In 2021, twenty-one Florida panthers died while crossing roads. The panther known as K373 was the last of them.
“K” stands for kitten, a label applied when she was microchipped in 2012, weighing in at three pounds. A panther can live fifteen or more years, and while K373 died just beyond her reproductive prime, she probably still had a couple more litters in her. The current wild population of Florida panthers now stands somewhere between 120 and 230. From 2014 to the end of last year, more than 200 panthers were killed crossing the road.
Panthers moving about may be a sign that this endangered species is recovering. Unfortunately, it also puts them in peril.
“The Native people don’t really think of themselves so much as stewards of the land, but rather as a part of the natural landscape.”
Thankfully, in spring 2021, the state legislature unanimously passed the Florida Wildlife Corridor Act, which Republican Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law last June. It allocates $300 million to purchase and connect parcels of land, allowing the panther and other vulnerable species to expand their range while also protecting groundwater and helping to buffer threats from climate change.
Florida is often seen as a battleground state where real estate is king, but this conservation win happened because it was popular across the partisan divide. During the 2020 election, conservation-funding ballot measures passed in three Florida counties—Manatee, Collier, and Volusia—that voted overwhelmingly for President Donald Trump.
Panthers—also called pumas, or mountain lions—roam the length of the Americas. For many years, they were parsed into thirty-two subspecies, but modern genetics has decided there are only two. In 1995, eight Texas panthers were transplanted to southwestern Florida to inject genetic diversity into the faltering population of about thirty remaining panthers. The population began to rebound; the animal has captured Florida’s imagination.
“The corridor concept has re-energized public opinion around land acquisition,” says Audubon Florida Executive Director Julie Wraithmell. She argues that environmental action enjoys bipartisan support because the twin pillars of Florida’s economy are real estate and tourism. “If our water quality goes south, if there aren’t places for families to play, it undermines all of our economic prosperity.”
We face overwhelming environmental challenges, headlined by climate change, and overwhelming political challenges, defined by deep division. Can the process of coming together to care for nature help lead us back out of the political wilderness?
Just days after his Inauguration in January 2021, President Joe Biden issued an executive order that set an ambitious target to protect 30 percent of the nation’s public lands and waters by 2030. This goal, known as “30 by 30,” is part of an international campaign now supported by seventy-three countries.
Such initiatives are also popular with voters. In polling completed just before the Biden directive, four out of five voters nationwide approved of protecting at least 30 percent of the United States’ land, ocean, and inland waters by 2030. A few months later, after a coalition of Republican governors called the plan a federal land grab, about three out of five voters still supported it.
Indeed, the history of environmental policy is markedly bipartisan. While Democrats and Republicans have long argued over using market tools or regulations, there has been significant bipartisan support for U.S. environmental policy over the last fifty years. That consensus began to break down in the last twenty years, particularly over the issue of climate change, a trend that accelerated with Trump’s systematic dismantling of protections.
But even under that sustained attack, bipartisan support saved major environmental projects, most notably the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. An analysis of 2020 county ballot initiatives by the Trust for Public Land found that blue-leaning counties supported environmental spending more often than red-leaning counties. But even in Trump-supporting counties, 83 percent of the ballot measures for the conservation funding passed.
“When it comes to the voters, this is not a partisan issue,” says Will Abberger, the group’s director of conservation finance.
It shouldn’t be. As the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change put it in a newly released report: “The scientific evidence is unequivocal: climate change is a threat to human well-being and the health of the planet. Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future.”
For “30 by 30” to be realized, the United States would need to more than double the amount of protected lands, which stand at around 12 percent today. Yet Florida is already at the cusp, just a couple of purchases away from hitting the 30 percent mark.
“We know that we have to aim higher, given the ecosystem services that we need to support,” says Wraithmell. With twenty-two million Floridians and another 130 million tourists every year, she says, the need for wetlands to support aquifer recharge and buffer rising seas is acute: “It’s a great floor, and states should be encouraged to exceed the floor.”
Conservation scientists call animals like the panther “charismatic megafauna”—large, attractive animals that draw public support. They often require large landscapes, so protecting charismatic megafauna can protect entire ecosystems.
Audubon Florida
A panther at Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary in Florida is captured on camera.
That nature is interconnected permeates traditional wisdom in many cultures, yet some of those lessons have been hard to learn. In a 2010 interview, Thomas Hoctor, director of the Center for Landscape Conservation Planning at the University of Florida, boiled it down: “Green infrastructure promotes the critical concept that ecosystem function, biodiversity, and the health of human communities are inextricably linked.”
As this understanding has grown, scientists have collaborated on huge accounting projects to figure out how much nature we need to conserve. Thirty percent wasn’t enough for a biologist like E.O. Wilson, who was most concerned with the extinction crisis and, until his death in December, argued that we needed to conserve half. Some scientists who know the importance of forests to carbon cycles would argue we may need to conserve even more than half.
What nature does for us is multifaceted, and not properly reflected in our economic systems. Wetlands and rivers store and clean water; forests and grassland root systems store carbon. Large systems like the Amazon can drive global weather patterns. Coastal mangrove swamps can dampen storm surges.
Generally, a healthy ecosystem stores carbon; a wounded one releases it. Ambitious plans to mitigate climate change by 2050 include protecting and restoring as much of these natural systems as possible. Nature alone can’t restore carbon balance, but it must be a part of the solution.
And while we live in an increasingly urbanized world, a staggering 1.6 billion people rely on forests for their daily livelihoods. Woodlands provide food, shelter, and water and even mitigate disease. Healthy, functioning forests help control both malaria and diarrheal disease—two of the top causes of death worldwide for children under five.
“The more we learn, the more important nature seems,” says Brendan Fisher, a resource economist at the University of Vermont. Two hundred years ago, draining a wetland to grow crops seemed like a great idea. But in many parts of the world now, conservation of nature means net gains, while degradation and destruction mean further losses. The benefits that nature provides outweigh their costs.
“Not only do nature-based solutions work, but they make economic sense,” Fisher says.
Most critiques of “30 by 30” are centered on the mechanics and not the core ideas. In the United States, the concern is that we can’t reach this conservation target without stepping on property rights. A parallel concern arises where the traditional ways of Indigenous cultures preserve the biota but these are not accepted by Western ideals of conservation.
Frank Ettawageshik
Frank Ettawageshik, an Odawa Indian from Harbor Springs, Michigan, and a former tribal chair of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians and executive director of the United Tribes of Michigan, has attended numerous international conferences on Indigenous rights and climate. He believes Indigenous perspectives can help accelerate the overall scientific objectives.
“The Native people don’t really think of themselves so much as stewards of the land, but rather as a part of the natural landscape,” he says. “You have relationships with all of the other beings, including the trees and the grasses and the Earth itself. We’re looking at restoring, and keeping healthy, the relationships. And we’re not looking at it as property.”
People who do things that harm the Earth or other beings, Ettawageshik reflects, are “not in harmony. So the whole goal is to restore that harmony, to work within it. But it’s not because we’re restoring property. It’s because we’re restoring the relationship with those beings that we share this world with.”
Conservation politics is still a contentious playing field, riven by egos and inequity. In Florida, for example, the press release touting the leadership of Governor DeSantis in passing the Florida Wildlife Corridor Act fails to mention that the $300 million came from the federal budget via the White House. Recently Florida has also woefully underfunded the part of its land-acquisition program that provides urban park spaces.
But there are also many places where nature and the city are becoming ever more entwined. The Valle de Oro National Wildlife Refuge near Albuquerque, New Mexico, is the first federal refuge created by the Urban Wildlife Conservation Program. When a 570-acre former dairy farm hit the market in the highly industrial Mountain View neighborhood, the community saw conservation as the way to prevent yet another dirty facility.
Home to two Superfund sites and more than forty EPA regulated facilities, the Mountain View neighborhood was steeped in questions of environmental justice.
“This is where Albuquerque has put all its polluting, contaminating processes,” says Sofia Martinez, a co-coordinator of Los Jardines Institute, an Albuquerque-based environmental justice group. “We wanted them to recognize that it’s not just about having a place to conserve, preserve, and recreate. Environmental justice—it’s where we live, work, play, pray, and go to school, right?”
With community input, Valle de Oro became the first federal refuge to develop its own strategic plan to address environmental and economic justice. This process helped design the visitor center, and has led to conservation corps jobs providing environmental experience for area youth. The refuge can’t advocate, but it can testify with expertise on environmental impacts.
“I think that has strengthened the position of the community because up to this point almost any polluting facility that has put in for a permit has gotten it,” says Martinez. The city is now looking at the cumulative impacts of these decisions.
The visitor center opens this year, and major restoration work is underway. The neighboring Rio Grande used to run across this land, and left pockets of ephemeral wetlands when it retreated to its current channel. After being wiped clean by a century of farming, the first wetland returned in 2018 and the water brought wildlife overnight.
“We had five species of toads calling the first night that we put water in the playa,” says Jennifer Owen-White, the refuge manager. More than a dozen species of shorebirds visited, including the only American golden plover in the state at the time, “Just to see the wildlife respond so quickly is beautiful and amazing.”
Two more wetlands have been created since, along with grass swales to protect the neighborhood from flooding. Using runoff to create more habitat for wildlife, it will also clean the water and recharge groundwater.
Restoring the water cycle provides a suite of ecosystem services. It may improve air quality, while the added water and vegetation should buffer heat island effects during extreme heat events.
As a Houston kid who didn’t grow up hunting or visiting national parks, Owen-White found nature in her neighborhood bayou—catching frogs and snakes—and eventually studied wildlife. But this urban nature didn’t always fit with her peers. “I always felt a little odd being in the environmental field and being somebody whose love for the outdoors was really like sitting on a porch drinking coffee,” she laughs, happy to be creating this opportunity at Valle de Oro.
As she puts it, “There’s so much resilience that can come from the restoration of this land.”