In violent times, you shouldn't have to sell your soul

The Heart of Texas in Need of Environmental Protection

The Texas Hill Country is known as the heart of Texas to locals. It is home to 31,000 square miles of wild natural beauty, prosperous biodiversity, and unique ecological systems. Bordering the rapidly growing metropolitan city of cultural San Antonio and trendy Austin, our urban sprawl further encroaches on portions of the Hill Country, where pastures of pecan, fields of bluebonnet, and roaming wild cats compete for landscape. The unique federal, state, and local regulatory challenges, are changing the natural habitats and systems and redefining the iconic territory of the beloved Hill Country. 

Projections merge Austin and San Antonio cities towards a single mega-metro area in the next 50 years (Chapa 2015), and its development drives through the Hill Country. The latest data analysis from National Land Coverage Database (NLCD) highlights 828,066 acres or 7%, have been developed as of 2016 (USGS 2018), making the Hill Country one of the fastest-growing regions in the nation (Census 2020). Urbanizing has been advantageous to humans in various ways; however, it changes the natural landscape (Li et al. 2018), and our evolutionary and inherent human inclination to affiliate with natural systems and environmental processes, which impact people's physical and mental well-being(Wilson 1984). Furthermore, landscape change endangers complete systems, species, habitat loss, water use and quality, and the loss of our cultural connection to the ecology. Conservation biologists have suggested that 30% of an ecosystem should remain intact to maintain essential functions (HCA Report 2022). The challenge is protecting sensitive landscapes and reducing urban sprawl development outside San Antonio city limits, also known as unincorporated areas. Unincorporated areas grew 103% in the past 30 years (Hill Country Alliance 2022). Incentives contributing towards the urban sprawl in unincorporated areas are lower land prices, light regulation for developers to navigate, lower taxes, and the lure of rural living.

When Environmental Laws and Property Rights Collide

In the words of Aldo Leopold (1938) "the oldest task in human history is to live on a piece of land without spoiling it." (Flader and Callicott 1991). The rise of urban development in Hill Country is the main driving force for habitat destruction; on one side, the constituents of that trend, the customers and developers, must be understood, and on the other, the larger dominant entities see federal environmental laws impede private property rights and their use of the commons. However, the power of ordinary citizens, which is yet to be heard, says no one should have a private property right to ruin them (Salzman and Thompson 2019, 22). Nevertheless, data and experience find that urban sprawl involves clearing natural habitats and systems to make room for houses and roads. The loss of those habitats will disrupt the unique ecosystem services provided we think of as free and limitless today, ultimately cascading into long-term irreversible impacts on people and wildlife. It is the dissecting and addressing of an environmental issue like urban sprawl, with the overlap of a myriad of industries and navigating the complex federal laws with state and local rules that genuinely make existing laws and rules inadequate and exhausting to achieve an environmental change.

Reference

Hill Country Alliance. 2016. “Toward a Regional Plan for the Texas Hill Country.” Hill Country Alliance. 1–120. https://www.hillcountryalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Toward-a-Regional-Plan-for-the-Texas-Hill-Country.pdf.

Hill Country Alliance. 2022. “State of the Hill Country.” Hill Country Alliance. 1–120. https://hillcountryalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/State_of_the_Hill_Country-Network_REPORT_2022.pdf. 

Salzman, J. and Thompson, B. 2019. Environmental Law and Policy. 5th ed. St. Paul, MN: Foundation Press. 

StatsAmerica. n.d. “San Antonio.” Accessed November 8, 2022. https://www.statsamerica.org/radius/big.aspx.

United States Census Bureau. 2020. “The 15 Fastest-Growing Large Cities -Bu Percent Change: 2010-2019.” Accessed February 10, 2022. https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2020/demo/fastest-growing-cities-2010-2019.html.

USGS. 2018. “National Land Cover Database.” Accessed March 8, 2022. https://www.usgs.gov/centers/eros/science/national-land-cover-database.