Your readers, in fact all the people of Florida, should know the entire Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary is an embarrassment for all of the good it hasn’t done.
And for all of the promises that weren’t fulfilled and the way the management mindset is nothing more than, “CYA, make as few waves as possible, kiss the behinds of the loudest ones who threaten our making it to retirement without controversy and otherwise ignore or discredit the rest. ...
"Start up little, meaningless programs under the guise of ‘saving the environment’ and widely promote them as ‘great successes’ to a clueless public. Make empty excuses when you’re challenged.”
I stupidly believed in the Sanctuary 25 years ago and spent my own money to travel to Washington to cheer NOAA on.
I sat for five years, at my own expense, on the Sanctuary Advisory Council and argued hard to gain the support of the skeptics, only to see that the idiots -- who at the very first meeting acted like a bunch of hooligans when in protest they rolled painted coconuts at us -- had been correct all along.
The water is crap, the fish stocks are crap, the Sanctuary’s own managers support shallow water injection wells -- in the 21st century! -- and won’t implement closed areas over known spawning sites because they’re afraid of the small but loud, still uneducated, opposition.
“Pass the buck” is the order of the day. They are nothing more than self-serving bureaucrats, afraid to risk the heat of doing what’s right, what must be done to fullfill their stated mission. But still they give each other awards for the “good job” they’re doing and every one of them will get a nice retirement pension.
They know the majority of the public is either indifferent or ignorant, both things that these “stewards of the environment” were supposed to rise above and work to fix. Instead, they seized upon it as a way to do nothing but run their mouths and collect a paycheck.
I refuse to forget how wonderful the Keys once were in the early 20th Century when my father and our family first came down here to fish.
I refuse to be a victim of “shifting baselines,” pretending that everything’s always been the cesspool it is now.
I know the paradise it once was is gone forever. Politics and selfishness destroyed it and there’s no going back. I know this now. Deep down I knew this was the way it would end up, even when I was in high school in the early 1970s.
I knew that someday I would be like Sol Roth [the character from the movie "Soylent Green" -- Editor], and sure as hell, I am Sol Roth.
Bill Parks, diver, commercial fisherman, former Florida Keys National Wildlife Sanctuary Advisory Council member, now lives in Boynton Beach.
Comments
I agree with Mark. Maybe it
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