Forces of Nature A leading environmental activist on why Floridians are passionate about public lands.

Environmental Humanities

 

 

 

By Clay Henderson

Growing up in the small Florida town of New Smyrna Beach was a childhood in paradise. For family picnics or beach days our favorite spot was the dunes of the north peninsula on the south side of Ponce de Leon Inlet. At a place we all knew as “the bowl,” the dunes were so steep we could sled down them in a cardboard box. We watched turtles swim through the waves and lumber ashore, and least terns by the hundreds nest along the pristine beach. That landscape remains a place of my dreams.

On my return from law school, I could see the beach I knew was disappearing.  Out-of-town developers purchased the dunes and planned six 20-story condominium towers with 640 units. A few of us tried to stop this at the city commission and even challenged it in court. We lost the battle but learned how to win the war.  During this time, I met local retiree Walter Boardman, the first executive director of The Nature Conservancy. He told us, “Don’t fight it, buy it.” That became my life’s work.

The battle over the dunes taught me that a defining sense of place can quickly be replaced by a palpable sense of loss. Love of the outdoors unites real Floridians. To walk along a moonlit beach; swim in gin-clear spring waters; paddle along subtropical river, streams, and lakes; and gaze at colorful wading birds are peak experiences burned into our collective memory. My motivation for preserving our state’s wild landscapes has always been to give my children the opportunity to experience Florida as I did. 

The history of Florida has two distinctive threads. In one well-known series of events, early naturalists found Florida, a largely uninhabited wilderness of 34 million acres of lands, so beautiful and teeming with wildlife that they described it as Elysium or paradise. But the state proceeded to give away or sell on the cheap to developers and railroad tycoons a staggering 21 million of those acres. Much of that land was ditched, drained and paved to lay the foundation for what is now our nation’s third-largest state.

But another thread of history tells a different story. This story recounts how passionate, hardworking advocates managed to claw back nearly half of our original birthright. If the 19th century was mainly about draining the swamp, the 20th century was partly about protecting the swamp, and the 21st century may be about restoring it to its natural glory. Here are but a few examples of those who preserved our wild places.

In 1915, May Mann Jennings and the Florida Federation of Women’s Clubs convinced the governor, cabinet and legislature to save Royal Palm Hammock, an island in the Everglades where 1,000 royal palms rose 100 feet in majestic splendor, as our first state park. Although the Everglades was widely viewed as a useless, empty swamp that should be drained and put to use, the women—who did not have the right to vote—recognized its beauty and managed to use their social and political connections to reverse a plan even Jennings’ husband, a former Florida governor, had endorsed.

The sweat equity of 50,000 now anonymous young men built the state park system during the Great Depression.  Working for $30 a month, members of the Civilian Conservation Corps constructed our first 10 state parks, protecting our natural heritage and making it available to everyone.

The Everglades is one of America’s great national parks. It didn’t come about magically, but after more than 20 years of intensive efforts, led by Ernest Coe, an out-of-work landscape architect, and Miami Herald reporter Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, who coined its evocative description, the “River of Grass.”

Beautiful and ecologically fragile Biscayne Bay and its islands were planned to be the site of luxury housing and the nation’s largest oil refinery and tanker port. But the son of a former enslaved person refused to sell his lands to the developers, despite their multi-million-dollar offers. He believed the place he lived in and loved should be a national park. Today visitors to Biscayne National Park travel a road named for him, Sir Lancelot Jones Way.

A brilliant naturalist (and also self-styled “housewife from Micanopy”) led the effort to stop the Cross Florida Barge Canal, which would have devastated natural lands and waterways and threatened the Florida aquifer. Now the Marjory Harris Carr Cross Florida Greenway is our largest state park, 110 miles long and 70,000 acres, a giant swath of green even visible from space. 

The work of these and many other forces of nature have inspired all Floridians. Time after time, voters have risen to the occasion and supported bond issues to buy more land and establish state parks.

 In 1963, they approved funds to build state parks and in 1972 approved $200 million to buy environmentally endangered lands. In 1991, the legislature approved Preservation 2000, which protected nearly 2 million acres and opened 20 new state parks. Voters reauthorized the effort in 1998, and the legislature enacted Florida Forever the following year. In 2014, voters approved Amendment 1, the largest conservation finance program in our nation’s history, which will raise more than $20 billion over 20 years. Over the last 30 years, Floridians have ensured that 3 million acres of conservation lands were protected. Nowhere else on the planet has such a feat been accomplished.

In 2008, when Governor Rick Scott proposed closing all state parks that did not make a profit along with building golf courses in others and ending new land conservation purchases, the citizens spoke again. Crowds protested at threatened state parks, letters to newspapers and legislators poured in, and social media was flooded with outcries. Within a few days, the governor withdrew his proposals to shut down or develop state parks.

In 2012, National Geographic photographer and eighth-generation Floridian Carlton Ward Jr. led an expedition that walked, paddled, biked, and rode horses for 100 days, covering more than 1,000 miles from Everglades National Park to the Okefenokee Swamp near the Georgia border. Their journey and the PBS film it inspired persuaded people to support creating and conserving a wildlife corridor through the Florida peninsula. I joined Carlton and his team for 27 miles through Volusia County as we kayaked through Deep Creek, biked along one of the oldest railroad lines in the state and hiked our way through a mosaic of sand pine and hammock. 

The Florida Wildlife Corridor was initially based on an ecological corridors mapping effort that I chaired for a committee in the late 1990s and was further refined by the University of Florida’s GeoPlan Center. The map identifies 18 million acres of connected lands to preserve the biodiversity of the state. In 2021 the Florida Legislature blessed the corridor and has since appropriated two billion dollars from Amendment 1 to acquire private lands and conservation easements.

Florida has now protected 11 million acres of conservation lands. That portfolio of federal, state, and local parks, forests, and wildlife refuges makes up nearly a third of the state. This includes 400 local conservation area parks protected by local governments through the Florida Communities Trust program. 

Anywhere one goes in Florida there is a park, a conservation area or wildlife refuge. The Florida State Park System been named the best in the nation multiple times, both for the parks themselves and the way they are managed. Everyday people use these parks for recreation, nature study, a walk on the beach, a swim in a spring, a hike in the woods. For many, the parks are a source of inspiration, reflection and joy, their refuge and their church, a place “to lie by still waters that restoreth the soul.” 

In 1998, I sponsored a constitutional amendment that authorized borrowing money to acquire conservation lands. But we were concerned that we needed a mechanism to protect these lands in perpetuity. There will always be people who think they have a better plan than keeping these lands wild and public.

Last summer James Gaddis, a state park planner, was ordered to design new plans for nine popular state parks to include golf courses, hotels, pickleball and disc golf. Once completed, the plans were designed to be fast-tracked to approval. He was so disturbed by his assignment that he decided he needed to warn the public, and he released the plans to the media.

The reaction was swift, furious and overwhelming. Facebook groups popped up to keep three golf courses out of Jonathan Dickinson State Park, which contains 10,000 acres of the last pristine scrub remaining in South Florida. Other groups assembled to keep a 350-unit hotel out of Anastasia State Park and another hotel out of Topsail State Preserve. The proposal to develop Destin-area Topsail State Preserve, which many consider to have the finest beach in the world, was ironic as well as unpopular. Topsail was originally planned as a beach and golf resort, but its developers were indicted for fraud and the property was sold in foreclosure. Luckily for all of us, the Nature Conservancy bought the property on the courthouse steps and transferred it to the state.

Within one week of the leaked information, more than 100,000 people signed an online petition to oppose the plans. Protests were staged at each of the threatened state parks, and they made national news. The issue even united contentious politicians, with both Democratic and Republican officials decrying the idea. Rick Scott himself, now a U.S. Senator, called the plans “absolutely ridiculous.” Ten days later Governor Ron DeSantis sent the agency back to the drawing board to rethink what he called a “half-baked idea.”

Those events shocked me back out of retirement. I’ve had the privilege to work with many others to develop programs that have acquired and preserved millions of acres of wild Florida. But now these lands we said would be protected in perpetuity are looking vulnerable. Just one example: Years ago, I worked on what we considered a forever plan to protect gopher tortoises on a spot called Split Oak in Orange County. Citizens and elected officials gave our plan their blessing. But the state recently approved building a toll road through the protected lands to open up thousands of acres to new development.

Clearly, we need more guardrails if “perpetuity” is to mean longer than just 30 years. Some states, including Alabama and New York, have “forever wild” provisions in their constitutions to protect conservation lands from later development. Florida’s constitution provides less protection, and even the stipulations it contains, including that removing land from protections requires a two-thirds vote of the governing body, have been evaded in recent decisions.

Yet the public response to last summer’s threats to their parks gives me hope, proving once again that Floridians have a deep connection to public lands and are willing to fight to protect them. Many of these lands are museum pieces of Florida’s paradise lost. Not only do they protect rivers, lakes, springs, forests and beaches, but they provide access to all, in contrast to private resorts, clubs, and golf courses.

Floridians worked to create these parks and preserves, gifting us pristine places to explore, observe, think, create, and recharge from the stresses of urban Florida. They remind us of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ response to the question of who actually owned her beloved Cross Creek: “We are tenants and not possessors, lovers and not masters” [of the earth], she replied. “Cross Creek belongs to the wind and the rain, to the sun and the seasons, to the cosmic secrecy of seed and beyond all, to time.”