Fritz vs. the Feds - Edward C. Fritz

In 1943, a young Naval Air cadet headed for Texas. In early March, the greenhorn was given his first flight lessons by Ensign Edward C. "Ned" Fritz. A hard man to please, Fritz's report reads: "Student serious and learns well. Has difficulty in maintaining altitude. Tends to make all turns in a slight skid. Took off several times with right wing low. Judged his first emergency well. Did not have the knack of setting three wheels on the ground at the same time. Bounced on his takeoffs. Safe for solo."

Ensign Fritz's fitness report for Cadet George Bush ranks the future President relatively low. Fritz concluded, "Bush is an upstanding lad with great self-confidence. It appears, however, that he may be somewhat eccentric."

Cadet Bush's flying problems would not have imperiled red-cockaded woodpeckers; for by then few members of this endangered species were airborne in the state's loblolly and shortleaf pine forests. The birds had retreated east or into remaining pockets of old-growth pine. In fact, the population of the red-cockaded woodpecker was plummeting throughout the South, where pine plantations with short rotations of 40 to 60 years had become the rule.

One of our endangered bird species, the red-cockaded woodpecker has very specific habitat requirements. It only colonizes pine forests that are at least 60 years old, and it forages only in the upper canopy of those forests. If and when a hardwood understory begins to take over, the red-cockaded woodpeckers move on in the face of competition from their cousins--pileated woodpeckers. Perhaps 500 red-cockaded woodpeckers remain in Texas, where a strange and bitter civil war rages over their fate. The leader of one side is Ned Fritz, relentless and judgmental. On the other side stands the U.S. Forest Service--outmanned, outgunned, and outraged. In Dallas, along the Trinity River, Ned Fritz and his wife Genie live in a defiantly modest house in an opulent neighborhood. While their neighbors' idea of landscaping runs to high gloss, the Fritz's three acres of bottomland feature a riot of hardwood vegetation thriving under 40 years of selection management directed by one of the toughest tree huggers around. Cedar elm dominates, along with Shumard red oak, chinkapin, Osage-orange, and the Texas state champion green hawthorne.

Unimpressed, Fritz's wealthy neighbors took him to court over his approach to urban landscaping. They should have known better. Fritz won hands down.

The Dallas Morning News calls Fritz "Nature's Angry Advocate." His fellow wilderness warrior, George Russell of Huntsville, told me, "Ned is like an old-growth tree, gnarled and sinewy, tenacious and dedicated."

Some are less sure of Fritz's virtues. A lobbyist for a national environmental group said, "Ned is not a team player." One of Fritz's bitterest enemies in the Forest Service told me, "Ned Fritz is a gentleman. I cuss him. I admire his pit-bull tenacity. He gets his teeth into things we can't control, like our timber-harvest quota, and he won't let go."

Others are less respectful: "What motivates Ned Fritz? Ego. He wants to be remembered as the father of wilderness in Texas. He'll use that end to justify and means."

But Dallas Congressman John Bryant says, "Ned Fritz is the father of Texas wilderness."

Fritz remembers growing up near a hardwood hollow in Oklahoma, where he "learned to love Jesus and John Muir," not necessarily in that order. Fritz speaks in a soft drawl. A lawyer, he is the kind of trial attorney who forgets little and forgives less, as Cadet Bush learned. He entered the law because "I am argumentative. I can ask a lot of questions pretty easily, especially about three-dimensional or environmental law."

Major conservation awards from sources as diverse as Chevron and The Nature Conservancy testify to Fritz's achievements. In the history of modern forest-related legislation and litigation, he has played a major role through his favorite organization, the Texas Committee on Natural Resources (TCONR).

At the time Ned Fritz was teaching George Bush to fly, the Sam Houston National Forest--which lies between Dallas and Houston--was only a decade old. Known locally as "the piney woods," the Sam Houston had been cut over by the 1940s, but it regenerated more or less naturally. Then one day the piney woods reached what the Forest Service regarded as rotation age--time to cut--and the Forest Service accelerated its clearcutting. All hell has been breaking loose, Texas-style, ever since.

The Silvecultural practice known as even-aged management or clearcutting appaled Ned Fritz. So did the site preparation that followed the clearcut--the bulldozing, the burning, the spraying, the pine-only planting. He calls clearcutting "the most destructive form of continuous logging ever devised."

Fritz had been all over this country and even to Europe to study forests under uneven-aged or (his preferred term) "selection" management. He could not understand why even-aged management was necessary or desirable. He was not and is not against timber harvest. He was and is against clearcutting.