Florida’s Remarkable New Wildlife Corridor from the Panhandle to the Keys

This week, Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, who is known nationally for his unstinting impersonation of the state’s most famous new resident, signed into law a remarkable piece of environmental legislation that could become a model for the rest of the country. The project will establish the Florida Wildlife Corridor, a blueprint for the state to connect all of its large national and state parks with tracts of open land. The corridor, once complete, would create an unbroken swath of preserved land from the Alabama state line all the way to the Florida Keys, nearly eight hundred miles away. It would insure that a population of wildlife—whether it be black bears or panthers or gopher tortoises—would not be cut off from other groups of its species, which is one of the main drivers of extinction.

The legislation, passed unanimously by the Republican-controlled legislature, commits the state to spending as much as four hundred million dollars in the first year to purchase land identified in the corridor map. Backers say they hope the state will continue funding the project in the years ahead. For now, they are savoring their victory, which they say will help safeguard the environment for future generations. “We’re in a race against time,’’ Carlton Ward, Jr., a Tampa-based conservation photographer who is one of the leading proponents of the corridor, said. “In ten years, if we don’t act, most of this land will be gone.”

As envisioned, the corridor could ultimately encompass eighteen million acres, about half of Florida’s total area. Roughly ten million acres are currently conserved in one form or another.

Environmental experts have long touted the need for wildlife corridors to better help populations stay connected and maintain their genetic diversity. Underpasses beneath major highways—for Florida panthers along Interstate 75, for instance—have been in place for years, and the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, on the Georgia-Florida border, and Osceola National Forest, in north Florida, were connected by the purchase of a roughly ten-mile corridor in the mid-two-thousands. But Florida is the first state to draw up a map for the entire state and get behind it with real money. “Florida is way ahead of the rest of the country,’’ Tom Hoctor, the director of the Center for Landscape Conservation Planning at the University of Florida, told me.

Across the country, Republican politicians have often opposed efforts to protect wildlife and the environment from heedless development. But in Florida the Party’s environmental record is more nuanced. In 1990, led by the Republican governor Bob Martinez, the legislature approved Florida Preservation 2000, which set aside three hundred million dollars annually for the acquisition of environmentally sensitive lands. Ten years later, the program was superseded by Florida Forever, which was backed by the Republican governor Jeb Bush and runs in perpetuity. More than two million acres of environmentally pristine areas were bought or otherwise set aside; the program, the most ambitious of its kind in the country, became hugely popular in the state.

Then came the financial crisis of 2008, which starved the state of revenues. Governor Charlie Crist, then a Republican, drastically reduced funding for Florida Forever. (Florida requires that the state government balance its budget each year.) Then Governor Rick Scott, a hard-line conservative, was elected, in 2010; he was so opposed to environmental protection that he forbade the use of the phrases “climate change” or “global warming” in state documents. Although Florida’s economy recovered, Scott never fully restored funding for Florida Forever. The program languished, but then, in 2014, voters approved Amendment 1, known as the Florida Water and Land Conservation Initiative, which attempted to restore funding. Still, Scott and his conservative successor, DeSantis, found ways to divert the money for other uses.

The American Rescue Plan, passed by Congress earlier this year to boost an economy reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic, provided an opportunity to break the deadlock. Under that law, some three hundred million dollars became available to the state for land purchases, and Florida agreed to pitch in up to a hundred million dollars. Carlton Ward, Jr. and his cohorts, working with the state senate president Wilton Simpson, a Republican, endorsed the wildlife corridor as a guide to future purchases; the legislation sailed to approval. DeSantis had planned a public ceremony to celebrate the legislation, but, after the collapse of the condominium tower in Surfside, last week, he signed the bill on Tuesday without fanfare.

The corridor could offer sustained relief to the state’s endangered species. For wildlife, the road to extinction almost always begins when populations become cut off from one another. Marooned in pockets, or islands, an isolated herd—of eastern elk, say, the last of which disappeared in 1877, in Pennsylvania—can no longer mate with nearby populations. The isolated elk are left to breed with each other, and their genetic diversity declines. Over time, some change in the environment—maybe a tick-borne disease or more habitat disappearing—pushes the genetically vulnerable population to the vanishing point. That’s how species die.

This path is so well worn that its patterns can be explained, in part, by “island biogeography,” which was originally developed to describe the dynamics of isolated communities living on islands at sea. The lesson is that nothing is so threatening to the survival of a species than for its population to be broken up—to be stranded on islands. The Florida Wildlife Corridor is a direct answer to that threat.

One of the most imaginative segments in the corridor would connect two huge tracts of land—Eglin Air Force Base and its adjacent forests in the Florida Panhandle and Alabama, totalling about a million acres, and Apalachicola National Forest, which, with adjacent preserved lands, totals another million acres. The two areas are separated by about fifty miles; a twelve-mile-wide corridor, totalling about half a million acres, would link the two together. For that to happen, several vast parcels would have to be purchased or otherwise set aside. Even if the Florida Wildlife Corridor receives sustained funding, that could take years to complete. “It would be a fantastically large swath of conserved land,’’ Hilary Swain, the executive director at Archbold Biological Station, in Venus, Florida, said.

One of the remarkable aspects of the Florida Wildlife Corridor is that it includes several privately-owned cattle ranches. One of them is called Blackbeard, located in the southern part of the state, in Manatee County. With five thousand acres, Blackbeard’s Ranch contains several ecosystems, including creeks, sloughs, and oak hammocks, and is home to myriad species, including panthers, black bears, and indigo snakes. The ranch is managed by Jim Strickland, whose family has been in the business since 1860. In 2018, the state bought the development rights to a third of Blackbeard’s Ranch, essentially preventing any future development. Unlike so many other similar parcels in Florida’s history, it’s a good bet that Blackbeard will never become a gated community or a golf course.

“There was a time when ranchers and environmentalists couldn’t stand to be in the same room together,’’ Strickland told me. But with nearly a thousand people arriving in Florida every day—it’s been that way, almost without interruption, since the nineteen-sixties—ranchers and environmentalists have come to realize that they care about the same things. “We both watched the land disappear together,’’ he said. “My hope is that this ranch can stay the way it is now forever.”