The effort to designate the Kissimmee River as one of America’s wild and scenic rivers has advanced in Congress, thanks to the efforts of Rep; Scott Franklin, R-Lakeland, and Rep. Darren Soto. D-Orlando to gain approval of this measure in the U.S. House of Representatives.\n<\/p>\n
The river, whose restoration was the largest project of its size in American history, drains a basin of more than 100 miles of creeks and thousands of square miles of land at the headwaters of a much larger system that flows to the Everglades.\n<\/p>\n
The Everglades, which was described in Marjorie Stoneman Douglas’ classic 1947 “Everglades River of Grass” as a unique feature of America’s landscape, needs all of the protection and management it can obtain because of decades of ill-advised drainage of the southern area of Florida’s peninsula to serve agricultural and development interests.\n<\/p>\n
The Kissimmee River was once a meandering stream that flowed for more than 100 miles through Florida’s Heartland until a misbegotten engineering scheme to reduce flooding in an area where flooding is a natural occurrence turned a wild river into a 56-mile long ditch that reduced waterfowl and wading bird habitat and seriously altered an important ecosystem.\n<\/p>\n
Sierra Club opposed the project and for many years worked to correct the damage the original engineering project caused.\n<\/p>\n
Approval of the designation still requires approval in the Senate.\n<\/p>\n
Anyone who supports this measure should contact Sen. Rick Scott and Sen. Marco Rubio to urge them to advance this measure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The effort to designate the Kissimmee River as one of America’s wild and scenic rivers has advanced in Congress, thanks to the efforts of Rep; Scott Franklin, R-Lakeland, and Rep. Darren Soto. D-Orlando to gain approval of this measure in the U.S. House of Representatives. The river, whose restoration was the largest project of its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gci"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1937","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1937"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1937\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1938,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1937\/revisions\/1938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}