Who Will Shape the Next Decade of Conservation in Texas?

For the previous three years, I’ve helped lead Audubon’s Texas Ladies in Conservation program, working with colleagues and honorees to acknowledge girls who’ve made important contributions to conservation in Texas.

This yr marks this system’s eleventh yr which bestows the Terry Hershey Award. We’ve got now accomplished a full decade of recognizing extraordinary conservation management, and we’re looking forward to what the following decade can turn into.

When the award was established, George Bristol served as Chair of the Audubon Texas Advisory Board, whereas longtime Texas conservation chief Dr. Andrew Sansom was a former Advisory Board member and emeritus member for Audubon Texas and former Chairman of the Nationwide Audubon Society Board of Administrators. Collectively, they performed a key function in approaching Terry Hershey about lending her identify to an award recognizing girls advancing conservation throughout the state.

It’s tough to think about a extra becoming inspiration. Terry Hershey was a outstanding conservation chief whose affect reached throughout Texas and past. She served on the Nationwide Audubon Society Board of Administrators and helped discovered the state’s largest native chapter group now referred to as Birds Houston. Over many years of advocacy and management, she labored to guard rivers and bayous, floodplains, open areas, wildlife habitats, and the pure locations that make Texas particular. The Terry Hershey Award carries that legacy ahead by recognizing girls whose management is altering conservation in Texas.

Every year, Audubon produces quick movies celebrating award honorees and their contributions. Throughout filming, I’ve watched a sample emerge repeatedly. These are terribly achieved girls, but their intuition is never to start by speaking about themselves. They discuss concerning the colleagues who labored alongside them, the locations they love, the organizations they helped construct, and the communities they serve. Typically it takes slightly encouragement to get them to acknowledge the complete impression of their very own contributions and management.

There’s something highly effective in that humility. It additionally reinforces why recognition issues. Texas Ladies in Conservation provides us a possibility to cease and say: this work issues, their management modified Texas, and it is a story price telling.

That grew to become particularly tangible final yr, when Audubon celebrated this system’s tenth anniversary. Greater than two-thirds of this system’s previous honorees returned for the Austin celebration, bringing collectively a unprecedented group of girls whose collective impression stretches throughout many years and almost each nook of conservation in Texas.

That night, Audubon additionally introduced a particular tenth Anniversary Legacy Award honoring former First Woman, Woman Chook Johnson, accepted on her behalf by her daughter, Luci Baines Johnson.