Conservation History Association of Texas
Texas Legacy Project
Oral History Interview
Nature Conservancy in Texas

Interviewee: James Byron Morris
Date: October 25, 2022
Site: Houston, Texas
Reels: 4545-4547
Executive Producer: Lydia Saldana
Producer: Jeff Weigel
Field Producer / Chief Interviewer: Lee Smith
Videographer: Curtis Craven
Writer / Editor: Ron Kabele
Transcriber: David Todd / Trint
Item: Morris_James_Byron_NCItem20_HoustonTX_20221025_Reel4545-4547_Audio.mp3

[Bracketed numbers refer to the interview recording’s time code.]

Lee Smith [00:00:16] So where did you grow up?

James Byron Morris [00:00:18] In Columbia, Marion County, Mississippi, which is just north of New Orleans, about ten miles from the Louisiana / Mississippi border in the very south part of Mississippi.

Lee Smith [00:00:32] It was big town, small town?

James Byron Morris [00:00:35] Well, for Mississippi, it was sort of a big town. It was at least 6000 people, but it was in the middle of the oil patch in Mississippi. Most people are surprised to find we have one in Mississippi, but we do. And Columbia, particularly in my childhood and coming of age, was still a place where you had a lot of upstream oil and gas drilling and production.

Lee Smith [00:01:02] And was there any… Were you an outdoor kid? Was there any experience when you were young that maybe sparked an interest in the outdoors?

James Byron Morris [00:01:14] Well, I liked watching TV. But I grew up on what was left of my great grandfather’s farm. And it was out in the country. And so, yeah, I was outside a lot. My parents, to my great chagrin, limited television viewing to about 30 minutes a day. So you had to go play outside or you had to go play outside!

Lee Smith [00:01:47] Cast your mind back. Was there a specific time of day or a specific event when you were young that you kind of made a connection with the outdoors?

James Byron Morris [00:02:01] We lived next door to the reform school in Mississippi, which I don’t know what people picture when you say reform school, but it was, I guess about 5 or 6000 acres and had been set up, I guess, around World War I to be self-sufficient. So it was a lot of timber, a lot of agriculture, huge fields. And then on our farm we had timber and we had large fields that originally were agricultural, were cultivated, and then they became grazing pastures.

James Byron Morris [00:02:43] So one of my favorite activities as a as a child was when they would plow the big fields in the spring was, if you were lucky, you’d get a rainfall and then you could walk through the the rows and pick up arrowheads. It was, you know, it was it was heavily populated in I guess Native American times. But there was a a lot of Choctaw relics.

James Byron Morris [00:03:15] And then our woods, we were in the piney woods. So there was always timber activity going on. And that was always fun to to be around.

James Byron Morris [00:03:25] But I was always plotting to watch the next rerun of Dick Van Dyke or Lucille Ball. So I enjoyed the outside, but I was not someone who lived. And I did, I did not enjoy hunting. So that sort of cuts you out of a lot of outdoor activity. But I like, I still like being outside.

Lee Smith [00:03:52] Was there anything in popular culture like a TV show or a book or magazines that …?

James Byron Morris [00:04:01] Well, we were good Southern Baptists, so we never got to stay home and watch Bonanza, which I resented all my life because it came on at 7:00 on Sunday night. But I remember the the magic with the the guy who did the the Wild Kingdom.

Lee Smith [00:04:20] Marlin Perkins.

James Byron Morris [00:04:20] Mutual of Omaha right before Disney and then which led into Bonanza. And that was like the last little bit of television you could catch before you had to get up and go to church on Sunday night. But yeah, I remember Marlin. Yeah, that was one of the most…

Lee Smith [00:04:38] It was either Merlin or Marlin.

James Byron Morris [00:04:40] One of the most fascinating programs on nature. When we were, you know, we only had three, but for a long time, we just had two networks in Mississippi. But then we got three. But that was that was well before the days of public broadcasting and all the the nature programs you see now.

Lee Smith [00:05:02] So what … so you went to high school in.

James Byron Morris [00:05:09] K through 12, and then I went to Millsaps College, which is a Methodist school in Jackson, which is the capital of Mississippi. And then I finished at Southern and I immediately went to law school at Ole Miss. And from law school, I came directly to Houston and stayed there for, stayed here for 34 and a half years, except for a couple of years in Denver and a year in New Orleans.

Lee Smith [00:05:42] So we’re out of law school and but you did you go straight to Mobil or how did you how did you, what was your path to Mobil?

James Byron Morris [00:05:51] I finished law school in 1981, which was during a very big boom in the US upstream oil and gas business. And I had grown up around the oil business. My family was in the service station convenience store business. And my grandfather’s company also had a lot of oil field service company accounts where we would deliver oil and gasoline, kerosene, diesel to pipeline construction sites or drilling sites.

James Byron Morris [00:06:32] So I sort of had a leg up on, I’d sort of, I’d been in an oil field, so I interviewed with a lot of oil companies because they were looking for people with law degrees with a little bit of background in the oil and gas business, not necessarily to do legal department work, but to work in the land department, which is taking leases for oil and gas drilling and and handling the land ownership side of the oil business.

James Byron Morris [00:07:01] And so I landed at the Superior Oil Company, at the site which was headquartered in the same building as Vinson and Elkins in downtown Houston in 1981 as soon as I finished law school. And I went through a land training program and was one of the, it was probably the best fit I could find for professional use of my skills. It wasn’t practicing law, but it required a lot of the knowledge I acquired in law school. And it was a lot of travel and outdoor work and putting land deals together.

Lee Smith [00:07:41] And this is Superior?

James Byron Morris [00:07:42] The Superior Oil Company which was, had been founded, I guess, in the ’20s by a man by the name of William Keck out of Kern County, California. And he started off, I believe, as a driller for Union Oil. And at some point, so I’ve heard, he started taking payments in interest in wells and I guess in the somewhere around World War I founded Superior.

James Byron Morris [00:08:18] And at the time I went to work for Superior in 1981, his son, Howard Keck, was the chairman and it was the largest US independent oil company. It was acquired in ’84, ’85 by Mobil Corporation, which was the old Standard Oil Company of New York.

James Byron Morris [00:08:44] And that’s where I stayed until 2000, when Mobil was merged with Exxon to form Exxon Mobil, which was the old Standard Oil of New Jersey.

Lee Smith [00:08:58] So what was your first involvement in a conservation project?

James Byron Morris [00:09:09] A lot of my early onshore land work was in California. There was, there’s a lot of very old production, both in the San Joaquin Valley up around Bakersfield, and then a lot of production, very old production, along the coast south of Santa Barbara in Los Angeles, Huntington Beach, those areas.

James Byron Morris [00:09:37] And early on, I started working in particularly the coast of California, which had become very developed, a lot of surface culture that had grown up around oil field operations. And you started having to deal with local drilling ordinances and things of that nature.

James Byron Morris [00:10:04] When I was in Denver, after Mobil had bought Superior, I was working in California and one of the more senior landmen worked out a deal on a pretty large parcel of property that Mobil had somewhere on the coast of California, I think around the Santa Barbara area, where Mobil made a donation of the property. And I don’t remember the conservation group, or if it was made to the to the state conservation part of the government of California.

James Byron Morris [00:10:48] That was my first realization that if we found ourselves in a situation where we couldn’t develop, that was that was an option for dealing with property. And it was sort of a “file-this-away-for-future-use”.

James Byron Morris [00:11:10] But mostly I was working up in the San Joaquin by that time around Bakersfield, and we were we were pursuing a very active drilling program at that time in the San Joaquin.

Lee Smith [00:11:25] So how did the Texas City Prairie Preserve come about?

James Byron Morris [00:11:30] Well, I’d worked with this guy in Denver and he was transferred to Houston and he offered me a job in Houston, I guess about six months after he got here. And I came back.

James Byron Morris [00:11:45] And this was in the mid to late ’80s when we were starting to see large oil companies sell off some of their older producing properties that were in a state of decline.

James Byron Morris [00:12:03] And the property in Texas City had originally been acquired by Superior as a potential refinery site. Superior was an independent oil company and they never got into, that I know of, the refining and marketing business. They were strictly upstream.

James Byron Morris [00:12:29] But as luck would have it, we’re in suburban Houston and oil and gas was discovered there, I guess somewhere in the late ’40s, early ’50s and Superior had produced oil and gas on that property.

James Byron Morris [00:12:43] And Mobil sold the oil and gas production in the, I guess, the mid ’80s, late ’80s and was left with a pretty substantial surface tract and was sort of at odds on what to do with it.

James Byron Morris [00:13:05] You recall in the late ’80s we were in a pretty significant energy downturn here in Houston and land values were not what they had been. So people were not chomping at the bits to develop the surface in Texas City.

James Byron Morris [00:13:23] So it sort of landed on my desk as a as a care, this I was the carekeeper, the person in charge of what to do with this this large tract, undeveloped tract, in Texas City.

James Byron Morris [00:13:40] We had a farmer, an ag lease, on the surface. It had, the surface had actually been used as part of the Superior Farming Company. Superior had a farming subsidiary mainly in California, but then they had operations in Texas City.

James Byron Morris [00:13:56] And we had leased it out before I was in charge of it, to the son of the man who’d been the farm manager back in the day when Superior was actually conducting farming operations. And he was running cattle on the property.

James Byron Morris [00:14:14] And it fell in my lap and we had no income except the farming lease to pay for the property. And our our taxes on it were far greater than what we were making off of our agricultural lease. Something needs to happen here.

James Byron Morris [00:14:37] And we started getting inquiries around the prairie chicken, the Attwater prairie chicken population, on the property from national media.

James Byron Morris [00:14:50] And we weren’t we weren’t operating on the property any more, and we didn’t, nor were we required to have a plan to deal with the prairie chicken population. But it was extremely endangered at the time. And it was, it had the potential to be a public relations issue if anything ever happened to those birds and we were the owner of the property.

Lee Smith [00:15:23] So it was a liability on two fronts.

James Byron Morris [00:15:27] I wouldn’t call it a liability. I would call it an opportunity. But it was an interesting situation. It was the largest undeveloped piece of land in Texas City, in the municipal boundaries. We had experts look at it and they would tell me, unofficially, the reason you have the last surviving flock of Attwater prairie chickens in this part of the world is because it’s not developed.

James Byron Morris [00:16:07] We’re we’re surrounded down there by residential developments and a lot of oil and gas, refinery, chemical plants, what have you.

James Byron Morris [00:16:19] And we had a couple of thousand acres that were just fenced and nothing there but cows. No one was living on the property. The farm manager was no longer living on the property. They always tell me our biggest threat to the prairie chickens were feral cats and hogs.

James Byron Morris [00:16:42] But that’s not how it plays out in public perception. And Texas City was very interested in what we were going to do with the property. It was their last large piece of undeveloped land in the municipality.

James Byron Morris [00:17:01] So, it was coming down to the point where we were getting a lot of lot of outside attention on the property.

Lee Smith [00:17:11] So how did the Nature Conservancy come into it? How did you discover and work with them?

James Byron Morris [00:17:21] Well, my wife worked with Carol Dinkins at Vinson and Elkins. And, you know, I guess at the end of the day, “What happened at your job today?” Pillow talk. I would discuss the wonderful opportunity I had down in Texas City with a piece of 2000 acres of surface property, surface fee, no oil and gas potential on it. And what was I going to do? And a critically endangered species on the surface. What was I going to do with it?

James Byron Morris [00:18:04] And I think at some point my wife said, “You know, Carol’s very involved in the Nature Conservancy. Maybe this is something they’d be interested in in buying or as a donation.”

James Byron Morris [00:18:21] And we were getting a lot of media inquiries at that point. I don’t know how much you know about prairie chickens, but in the spring, they do their mating ritual. And the media was all hot and bothered to come down and film the mating ritual.

James Byron Morris [00:18:52] The male prairie chickens go out and do their their dance on the on the lek, which was, you know, the hard surface, which was usually a drilling pad, being the only hard surface on coastal wetland properties, or that’s what they preferred. And then the female prairie chickens would come in and sort of would choose their boyfriend.

James Byron Morris [00:19:21] And we were able to say “no” to the media until we got a call from a fellow by the name of Roger Tory Peterson, who wanted to come and photograph the the male birds booming. And I didn’t know who Roger Tory Peterson was, but my wife did.

James Byron Morris [00:19:46] And by that time I think I knew Robert Potts. They were both like, “Oh, yeah, you need to facilitate this. You need to make this happen. This is not somebody you want to say ‘no’ to.” And that’s when we had our first, and I think, our only, official photo opportunity for our Attwater prairie chickens.

Lee Smith [00:20:16] And was it successful? Did you get some good shots of them?

James Byron Morris [00:20:22] You know, it was one of the scariest things I’ve ever done professionally. I didn’t know the details of prairie chicken mating rituals when I said “yes” to this. And I had to go pretty far up in Mobil management to get approval to allow this. And after I got the approval, I guess I thought we’d, you know, go down and eat at one of the seafood restaurants and then amble on out to the to the ranch and let Mr. Peterson take a few bird shots.

James Byron Morris [00:21:02] I did not know that we were going to have to have him in place at sunrise and that the birds, the male birds, only did their mating dance at sunrise, which, if you ask me, is one reason they’re probably endangered.

James Byron Morris [00:21:18] But anyway, it turned into a full-scale Hollywood production, and we had to get a tent set up for Mr. Peterson. He was on up in age then. Got a couple of vans, got everybody down there at some ungodly hour, like 4AM, had to get him out there in his in his tent before sunrise. Couldn’t disturb the prairie chickens.

James Byron Morris [00:21:57] And I had invited Robert and Carol. And then Mr. Peterson had his entourage.

James Byron Morris [00:22:05] Drove him out there. Turned him out of the van. And I remember thinking when we opened the door and he was, he was a frail little man. This isn’t good. This is not we are turning this 80-something year old frail little man out in the out in the dark in a wetlands.

James Byron Morris [00:22:33] And sure enough, he walked into the ditch and fell flat on his face with, you know, the kind of camera equipment NASA sends to the moon.

James Byron Morris [00:22:41] He got up though. He was not it was not to be deterred and got down out to his little tent and took some of the most beautiful shots of the booming male prairie chicken I’ve ever seen.

James Byron Morris [00:22:54] Took him to breakfast afterwards. And Carol, he said something about, “I have mud on my jacket.” And Carol Dinkins said, “I think you brushed against the van.” And I was like, let’s don’t revisit falling in my ditch.

James Byron Morris [00:23:09] But that’s that was when we really started getting the publicity on the prairie chicken flock there. And there was a sentiment in Mobil management that we wanted to do something with the property.

Lee Smith [00:23:29] So why? Why The Nature Conservancy?

James Byron Morris [00:23:35] Well one, I knew the Nature Conservancy because I knew Carol Dinkins and Robert Potts. I think Robert’s wife, Lana, was a lawyer at Vincent and Elkins and had started about the time my wife started. And Carol was on the board by then.

James Byron Morris [00:23:55] And two, when you look around at conservation entities that can manage a 2000-acre, around 2000-acre, donation, and you start looking at their financial background and the scope of their work, the Nature Conservancy, at least at that time, was really the logical choice because they operated all over the country. They had large, large conservation easements, preserves, what have you, and a large staff.

James Byron Morris [00:24:43] So the last thing I wanted was to have to answer to my management If we made a donation and then five years down the road, there was a disaster in running the property. Why did we we choose this conservation group if they weren’t capable of managing the property?

James Byron Morris [00:25:12] And the Nature Conservancy, in my very quick education on conservation organizations, stood out as these are these are, you know, to the to the conservation business, they’re like the big oil company in the conservation business. They have expertise. They have people. We’re not going to ever, this is not going to ever blow back on us that we chose the wrong recipient.

James Byron Morris [00:25:42] So that’s that.

James Byron Morris [00:25:45] And the Nature Conservancy had people and volunteers to to work with us, and they understood how large organizations, large corporations, worked and they could, they were familiar with what it requires to work with a large company. They were just the, the natural choice.

Lee Smith [00:26:11] And how did that process work? Was it easy?

James Byron Morris [00:26:21] Giving away anything at a for-profit company is not going to be easy. But we had pretty much determined we would be, Mobil, would be holding the land undeveloped for a pretty lengthy period of time until property values recovered in Texas City.

James Byron Morris [00:26:48] And we were not experts at managing a critically endangered species.

James Byron Morris [00:27:01] And we had nothing going on there to pay for it with. I mean, you know, in the business world, you want a profit center to book an expense against. Well, we’d sold the oil and gas operations on the surface. So it was, it was just an expense that just kept booking itself against no income.

James Byron Morris [00:27:22] And it was once once I guess once management looked around on the Nature Conservancy, this was like, you know, this is something we want to do.

James Byron Morris [00:27:34] And we ended up making a donation of the property directly to the Texas Nature Conservancy. And then I think a couple of years later, we funded a, Mobil funded a, building on the site.

James Byron Morris [00:27:51] But I put, I got to shepherd that through Mobil and the Nature Conservancy and it was a wonderful, wonderful project to work on, but I never thought it would turn out the way it turned out.

Lee Smith [00:28:12] And are you pleased with it?

James Byron Morris [00:28:13] I’m very pleased with the way. You know, in life, occasionally things come along where you get to do the right thing and you get to do it. And I was very fortunate to have a boss and managers at Mobil Corporation who once I said, “I think we probably ought to donate this before those chickens are extinct and let them select the experts, see what they can do.” They were behind me 100%. That’s very much off the beaten path of what you do day-to-day.

James Byron Morris [00:29:00] And in business, you’re you’re we’re capitalists. We’re there to make money. And this was, this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do something that benefited the greater good.

James Byron Morris [00:29:17] And I’d seen the example of what Mobil had done in coastal California. And at the time I saw that, I thought, “Well, this works in California, but I’m not sure it translates anywhere else.” And yeah, a few years later, it translated to Texas City, Texas.

James Byron Morris [00:29:34] In all my research, which I never thought I’d I’d become conversant on prairie chickens, back in the day when we were settling this country, and there were millions of prairie chickens, they were sort of the food you fed the the help because they were so abundant.

James Byron Morris [00:29:56] And, you know, I guess it’s sort of like deer, once you’ve tasted it, you really need to I know a lot of people like venison, but I sort of thought it probably I don’t know, I never tasted one, but I thought it’d be gamey.

Lee Smith [00:30:15] So as the Nature Conservancy closes in on its millionth acre, which is imminent.

Jeff Weigel [00:30:23] I’m sorry. In Texas.

Lee Smith [00:30:25] In Texas.

Jeff Weigel [00:30:26] Yeah.

Lee Smith [00:30:27] What has its impact been on Texas?

James Byron Morris [00:30:31] Well, you know, in Texas, and I consider myself a Houstonian and a Texan, even though I don’t live here anymore, I spent most of my life here. You go back to the Republic and the whole conversation that went on between the Republic and the United States when the Republic became part of the Union over what to do with state lands.

James Byron Morris [00:31:00] And what I’ve read of it is that the leaders of the Republic wanted the federal government to purchase or wipe out the Texas state debt in return for assigning state lands to the to the federal government.

James Byron Morris [00:31:18] And I’ll resist the urge to make a comment about the wisdom of politicians in Washington. But they didn’t take Texas up on the offer.

James Byron Morris [00:31:29] And so we ended up with the state retaining all of the Republic’s lands and there being just no federal lands, which is, particularly in the western part of the United States, is the backbone of our public lands conservation work.

James Byron Morris [00:31:49] So in Texas, we’ve had to come in and have private conservation organizations develop the public lands, the lands that belong to the public.

James Byron Morris [00:32:07] So having a million acres under the Texas Nature Conservancy sort of helps to bring us up to standard with a lot of our Western brethren who have large reserves of of public lands that will be preserved for future generations.

James Byron Morris [00:32:32] And particularly that this 2000 acres is part of the Houston metropolitan area, which is the fourth largest metropolitan area in the United States and well on its way to being third or second.

James Byron Morris [00:32:46] That’s a huge legacy to hand down to future generations.

James Byron Morris [00:32:52] When I drive down in that part of the world now and see the development that is going on, assembling that much acreage in one chunk would be a very expensive, probably an impossible task at this point.

James Byron Morris [00:33:14] So look at that across Texas, where the Conservancy has done all these different deals to preserve land and we owe them a big thank-you. I’m glad I could do my very little part. My 2000 acres of the 1 million.

James Byron Morris [00:33:34] And it wasn’t me. It was my employer, Mobil. I worked for a company that had the foresight and the generosity of spirit to make this donation. I just happened to be the one sitting in the desk that was responsible for the property. If I hadn’t worked for Mobil Corpoartion, I’m not sure it would have happened. It was just the way they did business, the way they they saw themselves and their their role in the world.

Lee Smith [00:34:07] And how do you feel about your role in that?

James Byron Morris [00:34:10] I was really proud of Mobil. I mean, it was it was it was one of the best things I ever saw them do.

James Byron Morris [00:34:20] I always have been proud to be part of the oil industry, and I was always proud to be part of Mobil Corporation. But if you look back on the people who founded Mobil, they were extremely generous. And I think it was just continuing that same same way of doing doing business.

James Byron Morris [00:34:47] Why do you want to take your, see your, grandchildren out there?

James Byron Morris [00:34:55] Oh, I’m not sure what they think I did for a living or what I contributed. Just just. Well, one, I think the ten year old has the potential to be a birder. And I know her mother is a birder.

James Byron Morris [00:35:15] Too, they’re they’re to the place, they’re learning about Texas history and and getting out and seeing that part of of Houston and and what it was like originally before civilization.

James Byron Morris [00:35:34] And you know, some ego in it. Let them, you know, I did do something.

James Byron Morris [00:35:42] I think if they had to sit down and tell you what I did for a living, they’d be totally, totally mystified. They came up to the lake in South Carolina, North Carolina, last summer. And I volunteer at a bookstore one morning a week. And it’s a nonprofit – nice bookstore.

James Byron Morris [00:36:08] But I took the two oldest grandkids who think the book store is just the neatest thing they’ve ever come across anywhere to work with me.

James Byron Morris [00:36:19] And driving back to the lake, my Ava, the ten year old, told me that she wanted to go to work with me the next day.

James Byron Morris [00:36:30] And I said, “Well, honey, I don’t go to work but on Thursday morning. That that’s it.”.

James Byron Morris [00:36:35] And she was like, “And how long do you work on Thursday morning?” And I said, “Well, about two hours. That’s how long we were down there.”

James Byron Morris [00:36:42] And she thought about that and she looked at me and said, “You know, if you worked more than two hours a week, you could buy more stuff.”

James Byron Morris [00:36:52] So, yeah, I’d take them down there, just let them know I did something besides sit behind a cash register at a book store for two hours a week.

Lee Smith [00:37:01] But so what do you think about a young person going into the field of conservation? What do you think the future holds for them?

James Byron Morris [00:37:12] Well, there’s a lot of work to be done out there. And you talk to kids today and they talk about wanting to go into environmental work. And, you know, I admire their passion.

James Byron Morris [00:37:26] But I think it’s a rude awakening when they find out that a lot of conservation work, a lot of environmental work, goes on in corporate America and that you’re going to probably, about 90, 95% of your jobs in the environmental field are going to be for for corporate America.

James Byron Morris [00:37:52] But I think there’s a huge passion out there among kids coming of age about wanting to preserve what we have and and work in that field.

James Byron Morris [00:38:03] I’m just not sure there’s a realistic connection between the education you get and where you can find gainful employment, because it’s a it’s a growing field in corporate America. And I guess it’s a growing field on the on the conservation side.

James Byron Morris [00:38:23] But I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive. I think you can do a lot of conservation work in corporate America if you put your mind to it. It’s not an either / or. It’s something you can, if you have that passion, you can find it all across, not just in the oil business, but all across corporate America.