Mr. Ozmore retired to Huntsville but earlier worked as a reporter and editor in Alabama (Montgomery Advertiser) and Texas (Houston Press) for hunting, fishing and other outdoor sports, as a Congressional aide to U.S. Representative Bob Eckhardt, and as an official with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In his work for Rep. Eckhardt, he became involved in efforts to protect Galveston Bay from shell dredging, Houston Ship Channel water pollution, and construction of the Wallisville Reservoir on the Trinity River. As staff for FEMA he carried on his interest in water resource issues by working on flood insurance and mapping to reduce casualties and construction in the floodplain.
Region: Piney Woods
Howard Peacock
Mr. Peacock worked as a newspaper journalist, as editor for both the Houston Chamber of Commerce weekly and the Southern Pacific magazine, as well the director of the Houston United Fund. Throughout, during his free time, he hiked, guided, and fought to acquire and protect examples of the Big Thicket in southeast Texas. With help from a variety of local citizens such as Mr. Peacock and support from national politicians, the National Park Service was able to secure a highly diverse a preserve of close to 86,000 acres in 1974, including specimens from 10 overlapping ecosystems, with at least 85 species of trees, 1000 species of shrubs and flowering plants and 300 species of birds.
The transcript of this interview with Mr. Peacock has been generously shared by the University of Houston Libraries, Special Collections. We are grateful to the University for making this material available.
Dwight Shellman
From 1993 through 2006, Dwight Shellman served as the president of the Caddo Lake Institute, which encourages interdisciplinary work towards preservation of the ecological and cultural integrity of Caddo Lake, reputed to be the only natural lake in Texas, noted for its cypress-dominated wetlands. Mr. Shellman and the Institute were successful in getting designation of the Lake as a wetland of international signification under the RAMSAR Treaty, in setting up cooperative lake research and monitoring programs at local colleges and high schools, in creating a new National Wildlife Refuge adjoining the Lake, and in finding sustainable uses for the nearby Longhorn Ammunition Plant. Mr. Shellman was also active with the East Texas Communities Network which sought to locate and interconnect conservationists in small northeast Texas towns, and organize them around local environmental problems, ranging from chicken processing wastewater to dam construction to water quality downgrades to air quality issues.
Larry Shelton
Mr. Shelton is a cabinetmaker by trade, but is also known as someone extremely familiar with the public forests of east Texas, about their trees and wildlife, and about their management and protection, and in that capacity has spoken out numerous times as an expert witness in litigation against clearcutting in the national forests. He received the Sierra Club Lone Star Chapter annual conservation award for 2004 in recognition of his contributions to forest protection.
Carmine Stahl
An ordained Methodist minister who lived in Houston, Mr. Stahl directed a number of church-related camps and participated in ministry and youth outreach. After he retired, he worked as a naturalist in a variety of capacities – as a consultant on design and acquisition of the Cypress Creek Parkway, as an outdoor education trainer for the Houston Independent School District and scouting programs, as director of the Houston Audubon Society, as a program coordinator at Mercer Arboretum, and as a teacher of ecology and botany at the Jesse Jones Park, Houston Museum of Natural Science, University of Houston, Texas A&M and Rice Universities. He was noted as an expert on wild edible plants and on the culture of area Native Americans. With Ria McElvaney, he published the guide, Trees of Texas (Texas A&M Press).
Geraldine Watson
Mrs. Watson was a self-trained botanist who lived near Silsbee, in southeast Texas. She made many contributions to protecting the Big Thicket, from her efforts in identifying and collecting plants for the University of Texas and the National Park Service, which went far to document the great biodiversity of the Thicket, to her political efforts with the Big Thicket Association to advocate for a federal preserve, to her work restoring a portion of the Thicket on her own land, near Warren. She was also an author: the University of North Texas Press published her books, Reflections on the Neches: A Naturalist’s Odyssey Along the Big Thicket’s Snow River (2003) and Big Thicket Plant Ecology: An Introduction (2006).
Ellen Temple
Mrs. Temple has worked as a publisher, but has also contributed a great deal of volunteer time toward Texas conservation causes, particularly touching on protection of native vegetation and habitat. Her environmental work includes helping lead Angelina Beautiful / Clean, serving on the board of directors of the Texas Nature Conservancy, working as a trustee and president of the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, the Stephen F. Austin Pineywoods Native Plant Center. Most recently, she has been working with the Texas Pineywoods Experience Advisory Committee to promote ecotourism’s role in east Texas’ conservation and economy, and collaborating with the Conservation Fund on promoting the idea of green infrastructure for Lufkin and Angelina County.
George Russell
Mr. Russell owns and operates a video and slide educational business in Huntsville, Texas, but has long been involved in protecting national forests and natural areas in east Texas from excessive logging, burning, herbicide use, roadbuilding and other forms of development. Not only has he been an active advocate for sustainable use and protection of public lands, but Mr. Russell has also invested in buying and protecting forestlands himself, using those private lands to investigate less harmful ways of management.
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Janice Bezanson
Mrs. Bezanson has had long experience as a volunteer, board member, officer and executive director with Texas Conservation Alliance, a statewide grassroots group that also serves as the state affiliate for the National Wildlife Federation. She and TCA have been successful advocates for reform and limits on clearcutting, burning and abusive practices in the public forests of Texas, as well as for creation of 35,000 acres of wilderness areas within these public lands. She helped extend many of these same goals and strategies to other states via the national Forest Reform Network. Aside from forestry work, Mrs. Bezanson and TCA have been active in protecting free-flowing streams against dams proposed for the Little Cypress, Neches, and Sulfur Rivers.
She is also active in land conservation, as a trustee for the American Lands Alliance, which advocates for public lands across the country. On the state level, she has been a board member and past president of the Texas Land Conservancy (earlier known as the Natural Area Preservation Association), the oldest and largest state-based land trust in Texas, responsible for 115 preserves throughout the state.
As well, Mrs. Bezanson is a board member of the Conservation History Association of Texas, helping guide its archive, documentary, and atlas work.