simply denied biologists permission to roam their land.
“They try to say ranchers can’t take care of our land,” Eppenauer complains. “How do you think that endangered plant survived all these years?” King is sympathetic to the ranchers’ point of view. “We’d like to convince Fish and Wildlife that we don’t need to list other species in the Davis Mountains because the mountains are protected by conservation easements.”
What irks Bob Eppenauer is that he has to contemplate any deal at all. He says he’d take great pleasure in laughing at someone offering any amount of money to buy his place. “After the money is gone, the land will still be there,” he says. But that attitude is tempered by the trusts his grandfather created to keep the property whole and avoid inheritance taxes. (Bob’s brother, Edwin, recently moved to Granbury, leaving his son Eddie in charge of part of the land.) But as the recreational value of the land soars, the trustee may regard that it has the fiduciary obligation to sell the land for its full value.
Selling a conservation easement may be the solution that will let the Eppenauers hold on to what they’ve got and satisfy the trustee. That’s what James King told Bob, and he’s still trying to digest what it means. “James King wants to help me,” he says. “He knows I truly care for this country.”
But Eppenauer admits to having reservations about the Nature Conservancy. “They have so much money, people just can’t turn it down. They know all the right people. They come in, buy the land, maybe build a farmhouse or two, then they quit and don’t put cattle on the land.”
King steers the Land Rover off the highway near the West Texas Utilities’ solar farm, where several acres of shiny solar panels are angled toward the sky. He goes a quarter of a mile up a road to a huge metal-sided building the size of a small Wal-Mart and introduces me to Rocky Beavers, one of the new landowners who bought part of the McIvor ranch from the Conservancy and donated conservation easements as part of the deal.
A friendly man of fifty who dresses cowboy and wears a diamond stud in one earlobe, Beavers is a native of Fort Worth who grew up in Jacksboro and Arlington. He knew the Davis Mountains from previous visits but didn’t become enamored with the place until 1988, when he too attended the ill-fated national park meeting in Fort Davis. He was working for the enemy then, as a representative of the National Park Service’s Denver service office of planning, design, and construction. The encounter with the local ranchers made an impression. He loved the land and he ended up liking the people too. “It was about the nicest, most cordial booting out of town I’d ever experienced.”
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