Job-killing government regulators are at it again. Now they want to take away our beloved pythons.
Well, to be clear, not my beloved python. I’ve never been quite comfortable with the idea of a pet that would devour me without compunction. (I’ve enough trouble maintaining personal relationships with cold-blooded humans.)
But these days, all right-thinking citizens are so conditioned to oppose government regulators that it doesn’t much matter that the thing they want to regulate, all 13-feet of it, came slithering into the backyard swimming pool of a Palmetto Bay home on Christmas Day.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed banning the importation and interstate sale of nine different big constrictors. Pythons, boas and anacondas, aside from having starring roles in our collective nightmares, have been deemed “injurious” to the environment. South Floridians figured that out years ago. Burmese pythons, tossed out by dim-witted pet owners, have been breeding in the Everglades and devouring indigenous animals like tourists at an all-you-can-eat restaurant.
Last year, Frank J. Mazzotti of the University of Florida’s Wildlife Ecology and Conservation Research and Education Center in Fort Lauderdale told a congressional committee that researchers have found 23 species of birds, 15 kinds of mammals and the occasional alligator in the bellies of captured pythons.
Wood storks, snowy egrets, great egrets, great blue herons, little blue herons and limpkins were on the python menu. Along with the endangered wood rat. Mazzotti said that where Burmese pythons have become common in the glades, marsh rabbits have turned scarce. “The only muskrats that have been seen in [Everglades National Park] in the past three years have come from the stomachs of pythons,” he said.
Other big constrictors seem to be flourishing too. William Thomas of the state’s Invasive Species Strike Force spoke Wednesday of finding Northern African pythons hereabouts. South Florida, by the way, is a long swim from northern Africa.
Not that the big snakes are content to stay put in the southern reaches of Florida. Art Roybal, a senior fish and wildlife biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service office in Vero Beach, talked Wednesday of persistent sightings of a big constrictor near Sebastian Inlet that has survived three hard winters. (Perhaps the Burmese pythons, weary of the upstart new constrictors moving into the neighborhood, are fleeing South Florida.)
Michael E. Dorcas, a biology professor at Davidson College and author of Invasive Pythons in the United States, told me that nearly all the studies he has seen show that, based on climate, pythons can survive throughout the state of Florida. Many of the models, he said, indicate that the big snakes could move even further north. Roybal thinks they could spread west along the gulf coast into Texas.
The specter of 15-foot pythons invading all 25 of Florida’s congressional districts (27 after redistricting) has created a kind of a political miracle. Eleven Florida lawmakers, both Republican and Democrat, have written the White House in a show of bipartisan unity demanding that President Obama stop equivocating and approve the proposed snake ban.
Except, these days, any talk of new environmental regulations sets off a hellfire of a reaction. Republicans get angry. Democrats get cowed. An outfit called the U.S. Association of Reptile Keepers has hired a bigtime lobbying firm (yes, in Washington even pythons have their lobbyists) to sell a wildly embellished claim that a ban would “put approximately 1 million Americans in jeopardy of becoming felons, destroy thousands of jobs, and threaten the annual $1.4 billion national and international trade in high quality captive-bred reptiles.”
Powerful members of Congress, adopting their default anti-reg position, came out against the “job-killing” ban. It seems instructive that the two leaders of the pro-snake faction, Senators Orrin Hatch and Lisa Murkowski, hail from states likely to remain unaffected by the python invasion, at least until global warming heats up Utah and Alaska.
The mindless opposition to a big-snake ban illustrates the great lesson of contemporary politics. Americans are fervently opposed to job-killing regulations unless nature gas fracking has happened to ruin their drinking water, or drilling for deep water oil has spoiled their beach, or strip mining has filled up a nearby mountain stream with coal silt or sugar cane fertilizer has spoiled their fishing in the Biscayne National Park, or a python has swallowed the family’s toy poodle. We’re united in opposition to job-killing environmental regulations unless it’s our particular environment that needs regulating.
Not that a constrictor ban would do much, at this point, to save South Florida from the slithering descendants of pet snakes. It’s too late. There’s too many on the loose. Down here, they’re beyond eradication.
But maybe, when the constrictors have wiped out the wading birds and the small mammals in the Everglades, they’ll turn on the Nile monitors and green iguanas and tegu lizards and other exotic discards of the pet reptile industry that are fast taking over South Florida. Our only hope is that these creatures, like the industry, will adopt a policy of self-regulation.
via miamiherald.com
Rural Miami-Dade residents and environmentalists have sued Miami-Dade County to stop a rock-mining expansion which they say was approved in violation of state law.
Rock mining operations just west of the Florida Turnpike in Miami-Dade County in 2007. (Miami Herald file photo)
BY ANDRES VIGLUCCI
aviglucci@MiamiHerald.com
Three residents of rural Southwest Miami-Dade and three leading environmental groups have sued the county to stop an expansion of rock mining on agricultural land outside the urban development boundary that the plaintiffs say was approved in violation of state law.
The suit, filed in December in Miami-Dade Circuit Court, is the latest sally in long-running conflicts among homeowners and environmentalists on one side and companies that use blasting to extract limestone rock used in construction from a vast network of open mines on the western end of the county.
via miamiherald.com
The long-suffering Everglades may get a louder voice in the Legislature thanks to the launch this week of a new coalition of South Florida lawmakers.
State Rep. Steve Perman, D-Boca Raton, started the Everglades Legislative Caucus, which pledges to push for more money for Everglades restoration during a time of deep state spending cuts.
The bipartisan group contends that investing in protecting what remains of the Florida’s famed River of Grass is more than an environmental cause: It’s also about protecting South Florida’s drinking water supply and a tourism industry tied to the water.
“The Everglades is a rare, natural jewel,” Perman said from a farmers market beside the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge, at the northern reaches of the Everglades in Palm Beach County. “No one is happy at the pace at which the Everglades is being restored.”
Restoring the $300 million a year the state once set aside for land purchases aimed at Everglades-preservation efforts is a priority for the new group, said state Sen. Thad Altman R-Viera, co-chairman of the Everglades Caucus.
Acquiring more land among the vast swaths of sugar cane and other farmland south of Lake Okeechobee is needed for water storage and treatment areas that hold onto and clean up stormwater that can replenish the Everglades, according to Altman.
The group also plans to call on Congress to start picking up more of the tab for Everglades restoration.
“We have a long way to go,” Altman said. “We need to find longer-term funding sources.”
The Everglades Caucus offers a forum to push for restoration issues that affect the water supply and tourism, said Dawn Shirreffs, Everglades Coalition co-chair.
“Florida has a compelling reason to do Everglades restoration,” Shirreffs said. “The ecosystem has continued to decline in the face of delay.”
The Everglades suffers from decades of draining land to make way for agriculture and sprawling South Florida communities. Stormwater loaded with phosphorus that washes off agricultural land also pollutes the Everglades.
Florida and the federal government in 2000 announced a long-term plan to share the costs of Everglades restoration, but none of the more than 60 projects to store, clean and redirect stormwater has been completed.
Gov. Rick Scott in October unveiled am Everglades plan that calls for cutting restoration costs by avoiding buying more land to build reservoirs and treatment areas.
Lawmakers who joined Altman and Perman on Monday in announcing the new caucus included Rep. Lori Berman, D-Delray Beach; Rep. Gayle Harrell, R-Stuart; and Sen. Maria Sachs, D-Delray Beach. They said their numbers would grow during the legislative session that will begin in January.
During recent budget-cutting amid the struggling economy, the needs of Everglades restoration too often faded into the background, according to the caucus.
Florida needs to “get back in the business of restoration,” Altman said, “get back on track.”
via miamiherald.com
Eight months after the Everglades Foundation released a poll showing disapproval for Gov. Rick Scott's proposal to cut Everglades restoration money by 66 percent, the Republican governor made an unpublished stop to the advocacy group's two-day meeting in Naples on Wednesday and apparently told attendees that Everglades restoration is now a top priority of his administration.
Down among the pipes and pumps and gauges, amid the incessant cacophony of the water works, talk of rising sea levels no longer resonates as some distant and esoteric political squabble, irrelevant to a city’s delivery of basic of public services.
Two more feet, said Hollywood City Commissioner Dick Blattner, and his city’s water plant no longer functions. Hollywood’s waste water treatment plant, he said, has 20, maybe 25 years before the projected sea level changes render it useless.
Those are the realities that ought to trump mindless chatter about global warming on cable television. Of course, city and county commissioners trying to fill the holes in this year’s piddling budgets aren’t particularly anxious to contemplate a massively expensive crisis a couple of decades away. Nor do they want to get drawn into the ferocious U.S. debate between climate scientists and climate deniers over whether the burning of fossil fuels has contributed to global warming.
Except, no matter the cause, the earth’s getting hotter. Ice caps are melting. The warming ocean’s expanding. South Florida, built to 20th Century sea level specifications, can’t simply ignore the water lapping at its infrastructure.
Just last week, Richard Muller, a physics professor at the University of California, a revered climate skeptic, funded in part by climate-denier sugar daddy Charles Koch, admitted that his Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature team’s study of global temperature readings had come up with findings that coincided with research he had previously doubted.
“Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warmingÿ values published previously by other teams in the US and the UK.,” Muller wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn’t know what we’d find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that.”
“Even if people don’t accept the science, there is plenty of evidence that something is going on. Just look at the facts,” said Blattner, a member of the Broward County Water Resources Task Force. “I have been bringing this up for months.”
The Hollywood commissioner said the older cities clustered along South Florida’s coastline must start planning for the inevitable problems. Low-lying neighborhoods will be inundated unless local governments find some new way to get rid of storm waters. Blattner worries that his city’s most prestigious neighborhood, the Lakes area, faces perpetual flooding.
Cities must find new well fields in the western reaches of South Florida before the encroaching sea pushes salt water into the local aquifer. “Plans should be developed now,” he said.
Without some planning, and soon, coastal cities like Hollywood, with waste-water plants on sites that were chosen back in the middle of the 20th century, are headed toward an utter dysfunctional system, without the means to treat or get rid of its own sewage.
Not much help will be coming from Tallahassee, where climate denial has been embraced as a political truism. But local governments can’t dawdle, hoping the skeptics are right and the thermometers are wrong.
Last week, Florida Atlantic University’s Center for Urban and Environmental Solutions released a study on the specific effects higher temperatures and the rising sea would have on coastal towns and on city services. FAU, using Pompano Beach as a model, calculated that the costs to salvage water and sewer services would be counted in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Hollywood may be even more vulnerable.
The water task force is composed of elected officials and technical experts from around the region. “The technical folks get it,” Blattner said. The politicians, he said: not so much.
Among the political leaders (with the notable exception, he said, of Broward County Commissioner Kristin Jacobs), “I have not seen any willingness to address this.” Blattner wants city and county governments in South Florida to devise regional water and sewer plants designed to deal with the rising sea levels. Instead, individual cities are planning and building separate utilities, oblivious to the coming crisis. His committee has seen plans for water treatment plants that will be located, he said, in areas that are clearly “doomed.”
“Buildings will go up, plaques will be installed to recognize the vision of local officials,” he said. Except that vision will be very short sighted.
via miamiherald.com
One of the most pressing problems facing South Florida today...