This story originally was published by Southerly.
Betty Osceola, an elder of the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians, lives in Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida, where a small Texas-based oil developer wants to build seven new wells. Burnett Oil Company slipped in its application Jan. 22, days before President Joe Biden signed an executive order pausing new oil and gas leases on public lands. I wasn’t surprised, Osceola said through a bitter laugh she knew it would happen eventually.
Big Cypress is part of the Greater Everglades and spans 729,000 acres a size comparable to Rhode Island across the heart of South Florida. Ecologists describe it as a mosaic of distinct yet interconnected wetland ecosystems: hardwood hammocks, pine flatwoods, sawgrass prairies, marshes, sloughs and gloomy cypress domes with cottonmouths and ghost orchids and endangered panthers.
Congress members: Big Cypress should be part of the climate solution
The letter also urges the federal government to deny the applications.
“As you know, the Biden-Harris administration has begun to advance a whole-of-government, climate-forward agenda,” the letter says. “We fully support this agenda, and we believe our country’s public lands and national park sites – including Big Cypress – should be part of the climate solution.”
The letter was addressed to the department’s deputy director of operations, Shawn Benge, and new Fish and Wildlife and Parks Assistant Secretary Shannon Estenoz.
Estenoz was an advocate for Everglades restoration under the Obama administration and worked as the Everglades Foundation’s chief operating officer.
Gathering at a trailhead off Alligator Alley Saturday morning, about 40 people stood in a large circle, heads bowed.
They were listening to Betty Osceola, an elder with the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians, give a prayer near the southern end of the Florida Trail.
The group was about to embark on a southbound hike, following a marked trail through wet prairies, pinewood flats and dwarf cypresses. The journey, about four miles in and four miles back, is an effort to inform and educate the public on Burnett Oil Co.’s permits to begin exploratory drilling in Big Cypress National Preserve.
The company filed four applications with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection on Jan. 22 to begin constructing the pads in one of the nation’s first national preserves. The company previously undertook seismic exploration projects in the preserve in 2017 prompting a legal battle the oil company ultimately won.