Consider the impacts of development
Editor, The Sun:
Recently I had the pleasure of addressing the Wakulla chamber of commerce meeting at the Seineyard Restaurant in Panacea several weeks ago, where a hundred and ten people were happily enjoying platters of beautiful cooked shrimp, crab, oysters and fish while overlooking our magnificent Dickerson bay. These were the movers and shakers of our community so I took the opportunity to tell them that the future of the seafood and ecotourism lay in their hands, that they were eating the products of marsh, mud, sea grass and clean water. I told them that when they cut trees (a favorite pastime of developers and bulldozer operators) that they were destroying the good nutrients that flow out into the estuaries and fertilize phytoplankton, which is the food of the oysters they were enjoying. Shrimp fattened on worms and copepods from mud bottoms were being served at the Seineyard, not charbroiled twenty dollar bills, nor silver platters of hundred dollar bills garnish with crab grass, or soups made from gold coins.
I told them that their endless development was going to put an end to all that. If they want a good economy should be working to preserve nature, not destroy it. When the habitats are intact and the water is clean from being filtered by the forests, people catch fish, which makes them happy. Happy people spend money. No one is coming from New York, Chicago or Atlanta to behold our obscene growing clutter of Crawford-Vile. They can see all the usual corporate clutter of McDonalds, Hardees, Walmart, Popeye chicken, Dairy Queen, etc. Tourists come to fish, to see birds and manatees, to behold crystal clear springs, and the wild lands of Wakulla, not the ugly flattened treeless landscape, and boring row upon row of subdivision houses, or our choked up highways of cars with the blaring sounds of ambulances, fire trucks and police.
We have mullet festivals, stone crab, blue crab and oyster festivals and even worm grunting festivals to the celebrate the goodness of our natural resources. We have endless fishing tournament attended by thousands. The Wakulla County Tourist Development Office puts ads on the radio saying Wakulla County, with its springs, rivers and wild lands is the place to get away from it all. Why then are the four members of our county commission working in lock step with the burgeoning army of developers and realtors to treat and isolate environmentalists the enemy? No, I didn’t enjoy being strong-armed and rudely shoved out the door the county commission chambers by an overzealous deputy during the Wakulla Springs Service Station hearing.
I started Gulf Specimen Marine Lab in 1965 with the hope that my late wife, Anne Rudloe and I could educate the public into the value of wetlands and coastal forests. We failed. With a blitz of Commissioners’ Ralph Thomas and Jerry Moore misinformation, fear mongering and outright lies, they frightened people into repealing the county’s four year old wetland ordinance. To me the epitome of ignorance came in during the 2014 St. Marks Stone Crab Festival when developers plastered signs all over town of a stone crab holding up a placard that read, “VOTE NO TO THE WETLANDS ORDINANCE”. Imagine that, a creature that is clearly one hundred percent dependent on the salt marshes, the mud bottoms, oysters bars, mud and rocky outcrops urging citizens to for the obliteration of interior and coastal wetlands that filter and clean the water flowing down river and into the estuaries where they live. Crabs have tiny brains but they’re not that stupid. Our elected officials however are. (Chuck Hess excepted)
With their vote after vote for subdivisions that scrape off all the vegetation and flatten the landscape, our four commissioners are acting like mindless cancer cells, expanding, growing, and destroying healthy tissues while sapping our energy and making us sick. They are doing so by jamming in miles of pipe, to accommodate the houses, to spray it onto the golf course that the county purchased needlessly. Eventually the excess nitrates and phosphates will percolate down into the aquifer, find its way into the Spring Creek watershed, and over enrich our oysters, both farmed and wild. With each flush of the toilet bowl, the fecal pollution will find its way to the bay and create red tides. So we can then join the urban sprawl of Sarasota, Tampa, Fort Lauderdale with tons of stinking dead fish, rotting sea turtles manatees and dolphins. Before long, unless we rise up and boot these and their puppet masters out of office before they realize their dream (of what, more money, will they ever have enough?) Wakulla County will become just like South Florida where property values are crashing and people are madly fleeing up here to get away from their nightmare. Do we really have to follow suit?
Jack Rudloe
President
Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratories Inc. and Aquarium