The National Park Service (NPS) is developing a new Wilderness Stewardship Plan for Wilderness in Everglades National Park in South Florida. Unfortunately, the agency seems to be headed down the wrong path with its initial ideas.
Your help is needed by March 31 to convince the NPS to restore true wildness to the Everglades’ Wilderness!
Located within Everglades National Park, the 1,296,500-acre Marjory Stoneman Douglas Wilderness is the largest Wilderness east of the Rocky Mountains and the largest subtropical Wilderness in the U.S. Established in 1934, Everglades National Park covers 1.5 million acres, and Congress designated its Wilderness—named after a long-time Everglades advocate—in 1978.
According to the NPS, the Everglades “supports an assemblage of plant and animal species found nowhere else on the planet.” This unparalleled landscape of nine distinct habitat types—hardwood hammock, pineland, freshwater marl prairie, freshwater slough, cypress, coastal lowland, mangrove, and marine and estuarine—is home to numerous rare and endangered species like the manatee, American crocodile, and the elusive Florida panther. The Everglades is also an international treasure—a World Heritage Site, International Biosphere Reserve, a Wetland of International Importance, and a specially protected area under the Cartagena Treaty for protecting biodiversity.
Unfortunately, the NPS has allowed development and has otherwise greatly disturbed nature in the Everglades for decades, including within the Wilderness. And the NPS wants to continue doing so to the detriment of all that’s wild here.
The NPS, for example, allows motorized boats (airboats and other motorboats) to disrupt what are supposed to be quiet, wilderness waters, including its well-publicized 99-mile-long Wilderness Waterway. In another travesty, the NPS has allowed the alteration of the area’s natural flow of water by maintaining canal plugs on artificial canals and pumping stations inside Wilderness in defiance of the Wilderness Act’s ban on structures and installations. This is typical of the agency’s penchant for manipulating Wilderness so as to create what it sees as “desired conditions,” rather than letting Wilderness determine its own conditions.
Further compounding the challenges of a healthy Wilderness, invasive plant and animal species (like the Burmese python) that have become established in the Everglades are wreaking havoc on native ecosystems by outcompeting native vegetation and killing native wildlife. This, compounded with the disruptions in natural water flows, has created an Everglades vastly different from what it should be if nature were allowed to call the shots.
Please comment by March 31 and urge the National Park Service to protect the wild in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Wilderness! |
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The National Park Service is accepting public comments here: https://parkplanning.nps.gov/commentForm.cfm?documentID=134476
The agency is requesting answers to four specific questions, plus general comments. We encourage you to answer the questions and leave a general comment at the end. Please write in your own words, and personalize your comments if you can, but try to include the following points.
Question 1 – Desired Conditions: Allow a healthy and naturally-functioning Wilderness to determine conditions on the ground rather than impose human-devised desired conditions on the Wilderness.
Question 2 – Barriers to visiting Everglades Wilderness: The extensive presence of motorboats and airboats in the Wilderness will prevent me from wanting to visit the Wilderness.
Question 3 – Refinement of Strategies: The National Park Service needs to get serious about removing structures, installations, and motorized uses inside the Wilderness.
Question 4 – Other strategies: Rather than merely “grandfathering” in existing structures, installations, and motorized uses, the Park Service should look with fresh eyes at those incompatible things and uses, and work to eliminate them.
Comments - Remove motorized boats from wilderness waters. Make the Wilderness Waterway and other wilderness waters truly wild by eliminating motorized travel. Motorboats and airboats have no place in Wilderness.
- Remove structures and installations from the Wilderness. Structures and installations are prohibited in designated Wilderness, and should be removed, including canal plugs, pumping stations, and other structures and installations within the Wilderness. Only retain structures and installations if the NPS can demonstrate they are the absolute minimum necessary for the administration of Wilderness.
- Remove emphases on “desired conditions.” A wild, untrammeled Wilderness will produce its own natural, wilderness conditions. “Desired conditions” represents the human manipulation of Wilderness, which is prohibited by the Wilderness Act.
- Ecological Restoration. Increase efforts to minimize non-native invasive species like the Burmese python in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Wilderness, and continue to work on restoring natural water flows to and through the Everglades.
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Help us protect Wilderness in the Everglades and around the country. A generous member has pledged to DOUBLE all first-time donations up to $30,000 this year. |
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