Posted on June 20, 2018 by Jonathan Z. Cannon
On vacation on Sanibel Island, FL, three hour’s drive from the central Florida town I grew up in, I’m thinking about place. When I vacationed here as a child, Sanibel was a sleepy island, with primitive bungalows for tourists, insatiable hordes of mosquitoes, mephitic drinking water, and glorious shell beaches, refreshed daily by the tides. Like most of Florida’s West Coast, Sanibel has undergone a sea change since then, transformed into a high-end resort community with luxury accommodations and expensive homes – and, yes, points of public access to the beach. There’re fewer good shells, because so many more people are hunting them.
A visitor from the early days might say the island had been spoiled, but in fact people who cared about Sanibel and its sister island, Captiva, worked to protect it even as it morphed under intense development pressure. The local land trust, the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation (SCCF), begun in 1967 with the first flush of the modern environmental movement, is the largest private landowner on the islands and manages over 1200 acres of conservation lands on Sanibel and another 600 on Captiva. That’s in addition to the conservation lands managed by the State of Florida and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which include the 6400-acre J. Ding Darling Wildlife Refuge. Established in 1945, through the efforts of J.N. “Ding” Darling, a Pulitzer-prize winning political cartoonist and conservationist who kept a winter home on Captiva, the refuge protects a part of “the largest undeveloped mangrove ecosystem in the United States” and “spectacular migratory bird populations.”
We all live in places, vacation in places; we care about them –their people and their nature. There are over 1300 active land trusts in the United States, most of them local or regional. These organizations protect and manage over 56 million conservation acres largely though private donations. Local governments protect additional land through easement acquisition programs, open space zoning, and protections for ecologically sensitive areas. These actions go on largely under the radar of the divisive politics that infects national environmental and natural resource policy. There are still conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats in these local settings, but they are joined by a common interest in their place – the qualities that make that place worth living in for everyone. This common commitment is more elusive at larger geographic scales, where red and blue segregate along lines of rural/urban, coast and heartland.
The power of place to mobilize action to protect and defend is no panacea for environmental ills. Rootedness in place can cause people to overlook the larger consequences of their actions, as in NIMBY cases. It also may fail to be an effective motivator for addressing issues at larger scales, such as climate change. But there’s evidence that politically diverse communities that are seeing the effects of global change, such as cities and counties in Southern Florida, are moving toward meaningful climate change policies – with both adaptation and mitigation components. A common threat to “home” might help lift even climate change into the realm of common commitment.
Tags: Landtrust