South Texas Land Sell Off as the Tumor Approaches
South Texas is the transition zone between the humid Gulf Coast and the Chihuahua Desert. Cacti grow in mud derived from limestone powder and lots of organic material, the decomposed plants of years past. Lichen coats the blackbrush. The heat is incessant and seemingly year-round. The humidity is intense and the Thornscrub is thick. At first glance it seems like this is the last kind of place you'd consider to label a desert. It's also the last place you'd imagine to be undergoing a period of intense land speculation and an orgy of greed. Maybe “greed” is too harsh a word. “Excitement about money” is a nicer way of putting it.
Many landowners in Starr County are dividing lots that have been in their families for generations, convinced they're going to strike it big and the suburbs are coming. Nevermind that there's no water and the summers are getting hotter. June 2023 was the first June on record that experienced three weeks of 105° temps.
As with most areas where modern humans inhabit, the plants and animals that live here and have evolved here are not highly valued by the dominant culture. They are seen as largely expendable - clutter that just happens to be here and which gets in the way of more important things like making money to buy new trucks and go on luxury cruise vacations and send children to private universities so that they too can get good at making lots of money. It's an illness of the spirit that afflicts those suffering from it and which also causes collateral damage to many other things around it, like the life that lives and grows in the areas being divided up and sold off. Short term gain, long term loss.
This is a shame because many of the plants and animals that live and grow in South Texas don't occur anywhere else in the world. Further, the region is vastly understudied compared the much of the rest of the US. Another case of setting fire to the library before you even know what's in it. Short-term gain, long-term loss - the ethos of modern civilization. The mark of a species that's not as intelligent and enlightened as it would like to think. To make things more unfortunate, it's likely that there they may be an exodus from the region in the coming decades as climate change ramps up, half the land gets converted to parking lots (because this IS Texas), and water becomes a thing in short supply. Places further North that have milder summers and more access to fresh water might become slightly more desirable. All this destruction will have been for nothing.
There's a bit of hope on the horizon, however. Many organizations and even individuals are coming together to purchase land for the purposes of conservation. Not enough conservation will occur, of course. How could it after so much had been lost already? South Texas as viewed from the air above McAllen and Brownsville is an amalgamation of agriculture and car-dependent sprawl, and all of this kind of development is slowly moving West towards Starr County. It would be highly improbable in this cultural climate and general orgy of greed (not to mention the pressures exerted on the general population as our corporate overlords and oligarchs drive inflation up and keep wages down for the purposes of corporate profit) for any large scale conservation to occur. At this point we are trying to preserve crumbs - fragments from which someone can possibly one day use to reseed the surrounding landscape once the sprawl has been abandoned.
