INTERVIEWEE: Dwight Shellman (DS)

INTERVIEWEE: Dwight Shellman (DS)

INTERVIEWERS: David Todd (DT)

DATE: October 23, 2000

LOCATION: Uncertain, Texas

TRANSCRIBERS: Lacy Goldsmith and Robin Johnson

REELS: 121 and 122

Note: boldfaced numbers refer to time codes for the VHS tape copy of the interview

DT: My name is David Todd. I’m a representative of the Conservation History Association of Texas. And it’s October 23rd, the year 2000 and we’re in Uncertain, Texas on the banks of Lake Caddo. And we’re visiting with Dwight Shellman who has done many things to help protect the lake and also to understand it. And I wanted to thank him for taking the time to talk to us.

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DS: Thank you David and welcome.

DT: I thought we might start with your early days and maybe you could tell us if there was any experience or event, people perhaps, that taught you your interest in the outdoors and your interest in protecting it.

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DS: I don’t really remember anything specific. I—when I was a young man in Colorado I began to hike up into the high mountain lakes. I did that, you know, significantly for ten—ten years or so. And I really begot—got connected with the—the high alpine kind of environment. But I can’t remember anything that particularly turned me towards conservation. My dad, who is a dentist, was a very widely read man who had been raised on a farm and seemed to have a lot of sensitivity about what we know today as environmental issues. Sustainability was a thing that he understood as somebody who had worked with the land and worked as a—as a farm hand during the thirties and before. I think about a lot of the—the environmental values that I have I really got from him—from being around him.

DT: In your early adult years you visited the Colorado Rockies. Were there very special spots that you grew to love or areas that you grew concerned about because of the changes there?

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DS: Well I--I was pretty much an urban person. I lived in Denver and went to law school there. And—and then prior to that, I’d grown up in Ohio. And I’d grown up in a community that really hadn’t changed much. I—I’ve since begun to regard that as a virtue, but when I was a young person, it seemed to be the place was dead. So when I finally came to college and law school in Denver, I began to see what it was like as a—when you get into these large urban growth economies. The California phenomenon were beginning to happen in Denver when I got out of law school in the—in the late fifties. And then—then I began to look into the mountain areas. Ultimately I moved to Aspen as a member of a law—large Denver law firm and then left that firm and started my own practice. And by then, I had become—I’d extended a thing I’d done in the cities which had to do with school and social integration in the school system and I got very engaged with community neighborhood level organizing. And—and—to the point where I really believe that—and still do, that that’s a very powerful activity and that people that

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live in neighborhoods are—are—know a lot more than we give them credit for, both socially and environmentally. So working off that urban issue, that—that—which was a social race-based integration kind of an issue, I then moved to Aspen which is a totally Caucasian community and became engaged in growth issues there. Hav—having come out of the city and watched a city—the City of Denver essentially sprawl all over the plain and—and also watched that phenomena occur in resort communities throughout Colorado where the development was kind of tacky and unregulated. I be—I became engaged in the beginning of that kind of process in Aspen and—and actually helped to organize local neighborhoods so that they would define their agendas for what they wanted their neighborhoods to be like. This is before the term "NIMBY" [Not In My BackYard] was invented but—and that’s the—the—the nim—the power of NIMBYism can be a very positive thing. So if you approach people where they live, they can tell you what they want their neighborhoods to be like and then, by extension, they extend those values into what they want their community to be like, what they want their valley to be like and so on. And it took awhile for me to realize tha—if you worked from the bottom up, although as a rar—very labor-intensive activity, you would get a very significant conservative wisdom by consolidating the opinions of all those neighborhoods. So, as a result of that, we organized a neighbor—four or five neighborhood caucuses, we had them develop their own en—environmental and social agenda for the community. We then engaged them all in a large community-wide meeting with four or five hundred people. This is fairly small community so that was a huge turnout.

DT: What year was this?

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DS: This was back in the sixties, late sixties, early seventies. And we asked them to draw their own platform, rather than to wait around for candidates to give them platforms and they did develop a consensus platform that was pretty much environmentally and development-based. And it turned out it was a very conservative platform. It was, "We like it the way it is." By the way, there’s a theme we hear in East Texas a lot too, "We like it the way it is, we want to maintain the attributes we have," and we—we want to have—in our—in the Colorado situation it was a belief because, and this was now in the sixties and seventies, that if we could use government, government could somehow regulate the desired outcome. But that began a pr—regime of environmental planning and I’ve—I’ve, within four years I had been elected to the county commission in our county and had—with another colleague who had been my law partner and also a environmentalist. And we began to develop an environmental land use code and development regulations, which had to do with mapping out the areas that were sensitive or special and—and by elimination, you would find the areas that were suitable for development. Have you ever heard of David—or Ian McHarg? I don’t—I don’t know if the name is familiar.

DT: Sure, maybe you can tell a little bit about some of his…

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DS: During the developmental part of this, we invited Ian McHarg to Aspen along with others. There were half a dozen people that were in the vanguard of environmentally sensitive development and we had basically town meetings. And Ian McHarg was one of the people. He was a Scottish architect and land use planner who had developed a system for what I just described, mapping out. You map out the areas of sensitivity or special cultural or other values and you basically do it with like acetate overlays and then you lay them over each other on the land map and then the areas that don’t have anything on them, theoretically, are the areas that would be the most suitable for development. And then you—then you orient those to where you want utilities and how you want growth patterns so you don’t leapfrog outside the urban areas. But in general, it was a methodology that was intended to preserve the good—the good environmental qualities in any area. It’s still used today—used extensively. Actually we’ve used it here too. So based on that, my lawyer colleague and I on the commission developed these land use maps which were created by our—the equivalent of A&M—Texas A&M. In that case, it was Colorado State University, which is our Ag school. And then used that mapping again, which is still used today, to identify wildlife corridors, calving areas, things of that nature, riparian areas. And those were mapped out so that development could not intrude on them. And what we found, generally, was we typically enhanced the value of the property where—and so the unintended results is we supported high quality, high cost development in our community that created a whole other set of problems. But the—the mapping was the key to it. You want to wait? We’ll see, we have boats going back and forth. The bottom line was, based on the mapping, we were able then to design zone maps and zoning categories that, in many cases, called research—resource areas with large lots and extensive conservation.

(misc.)

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DS: Well, any—anyway, the bottom line of the Aspen-Pitkin County experience was that we got into government. We did land use regulation on the technology that had existed when we started, which was a seventies technology, and actually created as part of our governments, these neighborhood caucus entities. And they began to then have, by law, comment authority for all government activities in the neighborhood and then I was a member of the—one of the more active ones. So as I got into that, Don Henley became my neighbor in the Woody Creek area and the Woody Creek caucus and we began to work on community-based activities throughout the—throughout that area. We had a large project having to do with extending the airport and night operation of the airport and things like that, as well as a lot of land use issues where the caucus would rise up and object to some intrusion by government of an industry or unsuitable residential development. So we worked together on a number of those projects up until about the late nineties, I’m sorry, the early nineties, and then Don asked me to come to Caddo Lake because there was a Corp of Engineers proposal to develop a barge canal going through the lake and local people were fairly concerned about it. And, in theory, I think the expectation was that I would be able to do something in the local community that would support the efforts to prevent damage to the lake by this barge canal—the Corp of Engineers canal. So I made a trip in December of ’92 and another trip in January of ’93, and quickly concluded that this was not a place that could be "organized" the way you would do in California or Chicago or some place like that, primarily because the—the culture in Texas is not that kind of culture. So while there was really broad and deep concern about this project and—and a lot of caring about the lake, what I perceived was that I wasn’t going to be able to do anything with the people that were here that they

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couldn’t do for themselves and were already doing for themselves. But the one thing that I found myself deficient in and I perceived that there was a lot of lack of knowledge about, was how the place worked, what the biology and the ecology of it was. So while there’s always—there are always people in cultures that have a lot of anecdotal information that sometimes contains scientific truth, there’s also a tremendous amount of scientific untruth imbedded in those cultural stories too. And it’s hard to tell which is which. So, as a result of that, and because some students and teachers from ETBU [East Texas Baptist University] had appeared at a couple of these hearings, I started to look around at the colleges, again on the theory that it would be an area where we could engage people, where they would get something out of the lake that they weren’t currently getting. And it turned out that that was the case, that the—the higher education institutions around the lake, East Texas Baptist and Wiley College were actually not using the lake at all for teaching or learning in any organized way. And that Stephen F. Austin, which is eighty miles to the South, which was a—a regional university, while it did that, it did that infrequently. Now what was underway when I got here was a—a the second of a ten-year study where one of the limnologists would come up to the lake and they would study it for the school term. But they only did it every ten years, although that got tremendously good information. So what we decided to do was to start the Caddo Lake Scholars Program among a—a consortium of universities and mainly keyed into interested professionals, pr—really—interested professional educators is what I meant, scientists. Roy Darville at E—ETBU was a leading scientist, limnologist, studier of lakes and water bodies, who had the technical skill and also had a tremendous interest in carrying out his own spiritual mission with—with stewardship ac—activities that involved using a science and he’s been doing that ever since. Seven, eight years later, he still comes here frequently, monthly at least, to sample the water and—and sediments of the lake. And he’s—he’s

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and outstanding example. But there were probably thirty other academics who did similar things. And as we saw that begin to go together, right—initially it was only a kind of an essay writing scholarship award type program, but it very quickly became a more institutionalized program and, for a time, we recruited teachers—science teachers at—at the public schools and science teachers—usually science teachers at the universities and colleges and actually put them through a course of training about wetland science. Early in the game, what I decided based on the experience I’d had in Aspen, is that the best way to find out what to do in a community is to ask the people that live there. And I, you know, I had forgotten that. And so we had—in February of ’93, we had a large meeting of agencies and citizens to scope the issues and that resulted in a kind of agenda that has guided us ever since. One of the principle issues that came up at that meeting was the RAMSAR Wetland Treaty on wetlands of international importance and by the end of 1993—by October ’93, we had actually gotten a significant part of Caddo Lake designated under that treaty. And so that RAMSAR Treaty became the framework for the scientific and technical framework that we put around our—our intern program. We did a—a pilot project in Jefferson which is up river from the lake, an old antebellum town, and had a tremendous success with teachers and students dealing with these issues. And that helped us then refine the intern program which we carried on for three or four years. At its peak, that program had, I would guess, fifteen academic scientists and twenty to thirty to fifty high school and college students running a network of water quality monitoring stations that were parceled out school-by-school that eventually covered the whole basin. And we have today accumulated three thousand data points for the Cypress basin and a tremendous amount of water quality information at Caddo Lake itself.

DT: Maybe this would be a good chance to tell a little about where Caddo Lake is…

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DS: Okay.

DT: …and what makes this lake unique.

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DS: Well, it is said that Caddo Lake is the only naturally formed lake in Texas, which I personally find hard to believe, but that’s what—that’s the—the—the anecdotal information on it. The natural formation of the lake occurred in probably pre-European times, before Europeans came to this country, but maybe not too anciently, we’re not really sure. But the—the dynamic was that the Red River, which is thirty miles to the East of which this forms part of the tributary system, became jammed with lo—big logs and debris for hundreds of miles along it’s course. That caused the lake to overflow—or the river to overflow its banks and fill in adjoining low areas and the Caddo Lake area was one of those low areas. Caddo Lake today has about twenty to thirty thousands acres of—of lake and wetlands that are associated together. Water flows in generally from Texas into the lake and it lies on the Texas-Louisiana border, so that Texas has most of the wetland part and Louisiana has most of what you would call the lake part, more open water although there—the whole system is dominated by bald cypress trees which are the large blusterous trees that you can see in the background. Moss, mossy trees and—and, even in the lakes, there are these blake—these islands or breaks of—of this cypress dominant species. So—and then that’s developed its own special habitat for a tremendous range of—of animals that provide food for animals at a higher level ri—starting right in the sediments and through the water column and up into amphibians and things like that so that we have a very large resident bird population, the most dramatic or which would be blue—the—the heron family. But a whole range of migratory song birds move through the area seasonally and water foul, ducks, geese, and that sort of thing also migrate through it, as well as a lot of other birds that are not good for eating or singing. So there is a tremendous bird population here based upon the wetlands that develop from that overflow system. The original lake was bigger than—the original complex was much bigger than it is now. And Henry Shreve for whom Shreveport is named, was sort of the first Corp of Engineers engineered to take on a river and he progressively removed the logs and the—th—what’s called the great raft from the Red River and when that was finally completed, the water level fell dramatically.