The Sierra Club has organized simultaneous rallies across Florida to publicize and oppose state efforts to create profit centers from our State Parks, including timbering, hunting, gas and oil of wells, cattle grazing and more.
We'll have a cookout with speakers and other fun activities.
Our goal is to convince our State Legislators and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to end their threat to vital recreational and ecological treasures.
Florida's State Parks are the only system in the nation to have won a national gold medal three times. We, the citizens of Florida, recognize that we have the best park system in the nation and we won't allow shortsighted state governmental practices to ruin them.
In 2015 Jon Steverson, the state’s top environmental official, announced that Florida's State Parks should pay for themselves and created a document called the "Optimized Land Management and Cost Recovery". Immediately questions started to arise over money making schemes like hunting, commercial timber harvesting, additional cattle grazing, and well fields.
Originally these plans were going to affect only state parks over 1,000 acres. Then last October planners were told to apply these plans to all 161 State Parks
Many retired DEP and State Park employees are now speaking out saying that these practices will turn back the 80 years’ worth of resource management that our state park system has been
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