Dan Oko, Texas Monthly, February 2015 — Texans may loudly profess love for their wide-open spaces, but about only 2 percent of the state is actually public property. The rest, famously, is privately owned. From an ecological perspective, this is not an entirely bad thing: the fact that there are so many exclusive spreads, such as the King Ranch, has guaranteed certain protections for the wildlife that thrives on them. But that is changing.