The ‘Single Best Environmental Idea’ Voters Ever Passed

How a voter referendum that created an Environmentally Endangered Lands Program helped prepare a coastal community to become resilient decades before the term resilient became a household name.

Photo taken by Author of a pinelands preserve in Miami-Dade

Here within my unique, metropolitan community of Miami-Dade located at the southeastern region of Florida, there exist an Environmentally Endangered Lands (EEL) Program all because the voters voted to establish it over 20 years ago in 1992.

Today, thanks to those voters of 1992, EEL is Miami-Dade County’s largest land conservation program with over . Many of these lands are part of South Florida’s unique ecosystem that comprises the Florida Everglades, also known as the “River of Grass.”

“There are no other Everglades in the world. They are, they have always been, one of the unique regions of the earth, remote, never wholly known. Nothing anywhere else is like them; their vast glittering openness, wider than the enormous visible round of the horizon, the racing free saltness and sweetness of their massive winds, under the dazzling blue heights of space. They are unique also in the simplicity, the diversity, the related harmony…