Our Parks Worth Fighting For pt 4. pt 0.

Our National Treasures are Amazing. Behind every National Park, Monument, Preserve, Reserve, Historical Park, and more, there are Awesome Stories of Wonderful Places which local communities recognized, wanted to protect, fought for, and preserved.

The reasons were varied and many: But in each and every case, people found something worth saving and came together to save it.

In this series I’m seeking to highlight those stories and some of those fights. And hopefully to encourage their continuation. Because, as I will discuss, that fight is never over.

For this multipart chapter, I’m going to come out with a series of personal announcements which might be both embarrassing and potentially career ending. Here is the first: I am not the biggest fan of southern Florida. I hate heat. I loath high humidity. Combine them, and you’ve invented an anti-Nathan repellant zone, add mosquitos and deer flies and that zone gains ten times the repellant power. I’d choose a cold day in the mountains over any of it. (maybe not the coldest days in the plains of South Dakota. Or the darkest months in Alaska.)

I’m definitely more of a scenic desert, or mountain person than I am an ocean person too.

And yet, some of my favorite places in the entire world exist in southern Florida: Dry Tortugas, Biscayne, and even the Greater Everglades Area, (encompassing all of Everglades National Park, Big Cypress National Preserve, the Marjorie Stoneman Douglass Wilderness area and much more.) People with clearer vision than me saw promise in these places before the invention of Air Conditioning and sealed forms of transportation which keep out all the bugs. It’s a testament to that vision that even I can find the magic they fought so hard to preserve.

In specific, let’s talk about the Greater Everglades Area which from now on I will just call the Everglades. (Because the park is a small part of that.)

The Everglades (all of it) is a massive section of southern Florida which was viewed by almost all but it’s inhabitants as a barren wasteland in need of opportunistic development. And, I’m going to admit that I personally do not believe the scenery is as readily majestic as the Grand Canyon, as striking as Fort Jefferson on Garden Key, as Labyrinthine as Carlsbad or Mammoth Cave, or as Colossal as the Statue of Liberty.

And yet, people like Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, Nathaniel P. Reed, Ernest F. Coe, May Mann Jennings, and many, many, more saw the majesty there. And like every national park, when they started out hoping to preserve one thing, they learned that there was so much more worth preserving and protecting.

Specifically, in the Everglades it was NOT the scenery which made the park.

Saw this advertising campaign in the Miami Airport while I was still writing the Biscayne Book. It was a fun one.

Read through any of the forums about the Everglades, (or the articles linked above) and you’ll quickly come across lines talking about how Everglades National Park is distinct because it was the first National Park established to preserve something other than scenery. The true wonder of the Everglades lies in its ecological diversity: the array of habitats, the distinctive glades and hammocks, and the wildlife therein. Most important to early preservation efforts: The birds.

In the Early 1900’s bird hunting was a big industry. Colorful feathers were so desirable that entire species like the Ivory Billed Woodpecker were driven to extinction, and birds like the Flamingo were hunted out of Florida. Extirpated means ‘removed from the area entirely.’ People extincted and extirpated birds because they wanted those feathers. They wanted to sell those feathers to other people who used them to decorate: hats.

It’s a phenomenon that is hard to imagine these days but has a long legacy in American History. French Fur trappers moved to the Americas so Europeans could accessorize with beaver and otter pelts. In the early 1900s, that fashion trend was decorative feathers in hats.

Hunters would go into the Everglades for birds and kill them in droves so large that people began to notice entire flocks were disappearing. Entire populations were brought to the brink of extinction or pushed over that edge. Not just in Florida, (RIP the Carolina Parakeet,) but the Everglades was hit harder than many areas, and some bird populations which technically did survive still have not recovered 100 years later. Flamingos are passing visitors in the area named for them. Roseate spoonbills are encountered in flocks a fraction of their previous size, and white pelicans, which once rivaled their brown counterparts in Florida, are an exciting and rare occurrence in the state these days.

People began to notice the sharp decline of many types of birds, caused in part by the reckless practice of wanton slaughter by some groups of hunters (exterminating entire nesting grounds,) but also caused simply by an insatiable desire and rich market for their feather. Learning from the loss of the passenger pigeon and the warning story of the Dodo, people knew where this trend would lead. Then, they took action, hiring wardens to protect the birds. And as our understanding of nature grew, they eventually worked to preserve the places where those birds lived too.

Technically this guy was hanging out in Big Cypress. But that’s still part of the Greater Everglades

Let’s start with that early fight, after the recognition of harm, but before the beginning of the work done to establish parks. Lets look at the early efforts to stop the decline of birds, which resulted in the hiring of wardens to directly protects bird populations. Because it was in those early days where we can see examples of how the movement to protect the birds, to protect the environment, and to protect the Everglades would never be smooth.

That early story gives a simply but tragic example. Guy Bradley, a former feather hunter, became one of the early wardens hired to protect the birds he’d once hunted. And he was killed for it. Then his accused killer was acquitted and even celebrated. Because the efforts to protect the birds, which expanded to protect the entire Everglades were not always popular!

This was a lot of build up to get to that point.

The point being that while our parks are worth fighting for, there are almost always reasons why it’s a fight. This isn’t to say that those opposed to national parks will always turn to violence, that is an extreme example. But, often, there are vested and/or monied-interests in preventing the formation of a national park.)*

*(and those interests can persist beyond the formation of a park as well, but we’ll get to that later.)

Sometimes the desire to preserve the natural and historical places around us starts out very unpopular.

I believe, as those that I have tried to highlight in this series did and do, that our parks are worth protecting. And this entire series is mounted upon that belief. My effort is to tell the stories of the people who came together to protect these parks, celebrate their accomplishments, and discuss the value and necessity of this fight.

But there is almost always another side to the story,* and despite the heavy-handed example above, it can be as nuanced and diverse as the efforts to form and protect a park. Often that means that forming a park, protecting a place for its nature, history, or environment comes against opposition.

*(and it’s not really just two sides there’s always more than a dichotomy, but 2 sides makes writing easier,)

Wouldn’t he just look great on a hat?

So, for the next few blogs I will talk about opposition to the parks. And I’m starting with the birds.

Stay tuned.