A Word For Thought

Many decades ago, the government banned cutting down cedar trees in Central Texas and the Hill Country—to ‘protect’ a small bird that nested in cedar trees.

In my lifetime, I have observed the extreme proliferation of cedars, taking over vast amounts of grassland that had been suitable for livestock grazing.

And I observed firsthand the devastation from cedar trees’ enormous consumption of water from the ground, actually killing much more desirable trees like oaks and elms.
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Over fifty years ago I had the privilege of working with a rancher, driving a big skidsteer with a sheer, participating in a government program reflecting a change in policy.
The government paid the rancher half the cost of removing all the cedars from a specified area, leaving all the good trees.
In the rancher’s house, I saw the ‘bales’ of natural grass seed, provided by the government, to restore the land to its original, productive grazing potential.

One day the rancher’s son showed me a creek below where we were working, and said,
“We used to swim in that creek—if all the ranchers in the area would do what my dad is doing, that creek would run again.”
That was profound, and gave me food for thought to this day.

The government did one thing right.

The Colorado River runs through the Texas Hill Country, with numerous lakes that suffer from lack of water, due in large part to the enormous increase in cedar growth over several decades of the ban on cutting cedars.

Government could do one more thing right in this scenario affecting thousands of acres destroyed by the takeover of cedar trees.
Using the same logic of paying ranchers half the cost of removing cedars and leaving good trees and providing native grass seed to recreate the natural landscape—on a larger scale, the government could fund the removal of cedars, mulching in one operation to protect from erosion, and then re-seeding.

I sent a letter to a Texas state senator with this suggestion, but never heard from him.