Oil-Drilling Benefits for Florida
Sound Good, But Take a Closer Look

By Julie Hauserman, Guest Column for TCpalm
Published Thursday, October 22, 2009

These days, I want to believe anybody who talks about bringing Florida some jobs. Lord knows, we need jobs.

But it is wishful thinking to believe the dubious promises from Florida Energy Associates, a shadowy group that wants to drill off our beaches. They won’t tell which oil companies they represent. But they are hiring, all right: so far, they’ve put 30 lobbyists and a small army of public relations spinners on their payroll. Let’s call them Slick Oil.

Dealing with these mystery people is like hiring a wedding planner before you even meet your blind date.

We have no idea whether they are capable of providing jobs for Floridians or if they will import workers instead. We don’t know if they are foreign governments or American companies. We don’t know if they are financially stable.

Let’s take a commonsense look at their wild economic claims:

Jobs: The Slick Oil lobbyists distributed a handout at the Capitol claiming they will provide 20,000 direct jobs. Who knows? There’s no way to check that. But let’s compare it to something we know for sure: Florida’s tourism industry — which depends on clean beaches that aren’t covered with ugly industrial construction and sticky tar balls — provides a million jobs, 50 times more than Slick Oil is promising.

The driller lobbyists are talking about blue-collar jobs, and admit they will import higher-paid managers and specialists from elsewhere. These oil jobs are years away, and they aren’t stable. Florida’s largest oil producer is the Jay Field in Santa Rosa County. The 70 workers there were out of a job most of this year after the owner, Colorado’s Quantum Resources, shut down in January, citing low oil prices.

State Revenue: Driller lobbyists are promising something that doesn’t exist — a stable economy based on oil drilling. The $2 billion-a-year annual state revenue they promise in their handouts depends on unknown petroleum reserves (companies have been drilling dry holes off Florida for 50 years), volatile world markets and unpredictable world politics.

How much money Florida might make or lose from drilling is anyone’s guess. Some Tallahassee politicians are scrambling to accommodate Slick Oil. So far, the oil lobbyists have dropped at least a quarter-million in campaign cash to lubricate the discussion. (And that’s just the money they report.)

History shows us that other “pots of gold” at the Florida Legislature haven’t been used as promised. Florida Lottery money was supposed to boost education funding, but politicians played a shell game with it. Legislators borrowed from the Lawton Chiles’ tobacco settlement trust fund — money that was earmarked for children’s health care — and they still haven’t paid it back.

This debate comes down to one choice: trading existing, clean industry jobs our $562 billion-a-year coastal economy — for dirty jobs that may not materialize. Somebody might get rich off this scheme, and I’m going to bet it won’t be Florida taxpayers.

Hardly an Earth Mother

By Julie Hauserman, Special to the St. Petersburg Times
Published Thursday, September 4, 2008 11:56 PM

Everybody wants to debate Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s motherhood skills because she has an unmarried, pregnant teen daughter. Enough already. If you’ve got kids, you know that before you throw stones at another parent because their child is clueless, you better knock on wood at your own house first.

The key question that mothers should ask is this: What sort of world does Palin intend to leave for her new granddaughter? Or to yours?

Palin’s public environmental policies offer plenty of clues: It’ll be a wounded, polluted planet with a fresh round of extinct animals.

She’s photographed in the latest Newsweek sitting on her office couch, which has a dead bear draped over it, complete with its sad, shaggy head. George Bush and Dick Cheney’s polluter-friendly environmental policies have been cynical and devastating, and Palin is even worse.

Where to begin? Let’s start with greedy, reckless thrill killing. Palin supports a disgusting and unfair blood “sport” where hunters in low-flying airplanes chase Alaska’s magnificent wolves and bears through the snow until the animals are exhausted, and then they shoot them. Sometimes the animals don’t die right away; it is hard to make a clean kill when you’re shooting from a moving airplane.

Her bubble-headed logic is that if hunters kill off more wolves efficiently from airplanes, then fewer wolves will kill moose and caribou, and then people will have more moose and caribou to kill. What wonderful values to model for our children!

Palin wants fewer protections for rare creatures than even the anti-environment Bush administration does, and that’s saying something. In a rare moment of compassion, Bush’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed to list the polar bear as “threatened” on the endangered species list because Alaska’s arctic sea ice shrank to record lows last summer. The polar bears’ summer home is melting away under their fat white paws.

Instead of recognizing the high stakes at hand, Palin filed a ridiculous taxpayer-funded lawsuit against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to block responsible protection for the only polar bears in America.

And the Anchorage Daily News caught Palin making up a bogus excuse to bolster her case. Palin told federal officials that her state scientists did a “comprehensive review” that found no reason to support a threatened species listing. The Anchorage Daily News got hold of e-mails that contradicted the governor completely. The e-mails showed that Alaskan state scientists — including the head of the Department of Fish and Games’ Marine Mammals Program — agreed with federal researchers’ conclusion that polar bears are threatened by shrinking ice. Whoops.

“The governor’s decision was clearly based on politics, not on science, and was primarily designed to protect the oil and gas industry’s stampede into the Arctic Ocean,” University of Alaska marine biologist Rick Steiner told the Los Angeles Times.

Sounds like Palin will fit into Bush and Cheney’s cozy Washington special-interest boots just fine.

We’ll be the ones on the outside, wishing someone would responsibly step up to preserve some clean air and water for our kids.

I used to sing my daughter a song called Baby Beluga, about beluga whales. She loved those mysterious, pudgy white creatures in the picture book. Palin apparently doesn’t. She fought against protecting a rare population of genetically distinct belugas located only one place on Earth: Alaska’s Cook Inlet. Scientists say the whales are one of the most endangered mammals in America. They numbered 1,300 in the 1980s. Sadly, there are about 375 now.

Still, Palin told federal regulators that putting the 375 remaining whales on the endangered species list would be “unwarranted.” Why would Palin sell out Baby Beluga? Money. An endangered species listing, she wrote, “would do serious long-term damage to the vibrant economy of the Cook Inlet area.”

Like Bush and Cheney, Palin favors drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The GOP’s top dog, John McCain, does not.

“When America set aside the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, we called it a ‘refuge’ for a reason,” McCain said sensibly.

Does anyone really believe that if we throw out protections for wild things that the world will be better off and we’ll all be richer? That our grandchildren will thank us later because we killed off species, made corporations fatter, and extracted every morsel of oil and mineral out of the planet, then used it recklessly until it ran out?

I would like my daughter, and her children, to one day see the Beaufort Sea, off the coast of the arctic refuge. I’d like her to see the endangered bowhead whale, the beluga whales, the bearded, ringed, and spotted seals. I’d like her to see polar bears. I’d like these animals to live without the threat of getting slimed by a giant oil spill.

Palin has only been Alaska’s governor for two years, and she’s already laid an impressive path of environmental destruction. I don’t get it. A true conservative would want to, um, conserve Alaska’s famous wilderness treasures. If Palin is so quick to sell off Alaska’s prodigious bounty, what will she do when she gets her hands on the rest of America’s natural legacy?

Bush, Cheney, Palin and their Big Oil friends are out of step. Their greedy natural resource policies constitute shameless theft — from their grandchildren, and from ours.

Bottom Line in the Sand

By Julie Hauserman, St. Petersburg Times
Published Jan. 28, 2007

There is no doubt Miami Beach’s precious waterfront will be shored up forever. The question is, whose sand will it be? Maybe the Bahamas’?

Every day, pop stars, fashion models and tourists come from around the world to see and be seen on the posh sands of Miami Beach, dropping dollars in their wake.

But the sand is literally shifting beneath the parade of designer sandals, and it’s unnerving tourism boosters. Parts of Miami Beach are washing away, and Miami-Dade County is running out of options to fix its shrinking shore.

Sand washes away – it’s the law of nature. For decades, Miami Beach has been propping up paradise by dredging up sand from the offshore ocean bottom. Like cosmetic surgeons injecting collagen to plump thin lips, they pump the sand onshore and make a wider, prettier beach for the starlets to stroll upon. The beach needs a touch-up every few years, and the dredges roar back to life, sucking the bottom to fill in the top.

Now, Miami Beach has a problem: The dredging game appears to be over. Miami Beach has run out of suitable offshore sand. As sand will do, it erodes off the beach and drifts gradually southward, spreading into the sensitive reefs off Florida’s southern coast. The dredges can’t pump it out without trashing a reef system that’s one of a kind.

“It’s kind of like fossil fuels, you know? When you use it all up, what’s going to happen? Well, that’s what’s happening in Miami Beach,” said T.J. Marshall, vice chair of the South Florida Chapter of Surfrider, an environmental group.

To save their cash-cow enclave, Miami-Dade County environmental officials have embarked on a strange odyssey to find pretty sand for sale. Their reigning solution now is to try to import it from some of the world’s most beautiful islands: The Bahamas.

If Miami-Dade gets its way, you’ll be able to wiggle your toes in Bahamian sand without ever leaving Florida, but so far Bahamian officials have done nothing to encourage those hopes.

The Miami Beach we have today is a man-made concoction. Carl Fisher, a rich Indiana snowbird, visited the bug-infested barrier island in 1913 and saw dollar signs. Back then, beachgoers boarded ferries from Miami, then crossed a wooden pier over mucky undergrowth to get to the beach. They could rent bathing suits for a quarter.

Fisher, a road builder who thought natural Florida was just a giant mud bog for bulldozers to play on, brought in dredges and filled the native mangrove swamps. He scooped up soft Biscayne Bay bottom to create the manicured fantasy destination that’s now home to the rich and famous: Hulk Hogan, the Bee Gees, Beyonce, Jennifer Lopez, Puff Daddy and Shaquille O’Neal, to name a few. Today, the high-rise-studded Miami Beach is home to more than 90,000 people. You can’t rent a bathing suit here anymore, but you can cut a multimillion dollar movie deal over a plate of frijoles and plantains, salsa on the side, swirling palm-frond fans above.

Fisher was one of a long line of men who come to Florida, fall in love with the place, and promptly begin turning it into something else.

Miami Beach’s sand is designer sand, and not just any substitute will do. It has to be the right sort of sand for sea turtles to nest in. It has to have a certain grain size and color to satisfy state rules. It has to allow little sand creatures to live unmolested in their tiny universes. Finding – and getting – compatible sand has turned out to be a giant headache.

‘Sand robbers’?

Last year, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced that there was a nice supply of compatible sand for Miami Beach. It was piled underwater on the St. Lucie County Shoal, about 120 miles up the Atlantic coast. The shoal that Miami Beach wanted to suck up and ship south, it so happens, protects a barrier island that’s home to the St. Lucie nuclear power plant. Residents there loudly insisted they could use all the protection they could get for the nuke plant, especially during a hurricane. And besides – Miami Beach had no right to “their” sand. Call it the first salvo in the sand wars.

“Sand Robbers Show No Mercy” sniped a headline on an editorial from the Port St. Lucie News, which accused Miami Beach of a “plunder-and-loot mentality.”

It might have been a low-key turf war except St. Lucie has a political advantage: The man who represents St. Lucie County in the state house is Ken Pruitt, now president of the Florida Senate. He’s a Tallahassee heavyweight who controls the state budget. Pruitt aired television commercials, starring him personally, to make Miami back off.

“We will fight to the death to make sure you don’t take one grain of sand,” declared Pruitt, a neo-environmentalist who started life as a well driller back when developers started draining wetlands and building subdivisions to fill up the wilds of St. Lucie County. The corps abandoned the plan and skulked off to write reports.

Desperate, Miami-Dade’s hired sand hunters turned inland, where they found a pocket of Florida prehistory and promptly appropriated it to shore up Carl Fisher’s man-made paradise.

Now, the county is spending millions to truck prehistoric sand from a commercial mine in Glades County, south of the Lake Wales Ridge. The sand comes from the Miocene and Pliocene periods, 4- to 8- million years ago when mastodons and mammoths stomped across the Florida peninsula. That part of Florida was beachfront back when today’s swanky coastal towns, including Miami, were under water.

Trucks pile this ancient sand along Miami Beach and then rumble past beachfront hotels and pricey Atlantic-view homes to spread it out. The sand has to be transferred three times, making it an expensive logistical pain. And the prehistoric stuff still suffers from that basic problem that comes with all sand – it won’t stay where you put it for very long.

“The reality of it is Miami Beach isn’t going anywhere. It’s going to be maintained almost at any cost,” said Brian Flynn, special projects administrator for Miami-Dade’s Department of Environmental Resources Management.

Sand sources and shortages

“The sand shortage is a Dade County issue now, but Broward County is one project away from running out of sand,” Flynn said. “In the foreseeable future, it’s a regional issue. The long-term solution is we have to look at nondomestic sand sources.”

Don’t worry: The sand shortage won’t be showing up in Tampa Bay any time soon. Experts say the offshore sand famine is confined to the state’s east coast, and not the more placid and shallow gulf. One solution, in use at Hillsborough Inlet, recycles sand that gets caught by inlets, using special pipes and pumps called “sand bypass” to move the sand to places where the beach is eroding.

Miami Beach Mayor David Dermer said he isn’t keen on importing foreign sand, but sees it as a stopgap until Miami-Dade finds better ways to hold onto the sand it has, possibly a modified sand bypass – or “back-pass” – gizmo at Miami’s Government Cut inlet to pump sand south to north.

Seeking foreign soil

Flynn, of Miami-Dade’s environmental department, said he’s been contacted by other foreign governments who hear Miami-Dade wants to buy sand. He says he’s heard from the Turks and Caicos Islands, the Dominican Republic and Mexico. But the Bahamas has the economic edge because it is closer, just 50 miles off Florida.

“There should be plenty of sand in the Bahamas,” said state Rep. Luis Garcia, a Miami Beach Democrat. “To make it simple, we need that sand and we would like to have it here.”

Would the Bahamas sell sand to Miami Beach? That’s an open question. The Bahamian Consulate in Miami didn’t return calls for this story.

Miami-Dade has another technical problem with the Bahamas sand solution: Right now, it’s illegal to import foreign sand, unless you can prove that there are no suitable domestic sources. But a loophole appears to be on the way. The corps is now preparing a report that, most observers predict, will declare that Miami Beach has no economically feasible domestic sand sources.

Miami-Dade’s Flynn is right. Miami Beach isn’t going anywhere. The place is hotter than ever. Luxury condos sprout along the vanished dune line, billionaires trade up seven-bedroom mansions for 14-bedroom ones, European tourists crowd into Deco hotels and walk topless on the beach. They come for the white sand and blue waves.

Do you think any of them care, that behind the scenes, dump trucks crawl like ants from Florida’s middle, carrying load after load of prehistoric beach? If that sand could hold up a mastodon, it ought to support a bejeweled flip-flop just fine.

And if the Bahamas won’t sell sand to its American neighbor, there’s always beach-filled Cuba, 112 miles offshore. You never know what the future might bring. And hey, stranger things have happened in Miami.

Levee Folly

By Julie Hauserman

An alligator was swimming behind the president when he stood in Everglades National Park in 2001 with TV cameras rolling. The government, he assured us, was going to save the Everglades.

Ten and a half billion dollars, we’re now told, is the price of putting nature back to rights again. And who is going to save the day? The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the same outfit that rode in on bulldozers, went hand-to-hand against alligators, and declared Mission Accomplished forty years ago when it drained America’s greatest wetland.

We didn’t catch on to the big mistake until the wading birds were gone, the panthers endangered, the rivers polluted, and Everglades fish were no good to eat.

Now, we hear bad news about the Corps out of New Orleans. It turns out that the New Orleans levees failed because the Corps didn’t build them right in the first place.

We’re already on the hook for another leaking levee – in Florida. It stretches 140 miles around America’s second largest lake in the Everglades. The Corps built it in panic after a hurricane, same as in New Orleans. A 1928 storm killed some 2,000 people who never knew a hurricane was coming.

They say it’s going to cost $3 million a mile to fix the Lake Okeechobee levee. That’s chump change when you think about the ten and a half billion we’re spending on the Corps’ giant engineering gamble in the Everglades.

President Bush and his governor brother Jeb call it “restoration.” A better word is “re-plumbing.” The project is a mish mash of Rube-Goldberg technology that a lot of scientists think won’t work. And that’s if the Corps does it right — an assumption we ought to question at this point.

The Corps’ solution is about as far from nature as you can get. They want to punch 300 holes deep into the stony aquifer around the Everglades. It is a limestone cave-scape that scientists barely understand. In rainy times, engineers would pump water underground, then pump it up during drought. No one knows if it would work.

There are also some strange underground artificial “curtains” that are supposed to keep water from leaking through Florida’s edges into the oceans. A lot of groundwater leaks out because the Corps built canals to make it leak out in the 1950s.

Back then, the Corps released a propaganda film to cheerlead draining the Everglades. The black-and-white Waters of Destiny has a hysterical tone like Reefer Madness, the cult-classic anti-marijuana film. But the enemy here is nature, not drugs.

“We’ve got to control the water and make it do our bidding! Water that once ran wild… Now, it just waits there — calm, peaceful, ready to do the bidding of man and his machines.”

“For every dollar being spent, four dollars are coming back. As any businessman knows, you can’t do much better than that!… Central and Southern Florida is no longer nature’s fool – the stooge for the impractical jokes of the elements!”

The Corps has its hands out for more of our tax dollars this year. It’s worth asking: who is the stooge now?

How to Love Florida

By Julie Hauserman

Florida is such a mystical, made-up, watery mirage place. If you paint a sunset using the real colors, it looks fake, like motel art.

Lime SinkIf you live here, you know that those colors do exist. That sometimes, canoeing on the mirrored surface of a cold, black spring, it looks like you’re paddling through sky. Sometimes, fog fills up the dune hollows like wildfire smoke. Blue heron statues poke out of green marsh. White ibis swirl, blizzard-like, off mangrove branches.

Breathe in that Florida smell. Clean. Salty. Blue. Listen to the birds – so many you can’t know all their names. Hear the water suck air when the alligator goes under.

Go barefoot, but watch your step.

There is so much to know here, and so much to lose. I have been writing about natural Florida for 19 years, and I feel like a storm chaser, bulldozers at my heels.

What we have become: House-driveway-mailbox-house-driveway-mailbox-house-golf course-strip mall-high rise-big mall-theme park-house-driveway-mailbox-house.

Foxwood is Glenwood is Heron Place. The wild things get pushed to woods and swamps without names. Once, state wildlife biologists radio-tracked a wild panther as it dozed beneath a billboard near a trailer park.

We have saved some great places, thank God. We all own wonderful beach and riverfront and springs and wild jungle woods. Big chunks of it and small slices, all public. We own the bottoms of rivers and bays. The sand under the curling beach waves is still public. Some species that we hurt are coming back; bald eagles and alligators — to name two.

But we have let so many places slip away. “Look at that,” we say listlessly, looking out the car window. “Another strip mall.”

Near my house, an Eckerd’s drug store sits, improbably, on what used to be an otter pond. I used to love a hilly cow pasture near where I live. The hillside soared toward the sky, and always reminded me of that Andrew Wyeth painting, Christina’s World. One day, I watched men drive huge trucks across that hill and load up the cows. They were making way for another crop of houses. Emerald Lakes, I think they called it. Odd name: in Florida, a green lake isn’t necessarily a good thing.

Where I live, the roads keep getting wider and the fat oaks keep coming down.

I need to tell you: So much of what happens to the wild, loamy jungle that is Florida’s heart happens inside buildings. It happens in county commission chambers and corporate boardrooms and Cabinet meetings and – God help us all – in the Legislature.

While you are going to work and picking up your kids, while somewhere nearby a heron works the shallows and an osprey plummets for a fish, deals are being struck. Impacts are justified. And when people talk about ‘the environment,’ what they always end up talking about is money.

I can’t tell you how many people in suits I’ve heard assuring us that they had found a “win-win situation.” As if wild Florida could possibly win when another three high rises were getting piled on top of her sagging, sandy spine.

I’ve watched governments put a price on trees. We let developers fill one swamp if they promise to build another, somewhere else. Sometimes, we let the bulldozers have their way and just take money in exchange. We let boats go fast where manatees float because the boats bring money and the manatees don’t.

We don’t like to say no.

And, like ants swarming over the remains of a picnic in the park, Florida’s newcomers aren’t particular about the landscape. The sun shines and the palms wave, and that’s enough. That scares me.

The Everglades could be completely overrun with cattails – a clear sign of water pollution there – and somebody who moved here from New Jersey would think the big marsh looks great. Thousands of people live in Florida condominums around “lakes” that are really man-made stormwater ponds, and they never know the difference. At Florida beaches, the waves still look pretty hitting the shore, even if the ecosystem is so sick that the fish are filled with poison.

I challenge you: Learn to see through the mirage. Tell Florida’s stories. Paint her sunsets. Photograph what’s here now, and what’s lost.

Love this place fiercely and loudly. Keep telling. Keep reminding.

Hurricane and Wetlands

By Julie Hauserman

In 1993, a dredging boat named The Katrina (really, that was its name) started a project south of Morgan City, La. to restore destroyed coastal wetlands. The dredging project cost us federal taxpayers $2.6-million, and it only helped a fraction of the ruined wetlands south of New Orleans.

Who knows what’s become of the dredge Katrina’s mechanical wetlands repair now that the other Katrina, the hurricane, has shown brutally that nature is boss?

One thing Hurricane Katrina shows us, graphically, is that wetlands are worth a lot more than their property values might suggest. Everyone from governors standing at podiums in Mississippi and Louisiana to scientists emailing frantically from their university cubbyholes agrees: if we hadn’t destroyed so many coastal wetlands, the hurricane’s impact would have been a lot softer. And if we hadn’t allowed houses and shopping centers and parking lots to go up in the wetlands we destroyed, we’d have fewer people dead and a lot lower tab for rebuilding now.

People died because government let developers build in wetlands. And we’re still building in wetlands, more and more each day.

Wetlands are a sort of free storm insurance. They slow hurricanes down by absorbing the deadly storm surge. One estimate is that every 2.7 miles of wetland absorbs a foot of surge. Most governments don’t factor that in when they weigh whether a developer should be allowed to fill marshes and put in buildings.

When it’s time to rebuild, we should be asking whether people ought to live in houses that sit on spits of land where the government had no business letting them build in the first place.

Louisiana (like Florida) has been trashing wetlands in a big way. Before the dredges and cranes built the levees around New Orleans, the Mississippi River would top its banks during floods and wash through bayous and swamps. The river water carried silt to feed plants and build up new wetlands.

After engineers contained the river, it stopped flooding and the wetlands started disappearing. It’s a lot like what happened when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers turned Florida’s Kissimmee River into a straight-sided ditch and ended up hurting Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades, miles southward. Taxpayers have paid dearly to restore the Kissimmee’s old river bends. It is far more expensive to fix broken natural systems than it is to prevent harm beforehand.

Louisiana’s wetland loss is the largest in the U.S., and Florida isn’t far behind. Louisiana loses a football field of land every 30 minutes, reports the advocacy group America’s Wetland. The state’s shoreline has migrated inland 20 to 30 miles since the 1930s, says oceanographer Joe Suhayda. That massive wetland loss occurred in less than one human lifetime. If what the scientists say is true, that 30-mile wetlands buffer would have sucked up a lot of Katrina’s storm surge.

Low-lying Florida has squandered its wetlands with abandon. St. Petersburg Times reporter Craig Pittman found that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has rubber-stamped permits to fill wetlands here more than any other state. In 2003, for example, the Corps approved 3,400 Florida wetland-destruction permits and rejected just one. The government could curb this, and steer growth to more suitable places. Instead, it bends to developers time after time.

Someone is getting rich from developing the Gulf coast, and you can bet it’s not the people who stifled in the Superdome or tried to plan funerals for loved ones this week in Biloxi.

Centuries ago, when the U.S. paid France $15-million for 828,000 square miles of land west of the Mississippi, folks described it as the greatest real estate deal in history. Just like in Florida, they got so busy draining and filling “cheap land” they forgot about the treasure right under their noses. Now we’ll pay $8-billion to restore the Everglades. At least $14-billion to restore Louisiana wetlands alone – not to mention those in Mississippi, Alabama, and the Florida Panhandle. And the cost of rebuilding along the vulnerable Gulf coast carries a multi-billion dollar price tag.

But that’s just money – many people paid with their lives this time.

When it comes to public policies like the war on drugs, our government leaders preach prevention. “Just Say No,” they warn. But talk about the environment, and they pursue the addiction of money and growth blindly, trashing the landscapes that buffer us from storms, clean drinking water, and grow our seafood. Wetlands are a bargain: they do all this work for free.

Hurricane Katrina’s winds and waves carried a message for our government leaders, one that should echo from town meetings all the way to Washington long after storm victims are buried and bulldozers push away the last of the debris. Here’s the message: When it comes to building in wetlands, Just Say No.

Ivory-Billed

By Julie Hauserman

In the last 20 years, bad news about the environment has been coming down like acid rain. It’s everywhere, and there’s no escape.

Except that sometimes wilderness can still surprise with miracles.

It happened last week, when ornithologists released the astounding news that an extinct bird has come back from the dead.

“It’s kind of like finding Elvis,” one bird watcher told the Los Angeles Times.

“Elvis” in this case is the ivory-billed woodpecker, which hasn’t been documented in the American wild since 1944. The ivory-billed is an impressive, hefty black and white bird with a three-foot wingspan that looks an awful lot like a pileated woodpecker. The females have a brilliant red crest on their heads. Scientists have now found one of the birds – a male – in the Arkansas wilderness. After a year’s worth of paddling through river and swamp, they’ve found just the one bird, and even videotaped it. But they hope he’s got a mate, and maybe a little clan.

Let’s all hope. Because the discovery of the ivory-billed means our hard work of saving wild places for future generations is a wise investment. It means we can use our American ingenuity, our dollars, our science, and our technology to repair the planet. We all benefit from the biological powerhouses in wilderness — not just birds like the ivory-billed woodpecker. In our unimaginably diverse peninsula nestled in the Gulf, Florida’s wild lands hold secrets that haven’t yet been told.

Ivory-billed woodpeckers lived in the hardwood swamps that stood here B.O. – Before Orlando. In 1924, two ivory-billed woodpeckers were found in northern Osceola County. It was a big deal, because the bird had been declared extinct just a few years earlier. Incredibly, the state of Florida gave a taxidermist permission to kill and stuff the pair, and the ivory-billed disappeared.

Or so we thought.

Over the years, sightings of ivory-billed woodpeckers continued. They were spotted in North Florida, in Louisana, and in Cuba. Most of these sightings were dismissed – it’s easy to confuse a female ivory-billed with a pileated woodpecker if you don’t know what you’re looking for. The males are more distinct, since they don’t have the red crest on their heads. Dick Hinson, 79, knew what to look for. In 1964, he saw a pair of ivory-billed woodpeckers pecking at a stump on his land along North Florida’s Chipola River.

“I’ve developed a little sympathy for someone who has seen a flying saucer. When you hold yourself out as someone who has seen an ivory-billed woodpecker,” Hinson said, “you get the impression that they are wondering: Is this guy a nut?”

For birders, documenting an ivory-billed woodpecker sighting has been the Holy Grail. Now the Grail has been claimed in Arkansas. The lone ivory-billed is living on the 55,000-acre Cache River National Wildlife Refuge— land that the federal government wisely set aside in 1986 as an investment in the planet. If that land had been drilled, or chopped down, or paved over, we’d never have the miracle of this tenacious bird.

Florida has an impressive 3.8-million acres of public conservation land. We have patched together chunks of wildness: shadowy palmetto thickets where bear and panther lie; vast pale marshes where herons stalk the shallows; white dunes where ancient turtles nest. My daughter, now seven, will be able to see these things because we set them aside.

Florida’s conservation land-buying isn’t done. Scientists have identified about two million more acres that need to get in public ownership. We pay for Florida’s conservation lands through growth, dedicating part of a tax on real estate deals to buy wildlands. It makes sense.

Our rare creatures in Florida deserve that investment, and not just because it will bring tourists, or cure cancer, or provide refuge for ivory-billed woodpeckers. We do it because it’s the only Florida we’ve got. We protect it because there may be miracles we don’t know about yet.