THE CIBOLO CENTER FOR CONSERVATION
KEL HOFFMAN,
PHD.
LAND CONSERVATION DIRECTOR
A weary Kendall County rancher eyes a bone-dry stock tank for the seventh dry spring in a row. April and May rains may soon dampen the caked, clayrich hexagonal patches of mud that have dried and split under the natural kiln of a Central Texas summer.
The water may even pool for a time, leaving six inches of tarry mud that clings to his Herefords and resembles sweet crude more than soil.
Or maybe not. As he calculates the cost of this drought to his bottom line, his time, his life, a tightness wraps his chest and hardens his resolve. The scarcity of this resource, second only to oxygen in necessity, produces other scarcities in its wake.
Profits thin first. Then the extras. A new Little League glove is out of the question this season, as is a new transmission for the Kubota. The old glove and transmission will have to do.
The extras are not the only casualties of this cascade. As the chances of that new glove dwindle, the rancher’s tension grows in step. Once it finds purchase, it manifests as shorter answers and longer silences at home, irritation at things once beneath notice.
The absence of water narrows his focus. Then, his world. It metastasizes into decisions that once felt flexible, rendering them rigid and ultimately brittle. Every gallon now carries weight. More than he ever imagined water could bear.
When resources tighten, evaporate, become scarce, so too does our grace. Conflicts become more frequent and more rancorous. Our sense of identity shifts from what we share with our neighbors to what divides us.
In conservation’s absence, conflict arrives not as a failure of moral character, but as a predictable outcome of scarcity.
A neighbor’s well is noticed. A city’s water use becomes suspect. A council meeting that once felt procedural now signals alarm. Scarcity sharpens attention, and the resulting awareness is seldom kind.
As private strain hardens into group position, opportunities for compromise evaporate and hardline stances take hold. Once perspectives are sorted into right and wrong, compromise has already failed.
This is what natural resource scarcity does to communities. It drives division and disharmony in a world already primed for both.
Conservation is not a panacea. It is, however, one answer to the pressure that resource scarcity places on human relationships.
Conservation builds margin into our impact on the land. It creates buffers, be they spatial, temporal or behavioral, between our decisions and their darker consequences. It allows the honeycombed aquifers beneath us to hold irreplaceable water in reserve, quiet and unseen in their depths.
Those drops may one day mark the difference between harmony and heartbreak along a stream’s reach or even grace the well of the rancher who helped secure their presence in the Edwards.
In the Hill Country, water conservation matters because the ties that bind us matter. Those ties respond to scarcity just as the rancher does. They contract, stiffen and lose resilience.
Water conservation is more than stewardship of an irreplaceable natural resource. It is an acknowledgment of our place within a shared landscape and the duty of care we owe one another.
Kel Hoffman PhD is Land Conservation Director for the Cibolo Center for Conservation.
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