TRANSCRIPT
INTERVIEWEE: Fran Sage (FS)
INTERVIEWER: David Todd (DT)
DATE: April 4, 2001
LOCATION: Alpine, Texas
TRANSCRIBERS: Robin Johnson
REEL: 2151 and 2152

Please note that videos include roughly 60 seconds of color bars and sound tone for technical settings at the outset of the recordings. Numbers correlate with the time codes on the VHS tape copy of the interview. “Misc.” refers to various off-camera conversation or background noise, unrelated to the interview.

DT: My name is David Todd. I’m here for the Conservation History Association of Texas and we’re at a beautiful spot south of Alpine, Texas, visiting with Fran Sage who has been active in the environmental community in Big Bend and has helped start the Big Bend Sierra Chapter, which is very effective. And I wanted to thank you for taking the time to talk to us.
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FS: You’re very welcome.
DT: I thought we might start with your early years. I think you once mentioned that you grew up during the Depression and I was wondering of you could maybe give us some insight how that might have affected you and maybe contributed to an interest in conserving things, of being careful about waste and so on.
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FS: Oh, I think so. My mother never transmitted values by saying or teaching, she just lived them. And one of the things we never did was, we never threw anything away, is what it amounted to. And perhaps there was that string saver mentality, but there was also the notion that you couldn’t afford to replace most things, so you repaired them and so forth. And I think that in an indirect way that probably influenced me because I notice we’re still using the same things—we’ve been married over fifty years and—and we’re still using some of the things from the ‘50’s because they’re still good. And I think you can translate that into the environment when you—when you think about how we’re consuming ourselves right out of resources and so we need to learn how to reuse—what they are talking about recycling, or repairing, or making do. So I—I think maybe that would be the—the link there. I’m need to I’m sorry (inaudible).
DT: Something else I was talking to you about earlier was, I’d ask you if there was anybody who might have contributed to an interest in the outdoors and you mentioned somebody near and dear to you.
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FS: Yes, indeed. I—I was brought up in urban areas and we didn’t have a car so we pretty much lived in an urban area. But when we moved to Montana—we still didn’t have a car, so I didn’t get out of town very much, but when I met my husband, Jim, and we—we dated and then got married and had children, he—he’d grown up on a farm and so—close to the Yellowstone Park area—so we spent a lot of time just getting out, hiking around, camping and I came to appreciate what that meant. And that was back before air pollution was so—so bad. So you had these wonderful, wonderful places you could go to and see. There was none of the brown powder that we now associate with the cities hanging there. So it—it I think that shaped those experiences with nature, and I feel as if I’m a Westerner. I can’t imagine living East. I love the long views, I love this world here, I loved it in Montana when I was growing up and we lived there. I wasn’t a miner; I didn’t value the mining or the cutting of the forest or the all of that world. It was just being part of something that large and knowing that you can’t control it. And so you have to learn to live with it and accommodate it. And so I think, yes, I think I owe a lot to Jim. Well, I owe a lot to Jim, but—but I do owe that introduction to nature, I think, to him.
DT: Can you recall any particular camping trips that were outstanding in some ways?
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FS: Well, there’s one that—that he gets a kick out of because we’ve got the picture of us all sitting around the campfire up—actually it was up in northwestern Montana, near Flat Head Lake, and we went up near Hungry Horse Reservoir and picked huckleberries up there. The other experience I can remember is, we used to take snow picnics up in out of Red Lodge, Montana, which is on the way to Yellowstone Park. And, I don’t know, I was young, to endure building a fire when it was down below freezing and stomping around in the snow and eating outside. I don’t think I’d do it now.
DT: I understand that as the years passed, you worked in Austin and then decided after you retired to move out to Alpine, and I was wondering if you could explain one of the ways you chose this area, and that you were looking for a sense of community. And I wonder what you mean by that, what you were looking for?
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FS: Well, I’m—I’m I guess it was in the early 70’s I read a book by Philip Slater, that whose title I can’t remember anymore. He’s written several. But it had to do with contrasting network to community. And community is geographically placed. It isn’t something you transport around with you, it’s being in a place and having relationships with the people that live in that place and being part of, I guess, to the degree you want to be active of making your community a good place to be. But always, at least, you’re known and you know people in that. A network is what I had when I lived in Austin. It was—I have an academic background to some degree and so you knew people in your field all over the nation. And even when I was beyond that academic connection, one tended to know just people that thought as one thought and liked to do what one liked to do. I went to stores in Austin for twenty years and shopped and I was a newcomer each time to it. So I—I just felt that I couldn’t—wanted to be part of something and I don’t
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know that it’s easy to be part of something in a large city at—at least for me the small town was essential. So when we looked, I wanted one that I could be comfortable in too and for—for me that meant being in a place that had a university in it. And—and Alpine has Sul Ross State University, which is one of the smallest universities in the state system. But it is a university and has people there that I know and like. But, interestingly enough to me, anyway, was that getting involved in the environmental work, took me into another world. And in fact, I know a lot of people from different—in different connections. We belong to the Big Bend Food Co-op, and so there’s the Food
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Co-op people we know. And there’s the Sierra Club people we know and the birders we know. And the Astronomical Society people we know. And we like to play bridge, so there’s all the bridge players we—we know. And there’s the hikers and there’s the political world of—of Alpine and the region. I really like that overlap. I mean, it’s overlap, but it’s also, they’re separate and I guess in a selfish way you can say that you never can be fully of yourself if you are just drawing on one part of you. But if you have all sorts of different people as part of your life, then you become more fully a person I think. So—so from the personal point of view and then I think communities, small communities, need everybody to take a part in—Alpine is quite isolated. So in some ways, it’s not like many of the small towns that are on the route to someplace else. And—
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and they didn’t have—they don’t have local television here. Their radio is partially local but feeds off if a feed out of Midland. So people tend to make their own fun. You still get that kind of July 4th parade and that whole—that whole world of small town. And I like it a lot. I feel a part of it now and I feel as if I’m contributing something to its well-being.
DT: I’d like to just talk a little bit more about this sense of being, part of a community. I’ve noticed you’ve been active in the League of Women Voters and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how that might have formed your interest in conservation and being a full fledged citizen?
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FS: Yes, I’m—I’m—Jim and I got married when I was eighteen and we had our first child when I was nineteen and another child three years later. And he at that time, traveled quite a bit around the territory out at Billings, Montana, and I joined the League of Women Voters before I was old enough to vote. And I always thought it saved my life, because they talked about serious issues that—women didn’t work so much then and we were able to meet and they were the league issues and one talked about them and took oneself seriously what one was doing, took the issues seriously. And while they were—had some conservation issues, they were much broader than that. But I think that notion of getting together and talking about things that matter to you and talking seriously about it and doing research on it was very important to—to the way I developed.
DT: I understand that since you’ve come to Alpine, you’ve taken conservation very seriously and were affective in starting the Big Bend Regional Group of the Sierra Club. And I was wondering how that came about and what sort of things you focused on?
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FS: Well, I didn’t plan on it, I’ll tell you that. I planned on—on working on some history projects and, because history is a love of mine, but we built a house here south of Alpine about eleven miles out in the country and we look out on the mountain called Cathedral Mountain and it was very attractive to us. It was part of what made this land special. We built a house here in August of ’95, practically to the day I can tell you, was when we saw this tremendous haze blocking the view of Cathedral. And I can’t—there’s no way I can prove it, no one will say when Carbon 2, the coal fire plant from Mexico went online, but I’m sure it was then. And I thought, well this is awful. And it was personal at that time. I moved out here for this wonderful place to live and now—now it’s going to have air pollution? I thought I’d left that all behind. So we talked about it over the course, I guess, of about six months and I called the Sierra Club in Austin and said
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we’d like to get a group going. Because it—it seemed to me—there were—there was a group—there were some groups forming on local issues, one of which was air pollution. But it seemed to me that we’re—we’re in too low a population area. The decisions being made about—about the air pollution were being made in Austin, Washington D.C. and Mexico City. And that we needed to be part of a national and statewide organization…take it off the hook would you?
DT: We were visiting before about air quality and the Big Bend area. I wonder if you could give us some ways on how to gauge visibility has changed. Maybe talk about some of the factors of and how visibility has degraded.
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FS: Well, we—we became involved with it as a visibility issue, as I said, because of living here. But as we got involved in learning about it, learned about it’s effect on the park and the—where it was coming from. Mary Kelly from the Texas Center for Policy Studies took us on as a—as a client, I guess. Pro bono work, so I don’t know if you’re a client when you’re pro bono. But anyway, she helped us frame some appeals on it using the Clean Air Act, which requires that the Class One Areas, they’re called, near the national parks and in Texas, that’s just two, Big Bend and Guadalupe National Park, that—that visibility has to be improved, you can’t just let it degrade all the time. So that was the approach we first got involved with was—was the—the park and the visibility issue. And that’s when I came to learn how complicated it is. When we first started, we thought it was all Mexico. There’s—there are two coal fire plants across from Eagle Pass, Texas, just out of Piedras Negras, Carbon 1 and Carbon 2. And they went online, as I
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alluded earlier, at different times. So we thought it was all coming from there and the—the pressure had to be of the—the national government to the Mexican government. And I’d want to show some sympathy to the Mexican problem because visibility is not a high priority with a country where you have health problems that are quite major. And water problems and—and heavily polluted cities like Mexico City and Monterey. It’s hard to get them excited about that your visibility isn’t so good. Having said that I am sympathetic, I didn’t want to have to wait until Monterey and Mexico City had clean air before Big Bend was addressed. In the—I guess it was in the September of ’96, there was a preliminary study done by the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Park
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Service and on this side of the border and by (inaudible) and I can‘t tell you what that stands for, but it’s their environmental agency. And they discovered that it the air pollution in Big Bend was coming not just from Mexico, but from parts of Texas and perhaps further east. It may be transporting into Texas too. And the Dallas area was one, southeast, I think it is Dallas, where the big brown unit of Texas indust—Texas Utilities and that—that gave us the idea to approach—approach trying to get Texas to clean up it’s problems. So that added another layer of complexity on it, though in some ways it
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certainly an easier layer. I mean, if you can convince Texas Legislators to deal with polluted—polluting plants, you can deal at least with that segment of it. It’s much easier than trying to deal with Ohio and Mexico City. So—so that’s how we got involved in the—in the visibility. And now…
DT: Some of these grand fathered plants?
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FS: Yes.
DT: Can you explain what that involved?
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FS: Well, in 1971 when the Clean Air Act was first passed, that’s a Federal Act, they—they exempted—allowed to be exempted plants that had been built or were deemed built before ’71. And the idea was, and the claim made by the plants was that, you know, it wouldn’t be too long before those plants would become obsolete and go offline. Well, it’s now thirty years later and they’re still there and they’re still polluting. In ’99, then Governor Bush came forward with what he called the voluntary program in which plants would sign up and there would be certain incentives for them to—to comply
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voluntarily. And that was considered superior to regulating them by dictating to them. Unfortunately, as we learned in January this year, only one plant has been permitted under the voluntary program. It’s been a spectacular failure in my opinion. And this legislature now is thinking seriously of—of regulating them. There was a—of the in the Electricity Deregulation Act in ’99, they did build into it a segment that required that plants cut down on the nitrogen oxide and on the sulfur dioxide. And it’s the sulfur dioxide that interests us out here, because it’s what is affecting the visibility.
DT: How much of the visibility has been cut back do you think?
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FS: Well, I don’t think it’s been cut back. Oh, I’m sorry, I misunderstood.
DT: Well I understand it used to be quite phenomenal and can you give us an example of how clear this area was)?
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FS: Yes. It—probably before we came out here. You could see as far as one hundred and eighty miles on a clear day and I suppose if you were high enough to get over the curves. And but probably more typical was a hundred, hundred and twenty-five. And I don’t mean that there haven’t been dust in the air or something that would knock it down from there, but it’s been measured down to nine miles. The park service has a picture as you come into, toward Park Headquarters, which is Panther Junction, on the north side of the park, you come down from Marathon, Texas and there’s a sign that says, Park Headquarters five miles and you can barely see behind that. So they do have the documentation. They—they could take continuous pictures all the time. So it’s become really awful. And it transports too. The Guadalupe National Park is affected by that air pollution coming. Perhaps not as severely as Big Ben, but still, it’s there, and it—it moves on out.
DT: And has the Park Service been an ally in trying to clear up the visibility problem?
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FS: Oh, indeed. In fact, they—they—it’s one of their major concerns at all times. And the new superintendent, well, he’s not quite so new now, but—but he’s been here over a year, he’s—he’s quite active in it. He’s going to be our speaker next month and talk about regional haze issues and I’m looking forward to what he’s learned on it and can tell us about. So I’m—yes, they’re very much an ally and I hope they view us as one too, because we’re trying.
DT: I’ve also heard that another group that’s concerned about the visibility out here is the McDonald Observatory. And I wonder if you’d comment on how the clarity of the skies out here affects them?
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FS: Well, they—they do not want the light pollution that comes, because of McDonald is in, I believe, the darkest area in the forty-eight states. And so they have their observatory located in a very fine place and they want to control the—and decrease the light pollution. And you wouldn’t think a town as small as Alpine could be polluting, but it is. In fact, from down here, you can see some of the city lights reflecting. Beyond though the—the visibility issue is that they have all those mirrors up there as part of their telescope and the pollution can eat at the glass and it has to be cleaned continuous—
continuously. So—so there is more than just the visibility at stake. Our Representative, Pete Gallego, got a bill through several years ago, through the legislature that re—now requires that as lights are being replaced on state-owned property, that they have to be
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shielded. That will take a long time, of course, to do it all, but it—it’s progress is being made there. If we could get the state to pass one that required shielded lights on all kinds of lighting that would be good. And the—the county is in the process of passing a—or looking closely at passing a lighting ordinance and the city of Alpine has passed one. And Marfa nearby has passed one and so it is being addressed. It—it’ll take a while for it to—to have a good effect, but it’s—it’s—it’s moving along.
DT: It sounds like you’ve worked with the legislature a good deal in trying to address some of these air quality issues. Can you comment on how you sort of structured your approach to the legislators, representatives, lobbyists and what kind of reaction?
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FS: Well one—one nice thing about living in a small community is that you can have a closer relationship with—with public officials than you can, for instance, in a town the size of Austin. And for us, one of the pluses is that our Representative calls Alpine his home base, so—so it gives you more access to him. Our State Senator is Frank Madla, and he lives in, I believe, West San Antonio. And they—both their districts are huge and so is our Congressman running all the way from West San Antonio to right to the border of El Paso. So, but—but having said that, it—it’s still been good. I’ve—I’ve been able to meet with—with our representative when he’s home in Alpine, and he’s quite accessible within the limits of his time. And I’ve also gone to Austin, and the done the same thing there, and also talked to other legislators. It’s—it’s—it’s an exciting experience, and it’s
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Also something that frightens some people to do, but—but it isn’t frightening. I mean, they pay attention to you. I don’t mean they always do what you want them to do, but—but they—they pay attention to the constituents.
DT: And do you find that you’re able to frame the environmental issues in a sort of non-partisan way where it appeals to both sides of that (inaudible)?
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FS: I’ve tried. I’ve tried very—very hard. And thinking the past, it was true. The radioactive waste issue, which we haven’t mentioned before, this time seems to be running along partisan lines and that may fracture that ability to appeal to both sides.
DT: Let’s talk a little about the radioactive bill issue. Maybe you can describe where you first entered i to it and what you have done in that area?
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FS: Well yes, we went to a meeting at the Civic Center in—in Alpine several years ago when Sierra Blanca, which is east of El Paso, I guess about eighty-five miles, something like that, was the chosen site. Beside from all the remarks about how it’s science, the legislature put a box around it and said it’s going to be there. That was before the science had been done. And so I learned something about it and got quite interested and we went over to Sierra Blanca to—to hear—to the public hearings that were there and we were shocked by the more we learned about it the more shocking it was. And so we were involved in that fight.
DT: Who was the proposal what kind of waste were they talking about?
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FS: Well it’s a radio—low level—they call it low level it’s not, all of it, it’s radioactive waste and it’s generated by power plants and by hos—research hospitals and universities medical waste. The most of the medical waste and the research waste is—is truly low level and it will—it will become safe after a relatively short period of time, then you can dispose of it as you do other waste. But the power plant waste is much—much higher in the radioactive and—and there’s a lot of it. And—and so Texas and Maine and Vermont formed together a regional compact, under federal law, from some years ago, the states were told they needed to form regional compacts. You may wonder how Maine
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and Vermont and Texas are regionally related, but I think they were chosen, those two, because they generated relatively low amounts of waste. And the argument for having a compact was that you have to have a compact, or you take waste from everyplace. So the—the state formed a state agency called the Low Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Authority, and they were to build a site there in Sierra Blanca and take in the waste. It was fought, very hard. It was very poor disposal, what they were going to do with it and they didn’t do the science. There were a series of administrative hearings and those judges finally said that they hadn’t done their homework. They hadn’t checked the possibilities of the earthquakes. Alpine, perhaps fortuitously had an earthquake during that time, so—so that did demonstrate it’s possible out here to have earthquakes. And then Mexico, because Sierra Blanca is relatively close to the Mexican border, the
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Congress of Mexico passed unanimous resolutions against the Sierra Blanca dump and people marched. School children were part of the parades. It became an international affair. The Texas—the TNRCC—the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission actually turned them down. That did not, of course, take care of the waste. It took care of putting it in Sierra Blanca. There’s also—were two private companies that wanted to get into waste disposal. I think the—the radio—low level—the state agency was so discredited by the work it had done that the legislature eliminated it, not this session but last session. And turned over all of it’s activities to the—to the TNRCC. Then the privates wanted in on it. There’s money to be made, real money. And one of them has already got a storage facility, process and storage facility, up in Andrews County, which is—is just—not too far out of Midland. And the other one had a facility there which a—a
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geologist told them wasn’t too safe to keep from contaminating the ground water. And in fact, the other one, Waste Control Specialist, may—it is near the Ogallala, sits over it and whether it’s safe there has not yet been fully explored. Waste Control Specialist sued EnviroCare. EnviroCare had moved into Ward County, which is not too far from Odessa, and won. And part of the settlement was that EnviroCare would leave the state of Texas, which it has, leaving just one person, one company that wants to have that waste. But, there’s not the kind of money to be made in disposing of waste if you’re just dealing with the two point seven million cubic feet of waste from the compact. The Department of Energy has fifty years worth of contaminated materials from building nuclear weapons and that adds up to ninety-three million cubic foot—feet. It’s hard…
DT: Is this high level waste?
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FS: No, no, it isn’t high level. No. It’s—it’s low level, which some of which takes thousands and thousands of years to lose it’s radioactivity. One of the things we’d like is to have low level defined in such a way that you separate something that decays in two weeks from something that decays in twenty thousand years. But that hasn’t happened yet. So the push is on in this legislature—there was a push on in the last legislature, and the—it was passing, they—they were putting a box around Andrews, they were allowing private companies to hold it. It passed the House. Amended on the floor to make it desirable for the private company. Went to the Senate, passed nicely out of the Senate Committee. Passed the Senate and needed to go into conference. It looked doomed from
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our point of view, that we were going to come out okay, but the Chair of the House Environmental Regulation Committee decided that he just couldn’t stomach the bill that—that had made it through all the way that was carrying his name. He’s a good Parliamentarian, I guess, because he—the—the conference we would probably lost on, given that there have to be equal numbers from the Senate and from the House and we’d lost with the Senate and somebody from the House, but he convinced Speaker Laney not to appoint anybody to the conference and it died on the last day of the session. Unfortunately…
DT: Warren Chisum?
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FS: Warren Chisum. Unfortunately, the story isn’t the same this time. The bill is worse, the bill would give the license to a private company, allow it to be given, doesn’t—und—under DOE, current DOE policy—Department Of Energy policy, they do not care to give, send their waste into a place where the state hasn’t licensed that. If Waste Control Specialists is licensed, the State of Texas cannot keep out DOE waste, I don’t care what they say. They can’t under Federal Law. So there you are. Our push right now is to keep the State containing the license. No guarantees that that’s going to work indefinitely, but for now anyway, it would work. Unfortunately, Senator [Robert] Duncan, who’s Vice-Chair and Senator Buster Brown, who’s Chair of the Senate Natural Resources Committee and Representative Warren Chisum, have all filed a companion bill and it—we’ve lost our Representative Chisum as bulwark against the bill. It’s being heavily
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lobbied. Waste Control Specialists is owned by Harold Simmons who has an empire in this country. He’s a billionaire. But he’s headquartered in Dallas. And one of part of what he owns is Waste Control Specialists. He’s heavy campaign contributor to a number of key figures in this and the bills are going to be moving out of committee within the next few days and the—the fight is very difficult on it. I—I organized a—a—well, let’s see, Jim and I started a petition campaign. Not in the name of the Sierra Club. We—we just moved fast on it to try and get our Senator and our Representative to fight it and we picked up a couple hundred signatures in a couple days and sent it on in to them. Because anybody that learns about it doesn’t want it out here. The bill also mandates it must be in West Texas. It doesn’t say it that way, it just says it has to be in a place that has less than
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twenty-six inches average of rainfall. So that means its in West Texas. So that—that—it also—the bill also provides for more than one disposal site. You don’t need more than one disposal site, if you only have compact waste. So, it’s a complicated issue. And it’s hard to get attention on it. I would think that the large cities would be nervous if you have all that waste rolling, it’s going to roll on the interstates right through their areas. But so far, it’s—it’s gets some press, but not a whole lot. So we’ll see. The sessions on. The fights on. Sierra Club here’s has mounted a—what Senator Madden calls an overwhelming of calls to his office. And I’m sure the same to Representative Gallegos. And we did that. Then the state offices put out alerts. I’ve written a column for the newspapers. We’re doing everything we can think of to do to try and fight it.
DT: Why do you think the legislators are so sympathetic to the waste bills, although I would imagine a lot of the representatives constituency isn’t as excited about the prospect?
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FS: Well, I think there’s several reasons. One is some of them don’t know—really understand the issue. I think they don’t understand when—when they’re told that it’s just compact waste. They don’t understand that what’s at stake there. It isn’t just compact waste, and nobody quarrels with the idea that compact waste has to be dealt with. It’s part of the agreement. But the other, I don’t know. There—there’s—there waste controls fielding a whole bunch of lobbyists there. You know if you’re being paid and paid well to go around and visit legislators in their office and give you their point of view, it’s going to make a big impression. And small volunteer groups have a hard time. You know, we’ve raised three hundred dollars so we can send somebody to Austin for a few hearings. That probably buys lunch or something. So—so it’s—it’s tough, but—but I—I just believe that you’ve got to try. Everyone said Sierra Blanca was going to be the place and they failed. So—so you just try and money talks. The phrase ‘follow the money’ makes real—real sense. But nevertheless, you’ve still got to try.
DT: You also mentioned that you have been trying to work with the press and get some coverage on this. I’m curious what sort of reaction you get from newspapers when you present the story. I know you’re writing a column yourself. If you could tell about that and then (inaudible).
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FS: I can say—I want to give full credit. It’s the state organization is—is mounting a tremendous campaign and they do go around to the capital bureau offices and they talk to the press and do what they can to make it known. And I’ve tried, I called the Dallas Morning News and talked to a reporter I knew there. And did a little of that. But I thought we could be most effective on trying to—trying to deal with our West Texas people. And I did send off a press release and a—and a letter to the editor to nineteen papers. I—I will never know whether any of them printed them, because I won’t have access to them, but—but trying to get it in. But I think our role out here has been to pretty well work on our own Representatives and—and Senator. The—the Senate’s the
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key place if—if under Senate rules you have to—bills are supposed to be considered chronologically. Well, of course, they aren’t. But the way they aren’t is they have to get a vote of the Senate to agree to bring a bill up out of chronological order. So if you got eleven Senators who won’t vote to bring it up out of chronological order, you can stall it. And it—and so that makes trying to get eleven Senators on your side very important. And so I figure if we can get one of them to go with us, then we would have done our part.
DT: I guess part of your effort in trying to persuade your Senators and Representatives to see things your way is to bring your local community along. And how do you, I think earlier you told me you made some interesting headway in cooperating with some of the ranchers out here. Of, maybe we could resume and talk a little bit about your efforts to get some cooperation between the environmental interests that you’ve been working with and some of the traditional ranching community that’s been here?
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FS: Well, I—I had, I suspect, an urban stereotype notion of the ranching community, when I came out here. And I’m not saying that I don’t think there’s a lot of flaws in—in the way ranching has been done in the past, but they’re not all—all the ranchers do not think exactly alike. It isn’t sort of them and us. And so there’s been people that have cared about some of these environmental issues. And I think perhaps the water issues, which are emerging now, will—will draw environmentalists and ranchers even closer together because their livelihood depends upon their water supply. And all of our well-being depends upon learning how to conserve water and how an adequate use. So, I think that—that we found some common ground. I don’t want to overstate the—the relationship with Sierra Club to any formal ranching group. I think there have been individual ranchers who have been sympathetic and I think the air quality issues that we’ve—we’ve worked the hard way and earned quite a bit of credibility on it, and I think
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that’s bothered people, the ranching community and the community generally. And—and so I think—I think we’ve gained support, probably through working so hard on the air quality issues. There’s been other issues that have bothered the ranching community that we’ve been interested in, even though we haven’t spearheaded them. One is the training of Air Force pilots, low level training, in some case fighters and in some case bombers. And that has been private property rights. Let’s see—respect for private property has not been a key element in the Air Force assessment of it. From their point of view, what the military needs and the way of training the military should have and they’ve accepted that they can’t fly over Big Bend National Park. But they haven’t accepted that they have to be sensitive to—to the amount of space they take up and the—the impact they have on
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the on the ranching community. That isn’t so much an issue in town because they’re not allowed to train over town either. But—and the—and the Sierra Club is interested in that and has attended some of the meetings and—and talked, but all—the ranchers have been the spearhead on that and have sued. But that was a common ground in which I think we could agree. And the air quality, and to some degree, the radioactive waste issue. There
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may be others, but those come to mind. I think where we’ve had the greatest impact has been with people, just ordinary people, that live out here who are not environmentalists by background, who are still not environmentalists in the sense of being activists, but who care about these—these issues and who will, when you appear to them for action, they will call their Congressman or they’ll call their State Senator or Representative and they will sign petitions and they will help you, and they will contribute some money to—to—to the cause. And I feel one of the long-term effects the Sierra Club is having out
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here is to—is to make environmentalism something that’s important to people. You hear so often the phrase environmentalists as though it were some sort of radical person and not just an everyday person who cares about the environment within which he or she lives. So I think we’ve given credibility to not being monsters, but actually being concerned people with similar concerns to what the other people have.
DT: You mentioned in passing one area where the environmental community and the traditional ranching community share an interest and that’s the water rights and I guess some of the proposals to exploit water to some of the urban areas. Could you talk a little about that?
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FS: Yes, there’s an—and El Paso Juarez are running out of water. Juarez is running out really fast. But El Paso is running out too. And El Paso some years ago bought the rights to water in areas that are much further inland. One is near Valentine, Texas, which is a ways down the road from—from Marfa. So it’s—it’s in—in Jeff Davis County, which is one of three counties out here. And by—they’ve also bought—bought some in other places and the idea would be that they would build a pipeline and export it out. Well the—the recharge is very poor out of—the one out of Valentine. It has a tremendous amount of water in it, but it recharges itself so slowly, that you could do away with it and do away with the water, essentially. Agricultural uses depend upon it and as—as one of
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the ranchers pointed out, he’s—he’s been involved in the water issues, you’re also going to affect the wildlife when you—when you do that. So that not only the land and its uses, but also the creatures that use it there. And I thin—I suspect the—the—the ranching community is probably divided on the water issues, but when we first came out here, the so-called Right of Capture, which is the right to do anything you want with water that’s on your land.
DT: Ground water?
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FS: The ground water. Yes, we don’t—except for the Rio Grande, we don’t have much in the way of surface water out here. And they could just take it at will. And that was a right cherished, but is—is they are starting to see it as a double-edged sword. That just as you can do what you want on your property, someone else can do what he wants on his property. And that might be draining the water out of your area. And I think there’s more understanding now of the need for some sort of regulation and control over the water and people out here would like to have local control over it. There’s a bill in the Senate right now that’s fairly controversial. It’s certainly controversial out here, because it would decrease the—the influence and the control that the water conservation districts have.
DT: Senate Bill Two?
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FS: Yes, the Senate Bill Two. That’s Senator Brown’s bill.
DT: To just explore a little bit more about the relationship between environmental folks and the ranching community that has been here for many years, it seems like one of the more difficult issues to find agreement is on the endangered species and wildlife. I was wondering if you could describe where the fault lines are on that…?
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FS: Well I don’t know if I know where all the fault lines are, but I do know that Texas generally having joined the Union, not as a territory, but as a republic, does not have much in the way of Federal lands. And most of it is privately owned. There some lands the State holds, but by and large it’s private lands and those—control of it is jealously guarded, I think. So there’s a long tradition that most western states don’t—don’t have that tradition. So, there’s concerns and the Endangered Species Act is one of the more powerful acts in—in protecting the other species. In fact, it’s probably more specific than many other federal acts are. And once you’re discovered to have endangered species on your property then some things start happening. And so one of the things that I think the
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land owners out here are very nervous about is letting people on their property and having them discover an endangered species and then they’d come under the control. I think that’s overstated, out here, myself, but nevertheless, it—it’s—it’s real to those people. And so that idea of private property, private property rights, not wanting regulation is all part of the tradition here. And the Sierra Club certainly affirms the Endangered Species Act and perhaps stands on the other side of the divide on that—that issue. It’s something—it’s something, I think it takes a long time to come to the conclusion that—people will come to the conclusion that you have to be a good steward. That’s still a good steward for human use of something. The harder move to make is to say that creatures on this planet have rights themselves and that—and that just because you’re a human doesn’t give you the right to—to destroy and you may not believe that now as you look around and see all the destruction going on, but I think—I think that’s what you
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have to convince people of and that’s a slow hard job. And it’s what makes environmental education so important, especially in areas where people haven’t grown up with that other view of—of other species. One of the nice things out here—the really nice things, is how other creatures become part of the rhythm of your days. We have birds that we feed out here. We have Montezuma Quail and Scale Quail and Finches and Titmice and Meadowlarks and they all eat out in front and you get to—we had Pinyon Jays this year. And they come in and you start knowing what time of day it is. You just have to
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look at who’s out there eating and what time we have deer come around. and then—not in wildlife, but in other rhythms of the day, the sun goes, the shadows on the mountains, the time of year from the—from the—the skies at night. You get—you get a relationship to nature that I think most people don’t easily get to grow up with anymore and so that’s what makes, to me, environmental education so important, because it is—makes you part of a whole and not an end in yourself.
DT: Speaking of education, I notice that much of your career was working with education associations and in actually teaching of course at the college level and I was wondering if you could comment on how your career might have influenced—how affective you’ve been as a spokesperson for the environmental community out here, or as a net worker and organizer for the Sierra Club Chapter?
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FS: Well, I did learn something as a paid staffer, working for the American Association of University Professors, the Texas Conference of that organization, and for the Texas Faculty Association. I did learn something about how organizations work. And I value—I value that the organization as an organization, that that needs some nurturing. You have to find some balance between focusing on the issues and focusing on your organization as such. And when you try and start a group, you got to keep both sets, you know you have to learn how to go out and get people who can be involved, how do you get them to do some of the boring tasks, how do you raise money, how do you organize, lobby, all of those things. How do you put it together, what sort of publications do you put out. When you put out the publications, for whom do you write? And you better take that into account. And you probably should be working five or six agendas all at the time as you’re writing, holding that in your mind. Well, those were all skills I had to learn as—working for a volunteers association. And so, even though I’m on the other side of the fence now, I’m a volunteer, I do bring some of my professional experience to work there. And then from the years of teaching, I guess, you learn something about shaping a
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piece of writing to—and to put yourself in the position of the person receiving it. One of the things I try very hard in my newsletter to do is to spell out the whole name of something and put its initials in behind commas. And you get so used to knowing what they stand for, but remind yourself that your reader doesn’t. And—and there’s a lot of bureaucratic lingo in—in laws and—and—a not to—not to refer to the Parks Superintendent as a Federal Land Manager. Even though that’s what he is in the law. It’s just to try and learn how to communicate and always take your audience into consideration. One of the things when—when we started Sierra Club out here, I was told that it was a dangerous thing to do. Well, they managed to make me a little afraid to draw a map of how to get to the house for the first organizational meeting, but not enough to not do it. And that never materialized. But in those early months, when we were trying to
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get people out for hearings and meetings, someone suggested I leave the name of the Sierra Club off. And I thought well what’s the point of having an organization if you’re not going to affirm it and—and make it creditable. So—we’re long past that point now, but—but there was that. And I think those years of both teaching and working for professional organizations helped me to understand some of the things you have to do to when you try and get an organization going.
DT: Mrs. Sage, I was wondering if you could read to us a little bit, some of the poetry that you’ve written over the years that speaks to your interest and concern about the outdoors.
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FS: Oh, I’d be—I’d be happy to if you’d like. I—I have another part of my life which was writing poetry. And—and I actually put out a literary magazine for a few years so I had the fun of editing and laying out all of that. But I have a few poems that I think—I don’t have any that have a message, a conservation message, but I do have a few that I think might give you some notion about what I feel about nature. And I have a few here—the first one I can read you from is called East Fork, the Rosebud River, which is a river in south-central Montana. So it’s a poem from the early years, even though it wasn’t written at the time. It’s called, East Fork, the Rosebud River:
Somewhere near the shore
At a now forgotten campground,
I sat on a boulder in the Rosebud River,
Watching the sun glint on tumbling white water.
I stared for an hour until earth, me, sky, water fused.
One continuous refraction.
Is reality spirit or matter?
I think it is just refraction in the East Fork of the Rosebud River.
Another one—I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Indian medicine wheel, which is up on top of the Big Horn Mountains in Wyoming. Well, it’s not—not everything is known about it, but I think it was believed that it was used for astronomical purposes by Indians.
DT: What is it made of?
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FS: Stones.
DT: Just made of stones?
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FS: Yeah, uh huh. In some ways like a wagon wheel I guess, or at least that’s the way I remember it. We used to—to have—get out on the weekends and just travel around and get on a rough road and getting up there was a one way road up the mountain, so that was fun, it was a challenge. Had to back down if you met someone else coming the other way. So this poem is called, At the Indian Medicine Wheel in the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming:
Off the road the trail winds upward
to the final elevation on the high plateau.
The wind blows steady.
White stones formed in an ancient circle.
Holy place of unknown rituals.
When Indian mysteries do these stones reveal.
To the southwest the Tetons on the hazy horizon.
Across the valley, the Beartooths, solid mass with jagged peaks.
To the north the Priors, rounded mountains of reservation lands.
Epiphany of blue sky, bright light, cold wind and the timeless space.
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After we moved to Texas I was always looking for the mountains. And while Austin has lovely beautiful hills, I didn’t appreciate them for a long time because I kept wanting the mountains again. And we used to go over to New Mexico whenever we could on vacation. And this poem is called, Vanishing Point, it’s between—it’s the land between Roswell and Vaughn, New Mexico, which is sort of middle of no where in New Mexico: Mesquite vanish, wildflowers vanish, cacti and fences vanish, shrubs get stubbier and vanish, grass ceases to wave, diminishes to beige, cattle vanish. The occasional antelope vanish. The car falls away to blue sky, level earth and the self. The self vanishes. Airy blue, gray-brown horizon and the wind.
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After we came out here I was motivated by some of the experiences here to write and so I have two poems from the Big Bend area. The first one’s called Big Bend Country. I might say that when we moved out here we were going to build a house and we rented in town for a year while we were building our house:
Now in retirement in the desert mountains, above Chihuahuan Plains,
We await the stark, harsh land.
Though the deer and antelope deceive,
Hidden in the brush with their melting brown eyes,
The Javelina lumber.
Coiled near volcanic rock, the rattlesnake waits.
The scorpions crawl.
The emptiness stretches, the beauty not human.
For now we live in town,
With sycamore and mulberry trees,
Hummingbirds at the feeders, house finches and house sparrows,
Doves and titmice.
Peace roses bloom in yellow bursts
And the climbing red Don Juan roses fill the air with intoxicating scent.
We talk, we read, we play cards, we travel.
The town lies sits lightly on the desert rock,
Beyond the post office, across the tracks, into the brush plains mountains,
The emptiness stretches.
We grow old.
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And the final one is called, Pindle Canyon, Ode to the Javelina. And Pindle Canyon is—is a marvelously wild stretch that goes from the plains out of Marfa and down into deep canyons and comes out at the river:
Pindle Canyon, wild country.
Not a car, not a cloud, not a creature,
And then, across the creek in the cottonwood trees,
The black boars, javelina, large, medium and small.
They lumbered along the bank and
Scrambled agile and clumsy at the same time.
Up the hill through the cotton, out of sight.
They did not need us.
We needed them.
They who are otherness like the birds above.
We rode in the car, a portable culture.
Tourists and wildness.
Through it, not of it.
For one brief moment, though,
Back through the neocortex,
Back through the mammal brain,
Back to our own otherness, wildness, pure instinct.
We touch the Javelina of the self.
Blue sky, canyon walls, yellow trees, fall like, black movement, home.
DT: Well done.
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FS: Thank you.
DT: (inaudible)
End of reel 2151
DT: Mrs. Sage, just before we ended the last tape you were reading some of your poems about the outdoors and your experiences there and I was curious if you could tell us a little bit about how you write these poems. Where the inspiration comes from and how you lay it down on paper?
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FS: Well, I don’t want to be mysterious or say it’s magical, and you hear poets talk about their muse, and I don’t know what my muse is, but I do know that when I first started to write it would just sort of come on me and I’d sit down and I’d write just the words that came out of my head. And then—then from there is sort of started to shape. I came to learn to trust the something feeling that said, you want to write a poem now. So it didn’t matter what I was doing, I would stop what I was doing, if I—at all possible, and try and write the poem. And they tend to kind of plop out for me. They—I don’t mean I don’t revise them or work them over, but they tend to come out whole. I do know one of my weak parts in my writing and poetry is I don’t have enough middles sometimes. I have the beginning and the end, and that may be because they plop. But they’re hard—
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it’s hard to write for me when—when I was working. And so it was when I was home and I—I tended to want to be home alone when I was trying to—to write. When you’re—when you’re concentrating, you need to concentrate and it’s very easily—easy to be distracted. Some boss comes along and says where is the report?
DT: Let’s maybe move from your artistic side and talk a little bit about the affairs of the day, problems of the world. You—you dealt with air quality and nuclear waste, and water. All sorts of issues that are current out here in West Texas. I wonder if you—as you read the newspapers and watch the news, what do you think the really important environmental challenges that we and others will have to confront as time goes on?
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FS: Well, the obvious one, it seems to me, and the one that comes immediately to mind is global warming. Because what’s at stake is the whole planet. And I’m disheartened by our governments, this administrations response to global warming. At least, I guess they’ve made the move that there is such a thing possibly. But—but—it seems to me that—that if you wait on any environmental issue until it’s all sure and nailed down, it’s too late, and the evidence is pretty strong that there is global warming. And I wish that we as a people, and myself as an individual, could learn to conserve. Because I don’t see how we can as a country could go on using a quarter of the world’s resources, and maybe I’m wrong, maybe it’s more than that. Maybe it’s not quite that much. But at least on the emissions that we are putting out that’s contributing to global warming, we put out twenty-five percent of the world’s emissions. And I don’t much like
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the only focus to be on how do we continue to live this way? How do we get more oil, how do we get more resources? I would like us to look at how can we conserve what we have and—I’ve grown up in a world of plenty. I may have come out of the depression world, but I’ve still grown up in a world of plenty. And—and a lot of people, I don’t mean to suggest everyone has plenty, but money is prevalent and people are used to spending and buy on credit. And how do you convince yourself and other people to live a more restricted and a more modest life? And it seems to me we have to learn how to do it and learn how to do it fast. So I would put that whole package of global warming, what causes it, and what we can do as the number one on the agenda right now. And I guess there’s so much pollution going on of all kinds. There’s—there’s—there seems to be a terrible fear of regulation—and I—I know, I’ve worked for the state and I know there’s the bureaucratic world. But I don’t think that—I don’t think that voluntary programs have
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worked at all on pollution. And I don’t see any way to address them then to try and come up with regulations and to still be fighting the battle as to whether there should be regulations on it, is very—very depressing, because you’re not making any progress in fashioning good regulations if you’re still arguing as to whether anything should be regulated or not. And living out here where regulations are (inaudible), it’s—it’s not a popular thing to say, I’m sure. And—but at any rate, I’d like us to see that as a problem. How to—how to regulate and how to constrain ourselves some.
DT: You have children and your husband and I was wondering as you looked to the next generation, what sort of advice you would give them in trying to tackle some of the big problems you mentioned, whether it’s air quality or how to regulate our economy in our society?
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FS: Well, I do believe that everyone needs to start with themselves, but they can’t stop with themselves either. You do need to work all the time at controlling your own behavior, doing things that you know aren’t good for other people and for the environment and probably not ultimately for yourself. But I’m a great believer if you guessed earlier, on community. I’m a great believer in teamwork and group action too. So, I do believe that it makes sense to participate with others. People are different. Some people aren’t joiners and some people—you know, everybody has their own way of being. But to at least try and make a contribution to the best of your ability—to a team effort, I think is crucial. In days where money is influencing politicians tremendously, it seems to me you have to be willing to band together with others and—and contribute.
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And that’s what I would like younger people to know, because we all value individual freedom and I think the counterview has to be put out there too. Maybe—maybe ultimately you don’t influence another generation except by your own behavior. My mother never preached to us, she just did what she did. And maybe that’s the only way you ultimately do it. But you can at least provide structured experiences that allow people to—to see models.
DT: You just mentioned experiences and I was wondering if you could tell me about a place that gives you an experience of pleasure or serenity or some connection with the outdoors that means a lot to you?
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FS: Well, those—those first two poems I spoke of, about the Rosebud River and the Indian medicine wheel both were special to me, because I had never lost myself totally before those experiences. In the case of the—the Rosebud, it was—it was sort of losing awareness and just being. And in the—the case of the Indian medicine wheel, it was—I felt, instead of being overwhelmed by all of that long distance view and those mountains and so forth, I just felt I went out and became one with a vast amount of space. And so those were very important. But, out here, there’s a favorite place that Jim and I have that we like to go to. It’s called Dugout Wells and it’s in Big Bend National Park. And it’s hardly would be anybody’s first choice of the best and most beautiful place to go in the park. It’s a little east of Panther Junction, the headquarters, and it’s off to the left, which is the north as you head down toward the river. And it was a place that long before there was a park, there was—there were people that lived there. Not many. And there’s a remains of a—a windmill. And it is sort of an oasis there. There are cottonwood trees and
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other trees around in the desert area there. And there’s a wonderful sign that says, ‘This was the cultural center of the Big Bend at one time’, and I thought, well, I thought of that poem and—and (inaudible), in which it ends: It has a great giant sculpture. I don’t know if you know the poem. But it lies in ruins there and low the level sands stretch out. I’m not good at remembering the lines. And that’s sort of the way I feel at Dugout Wells. Is it reminds you that everything is transitory. That was once a place that people lived and I’m sure in a very modest way had a culture together, ceases to be that and the land is reclaiming it’s own there. And it’s a very quiet place, because nobody goes there. And
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we always like to go there and have lunch and just enjoy being in it. So, one of my favorite places in Big Bend National Park is Dugout Wells for all those reasons.
DT: Well, thanks for letting us join you here. It’s been very pleasant for us.
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FS: Thank you. It’s not often one has the opportunity to just talk about one’s self and have people listen.
DT: Well, it’s been a pleasure. Thanks a lot.
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FS: You’re welcome.
End of reel 2152
End of interview with Fran Sage