By Elizabeth White

Jim Stanley retired in the Hill Country area with his wife in 2000. As soon as they came to Texas, he became involved with a lot of other people that were involved in working with—and maintaining—native land. He went to a handful of government agency meetings discussing land management, worked at the Riverside Nature Center in Kerrville, and ended up finding friends with a similar interest in nature.

Then, in 2002, a lot of those friends got together and started the first National Master Naturalist chapter in the area. Mr. Stanley was involved in that and has since taught a great many classes over the years as a Texas Master Naturalist.

“You can’t reach everybody by having them come in to take classes,” Mr. Stanley commented. “So, the first thing I did was to write a book about the Hill Country. And then I wound up writing two more.”

Shortly after he had written that first book, a good friend who was a native plant and bird expert and had been writing a column on birds encouraged him to write his own column. That started Mr. Stanley’s column down in Kerrville in 2010. It’s been running ever since and runs weekly here in the Mason County News.

Mr. Stanley turned 80 a few months past. He grew up out in the oilfields in West Texas, went to Texas Tech for his bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and went on to Indiana University to earn his PhD. After that, he spent some time at Louisiana State University doing postdoctoral work and teaching, and then went to work up in the Northeast.

For Mr. Stanley, having the opportunity to be out in nature and observing the behavior of plants and animals has been a rewarding part of being a naturalist. In addition, reaching out to other people about this, both in person and through writing, has also been important to him.

There are so many aspects to living in the Hill Country—an enormous amount of interrelated, but unique topics about how we interact and manage the land. It makes sense, then, that a Master Naturalist must go through 60 hours of training, hear talks from various experts. And it also makes sense that Mr. Stanley, as a Master Naturalist, would turn around and work to spread that knowledge further. Our collective knowledge of nature is a vital, but vulnerable resource.

As a local Gen Z kid myself, I asked Mr. Stanley what he would say to my generation about native ecosystems. “If we don’t take care of it,” he commented, “we could destroy it.” It’s all too easy to take for granted the resources available to us, forgetting the complex systems that create and maintain the world we enjoy.

Interest in this knowledge is clearly growing though. When Mr. Stanley was involved with starting the Kerrville Master Naturalist chapter in 2002, there were only a small handful of chapters in the state. Now, there are close to 40 chapters, with thousands of Texans as Master Naturalists, carrying this knowledge.

Being a Master Naturalist, ultimately, is about bringing together people who can use the knowledge of the land to help protect it. As the mission statement puts it, “The Texas Master Naturalist Program’s mission is to develop a corps of well-informed volunteers to provide education, outreach, and service dedicated to the beneficial management of natural resources and natural areas within their communities for the State of Texas.”

For Mr. Stanley, this means educating others. We can’t all be Master Naturalists, but maybe we should all embrace the spirit of this, as Amateur Naturalists. After all, amateur comes from the Latin word meaning love—to be an amateur is to do something for the love of it.