John Mac Carpenter

Past president of Native Plant Society of Texas

Today's Date: 7-20-2006

1. What interaction with an animal and/or nature in your life has had the biggest impact on you?

Perhaps the biggest single thing that has caught my attention...although I grew up knowing that the area in west Texas where I grew up had been short grass prairie and was degraded to desert scrub, my first guy realization was driving to the farm where I grew up, I suddenly realized that when I was a small child I could see over the mesquite in the range land, I was now 6'2", driving over roads that had been raised more than a foot before they paved so that they wouldn't go under water during heavy rains as they did when I was a child and driving a full sized pickup instead of sitting in the back seat of a '41 Chevrolet sedan, I could no longer see over the mesquite, so I knew totally that the mesquite was a recent addition. One of my earliest memories was of the floods along the Pecos River in 1941 and then the great profusion of wildflowers the following spring and then no wild flowers until the middle 1950's because of drought.

2. Did you have a favorite place in the great outdoors during your childhood?

There was a place on the Pecos River, not far from our farm house that widened out into a good swimming hole with trees all around. Of course they were Tamarix ssp, invader plants. But it was a place where we skinny dipped and where I often went alone with a book.

Now? The place that feeds my soul the most is McKittrick canyon in the Guadalupe Mountains and the San Antonio hot springs in the Jemez mountains of NW NM.

3. As a former zookeeper, I would love to know what your favorite animal is, and why?

The tiger....because of its perfect beauty, as in "tiger, tiger, burning bright, in the forest of the night." I also love the brown bears we occasionally see in the Chisos Mountains in the Big Bend National parks. They are always black there and always beautiful and have not yet become a danger to man....and are less in danger from us there than in most places.

4. What do you think is the greatest environmental challenge facing us now, and what do you think will be the greatest challenge in the future?

The heating of the earth and the increasing presence of nuclear waste being transported from place to place and then buried with little attention paid to the water tables it will eventually foul.

5. If you could give everyone one piece of advice regarding the environment and our natural resources, what would it be?

Please remember that the size of a man's vehicle is in reverse proportion to the size of his penis.