Romey Swanson — The Work of Finding Common Ground • Mountain & Prairie

Romey Swanson is the Executive Director of the Devils River Conservancy, and he wears a lot of other hats too—wildlife biologist, naturalist, writer, photographer, and a leader in just about every corner of the Texas conservation world. The Devils River is generally considered the most pristine stream in Texas, and maybe in the entire Southwest—remote, spring-fed, and held together entirely by private landowners. The county it runs through leads all 254 counties in Texas in privately conserved acres, and none of it was required by regulation. If you’ve ever wondered how conservation gets done in a place with almost no public land, Romey and his community have built a model worth paying attention to.

Romey grew up in rural West Virginia as part of what he calls the last generation of feral children—turned loose outside with instructions to be home before dark, with the creek behind the house as his best friend. His family moved to Texas when he was in junior high, and like most teenagers, he traded all of that for sports and a social life. He was a first-generation college student headed toward sports medicine when he walked past a flyer at Texas State advertising a Wildlife Society meeting—free pizza and live animals. He went for the pizza, met a faculty advisor, and changed his major that week.

I’ve known Romey for six or seven years, and we cover a lot of ground here—his early days filling deer feeders and checking bird nest boxes, why he says waiting tables taught him as much about this work as his degrees, and whether leadership can actually be taught. We get into the threats facing the Devils River—data centers, transmission lines, and energy projects that can undo decades of voluntary conservation—and his work with the mountain lion stakeholder group in Texas, which has some obvious parallels to the wolf situation here in Colorado. There’s also a good stretch on his passion projects, including his owl research in the mountains of far West Texas, and why he decided to use social media to push out something positive instead of more conflict. We wrap up with a few book recommendations and his encouragement to all of us to just pay attention. I loved this conversation… Enjoy!

Photos courtesy of Romey Swanson