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Lying About Lake O to Win Hearts and Minds: The Eric Draper Story
Around the State
My money is on the latter. I can see his nose growing from here.
Draper is the executive director of Florida Audubon Society. Surely the man knows a thing or two about every endangered creature in Florida.
So, you have to ask yourself, why would he write a four-page, full-of-baloney letter to the South Florida Water Management District, blaming the district for so mismanaging Lake Okeechobee water releases in the drought that “the water body experienced significant harm, including … loss of apple snail habitat and failure of Everglade Snail Kite nests”?
Eric DraperDraper goes on at length: “… six of the remaining nine endangered Everglade Snail Kite nests on Lake Okeechobee … failed, apparently resulting from parental abandonment related to low water levels and lack of available food. The loss reflected deteriorating habitat conditions in the Lake that continue to threaten the survival of newly-fledged young and adults.”
Birders must have gone nuts hearing this sky-is-falling hooey.
Oh, my God, they're killing the kites!
Think about it. Literally thousands of Floridians are engaged in some kind of volunteer effort to protect the vanishing habitat of native creatures in this state. And here comes Eric Draper, with environmental credentials up the wazoo, telling them that another species is going under because -- to hear Draper tell it -- chronic screw-up SFWMD is playing favorites and evil Big Sugar is greedily sucking up Lake O.
Very little in this letter is true, no matter what light you hold it under.
It's super-hype. It's a blueprint to what is, frankly, a sinister agenda.
About the kites: If six snail kite nests were abandoned -- and let's say they were -- many more that Draper fails to mention were productive and thriving.
Don Fox of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission told me Friday that in spite of the drought, successful kite nests on the lake are up -- yes, up -- 35 percent this year. Fox, by the way, is The Man on the lake and in the tall grass. He's a biological administrator for FWC's Division of Habitat and Species Conservation. It's his job to manage the habitats supported by Lake Okeechobee.
"We had 41 snail kite nests on the lake this year," said Fox, "which is a huge improvement over last year and over 2007 and 2008 when we were down to nests in the single digits. It means our numbers are back to normal in spite of the drought. Oh, it's nothing like in the 1980s when there were hundreds of kites over the lake, but I'm encouraged."
Fox said the importation and embedding of apple snails deep underwater in the Okeechobee muck have begun to pay off. "We brought in food, got it started and it sure worked well. This year the snail kites have had plenty of food.
"The kites are out there on the lake now, they haven't left. That's how we know they're getting the food they need," he said.
So much for Draper sounding the snail kite alarm.
Comments (7)
These water resources are in finite quantity and belong to all of us, not just a few corporations or industries. As to the typical right wing-nut screech about "taking" land from the sugar industry. Let them keep their land, just not our water and our money in the form of high tariffs.
Otherwise, I find it hard to believe there are people out there working to destroy the economy through environmentalism, but then again, I find it hard to believe there are people out there willing to pollute others in the name of the economy, so who knows...
Draper is a left wing nut job who could care less about our 'environment' but desires the implementation of 'social' and 'environmental' justice.
I would ask that SSN inquire to his position on “regulatory czar,” Harvard Law School Professor Cass Sunstein,a radical animal rights activist.
Sunstein has made no secret of his devotion to the cause of establishing legal “rights” for livestock, wildlife, and pets. “[T]here should be extensive regulation of the use of animals in entertainment, scientific experiments, and agriculture,” Sunstein wrote in a 2002 working paper while at the University of Chicago Law school.
Inquiring minds want to know.