Houston Chronicle Editorial: Common ground

A way to protect and produce

Surely the most engaging of our many Texas myths is the one we city dwellers get to see with our own eyes when we venture outside Houston city limits: wide open spaces and big beautiful skies. It takes a little bit longer to find them, but they’re still out there. And a drive across West Texas can convince the road-weary traveler that the empty spaces and big skies really do go on forever.

Not quite. Between our state’s mega-burbs, our vast expanses of crop and pasture land under cultivation and large new tracts being tapped for drilling for gas and oil in the shale formation, it’s actually getting a little crowded on our fabled lone prairie.

As usual, the first to feel the pinch are the native critters. In a recent Outlook essay (“Booming growth poses extreme threat to grouse species,” Page B7, Sept. 14), contributor Wayne Walker brought readers’ attention to the plight of one, the lesser prairie chicken, whose habitat is threatened not only in Texas, but also across a five-state area stretching to Colorado. The lesser prairie chicken is a member of the grouse family and related to the Attwater’s prairie chicken, which has all but disappeared from Texas’ coastal prairies since the 1990s.

Walker would like things to turn out better for the lesser prairie chicken, and he comes at the topic from an interesting position. He’s seen both sides: A former energy developer, he’s now a conservation banker, devoted to bringing industry and environmentalists to literal common ground. This is done by protecting endangered species by requiring those who impair habitat to pay for other protected habitat.

The concept isn’t new; it’s been used in Texas for some years now. What is new is the pressure brought by population growth and greatly expanded drilling in shale.

This seems a sensible path to meet the demands of competing goods in Texas – protection of our native species and sensible development of our natural resources.