Jack Rudloe: Enough of accepting Wakulla County’s insistence on runaway development
Recently, I had the pleasure of addressing the Wakulla Chamber of Commerce’s meeting at the Seineyard Rock Landing restaurant in Panacea, where 110 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, they are 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 $20 bills, nor silver platters of hundred-dollar bills garnished with crab grass, or soups made from gold coins.
I told them that, if they want a good economy, they should be working to preserve nature, not destroy it. When the habitats are intact and the water is being filtered and cleaned by the forests and marshes, people catch fish. When people catch fish, it 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 McDonald’s, Hardee’s, Walmart, Popeyes, and Dairy Queen, back home. 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, 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 tournaments attended by thousands. Our Wakulla County Tourist Development Council 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 five-member county commission (Chuck Hess being the constant lone dissenter), working in lock step with the burgeoning army of developers and Realtors to treat and isolate environmentalists as the enemy? No, I didn’t enjoy being strong-armed and rudely shoved out the door of the county commission chambers by an overzealous deputy during the Wakulla Springs Service Station hearing.
It didn’t go well for them; the commissioners had to back down. But back in 1994 they won. With a blitz of misinformation, fear mongering and outright lies, the commission majority succeeded in getting voters to repeal the county’s existing wetland ordinance.
To my surprise, the Wakulla County Chamber of Commerce gave me a resounding round of applause. Perhaps it is because their membership includes people from South Florida, fleeing the nightmares of overcrowded, crime-ridden cities and beaches that stink from the ever-recurring red tide fish kills, and carcasses of rotting manatees, sea turtles and dolphins and they don’t want to see it here.
Jack Rudloe is an 80-year-old environmental activist and President of the Gulf Specimen Aquarium in Panacea, Florida.
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This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Jack Rudloe: Enough of accepting Wakulla County’s runaway development
