Did You Know?

By Tom Harvey

State parks and the people who visit them are important to the new leader of Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, Carter Smith.

“We are blessed with a tremendous variety of natural resources, some of the most biologically unique, some of the most ecological special, in our nation,” Smith said. “And we as an agency are charged with one of the most special missions there is, to ensure that those natural assets, those Texas treasures, like our open spaces, our natural lands, are passed on to future generations. That’s a wonderful privilege, but it’s also an obligation to leave these in a better place than we found them.”

Smith is a seventh generation Texan who grew up “with one foot in the city and one foot in the country.” He lived in Austin, but spent many formative childhood hours on family ranches north of the capitol city and in Gonzales County down near the coast. He has a wildlife management degree from Texas Tech and a masters degree in conservation biology from Yale. His career path runs from the bottom to the top. He started with TPWD as a student intern in 1992, and in late 2008 came back to lead the agency as executive director. From 1998-2008 he was with The Nature Conservancy of Texas, where he led the organization as state director for the past five years.

Smith grew up immersed in the outdoors on family ranches, learning about wildlife and nature first-hand, but he realizes most of today’s urban Texans don’t have that experience.

“I am very concerned with the state of conservation literacy among our younger demographics in this state,” Smith said. “We’ve been talking about the ‘Last Child in the Woods’ syndrome, and there is a growing disconnect now between people and nature. Turn that around and we’ve got a great opportunity to promote more outdoor recreation, whether that’s use of our state parks, creating new paddling trails, fostering public hunting programs, ensuring there are places to birdwatch and helping families as a unit get out in nature together.”

The new leader is arriving at a time when funding for parks has been in the public and political spotlight for the past year.

“There was a large groundswell of public support to help encourage greater investment in our state parks,” Smith said. “We saw a large and diverse culture of stakeholders that came together to help advocate on behalf of our state parks. The good news is the legislature listened. They were very responsive, and have made some strong investments. Now we have the responsibility to steward those resources well and make sure we expend those in a very fiscally sound fashion, so that we can keep that momentum going and continue to have a bright future for our parks.”