Defending Florida's State Parks: A Call to Action to Prevent Proposed Development

When you think of Florida, what do you think about? I know, I know, a lot of people are like a Florida man or like the politics and things like that, but do you ever just think about the beauty of Florida? You know, the natural landscapes that you see, the Everglades, you know, there's a lot of different parks, state parks, national parks, obviously the coast, the Gulf of Mexico coast, the Atlantic coast. It is beautiful in Florida when you really think about things. And that beauty of some

of those state parks are in jeopardy. And so I have a call to action today for us to come together as a community and let's defend these parks. So you're going to want to listen to this episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. We're protecting parks, folks. Let's start the show. Hey

everybody, welcome back to another exciting episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I'm your host Andrew Lewin, and this is the podcast where you find out what's happening with the ocean, how you can speak up for the ocean, and what you can do to live for a better ocean by taking action. And on today's episode, we're going to be talking about something that was actually a listener requested story, which to be honest, I love these. When people reach

out to me, it's like, hey, can you cover this? Can you cover that? I'm actually working on another story that somebody's asked me to cover. I prioritized this. I actually had another interview that's gonna go up on next episode, but people are coming to me with some stories that they want me to cover, which I love, by the way. If you have more stories, just hit me up on LinkedIn or on Instagram at HowToProtectTheOcean. I'd love to help you out with putting that story on a bigger platform, like

on my platform. and I've seen this story about the state parks that are in jeopardy. In fact, there are nine state parks in Florida that are in jeopardy from basically development proposals that are up, hotels, golf courses, things like that. that's really, really disappointing to hear, to be honest. So we're going to be covering that today because it's a call to action. Now, when I was contacted, I want to just kind of give a shout out to Courtney Doberton,

who let me know of this story on LinkedIn. It's basically state parks threatened with development. And there are nine state parks that are threatened. I'm going to read out the parks if you're familiar with them or not. Anastasia State Park, Topsail Hill Preserve State Park, Grayton Beach State Park, Jonathan Dickinson State Park, Honeymoon Island State Park, Hillsboro River State Park, Camp Ellen State Park, and Dr. Von D. Mitzell Euless Johnson State Park, and

Oletta River State Park. Some of these parks are along the coastline. A lot of these parks, actually. I know the first two, Anastasia and Topsail, are along the coastline. Anastasia's just south of Jacksonville on the Atlantic side. Topsail Hill Preserve State Park is just actually in the panhandle in the northwest side of Florida and in the Gulf of Mexico side. I want to tell you how important these parks are to not only the environment, but to the people in

Florida and a lot of different people. It doesn't matter the political background. Let's keep the politics out of this for this thing. Let's think about it from a park standpoint. When parks are designated or even are proposed to be designated, there's usually a number of reasons to propose that park. Oftentimes, usually the quickest way to get a park, you know, essentially designated as a park is a cultural moment. So it could be indigenous

or tribal. It could be something of cultural importance. And I know in like lakes and oceans, there's like specific shipwrecks or a specific habitat On land, it could be the same thing. It could be a piece of river or a piece of land that's been very important culturally in the past or to people or to history. And those become state parks pretty quickly because there's a reason. Everybody's like, oh, yeah, we want to remember that. We want to

protect from a cultural perspective. then there's also the environmental perspective. So, you know, protecting for biodiversity, protecting against land development, but also protecting for security. And this is one that often gets overlooked a lot of times when we think about parks. And this has happened actually, not just in Florida, but everywhere. Because when you preserve you're really

anything that happens in nature. So if we have a lot of rain, like Florida gets a lot of rain, flooding happens, you get hurricanes and things like that, those natural parks become a buffer. There's easy drainage because nothing has really been paved over. Nothing's been altered because you can't alter a state park in the way that it's designated now. And this

is one of the problems with these new proposals. And so having those natural areas do their natural ecosystem function, which is really, really important when we talk about economy, when we talk about protection of residences around the park and areas and communities and regions and counties around the parks. These are really, really important. In fact, coming up to Canada, just to kind of give me a local perspective, to talk about something local, we have the Oak Ridges Moraine, which is just

north of Toronto, and it's a green area. And essentially, it is an area where you cannot build on, you cannot develop. And it's a provincial area that is protected. It's the Oak Ridges Marine is what they call it. And that sits north of Toronto. And what that does is that helps buffer the rest of Toronto's sort of flooding and river systems and things like that. It's not a huge piece as much as it should be, but it is a piece that

helps sort of the natural processes happen. So when we got the big rains in July and there was a lot of flooding across Southern Ontario, Some of those areas actually did better than others because they had that natural drainage. You know, the rest of Toronto, like downtown Toronto and other parts of Toronto where rivers have been historically buried underneath the... Basically, it's the... Oh, gosh, I forget the... Essentially, the natural drainage. It's essentially like the

sewer system. Not really the sewer system, but just... I'm blanking on the word right now, but it'll come to me. But it's just the stormwater drainage. So, it's a stormwater sewer. right? So when water comes down, you know, when you pave roads and everything, you have these underground, like, like drainage, right? You have these storm drains. And you

know, if those get blocked, that's when you get flooding. But the idea is to allow the water to get through and drain down towards the lake or towards, you know, maybe a natural area. A lot of our rivers in Toronto were buried, you know, historically, because we wanted to put in paved roads and things like that. So they became part

of our stormwater drainage. But that doesn't help a lot of times, because a lot of times, like I mentioned, those drainage areas get blocked by leaves, or debris, or plastics, or pollution, or anything like that. And you get flooding that occurs. And this year, we had a lot of flooding over the last month. And that's been a huge problem, where people have to have been rescued in parking lots, believe it or not, because the water was up to the top

of the roof of their cars. It's a scary situation when we start to take away our natural areas. So we have these areas like Oak Ridge's moraine just north of Toronto. We have state parks in Florida to keep those ecosystem functions working properly. You know, it's not the best case scenario because we want to keep as many natural areas natural and many green spaces green.

That's why when you always see uh a residence a new residence that's being or a new neighborhood that's being built up there has to be a certain amount of green area to allow natural drainage that's one of the reasons not only for the viewing capabilities and just sort of like people like having seen like green areas You have to have greenery to allow for that drainage to happen, you know, and you have to have stormwater ponds in new neighborhoods because you

need to have that drainage. You need to manage the water that's coming in, especially now in the times that we're at where we're seeing increased rain and increased storms. and increase intensity of storms, we're going to need that drainage as much as possible. So having these

types of parks are extremely important. Now they're also important for just preserving and conserving the... taking like a proactive approach in preserving biodiversity, preserving the animals that are there, again, that keep the ecosystems functioning to help us and all that drainage and all that area to keep it natural and that buffering area,

right? That's what helps all this. If we lose those animals, we lose those habitats to development, we start to lose that park and we start to lose the essence of the area and it's all drainage or it's all paved. You know, everything gets paved over. Think about that. Instead of green, you get basically asphalt or

concrete or interstates and things like that. And yeah, it might help traffic a little bit for the time being, but then more people are gonna move in, you're gonna get more problems, and then you're gonna get more flooding, and people are gonna be more at risk, and you're gonna get, you know, climate change happens more and more. You're gonna get less green areas in state parks. That's a problem. That's a huge, huge problem. And a lot of

the times, like I have to admit, Florida has a lot of state parks. And they're beautiful. I've heard many people go down and visit them, and you see them online talk about how beautiful they are, how they love these parks. And I'm not just talking about hippies and environmentalists and left-leaning people. These are like hunters, fishers. It doesn't matter what political part of the spectrum you're on. These are people who enjoy nature. Everybody enjoys

nature at some point. It'd be very hard-pressed to find anybody who doesn't. I'm you know, our newly lost friend, Dr. Jane Nichols, he used to talk about the slow coast all the time. He created, him and his wife created the slow coast. They created a store and just sort of an area where you can just slow down, enjoy nature. And I, you know, since his passing, I've

really thought about that. You know, going away to a cottage a couple weeks ago and just putting away your phones and just enjoying looking out onto the lakes and looking out onto nature and looking out onto the oceans when you have it in front of you is probably one of the best things that you can do for your mental health. your natural well-being. We all know our mental health is suffering these days, right? And

so we need to protect that. We need to make sure that we are in good mental health so we can attack these problems and these issues that we're facing and just being present for our families and our friends and everybody else and just ourselves. We need to have nature to have that. So when I heard that there are people out there that want to propose developing on these state parks I got angry. I got scared. There was a lot of fear. And this is not new.

We've seen this before. We've seen, I believe it was during the Trump presidency, Trump was going to allow exploration and mining and coal mining in certain state parks or federal parks around the US. And it was actually a lot of people came out, and there were a lot of Republicans that were for that. And we need to get more fossil fuels, and we need to reinvest in those and double down on those. And of course, the

whole climate change debate and everything like that was going on. A lot of hunters and fishers started pressuring Republican senators to be like, hey, what are you doing? You're a hunter and fisher. Don't you want, like, we go to our national parks and our parks to hunt and fish and we do it responsibly and we want nature. We love being

in nature. You know, as much as people don't like hunting and don't like fishing, there are people out there who enjoy that and and but want to protect like they love being in nature. That's one of the things that they love doing. And and that's part of the process of hunting and fishing. you're out there, you're probably out there longer than you are catching anything or

hunting anything or killing anything. And the people who do that are have been in historically have been very, you know, very, how do you say proactive as advocates to protecting these these national parks and state parks. So I'm curious to see how many fishers and hunters will be having a say against this. And I just want to talk to you and just let you know about certain aspects. And I'm going to talk about the call to action because this

is really important. You know, this is something that I've wanted to do a long time here on how to protect the ocean. I mean, we are here talking about how to protect the ocean. This is Monday. This is a new week. And we're about to come into a long weekend here in North America. And people are like, let's let's party. Let's do this. But we have one thing to do.

We have to protect these national parks. It doesn't matter if you're from Florida or not from Florida, you can participate and there's a public comment that's going to happen. Now, the public meetings in Florida, like in person, have been postponed for nine state parks. They've all been postponed. And so I don't know when this is going to be, but I am going to share the link. So it's the floridaspringcouncil.org. And it's a full page, and it kind of gives you updates of when and where these

public meetings will be there. But here's what some of the developments are. Anastasia State Park, there is a proposed changes to include a resort with up to 350 rooms, as well as a disc golf course and pickleball courts. Really. You know, is that really, really necessary? Top Sale Hill Preserve Park, proposed changes to include a resort for up to 350 rooms, as well as a disc golf course and a pickleball, and pickleball courts. So I'm assuming these are the same, this

is the same company that's going, and these are two very different areas. One's in the Top Sales, and like I said, is in the Panhandle, Florida, and the other one's just south of Jacksonville. Grayton Beach Park, a proposed change of a disc golf course and pickleball courts. Jonathan Dickinson State Park, looking at proposed changes, include multiple golf courses, a clubhouse, and related facilities encompassing over 1,000 acres. 1,000 acres

gone from these state parks. Think about what a clubhouse would bring, or even the land use changes that happen when you put multiple golf courses in. The fertilizers and pesticides that are used to maintain those golf courses. How the drainage changes when you put in those golf courses. there's a lot of difference in there. When you put in a hotel or a resort, a 350 room resort plus all the amenities, another golf course and a pickleball course, which is basically paving over

natural areas. These are big changes. So we have Jonathan Dickinson. I told you what that was. There's looking at the Honeymoon Island. They never detailed what was going on. Hillsborough, they never detailed. Camp Helen, they never detailed. It looks like none of the other ones, they've detailed what is proposed to go in there. But these changes are brought by the state government, so the governor of that area and of Florida. And we know this governor is not a

person who is for the environment. We know he's for big businesses, except for Disney, of course, for different reasons. But he's there to, you know, bring in more money and this and these are like tourist stuff. You know, these are tourist things to happen. Now, a state park is a tourist destination in general. It doesn't need to be augmented. It doesn't need to be changed. The state park in itself is a tourist attraction. You don't need to put a resort. You don't need to put golf

courses. Like, think about the amount of golf courses in Florida anyway. When people go down to Florida, they golf. They golf. They don't need more courses. They don't need more golf courses to happen. And we've seen so many changes to the natural landscape of Florida over the past, you know, 50, 60 years. It's definitely changed things. Florida in general is at

risk of climate change consequences. I've covered stories before recently, you know, in the last couple of months where, you know, we talked about how the groundwater, the water in the ground is so dense, and it's so high, that when flooding happens, it happens from the ground up. It

doesn't happen from the ocean in. It happens from the ground, because it's so saturated, that ground, with water, and it could be sometimes ocean water, that it's changing that landscape, and it's changing sort of the the permeability of that area and sort of the security of that area. You're going to see a lot of erosion happen in those areas. And the predictions of all the sea level rise models and the IPCC models is that half of Florida is going to be gone at some point in time. I don't know

when, but at some point in time, it could be gone. Now imagine a state that's at risk from climate change consequences, more intense storms coming, flooding and nutrients and water quality issues all around. And what helps is natural areas that stay natural. So these state parks actually help. And the natural landscape actually helped. Changing those landscapes even a little bit, because these state parks are not huge. So changing them and paving them can have drastic consequences for

the areas around them. We've already seen some of those changes. When Big Sugar decided that they wanted to empty out more and they wanted to take out some of the Everglades so that they can put a plant there, and then they started to take away and redirect some of the water that was coming out of Lake Okeechobee, we saw the nutrients increase. We saw what happened to the algal blooms and the red tides that eventually came in as well. Just it's not good. We're not in a good shape in Florida. And

Florida can be very beautiful. It could be amazing. But these changes will probably have problems for water quality down the road. We just don't know how. We just don't know when. But having these changes will drastically change the landscapes of those state parks. And state parks are there to be state parks. They're not there to be a resort. They're not there to be disc

golf courses. They're not there to be pickleball courts. These are there to be natural areas, and people enjoy the natural areas by hiking, maybe camping a little bit. There's certain areas that are managed differently, and they're there to be enjoyed by everybody, including Floridians. So Floridians, we are very fortunate to have a lot of people that live in Florida that listen to this podcast. And it's great to have that as a community. It's time to

look at these areas. Pay attention to when those public comments. If you're in those areas, go to those public meetings. Be a voice for those state parks. There are a lot of people within the state government that work on these state parks that are there that will help you. you know, that

will there that are there to be like, hey, we don't want these changes either. I know public sector people, they do not want to see these changes, the people, the Rangers, the people who work for it to protect those parks and those boundaries. They are there to protect land, they are there to protect the environment. So they will have your back. At some point, we just need to hear from the

people from Floridians. And if you're outside Florida, like I am, not even in the country, I'm going to send, you know, some some emails, you know, maybe some phone calls to the governor's office. You know, there's a lot of there are a lot of people on TikTok and online that are doing some great things. I'm gonna give them just some shout outs here, because I want you guys to be able to know who they are, because I think it's really important. Carissa Cabrera, who is on

TikTok, she is a great person out of Hawaii. She's a great psycom person and conservationist. She's great. There's also, I'm just looking up this person here, um it's it's at whales we i think her name is erica i don't know her very well but she's been doing uh erica yeah e-r-i-k-a and she goes by whales we so whales all one word whales and then w-e-e check that out i'll put the link into the show notes to both of those accounts and to some

of those posts that they've been putting in. They're putting in updates to what's happening. I'll put in some TikToks and some social media posts as well just on what I know, but a lot of the information I get are for people like them who are helping me out and people like

Courtney Dobberton who are helping me out and gathering information. you know look them up thank them for the work that they do and and uh you know a call to action is go to the website that's in the show notes it's uh it's floridaspringcouncil.org all one word floridasprings with an s council.org but check out the link in the show notes to get i have the actual page to find out when those meetings are it's very important that

we participate in those. It's very important that we protect these state parks. So that's it for today's episode. Love to hear what you think. You can leave a comment on Spotify because we have videos up there as well. You can go to YouTube. You can leave a comment there. I'd love to hear your thoughts on these state parks. You can also go to any of your favorite podcasts and listen to them there, but you can hit me up on Instagram at HowToProtectTheOcean. I'd love to hear your thoughts on

this and stay tuned for the next episode. We have a cool book coming at you. If you have questions on the ocean and on the atmosphere, there's a book that's coming out that's right down your alley that answers probably the questions that you have. It's gonna be a lot of fun. So check that out subscribe, you know Follow whatever you need to do to find out more information and make that call to action to help these state parks Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the how to

protect the ocean podcast. I'm your host Andrew Lewin Have a great day. We'll talk to