Florida Environments

Team launches trek to promote Florida Wildlife Corridor

By BRUCE RITCHIE

A conservation photographer, biologist and filmmaker on Tuesday will begin a nearly 1,000-mile trek up the Florida peninsula to highlight the need for maintaining a habitat corridor through the area.

Along the way, they expect to stay with ranch landowners and be joined by some conservation leaders and elected officials including possibly U. S. Sen. Bill Nelson and Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Photojournalist Carlton Ward Jr., bear biologist Joe Guthrie, conservationist Mallory Lykes Dimmitt and filmmaker Elam Stoltzfus launch their journey on Jan. 17. They start from Florida Bay at the tip of Everglades National Park and expect to finish 100 days later at the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge at the Georgia line.

Their route will follow public conservation lands such as Everglades National Park, the proposed Everglades Headwaters National Wildlife Refuge south of Orlando, the St. Johns River and the Ocala National Forest. Several trail segments will cross through corridors of private land that are proposed for purchase by state or federal agencies for conservation through landowner agreements.

The Florida Wildlife Corridor, Guthrie said, arises from the Florida Ecological Greenways Network (FEGN) and Critical Linkages concept produced by Tom Hoctor at the University of Florida. The FEGN is administered by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection in cooperation with the Conservation Trust for Florida.

Panthers and bears roam the corridor in South Florida on the outskirts of Disney World around citrus groves, cattle ranches, swamps and forests. In north Florida, the corridor links the sandhill forests at Camp Blanding military base with vast swamps of the Okefenokee.

Maintaining a corridor through the area will protect farming and ranching, wildlife habitat and water supplies for the region, Ward said.

“I would like state leaders to keep Florida’s green infrastructure and agriculture production as a priority,” he said. “Just in those simple terms, this is important. This is our last chance to get it right.”

About 300 miles of the trip will be paddling through areas such as Shark Slough in the Everglades while the rest will be on foot, some of it along the established Florida National Scenic Trail.

The trip could be shortened by half by following roads and highways. Instead, it will twist and wind through habitat areas such as Babcock Ranch, Fakahatchee Strand, Picayune Strand and the Lake Wales Ridge.

“There are a lot of key stepping stones we have to take in the path,” Ward said. “To connect those takes us to 1,000 miles. We don’t do any extraneous traveling to get to that number.”

They may be camping, sleeping in bunkhouses or staying in other rustic settings. “We have sworn off hotels,” Guthrie said.

Dimmit says despite having vehicle assistance for equipment and lodging, going the 1,000 miles in 100 days won’t be easy.

“I am really looking forward to this,” she said. “I think I have never gone with a group that wants to carry so much equipment.”

The team will document the corridor through photography, video streams, radio reports, daily updates on social media and digital networks and other activities. Stoltzfus will document the expedition for a film about the journey and the wildlife corridor.

Ward is an eighth-generation Floridian whose family includes ranchers. His 2009 Book, Florida Cowboys, won a silver medal in the Florida Book Awards. Popular Photography Magazine featured him as one of three photographers working to save vanishing America.

Joe Guthrie moved to Florida while working for the University of Kentucky to study the ecology and conservation of a small Florida black bear population in Highlands and Glades counties. His master’s thesis focused on the function of corridors and highway crossings for bear movement south‐central Florida’s developing landscape.

Stoltzfus is a producer, director and cinematographer of film documentaries and educational programs. They include “Living Waters: the Aquatic Preserves of Florida,” “Apalachicola River: An American Treasure” and “Big Cypress Swamp: the Western Everglades.”

Dimmitt is a director, vice‐chair of the Corporate Responsibility Committee and a 5th-generation member of the Florida‐based family agri‐business company, Lykes Brothers, Inc. She specializes in a variety of environmental issues and previously worked for The Nature Conservancy in Telluride, Colo.

She said the importance of agriculture to conservation in the state’s heartland may be overlooked by residents living on the coasts.

“I think its an important part of the mix,” she said. “The unique thing about the Florida Wildlife Corridor is the matrix of land ownership.”

(Story copyrighted by Bruce Ritchie and FloridaEnvironments.com. Photos and expedition map copyrighted by Carlton Ward Jr., used with permission.)

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Author’s vision of a “Blue Revolution” began with Florida water wars

(Editor’s note: See disclosure)

By Bruce Ritchie
Floridaenvironments.com
Author Cynthia Barnett of Gainesville says she traces the start of her focus on water issues to a St. Petersburg Times page 1A story written in 2003 that she says made her “insane.”

Barnett is author of “Blue Revolution: Unmaking America’s Water Crisis.” It’s an important new book that challenges Americans to transform their views of water to protect and sustain a resource that is so important to people, the economy and the environment.

Her book follows her 2007 book “Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S.” Mirage created the realization that water wars, droughts and vanishing supplies are issues no longer confined to arid Western states.

Four years before Mirage, Barnett had just earned her master’s degree in environmental history at the University of Florida. Among the books she had read was “Land into Water — Water into Land: A History of Water Management in Florida” by Nelson Manfred Blake.

Barnett said the book, published in 1980, described how developers throughout Florida’s history had “got rid of water, got rid of water, got rid of water.”

She also was working as an associate editor at the business magazine Florida Trend (which is owned by the Times). She said she was “writing stories about how developers are desperate to find water, find water, find water.”

“It was with that specific irony that the same guys who got rid of it all got desperate to find it,” Barnett told the attendees at the Society of Environmental Journalists national conference in Miami on Oct. 25.

But it was the St. Pete Times article — and watching the loss of her clear, bubbling springs in north Florida, that provided that extra motivation to focus on water threats, she said.

Times writers Craig Pittman and Julie Hauserman wrote the page 1A story “North has it, South wants it” telling how the Florida Council of 100 business group in 2003 was working on a recommendation to then-Gov. Jeb Bush to redirect water from slow-growing, water-rich North Florida to booming Central and South Florida.

“They wanted to move water from the north to South Florida or Central Florida to replenish what they had drained,” Barnett said. “That single story got me so insane that I went on to spend the next eight years of my life writing water books.”

In researching “Blue Revolution,” Barnett traveled around the United States and the world exploring places where people are conserving and protecting water or are looking for more. She paints no one as saints or villains, just players in a system where too much authority has been turned over to utilities, power companies and engineers. We use water with wasteful abundance in some areas when it is tragically lacking in other areas.

It’s an amazing book and is amazingly well-written. It ties history and policy-making with water disasters around the world, such as the disappearing Aral Sea in Central Asia or the Colorado River as it disappears, never making it to the sea.

In the Netherlands, she explores how the Dutch created engineering marvels and disasters along its coastline. In Singapore, the island nation has created a water ethic that led to reducing pollution, reusing treated wastewater and cleaning up waterways. But farmers were moved off their lands and the nation’s residents lost touch as their natural waterways were viewed as enemies.

Barnett drills down into the politics, economics and seeming corruption that drive the “water-industrial complex” in this country. The water industry drives us towards engineered solutions rather than low-tech adaptations towards living lightly on the land.

In her firm but polite and well-researched way, Barnett touches everyone’s lives, making us think about how our ignorance or how our religious views of the end of the world may shape our living now. And she makes us think about how our hurried lives separate us from knowing life’s crucial resource and where it comes from.

But she offers so much more for the reader to take away than self-loathing or condemnation of others.

Her writing encourages us all to learn about our sources of water — to explore our own neighborhood frog creeks from where they begin as a trickle on the land to where they end in a bay or ocean.

“The blue revolution is a reconnection to water,” she writes. “It gives children more natural waters to play in — flowing springs and rivers. It alters the way our communities look: More meandering streams, less concrete. More natural wetlands thronged by living things, fewer chain-lined retention ponds. More green roofs, less asphalt. More shade trees, less open lawn. More plant buffers to filter rain, fewer stagnant stormwater basins. More community farms, less industrial irrigation.”

Her idea of a “water ethic” is borrowed from Aldo Leopold’s “land ethic” in his landmark conservation book “A Sand County Almanac.” The land ethic was first applied by his hydrologist son, Luna, to water.

And Barnett ends her book by acknowledging Luna Leopold’s “acid test of leadership” on environmental issues and describing how that begins with the individual, be they a homeowner, a water engineer or a member of Congress.

“The water ethic begins with that one, brave steward,” she writes. “Then, it spreads out into the community, building collective courage among citizens, businesspeople, church members, political leaders. Just like ripples of children playing in a wide, free river.”

Inspired by the journalism of others, Barnett is creating a new brand of environmental journalism that will inspire others.

(Photos courtesy of Beacon Press. Story copyrighted by Bruce Ritchie and Floridaenvironments.com. Do not copy or redistribute without permission, which can be obtained from brucebritchie@gmail.com)

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NASCAR says it’s racing towards a green future

BY BRUCE RITCHIE
Floridaenvironments.com

Race tracks and gas-guzzling hot-rods may seem to be the antithesis of environmentalism, but NASCAR officials are trying to change that viewpoint.

NASCAR is big business in Florida with two of its top races being held in the state. The sport closes out its 2012 season on Sunday at Homestead-Miami Speedway with the naming of a new Sprint Cup series champion.

On Thursday, NASCAR held a “Environmental Summit” in Miami to highlight its environmentally-responsible efforts. Gov. Rick Scott, who describes himself as a NASCAR fan, was there and met with NASCAR truck driver Ricky Carmichael of Tallahassee.

NASCAR officials recently have been highlighting how their race cars are using gasoline with renewable E-15 ethanol and how track owners are increasing recycling and planting trees.

NASCAR is working to be an environmental leader among sports and industries while reducing its environmental footprint, Michael Lynch, managing director of NASCAR’s Green Innovation program, told the Florida Energy Summit on Oct. 28.

Tracks in Michigan, California and Pennsylvania also have solar energy panels. There is a 3-megawatt solar array at the Pocono raceway that powers the track and another 350 homes in the surrounding community.

“What we are trying to help folks really appreciate is (NASCAR) seems to be the ultimate demonstration platform for green technology solutions,” Lynch said, “to show they really work, to show their business viability in which the fans and the public are going to have a level of acceptance.”

NASCAR fans, he said, are about 25 percent of the nation’s population — more than 60 million. And they have shown in public opinion surveys that they are 50 percent more likely than the general population to save they have a “very green” household.

Race cars get about five miles per gallon, according to a CNN report shown by Lynch at the Summit, which was hosted by Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam in Orlando. Two of the car models — the Ford Fusion and Toyota Camry — are available in showrooms as hybrid vehicles.

The cars use 450,000 gallons fuel per year, Lynch said. Recycling at race tracks offsets 300,000 gallons of fuel used, he said, and 2,000 trees are planted each year to offset pollution.

At the Florida Governor’s Mansion in July, former NASCAR champion Darrell Waltrip told Floridaenvironments.com that the sport has created technology advancements that are used by automakers and tire manufacturers.

“The manufacturers learn a lot from what we do whether it’s emissions, fuel mileage (or) engine management,” Waltrip said.

“There are so many things that are all encompassed in that race car every Sunday afternoon,” he added. “They are not just a bunch of good ol’ boys going in a circle.”

Determining whether NASCAR’s green innovation program is more real than publicity would take some analysis, said Aliki Moncrief, state director of Environment Florida. But she said NASCAR could help reach a new audience to support national environmental efforts such as the federal vehicle fuel economy proposal announced this week.

The U. S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U. S. Department of Transportation proposed stronger fuel economy and greenhouse gas reductions for passenger cars and light trucks, boosting average mileage up to 54.5 mpg by 2025.

The proposal along with other fuel-efficiency measures taken by the Obama administration would reduce oil consumption by 2.2 million barrels per day by 2025 – enough to offset almost a quarter of current foreign oil imports, according to the EPA.

Moncrief said it makes sense for environmentalists who support those fuel-efficiency standards to find common ground with NASCAR fans who are interested in the environment.

“I think to the extent that NASCAR is getting out there and educating people about the importance of clean energy alternatives for cars … hopefully they would go one step further to encourage their constituents to go with clean-car options like the Ford Fusion and Camry that have a hybrid alternative,” Moncrief said.

(Photo copyrighted by Mark Wallheiser, used with permission. Story copyrighted by Bruce Ritchie and Floridaenvironments.com. Do not copy or redistribute without permission, which can be obtained from bruceBritchie@gmail.com.)

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