Where the River of Grass Meets Florida’s Next Leaders

For a cleaner, more prosperous world, ACC mobilizes conservatives around environmental issues, fostering collaboration in the pursuit of environmental conservation.

Who We Are

When you think of Miami, the towering glass skyline of Biscayne Bay immediately comes to mind, but just to the west of the city you will find rivers thick with sawgrass in every direction. It is a unique landscape: a shallow, slow-moving sheet of water drifting south toward Florida Bay, broken only by the occasional dome of a cypress island. In the vast shallows, a heron can be seen stilt-stalking prey while a roseate spoonbill catches the early light on the wing. Florida conservationist Marjory Stoneman Douglas fittingly called this place “the River of Grass” and there this past weekend, amid the drone of a lone airboat engine, you would have heard the laughter of young leaders learning about the land they seek to conserve.

This was the scene for this past weekend’s Florida Branch Leadership Retreat, where the hardest-working branch leaders from across ACC Florida met to strengthen their leadership skills amid a surge in new membership. A fast-growing movement needs strong leaders, and the focus of this retreat was reinforcing the support for that growth while giving the leaders the knowledge they need to properly advocate for their place. Leaders from seven branches spent the weekend in sessions on cultivating meaningful gathering, ambassadorship, and mobilization. All of it aimed at cultivating their professional development even outside of ACC. Leading a Branch also requires a working knowledge of the places we’re fighting to protect, along with the ability to explain their value in terms our neighbors, stakeholders, and even opponents care about and understand. There is only so much one can learn in a class or conference room, however, so very early on Saturday morning our branch leaders climbed on an airboat and set out into the River of Grass.

They were joined by our partners at the Everglades Foundation, whose staff guided our leaders through the ecosystem and its long history of restoration efforts. Dr. Meenakshi Chabba, Ecosystem and Resilience Scientist at the Foundation, explained how the Everglades once flowed freely from Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay, and how a century of building canals, levees, and development parched the old natural waterways in some areas while completely flooding others. She walked our leaders through the restoration work that has been underway to send clean water south again, and what that will mean for the wildlife and wetlands that depend on it. The stakes of the sawgrass were made clear to our leaders, and they’ll carry that knowledge back to their Branches.

That this restoration happens at all is good and just, and it is clearly righting the conservation wrongs of the past. That being said, real dollars supporting those ethics drive the work and cannot be ignored. The Foundation explained to our leaders that the Everglades create roughly $31.5 billion in economic value every year and will be responsible for more than $1 trillion in benefits over the next 50 years. That is fishing and tourism, clean water, and natural resources utilized well while providing tangible economic benefit. It was made abundantly clear to us that conservation and prosperity grow together, and a healthy Everglades is not only the right thing to support, it’s also just a good investment.

Advocating for conservation in our communities takes partnerships and events like this one, which bring together sound environmental science, local leadership, grassroots action. As branch leader Luke Strominger put it, “What ACC does well is turn people who care about conservation into people who can lead on it. Between the conversations in Miami and the time out on the Everglades, this weekend did exactly that.” 

That was exactly the purpose of this past weekend and the goal for our leaders. They leave with the sight of a spoonbill and the language to advocate for it. They know the water flowing through the sawgrass and the policy knowledge to defend it. The River of Grass is in good hands, and so are the communities to which these leaders return.