Foundation News

Environmentalists working with the Sierra Club’s Florida Panther Critical Habitat Campaign, with funding from The Sierra Club Foundation, won a year-long battle last month to stop oil drilling in southwest Florida after a Texas-based oil drilling company announced it will terminate its lease holdings on 115,000 acres in the environmentally sensitive areas of the Everglades and Big Cypress Watersheds.

The fight began in April 2013 when the Dan A. Hughes Company mailed a letter informing residents of a Naples suburb they were living in a "hydrogen sulfide evacuation zone" for an exploratory well. The well, which would be 1,000 feet from residences and less than one mile from the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge, sparked public protests, meetings with elected officials, and hearings to assess the environmental impacts from the company’s oil wells in the western Everglades.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency held a public forum to address the numerous concerns with drilling in the western Everglades, ranging from water quality and hydrology to habitat fragmentation and increased panther mortality. Sierra Club generated over 167,000 comments calling for the exploratory permit to be revoked.

The tide turned in May 2014 when the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), which had supported drilling, issued a press release exposing the driller for illegal extraction techniques that mirrored fracking and is currently filing a lawsuit against the company.

This is a great victory for all the dedicated activists and citizens of southwest Florida. However, the war on oil drilling is far from over. Two other companies are proposing to do seismic testing, a precursor to exploratory drilling, on over 200,000 acres in the Big Cypress area. With millions of dollars invested in the restoration of the Everglades, these companies pose a salient threat that could undermine the efforts of so many to protect one of the most unique ecosystems in the world.