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Go DeeperThe Nature Conservancy in Texas
Submit Your StoryLearn how to submit your story about a lasting impression of a natural place. |
Human Nature: What’s in a Name?
Sometimes nature exists in name only.
By Lisa Kay Adam
For 12 years, I was a Badger. Not in any kind of mystical or talismanic sense. No, I was a badger because in the south Texas town where I grew up, the badger was my school’s mascot.
Most of those years, the only mental image I had of badgers was of helmeted football players. Our high school’s foyer displayed a taxidermied version of the real thing—slightly faded, teeth bared in a ferocious snarl—but no one I knew had seen a live one, and I never wondered where our antagonized-looking specimen had come from.
Years after leaving home, I learned that there had been badgers in the region, which is blackland prairie interlaced with brushland. In the early 1900s, the walking plows and big-wheeled steam plows that first broke the waxy soil probably disturbed many badger dens and tunnels forever. Learning about our mascot made me wonder why so many sports teams are named after what we inadvertently—or intentionally—decimate: Badgers, Bears, Eagles, Dolphins. Mostly I pondered the incongruity between the name and the reality.
I once had the same bewilderment about the name of the street where I grew up: Meadowbrook. This name seemed a fanciful invention, the stuff of storybook heroines. I eventually learned that the “brook” was the intermittent creek behind our house. The “meadow” was the open country of native grasses, running mesquite and prickly pear that my parents had grubbed out in the 1950s. Meadowbrook may have been a prettified name to attract property buyers, but the basic elements were there.
After years away, I live in south Texas again, now in the Rio Grande Valley along the Mexican border. The first major land clearing here occurred after the turn of the last century, bringing big irrigation for winter vegetables and citrus groves. Today, we are losing farmland and native plants alike. Bulldozers operate every day; subdivisions mushroom overnight.
The monikers for these freshly created places seem especially contrived. I often drive past Wisteria Heights (recently changed from “Wisteria Hights,” proving that development is occurring faster than the speed of spell check). There is no wisteria (never was) and, at a mere 95 feet above sea level, no height. In nearby Granite Meadows, except for countertops, there is no granite (it’s strictly sedimentary down here), and no meadow. Right now, there is bare dirt, eventually to be replaced by water-sucking lawn.
Such development is disheartening, but hope exists. One local nature center operates a native plant rescue, a SWAT team to pluck out imperiled vegetation before it’s bulldozed. And the valley retains a string of scattered preserves, parks and nature centers. Where some envision a divisive wall along the border, naturalists here instead see a protected wildlife corridor in the making, some of it reclaimed farmland, to link these natural areas and preserve our species.
If we must have new subdivisions (and I, for one, don’t think we must), I hope someday to see one called “Huisache Lanes,” with native trees left on it. When my own parents cleared their lot, they had visions of gloxinias and redbuds and gardenias. Yet they spared a spindly, knee-high mesquite, whose resilience and long taproot ensured its survival through hurricanes and droughts. It developed an immense, lacy canopy, sheltering generations of mourning doves, mockingbirds, paisanos (roadrunners) and one young human. Under the mesquite’s green fringe, I began to learn the names and the realities of the natural world around us.
Pictures (top tpo bottom): Illustration © Stan Fellows (Meadowlark); Photo courtesy Lisa Kay Adam
