Fresh Water Experience

Approximately seventy-one percent of the Earth is covered in water. Ninety-seven percent of that is found in the Earth’s oceans, an infinite supply of salt water. The other three percent is fresh water, which is found the ice caps, rivers, lakes, ponds, and swamps. Fresh water is a finite resource, essential to sustaining life of both humans and wildlife, and yet, humans continue to wipe out fresh water habitats with over-development, pollution, and global warming. One such habitat, right here in our own backyard, is a sixty-thousand acre watershed ecosystem called the Corkscrew Regional Ecosystem Watershed (CREW).

A watershed ecosystem in a geographical area of land where rainwater runs off higher grounds into lower wetlands and common bodies of fresh water while

transporting sediment, energy, and many types of organisms. Every factor in this ecosystem is interdependent to each other. Any abrupt or unnatural change to the ecosystem can cause it to perish.

The CREW ecosystem supports life within it and life around it such as humans. These ecosystem services include regulation of floods, climate, and diseases. Other essential services include providing food and fresh water.  Over-development into Southwest Florida has caused a shortage of fresh water killing untold number of species. The watershed refills aquifers, water settlements beneath the ground that are made up of limestone. These aquifers provide fresh drinking water to all of the residents of Southwest Florida.

In 1985, only eleven thousand acres of the Corkscrew Sanctuary was protected; however, an extraordinary, diverse group of environmentalists, government agencies, private landowners, developers, and private citizens started an ambitious project to acquire and protect up to sixty-thousand acres of the corkscrew regional watershed using a land acquisition program created in 1981.

Today, because of the vision and success of that unique consortium, sixty-thousand acres are forever free from development and pollution, which directly helps residents and businesses to sustain in Southwest Florida. The public not only benefits from its vital resources, but also by interacting with unspoiled nature. The public is free to observe and engage with the sanctuary. None of this would be possible without the efforts of the visionaries that secured the watershed for all future generations to follow.