Messages from Our Supporters

The Everglades Foundation understands how challenging it is to build a core group of supporters who will stay committed to this complex, long-term battle to save one of the world's last great places.  Everglades restoration is a marathon, not a sprint and like any long-distance runner participating in an intense competition, it's nice to refuel, find sustenance and be cheered on along the way to the finish line. Our efforts on this epic odyssey are sustained and energized by hearing from our supporters. One of our most heartfelt examples of support comes from two Everglades Foundation donors who hail from Minnesota.  You can read their letter by clicking here.

Other individuals who recognize what impacts our efforts are having include representatives of key federal agencies involved in advancing Everglades restoration.  Listen to and see their comments by clicking here. 

Judy Keller

In the late 1800s, lacy feathers or plumes, taken mostly from herons and egrets in the Everglades, became a popular adornment for fashionable ladies’ hats. Quick fortunes were made buying and selling plumes, and for ease of gathering, plume hunters would often shoot the birds during nesting and abandon the chicks to die. By 1900, only a few thousand herons and egrets remained.

I am a lover of wildlife and, more specifically, a bird person. These are the kinds of facts, old and new, about the Everglades that move me, scare me, drive me to action.

Though plume hunting was soon banned, the introduction of water drainage and unnatural water control methods posed a darker threat. Since 1960, the fate of one of the most important wading nesting birds in the vast Everglades ecosystem, the Wood Stork, has taken a tragic turn. Standing  more than three feet tall with a five-foot wing spread, the Wood Stork feeds by touch, not sight, groping in pairs through muddy, plant-filled waters, and requires 440 pounds of food per pair of seasonal drying concentrate to survive with its mate. In the past 50 years, water management procedures to accommodate agriculture and population growth have eradicated this primary food source, reducing the nesting population from 6,000 to 500.

The Wood Stork is important because it is an indicator species, meaning one whose well being is directly linked to its environment. As an indicator species, the Wood Stork tells a singular story – past, present, future – about deterioration of the Everglades ecosystem: the drainage of wetlands, the flooding of feeding pools, an aggressive alteration of habitat uniquely suited to this and so many other species that for hundreds of thousands of years have made the Everglades their home. It is, most of all, the story of the civilizing of South Florida and what we have done to be where we are.

During the 1950s, at age ten or eleven, my family took summer car-touring trips to Florida. Up the east coast to the Alligator Farm in St. Augustine, across the Tamiami Trail, down the west coast to see the sponge divers. I loved it all because I had an interest in flora and fauna and I could see it all from the window of a station wagon. Years later, on a trip into the Everglades with my husband, we stood and watched a bird killing a snake, as it beat it and shook it, and to stand there inside the ecosystem and witness it in real time is an excitement difficult to translate.

In the many trips I have made to Africa, and when I go to the Everglades, it is mainly the birds I go to see. It is my particular avenue of understanding, a new way of seeing the world. And it is always life changing. As co-chair of the Everglades Foundation Advisory Committee, my message from the Everglades is this:  It is all there – something for everybody – and when you see it you will be changed forever, for the better.

I will be working with other Everglades Foundation Advisory Committee members to spread this message throughout countless communities affected by the Everglades ecosystem - via local, grassroots gatherings that will inspire individual discovery of this remarkable resource. Our initial work will be with residents of the communities where we live – Naples, Jupiter, Miami and Fort Lauderdale – hosting Everglade Foundation speakers, wildlife lectures and organizing tours. These are designed to serve as a model for expanded activism. This is, where I believe it all starts, the chance to change the past and restore the Everglades by tapping into the natural curiosity of those next door or down the street or across town.

This kind of grassroots approach, building a visceral excitement through a door-to door, community-based experience of the Everglades, I see as the first step toward teaching people what is truly at stake: the salvaging of an irreplaceable 2 million-acre ecosystem. Teaching people--especially the younger South Florida population--how to live with the Everglades will, I believe, soon teach them why they cannot live without it.