Protecting our Everglades

We are tired of watching our native wetlands being turned to superfluous sugarcane fields, then ripped apart by rock miners, sold to power plant builders, and eventually covered with housing developments spreading like canker over our bioregion. We work to defend the little habitat remaining in hopes that future generations can enjoy the clean air, water, and biodiversity that sustains human and other life in this state.

FPL's West County
Energy Center

The Loxahatchee Basin is home to one of the first Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) projects to get off the ground. The site is already riddled in scandal; now it´s becoming the waterfront property for the country´s largest fossil fuel power plant.

Since 2006, Everglades Earth First! has been involved in challenging the West County Energy Center, a massive gas-fired power plant proposed by Florida Power & Light (FPL) a ¼ mile away from the Arthr R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge. The plant, which would consume over 6.5 billion gallons of water per year, emit 12 million tons of CO2 annually, requires 34 miles of gas pipeline through the L8 Canal/Loxahatchee Basin system and would invite over a million homes worth of sprawl, is now under construction in violation of Federal and State laws, including NEPA, Clean Air and Water Acts, ESA, the National Wildlife Refuge Act, RICO, and others. While courts are reviewing the environmental permits (or lack of), FPL and the Gulfstream pipeline are moving ahead, considering the ‘Final Certification’ of former-Governor Jeb Bush as their justification. Over the year EEF! has added our protests to the chorus of local dissent, which has sadly not included several other environmental groups due to FPL pay-offs. We have obstructed the road to FPL’s annual shareholders’ meeting, blocked the entrance to their illegal construction site on the Palm Beach Aggregates, covered the County with flyers and posters and confronted them face-to-face at nearly every public hearing.

We are ready to take our fight to a new level. Over the next year, while the pipeline and plant are under construction, we intend to launch a sustained campaign of direct action to bring attention to the greed of the energy industry and the failure of the government to respond, even within the bounds of its own corrupt system. We will set up camps on public land to monitor the progress of these projects and slow them down at every step we can. We will document their violations from the field (a tactic known as ground-truthing), we will stop them from harming a fragile ecosystem and its endangered species (including over 100 identified gopher tortoise burrows) and we will help turn the tide against the Energy Empire once and for all. Our camps will model the sustainable, cooperative and decentralized worldview that we believe in. We intend to reclaim the goal of restoration from the stranglehold of bureaucracy into the grassroots community...

And y’all are invited!

Protecting Our Beaches & Coral Reefs

Everglades Earth First! is joining the local chapter of the Surfrider Foundation in resisting the Reach 8 dredge & fill project proposed by the Town Of Palm Beach. The project would dredge silt from offshore and dump it on the beach, allegedly to combat shoreline erosion.

The true effects of the project would include:

  • degradation and burial of nearshore and offshore reefs
  • increased turbidity leading to increased likelihood of shark attacks
  • potential harm to sea turtles and other wildlife
  • ruining established surfing, fishing, and diving hotspots
  • altering the natural composition of beach sand

These dredge & fill projects, often called "beach renourishment", never work - shorelines naturally shift! In fact, such attempts at battling "erosion" has led to even more severe erosion, as the dredged fill is fine silt, not coarse natural sand, and easily washes away in storms - burying coral reefs and clouding up the waters.

We are currently looking into joining the legal challenges that Surfrider Foundation has initiated, and are prepared to use direct action if such interventions fail.