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How a panther habitat became a battleground for the state’s environmental groups
About 27 miles inland from Florida’s southwestern coast sit three empty swaths of land among a sea of green. This undeveloped area represents both the future of Florida’s development and the culmination of a 20 year fight between the state’s environmentalists.
“What happens here will change the face of Collier County forever,” April Olson, a researcher at the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, told me.
Home to affluent Naples and its fast-growing population of retirees, the county recently approved plans for four new villages to be built in one of Florida’s last undeveloped areas, which is sandwiched between some of the state’s biggest and most important nature reserves. The region hasn’t enjoyed official protection, per se, but it has enjoyed a special status. But with almost half a million people having moved to Florida just last year, and more on the way, the county of 300,000 inhabitants and counting has decided to keep building.
Yet if this sounds like a typical story of developers versus environmentalists, it isn’t. Instead, it has become a unique point of tension among environmental groups in Florida. While one group believes it’s their responsibility to be a part of this conversation and help manage unavoidable development, the other side believes it’s their role to fight against it.
“I’m very surprised environmentalists are taking this pragmatic approach,” said Matthew Schwartz, executive director of the South Florida Wildlands Association. “This isn’t what environmentalists do.”
The result is a rift among the guardians of Florida’s wildlife.
The environmentalists all agree on what they’re trying to protect: the panthers. From a conservation perspective, the region has acted as a corridor for the state’s remaining endangered panthers, of which there are only 120-230 adults left in the wild, to travel.
The area is surrounded by protected nature reserves. To the north is a complex of wildlife, bird sanctuaries, and wetlands; to the northeast are two different wildlife management areas, and to the south is the Florida panther national wildlife refuge, another wildlife management area that is home to bears, a state forest, a state preserve, and a national preserve that ultimately extends into the Everglades.
“This area is a mosaic of habitat types that allows the panther to live,” said Schwartz. “What they are doing essentially fragmented those complexes from one another.”
But to understand how the area has become a battleground of environmentalist groups, you’ll first have to dive into the area’s weird regulatory history.
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The villages being constructed amid this remarkably untouched land are the most recent outcome of a partnership between developers, land owners, and environmental groups. Called the Rural Lands Stewardship Area (RLSA) program, this partnership changed zoning over 20 years ago to allow for more dense development in exchange for environmental protections.
“At the end of the day, the RLSA is a compromise,” said Meredith Budd, who worked on this project when she was a policy director at the Florida Wildlife Federation. (She is now the director of external affairs for the Live Wildly Foundation.)
The RLSA was born way back in 1999, when then-Florida Governor Jeb Bush put a moratorium on development in Collier County. He claimed that urban sprawl in Naples, the state’s fastest growing city at the time, had gotten out of hand and that everyone needed to figure out a better solution for development that preserved agricultural lands and protected the environment.
When the RLSA was first discussed and proposed in 2002, most environmentalist groups, including the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, were on board. The battle that has emerged among these groups has its roots in some imprecise wording from the original proposal that almost tripled the amount of land that developers could build on.
The total area was — and still is — about 198,000 acres. Just over half of the acreage is protected nature reserves, with the rest mostly agricultural land available for development. But there’s a catch. Prior to the RLSA, the zoning only allowed for a single house, called a “ranchette,” to be built every five acres on the developable land. While some of these solitary homes exist today on farms, the majority of the area is still uninhabited, therefore serving as a wildlife corridor as well as porous land to absorb heavy rainfall or storm surges.
That’s where the RLSA was supposed to come in. Published in 2002, it proposed to change the allotment, swapping denser housing for more protected land. It indicated that 16,805 acres of the 98,000 available could be built on if developers earned allowances by restoring other land, although what would count as restoration was a little hazy. The language around these numbers was also very vague, critically leaving room to increase the amount of credits able to be earned and, subsequently, the acres developed. It ultimately increased the amount of land up for development to 45,000 acres. Many of the conservancies didn’t realize this change until the five-year review in 2007.
“We were supportive of RLSA,” said Olson. “But we believe the goals are not being met. The public was promised that 16,000 acres would be developed and that 91% of the area would be preserved.”
But those working with the RLSA think what’s done is done. “There’s no point in going back and figuring out what happened,” said Budd. “The allowable footprint is over 40,000 acres. We have to move forward and figure out whether wildlife connections can be made.”
The intent of the 1999 moratorium was to curb development for the benefit of conservation. The RLSA is still attempting to do that, but it’s a voluntary program, and much of the power lies with the landowners.
But in the past few years, Florida’s real estate market has boomed and land use planning regulations have been weakened. This combination made landowners restless to start building, more able to do so, and more impatient when it comes to making concessions to conservationists. Pro-RLSA environmentalists say playing hardball in negotiations with developers just won’t fly anymore.
“These organizations trying to save habitat by killing these programs aren’t helping, they’re making it worse,” said Elizabeth Fleming, a representative at Defenders of Wildlife, which supports the RLSA.
The four new villages, which are cumulatively known as “The Town of Big Cypress,” are only the most recent developments in the RLSA. The first, called Ave Maria, began building in 2005 but construction paused for a while after the recession. Big Cypress is one of the first cohesive plans out of the RLSA to keep building since then, but six more are in development. Though not nearly finished yet, the website for the Town of Big Cypress promises to fulfill all the expectations of the American dream. “Families strolling along storefronts with ice cream cones in hand … on-street parking for easy access to the hair salon, dog groomer, dry cleaner, and local grocer,” the website says. It promises happiness, community, convenience — even good weather and “responsible growth.”.
Today, both sides agree that no development would be the best way forward. “In a perfect world, I would love to see no more of it developed,” said Budd. “If I was Queen, I would say you no longer have property rights.”
Bradley Cornell, policy associate at the Audubon Society of the Western Everglades, helped make the RLSA a reality. “I’d much rather build a wall at the Georgia line and tell everyone to go home,” he said. “But we’re expected to get another 15 million people in Florida over the next 50 years. All of these people are moving to Florida. Where in the hell are we going to put them without ruining Florida’s nature?”
Between July 2021 and 2022, 444,500 people moved to Florida, according to the Tampa Bay Economic Council. Despite the increase in hurricanes and flooding and the decrease in affordable insurance, Florida is more popular than it has ever been.
Those in favor of the RLSA say that development is going to happen with or without them, and the RLSA allows them a platform to negotiate. “This is the best compromise we could have gotten,” Cornell said.
The primary benefit of the RLSA is that it offers a chance at higher density living with a potentially smaller ecological footprint. The pro-RLSA group, for example, has kept some developments from further encroaching on panther habitat. These conservationists have negotiated underpasses and fencing in three different areas to allow panthers and wildlife to cross roads without getting hit. They have also gotten the county to require bear proof trash cans, lowering lights to avoid light pollution, and smoke easements, which require new tenants to sign off on necessary controlled burns to maintain the environment for the panther preserve. From the Town of Big Cypress alone, the RLSA crediting system requires the developers to permanently preserve 12,000 acres. In this case, they will be restoring the hydrology of a major wetland nearby, according to Cornell.
“We’re just trying to have a seat at the table and ensure that we can get the best conservation outcomes knowing that the landowners have the rights to this land and are permitted to do whatever they want,” said Fleming.
The pro-RLSAers also pushed for more protections than they got. For 10 years, they fought for a Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP) that would have legally bound the landowners to certain conservation requirements, according to Budd. But pushback from the anti-RLSA groups slowed the process so much that eventually it wasn’t worth the landowners’ time and it was withdrawn in August 2022. Those against the RLSA had many qualms with the HCP and don’t see its withdrawal as a loss.
The other arguments against the RLSA are plentiful.
The anti-RLSA group contends that any development will harm the panthers. “This project would be the nail in the coffin of the panthers,” said Olson.
This side of the debate also thinks that the zoning rules that predated the RLSA, which previously allowed for ranchettes every five acres, were highly unlikely to practically result in development. They argue that implementing the road infrastructure required for such scattered housing would be prohibitively expensive, suggesting that if the RLSA hadn’t been proposed, this area would have been left untouched.
“It’s highly unlikely that they would come in and build five-acre ranchettes,” said Olson. “They would need thousands of miles of new roads. One new 100 mile road was calculated to cost $111 million in 2015.”
Schwartz agreed. “This is completely unpopulated, undeveloped rural land,” he said. “People don’t want to buy a swath of rural land and move into undeveloped lands.”
But pro-RLSA environmentalists think that perspective is naive. “That’s a false argument,” says Fleming. “It’s based in no reality. People are moving here and that area is the least expensive if you want to be near Naples. I see no reason why that wouldn’t continue.”
Budd added that money is not a concern in this area. “Collier County is one of the highest wealth points in the state, if not the whole country,” she said. “So to say this would be too expensive is unreasonable.”
Another area in between Naples and the RLSA, called Golden Gate Boulevard, had the same one-in-five zoning restrictions as the RLSA and has been heavily developed in the last 10 years.
The RLSA plan also does not seem to be taking the changing climate into account. According to Olson, 96% of Collier County is susceptible to storm surge. The inland parts aren’t as vulnerable, but there is still a high threat and the area’s porosity would be lost with these developments. In addition, the RLSA will experience 109 days where the heat index is above 100 degrees Fahrenheit in 2023, and 138 in 2053, according to The Washington Post’s interactive map on heat waves.
County Commissioner Bill McDaniel said that climate change was not a concern in the process of developing The Town of Big Cypress. “There are no stipulations with regard to climate change because it’s such a nebulous discussion point,” he said.
Though the commissioner agreed that many climate-friendly technologies are comparable, if not less expensive to purchase and maintain, the RLSA does not require developers to install permeable concrete, heat pumps, special shade trees for temperature, or solar panels on the houses.
“We recommended numerous policies that would encourage more energy efficient homes and appliances, improve permeability of sidewalks, require complete street designs that all users can use, ease traffic congestion, increase Florida friendly plants that require less water, include stipulations for storm water runoff, etc.” said Olson. “They just ignored it. I have not once heard the County even discuss heat issues or climate issues.”
Budd said that the choice to build inland in itself is a climate-conscious decision. “When looking at this long term and the threats of climate change, the main threat is that people will be moving inland,” she said. “Where we put the development is the most important thing.”
One of the biggest landowners in the area, named for the county’s namesake, Collier Enterprises, echoed Budd’s sentiment in emailed responses. “The Town of Big Cypress is 19 miles from the coast, similar to Babcock Ranch, which did not sustain damage from the recent Hurricane Ian, having one of the largest reported storm surges ever recorded.” He added that most of the national buildings in the area provide options for energy efficiency and smart home technology
Though both sides have very different ideas of how to be involved in development, they are both aware that development is coming to Eastern Collier County and share the same ultimate desires for the region.
“We do know that the RLSA is going to grow,” said Olson. “We know that Collier County is going to grow. We just think it could be done more sustainably.”
Environmentalists everywhere are grappling with how to best save the last bastion of the lands and animals that sustain us. Depending on which side you take in the RLSA fight, it has become a question of cynicism versus hope or pragmatism versus pipe dreams.
Those against the RLSA are still championing its original goal: to preserve the environment and to curb excessive development. “The goal of the program wasn’t to allow each and every landowner to maximize their profit to the greatest extent,” said Nicole Johnson, Director of Governmental Relations at the Conservancy of Southwest Florida.
The other side has committed to pragmatism. “At the end of the day, the dollar speaks,” said Budd. “And unfortunately it speaks louder than the voices against the project.”
As regulations recede in Florida, the RLSA disagreement signals a philosophical choice environmentalists will increasingly have to make: If we can’t beat them, should we join them?
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The Loan Programs Office is good for more than just nuclear funding.
That China has a whip hand over the rare earths mining and refining industry is one of the few things Washington can agree on.
That’s why Alex Jacquez, who worked on industrial policy for Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, found it “astounding”when he read in the Washington Post this week that the White House was trying to figure out on the fly what to do about China restricting exports of rare earth metals in response to President Trump’s massive tariffs on the country’s imports.
Rare earth metals have a wide variety of applications, including for magnets in medical technology, defense, and energy productssuch as wind turbines and electric motors.
Jacquez told me there has been “years of work, including by the first Trump administration, that has pointed to this exact case as the worst-case scenario that could happen in an escalation with China.” It stands to reason, then, that experienced policymakers in the Trump administration might have been mindful of forestalling this when developing their tariff plan. But apparently not.
“The lines of attack here are numerous,” Jacquez said. “The fact that the National Economic Council and others are apparently just thinking about this for the first time is pretty shocking.”
And that’s not the only thing the Trump administration is doing that could hamper American access to rare earths and critical minerals.
Though China still effectively controls the global pipeline for most critical minerals (a broader category that includes rare earths as well as more commonly known metals and minerals such as lithium and cobalt), the U.S. has been at work for at least the past five years developing its own domestic supply chain. Much of that work has fallen to the Department of Energy, whose Loan Programs Office has funded mining and processing facilities, and whose Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains hasfunded and overseen demonstration projects for rare earths and critical minerals mining and refining.
The LPO is in line for dramatic cuts, as Heatmap has reported. So, too, are other departments working on rare earths, including the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. In its zeal to slash the federal government, the Trump administration may have to start from scratch in its efforts to build up a rare earths supply chain.
The Department of Energy did not reply to a request for comment.
This vulnerability to China has been well known in Washington for years, including by the first Trump administration.
“Our dependence on one country, the People's Republic of China (China), for multiple critical minerals is particularly concerning,” then-President Trump said in a 2020 executive order declaring a “national emergency” to deal with “our Nation's undue reliance on critical minerals.” At around the same time, the Loan Programs Office issued guidance “stating a preference for projects related to critical mineral” for applicants for the office’s funding, noting that “80 percent of its rare earth elements directly from China.” Using the Defense Production Act, the Trump administration also issued a grant to the company operating America's sole rare earth mine, MP Materials, to help fund a processing facility at the site of its California mine.
The Biden administration’s work on rare earths and critical minerals was almost entirely consistent with its predecessor’s, just at a greater scale and more focused on energy. About a month after taking office, President Bidenissued an executive order calling for, among other things, a Defense Department report “identifying risks in the supply chain for critical minerals and other identified strategic materials, including rare earth elements.”
Then as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the Biden administration increased funding for LPO, which supported a number of critical minerals projects. It also funneled more money into MP Materials — including a $35 million contract from the Department of Defense in 2022 for the California project. In 2024, it awarded the company a competitive tax credit worth $58.5 million to help finance construction of its neodymium-iron-boron magnet factory in Texas. That facilitybegan commercial operation earlier this year.
The finished magnets will be bought by General Motors for its electric vehicles. But even operating at full capacity, it won’t be able to do much to replace China’s production. The MP Metals facility is projected to produce 1,000 tons of the magnets per year.China produced 138,000 tons of NdFeB magnets in 2018.
The Trump administration is not averse to direct financial support for mining and minerals projects, but they seem to want to do it a different way. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has proposed using a sovereign wealth fund to invest in critical mineral mines. There is one big problem with that plan, however: the U.S. doesn’t have one (for the moment, at least).
“LPO can invest in mining projects now,” Jacquez told me. “Cutting 60% of their staff and the experts who work on this is not going to give certainty to the business community if they’re looking to invest in a mine that needs some government backstop.”
And while the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act remains very much in doubt, the subsidies it provided for electric vehicles, solar, and wind, along with domestic content requirements have been a major source of demand for critical minerals mining and refining projects in the United States.
“It’s not something we’re going to solve overnight,” Jacquez said. “But in the midst of a maximalist trade with China, it is something we will have to deal with on an overnight basis, unless and until there’s some kind of de-escalation or agreement.”
A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.