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.
