Big Oil vs. a little West Texas lizard

Snakes, salamanders, and other slimy specimens peer sightlessly out from rows of glass jars in a College Station archive. As Lee Fitzgerald walks past roughly 115,000 preserved amphibians and reptiles that belong to Texas A&M University’s Biodiversity Research and Teaching Collections, he points out a boa constrictor from California, a goliath frog from Cameroon, and a thorny devil from Australia. In front of one metal shelf, he stops before a hefty container piled with about thirty lizard corpses in varying shades of brown and gray. Fitzgerald picks up the jar and holds it up proudly, as one might when introducing a beloved pet. He and fellow herpetologists collected these two-inch-long lizards during more than three decades of research in West Texas and New Mexico, where the creatures make their homes in dunes of coarse sand. Since Fitzgerald started studying the dunes sagebrush lizard in the 1990s, the reptile has suffered significant population loss and habitat destruction, mostly from road construction that comes with oil, gas, and sand extraction. According to a 2023 analysis by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the dunes sagebrush lizard is now “functionally extinct” across 47 percent of its range. Only in a small patch of the Permian Basin, in West Texas and southeastern New Mexico, does the critter endure.

Now the species awaits a fateful ruling as the agency deliberates over whether to list it as endangered. That designation would restrict land use within the lizard’s habitat, potentially protecting it from extinction. But its habitat includes sand and brush lying above valuable deposits of oil and natural gas, putting the tiny creature at the center of a political and economic battle that has been intensifying since 2002. That’s when the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental nonprofit based in Tucson, first petitioned for the lizard to be listed as endangered. The oil and gas industry has successfully lobbied against the designation, leading to state-run, voluntary conservation agreements instead of long-term, federal requirements. Toeing the line between advocacy and scientific inquiry, Fitzgerald has drawn on decades of research to push for conservation in the West Texas desert. He has met with stakeholder organizations to explain the lizards’ plight and watched as conservation took a back seat to jobs and profits in the oil and gas industry. His hopes for permanent protection of the lizard have repeatedly been trampled, but he is not backing down. “Is the lizard gonna make it?” he asked. “I’m sure not giving up.” Fitzgerald’s love for all things small and scaly started early. When he was a five-year-old growing up in the Houston suburb of Pasadena in the 1960s, his father died of a heart attack at age 41.