Controversy cuts through preserve

An environmental group may drag the government back into court to control off-road vehicle use in Big Cypress National Preserve.

By CRAIG PITTMAN

© St. Petersburg Times, published March 14, 1999

Every time John DiNunzio climbs into a swamp buggy and splashes through the Big Cypress National Preserve, he feels like he's in church.

"God's out there in them woods," he said. "It's the biggest cathedral in the world."

But some environmentalists think what DiNunzio and other off-road vehicle users have done to Big Cypress is close to sacrilege. Four years ago an environmental group called the Florida Biodiversity Project sued the government, contending Big Cypress managers were letting ORV users tear up a national treasure.

To settle the lawsuit, National Park Service officials agreed to write a plan to control ORV use in Big Cypress, a 729,000-acre preserve near Naples. The plan was supposed to be finished last April. But nearly a year after that deadline expired, the ORV plan remains incomplete, and park officials say they need at least five more months to work on it.

Meanwhile, the latest studies have discovered off-road vehicles such as motorbikes and swamp buggies have cut a larger swath through Big Cypress than previously suspected. When the preserve opened 25 years ago, park officials documented 4,000 miles of ORV trails. But a recent survey has found 30,000 miles of trails through 148,000 acres, said Brian Scherf of the Florida Biodiversity Project.

"It's pretty messed up," Scherf said. The ORV use "has gotten completely out of hand."

Because the plan's delay has allowed ORV users to inflict fresh damage, he said, the Florida Biodiversity Project may drag the park service back into court.

"Our patience is pretty well worn thin at this point," he said.

The delay is also wearing on ORV users, who want to know where they stand. Some fear the Florida Biodiversity Project will not be satisfied until their vehicles are banned. Scherf denied that, saying his group's goal is to minimize further harm to what he called "a national crown jewel of biodiversity."

Sprawling across parts of Collier, Monroe and Miami-Dade counties, Big Cypress provides habitat for 11 endangered or threatened species, including the Florida panther.

In the wet season, 90 percent of Big Cypress floods. The preserve is half the headwaters for the adjacent Everglades National Park. But unlike its neighbor, the preserve's water has not been rerouted by engineers or polluted by sugar farms.

And unlike Everglades National Park, it allows ORVs. About 2,000 people pay $35 a year to run swamp buggies, all-terrain motorbikes, four-wheel-drive trucks and airboats through the preserve.

Some areas are completely off-limits to motorized vehicles, and in other areas ORVs are allowed only on established trails. But in some areas ORV users are free to churn through the swamp any way they can as they hunt deer and turkey, wallow in the solitude and commune with nature.

"It's just the most beautiful place that's ever been," said DiNunzio, 51, of Naples.

Mark Cruz, 35, of Fort Lauderdale contends that ORV damage is good for the environment: "Everything always grows back, and it's twice as strong."

But Big Cypress Superintendent Wally Hibbard said there is no doubt the ORVs "can have a pretty heavy impact" on the preserve.

An ORV that roars through water an inch deep spread over 20 square yards can leave all that water puddled in deep ruts, altering habitat for plants and animals and changing the flow patterns.

The challenge is in finding a way to allow ORV use to continue while protecting nature from permanent scars, Hibbard said.

ORV users should be delighted about one aspect of the plan: Once it's done, Hibbard said, the preserve will allow ORV users access to land that has been closed since it was acquired three years ago.

"That's what's so ludicrous," Scherf said. "The ORVs have done all this damage, and now they want to open up new land for them."

'Killing this little wetland'

Scherf's biggest opponent is history. The practice of using off-road vehicles to wade through the trackless expanse of Big Cypress dates to the 1920s, long before there was a preserve

Loggers blazed some early trails through Big Cypress. Some paths lead to the remnants of small farms. Some lead to Florida's first producing oil field. But many are the mark of hunters muscling their way through an otherwise impassable wilderness in pursuit of their prey.

"That's part of the challenge and the thrill and the culture here," explained Jack Moller, 52, of Pembroke Pines, who has been hunting in Big Cypress using ORVs since the 1960s.

Back then "you used to see cars and trucks and buggies all over the place," said DiNunzio, who used to live there. Many of the swamp buggies were built in someone's backyard, the work of what DiNunzio jokingly called "redneck rocket science."

By the 1960s, though, the wave of development washing over South Florida was lapping at the edges of Big Cypress. Environmentalists and hunters both wanted to keep it pristine. Together they persuaded Congress to declare the area a preserve, which would leave it more open to recreation than a national park.

"If it hadn't been for us hunters and sportsmen," DiNunzio said, "it would've turned into the Sunny Acres Mini-Ranchettes subdivision or something."

So when the Florida Biodiversity Group sued Big Cypress over the ORV use, the hunters who had worked to save Big Cypress felt betrayed by people they viewed as Johnny-come-latelies.

The conflict over ORVs in Big Cypress mirrors a struggle going on across the country. ORVs have grown in popularity while more and more of the landscape has been paved over. For many ORV users, the only places left to ride are environmentally sensitive parks and forests.

A 1979 federal study found ORVs damaged public land from the dunes of Cape Cod to the Alaskan tundra. Environmental groups have mobilized to oust ORVs from public land, but ORV users have vigorously defended their traditional access.

Some ORV users are their own worst enemies. Rangers in Apalachicola National Forest near Tallahassee recently confiscated two ORVS from people caught trespassing in restricted wetlands.

"We've got some responsible users and some outlaw fringe groups who do whatever they want," said David Coleman of the U.S. Forest Service. The damage by the renegades has prompted rangers to limit all ORVs to designated trails, he said.

Even well-intentioned ORV users may not realize the harm they do, said David Printiss, a zoologist with the Florida Natural Areas Inventory.

"They don't understand that when they go into a wetland and spin up the mud and tear up the vegetation that that's bad," he said. '"They don't realize they're killing this little wetland."

'Worth the pain'

A few hard-core ORV fans don't want to hear about what they're killing, as Mike Aust learned last year

Aust, a Virginia Tech professor who is an expert on soils and hydrology, made a brief visit to Big Cypress and examined a small area of the preserve that ORVs plowed through regularly.

In a memo Aust wrote he was "amazed at the depth and extent of buggy ruts," some of them 3 feet deep. Such deep ruts, he wrote, permanently altered the flow of water and killed trees.

"When you ride a tree down and break it off," he said, "it really doesn't grow well."

After the Miami Herald wrote about his memo, "I got a lot of hate mail," he said. "My phone rang off the hook. People were convinced I was the Antichrist."

Scherf, of the Biodiversity Project, thinks park officials are so afraid of offending those hard-core off-road vehicle users that it has slowed preparation of the ORV plan.

But Hibbard said the delays are due to more mundane reasons: staffing shortages, format changes, the red tape a federal agency must go through to get something printed.

Hibbard would not give details of what might be in the plan. DiNunzio speculated it will limit ORV use to designated trails and impose limits on tire size and vehicle weight. Although ORV users will gripe, DiNunzio said, the ones who really love the preserve will go along with the plan.

"The experience is worth the pain," he explained. "I ain't going to give up those woods."
-- Times researcher Kitty Bennett contributed to this report.