Phil Ammann
Happy 100th birthday, Florida state parks!
This year we should be celebrating the state’s first park – Royal Palm State Park – created at the insistence of women’s club members who wanted it protected before it was consumed by development.
Instead, the Florida Legislature is considering allowing a number of commercial activities, including logging, cattle ranching, and hunting, inside our award-winning park system. Such activities are certain to despoil these lands and greatly reduce aesthetic or recreational pleasure for the millions of people who visit them annually.
To do so would dishonor the people who fought so hard to create them.
In 1916, a line of 168 cars, many filled with members of the Florida Federation of Women’s Clubs, made the arduous trek to Royal Palm State Park. The tropical hammock in the Everglades outside of Miami was home to beautiful orchids, wading birds, and namesake palms.
Once there, they celebrated the dedication of the park, the first created in the nation by women’s clubbers. Three decades later the park became the nucleus of Everglades National Park, an internationally beloved oasis.
The park was the culmination of a long, tough fight. Women were unable to vote but succeeded by putting together the land deal, pressing politicians to pass legislation, and then funding it themselves for several years until the state did.
They persevered in the face of ridicule by male politicians because they believed in their mission, employing what one activist called “sand-spur tactics” to force action in Tallahassee. They wouldn’t go away and demanded — and eventually got — the park.
Perhaps that’s what’s needed now as the Legislature considers moves that would degrade many of Florida’s 174 parks. Last year, 31 million visitors came to parks, pumping $2.9 billion into the economy. The park system has been honored three times as the nation’s best – the most of any state. That’s more reason to celebrate.
However, proposals that would greatly alter parks by allowing logging, ranching, and hunting are being promoted as ways to generate more revenue. Ironically, other legislation would eliminate the parks’ entrance fees that now pay for 80 percent of their operations.
Taking away park revenue and then accusing the parks of not generating enough money is a political sleight of hand meant to damage the parks and our enjoyment of them. Does anyone really want to go hiking, bird watching, or picnicking with the sound of gunshots or chain saws nearby? Do you really want your children wearing orange vests for their safety?
Florida’s women worried greatly about the loss of natural areas to development a century ago. Imagine what they would think now, with a population of more than 20 million people and resurgent development in almost every landscape.
Do what these women did. Contact your legislators. Sign petitions. Insist that your voice be heard and that parks be protected. Be a thorn in their heels until legislators heed the voice of the people, a call raised by our mothers and grandmothers so many years ago.
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Leslie Kemp Poole PhD. is a fourth-generation Floridian who grew up in Tampa. She is an assistant professor of environmental studies at Rollins College in Winter Park, and the author of “Saving Florida: Women’s Fight for the Environment in the Twentieth Century.” Column courtesy of Context Florida.
