Big Thicket The Historic Texas Wilderness That Changed Conservation

To celebrate America's 250th birthday, Trey Sanchez looks at how a 1974 Congressional designation is helping preserve a portion of the Big Thicket in southeast Texas. With all of this, there's another thing happening. This National Park Ranger is telling the story of this area. A story written in the soil and told through the trees. All these different efforts coming together. The area is known as the Big Thicket. It stretches across what used to be a 3.5 million acre wilderness. A biological crossroads where forests, swamps, prairies, and streams support more than 1,300 plant species and thousands of animal species. It's a landscape so unique, Americans spent decades trying to protect it. Eventually, Congress created something we had never seen before. In 1974, the Big Thicket became America's first National Preserve. I don't vilify logging. It's a very important industry, both historically and today. And as that shift from longleaf pine to other trees like loblolly occurred, we're starting to see less biodiversity, less habitat for wildlife. And those are the changes that have kind of occurred when the National Park site is designated in 1974. We've been working to kind of correct those changes. Today, the National Park Service protects more than 113,000 acres across 15 separate units. Part of that work carefully planned prescribed fires, restoring longleaf pine forests, and bringing back the conditions native plants and wildlife depended on for thousands of years. We know that there are a number of threatened or endangered species that live in these ecosystems. The red-cockaded woodpecker, the Louisiana pine snake, there's other plant species like the Texas trailing flocks. When we did a rare plant inventory in 2025, not even just endangered, but just rare plants, almost 40% of those plants were found in these pine forested ecosystems where burning is taking place regularly. The results aren't measured in months, they're measured in decades as new forests grow and future generations inherit a landscape still filled with life. We're here because of the efforts that people did before us, but hopefully each group of people is able to contribute a little bit more. And I think the 250th is just as much about the future as it is the past. So when we think about that in the lens of Big Thicket, to me the 250th is a celebration of the work that we're doing now for future generations and hopefully inspiring more work to come. The Big Thicket stands as a reminder that some of our greatest legacies aren't built, they're preserved and restored one generation at a time. Trey Sanchez, KFDM News. Such a cool place. The National Preserve designation allows for some limited activities not allowed in national parks. For the Big Thicket National Preserve, that includes some hunting and fishing and oil exploration. The United States now has 19 National Preserves.