Looking at the word cloud the first thing that drew my attention was the abundance of nouns. Adjectives such as “beautiful” verbs such as “noticed”, these were the things that stood largest among the cluster of words. What struck me was how visual it all was. This makes sense though. Sight is our first interpretation.
To really reflect on everything around us we need to engage the world with all possible sensory input. It is not just the sights but the smells and the sounds that change. The chirps of the birds that fade in winter but rise in sound and pitch in the summer. The smell of the dew of the spring and of the fresh flowers. It is not just changing colors of leaves but the entire sensory output that can inform us. This may give explanation to what seems to be an overall underappreciation of Texas’ natural world.
For me it certainly has been. I’ll admit that central Texas numbed me a bit to the nature around me. Growing up in Texas, it is easy to dismiss the Texas environment as a largely homogenous and non diverse system. At first glance, large populations of oak and cedar make for comparatively uninteresting ecosystems. The thinness of Texan topsoils and the overwhelmingly arid climate of south-central Texas makes the range of life capable of living here extremely limited. In comparison to the natural landscapes of such places as Costa Rica and the towering forests that blanket both the eastern and western coasts of the United States, Texas seems – in all honesty – rather uninteresting. Yet if I’ve learned nothing else through my time spent learning about the environment, it is that diversity exists everywhere.
The Texas environment, even when limited to an area such as the Austin metropolitan area, is an incredibly complex system. While the untrained eye might be blind to the variations between different species, there are appreciable differences in the role each provides. While “oak” might seem like a suitable descriptor for the trees that cover the Texas hill country, there are, in actuality, over forty species of oak within Texas. From providing a habitat or shelter for other organisms, each of these species holds the potential for the provision of a unique service to its community. While the overall number of unique species found within our local Texas environment may not make for the most biodiverse set of ecosystems, their overall complexity is far more intricate a measurement than can be determined through species count. From an external perspective, the Texas landscape may seem monotone. In truth, it is a luminous spectrum of biodiversity.
In addition to my initial ignorance of Texas’ immense biodiversity, I also realized that I had made the mistake of assuming that the incredible resilience of the Texas environment equated to an overall disconnect from nature and the anthropogenic effects of mankind and the expansion of our civilization in Texas. Even before Texas’ settlement, the Texas landscape was subject to extreme seasonal droughts, scorching temperatures, and incredibly harsh climatic conditions. The ability of Texas ecosystems to survive, recover from, and even thrive during such extreme conditions may give the impression of an almost indestructible environmental system. After all, when such ecosystems are capable of surviving the brutality of the Texas climate, how could humanity possibly be capable of damaging the natural world in which it exists. Yet, especially within the last few years, it has become apparent to biologists, ecologists, and even locals that the Texas environment has suffered as a result from expansion. Urban skylines have grown both upwards and outwards, suburban landscapes have begun to blanket the Texas hill country, and rivers have become dammed, choked, and polluted as urbanization draws an increasing amount of resources to fuel its growth. In the process of such expansion, the destruction of habits has become an altogether far too commonplace consequence of human development. And as our roadways continue link Texas towns, habitat fragmentation has becoming a growing threat to the populations of Texas wildlife.