| 20 August 2011
A U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service news release identifies the New National Wildlife Refuge as an undertaking using a variety of public and private partners to advance a collaborative approach to address landscape-scale land protection efforts to conserve wildlife and habitat in the greater Everglades landscape. This partnership is referred to as the Greater Everglades Partnership Initiative.
As part of this initiative, The Nature Conservancy and the National Wildlife Refuge Association are putting together an advisory group of significant landowners and other influential people associated with lands and waters in the Kissimmee Valley (i.e., Northern Everglades) to help guide the thinking of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in their quest to establish the New National Wildlife Refuge. Officially the group will be known as The Land Remembered Advisory Group for the Everglades Headwaters NWR and Conservation Area.
Florida Guides Association, West V.P., Capt. Dave Market has been asked to serve on this private advisory group. So, it looks like there will be one ol' and crusty, airboating, gun toting, public access demanding Cracker in the federally funded EHNWR Cougar Corridor Advisory Group.
Markett responded to the invitation to serve by saying, “I am honored to have been asked and agree to serve on your EHNWR Advisory Group - and I will contribute to the best of my abilities.”A spokesman for the group commented, “This is not a public meeting (both TNC and NWRA are private, non-profit organizations and no one from the USFWS will be there). We are only inviting about 20-25 people to attend.”
An overall goal of the first meeting, as stated in the invitation to participants is to encourage “thoughtful discussion and solution-oriented action for protecting Florida’s water, wildlife and way of life captured in Patrick Smith's A Land Remembered.”
The first meeting of the group is tentatively planned in St. Lucie County late in August.
