The National Park Service (NPS) is considering plans that would open up the Big Cypress National Preserve to hunting and more off road vehicles, but environmental groups oppose these plans because they say it will damage the land and harm the animals that live there.
The Big Cypress National Preserve is 720,000 acres of wilderness taking up a large swath of eastern Collier County. It was created to protect the area from development and degradation. However, Matthew Schwartz with the South Florida Wildlands Association says plans to open the area to more hunting and off-road vehicles would achieve the opposite.
“It’s a remarkable place and it’s kind of astounding that the national park service would manage this rare place in the way that they do,” Schwartz says.
He says he has been fighting officials on several fronts.
“It seems like at every opportunity the preserve administration ops to open up access, decrease wilderness, open up areas to hunting instead of leaving an intact ecosystem as it is,” Schwartz says.
Schwartz and other groups like the Sierra Club have said they are ready to file lawsuits against federal officials. Pro-hunting groups have said they would defend the Park Service.
The preserve’s Superintendent, Pedro Ramos, told the Naples Daily News that "the groups' allegations are under review and park officials hope to resolve the issues outside of a courtroom."
Today is the last day the NPS will take public comments on the new hunting plan.
Schwartz says no one knows for sure what will be available to hunt in the proposed areas, but says an endangered species living in the Big Cypress would be impacted.
“The NPS itself has said that opening up the additional lands, for example, is likely going to put panthers and hunters in competition for the same food supply, he says. "It’s not just deer. Panthers eat hogs. They eat small animals, raccoons, armadillos, possums. And if you got hunters shooting and you don’t know exactly what’s out there, you got a bad situation.”
