“The Teddy Roosevelt of Texas”
Photos and Video courtesy Loren Steffy
A new biography explores the life and legacy of Andrew Sansom, who’s saved more than half a million acres for public lands in the Lone Star State.
Loren Steffy
If you enjoy hiking in Central Texas, chances are, you can thank Andrew Sansom. No single person in Texas history has done more to preserve and protect public lands.
In our area alone, Sansom helped establish or expand Pedernales Falls, Palmetto, McKinney Falls, Longhorn Cavern, and Old Tunnel state parks, as well as the Honey Creek and Government Canyon natural areas. During the 11years that he led Texas Parks and Wildlife, Sansom was instrumental in protecting a half million acres of land for parks and wildlife management areas statewide. That doesn’t count his time running the Nature Conservancy, his work with the U.S. Department of the Interior or his role in founding the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment at Texas State University.
What makes Sansom unique is that he’s equally comfortable talking water conservation with naturalists or land financing with hard-bitten capitalists.
In her new biography, Andrew Sansom: A Life in Conservation, Austin author Laura Raun takes us inside these deals. As Raun notes, Sansom has spent a lifetime finding common ground between those who want to conserve natural resources and those who want to monetize them.
Author Laura Raun discusses her biography of Andrew Sansom at Bamberger Ranch.
She unpacks the political battles and financial transactions that Sansom navigated at TPWD, making her book as much a fly-on-the-wall narrative of how such deals get done as a biography of conservation. The book makes the case that in a state in which private land ownership and property rights are sacrosanct, someone like Sansom is essential to protect natural Texas for future generations.
As a former business reporter, Raun is adept at unpacking the financial transactions as well as the environmental ones—while making both interesting and engaging to the casual reader.
“My challenge was to figure out his magic formula,” Raun told me. “How did Andy persuade these people who were major landowners to sell their land to the state, to put their land into wildlife preserves, and to give up the ability to commercially develop their land?”
The book was released in November by Texas A&M University Press, which is known for its conservation books, and of course, the tome-like Texas Master Naturalist Handbook. I should note that Raun and I were colleagues at Bloomberg News years ago, and my publishing company produced the video trailer for her book. (My company also has a distribution agreement with TAMU Press.)
The book provides a complex portrait of a man who has the rare skill to quickly assess what someone wants and figure out how to get it for them. In the case of landowners, that could be money, a lasting legacy, or the enjoyment of managing their land to make it the best it can be.
“Andy has emotional IQ,” Raun said. “He can read into people who are very big landowners, people who may have had land in the family for generations, and he can talk their language, even though he didn't grow up with immense wealth.”
I found myself thinking that Sansom probably could have made a fortune on Wall Street, but fortunately for Texas and Texans, he chose to devote those skills to something that had greater future value than individual wealth.
Even more interesting than the financial deals are the political battles. Sansom proves adept at moving easily among politicians of all stripes. The book is full of stories about Sansom’s work with a young Karl Rove, and later with then-Sen. Kay Baily Hutchinson, former Gov. Ann Richards, and some epic confrontations with former Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock, whose political maneuverings were legendary. He considered political office himself but found the prospect of “sacrificing everything for my ambition” unappealing.
Sansom, often called the “Teddy Roosevelt of Texas” for his conservation efforts, has always taken a different view of land preservation. He remains an advocate for private land stewardship in part because so much land in Texas is in private hands.
At a recent book signing at Bamberger Ranch, near Johnson City (where his daughter, April, is executive director), Sansom noted that if the state allocated $1 billion for acquiring new public lands, it would be enough to add only 1 percent to 2 percent to the state’s total holdings. In other words, serious stewardship is going to require support from private landowners.
“We can’t solve the problem by buying land,” he said. “We need to keep landowners on the land.”
Bamberger Ranch is, of course, the model for such private conservation, and Sansom is an avid follower of its namesake. David Bamberger, a former fried chicken tycoon, acquired 5,500 Hill Country acres in 1969 and has spent the years since on habitat restoration and conservation. Sansom has called the property “a beacon of hope.”
Among conservationists (and Master Naturalists) Sansom is a beloved figure. Indeed, Raun said the biggest challenge in her five-year writing project was that she wanted it to be an objective look at Sansom’s life and accomplishments, and few people are impartial about him.
“This was not intended to be a hagiography,” she said. “This was intended to be a textured biography of Andy, and it was like pulling teeth to find anyone who would say anything even the slightest bit critical.”
As well-known as Sansom and his accomplishments may be to conservationists, what’s surprising is how Sansom “pops up,” as Raun puts it, in so many other events of national or statewide significance. He was involved in the first Earth Day, for example, he helped run the federal government’s “Don’t Be Fuelish” conservation effort in the 1970s, and he was in the State Capitol when the Texas Legislature first started considering water plans.
But the book’s themes transcend conservation and even politics. What emerges is a picture of leadership that’s based on compromise and collaboration, ideas that are out of step with the divisiveness and zero-sum mentality of the day—but which are sorely needed.
“It's not just environmental leadership, it's leadership, generically—leadership that is consistent, that is steady, that is committed to achieving an end that benefits not only the parties at play but the wider community,” Raun said. “It's leadership that is practical, pragmatic, and well intentioned.”
When I finished the book, I was left with another thought: how desperately we need a new generation of Andy Sansoms to remind us of our tenuous relationship with the natural world and help us preserve it. Amid the encroachment of wanton development, the lesson is easily paved over.
“We are all in this together—people and the environment,” Raun said. “We rely on each other. We must have each other. We cannot allow species to continue to go extinct endlessly. We cannot allow water to dry up and somehow think that there will be some technology that's only going to come down from heaven or from AI and solve our water shortages.”
In bridging the divide between conservation and capitalism, Sansom’s life stands as a reminder of how interdependent those worlds are.
Andrew Sansom: A Life in Conservation | Cinematic Trailer
Stoney Creek Publishing