05/01/2026
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“There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” — Barry Commoner, The Four Laws of Ecology
While nearly all speakers at Tuesday’s Collier County Commission meeting on Corkscrew Grove East spoke out against the project and the destruction it will bring to panther habitat, one voice struck a different tone. Excerpt from an article on the topic found in Gulfshore Business:
“Although 23 speakers and environmental groups from as far as Broward County lined up to voice concerns on April 28—most citing loss of habitat and increased traffic—what helped tip the scales for commissioners were two of the county’s most prominent environmental organizations, which worked with Alico Inc. for more than a year to mitigate concerns: Audubon Florida and Audubon Western Everglades.
‘While we do not support or advocate new development, we acknowledge that people keep moving here—wish they wouldn’t, but they do,’ Brad Cornell, Audubon Western Everglades’ policy director, told commissioners. ‘What we do support is the mechanism that the Rural Lands Stewardship program provides for protecting panther habitat, wetlands, and farms.’
Cornell said the 1,200-acre stewardship sending area is a key component designed to protect movement corridors for the Florida panther and other large mammals along the eastern portion of the project, while improving connectivity through a pathway extending to the Caloosahatchee River—a critical strategy.
Commissioners voted unanimously to allow Fort Myers–based Alico Inc. to create a 1,446.5-acre stewardship receiving area on land where it harvested oranges until deciding to end production in 2025, and to designate 1,295.5 acres as a sending area. Sending areas preserve high-quality habitat, while receiving areas are designated for development.”
As we noted in our last post on this topic, the commissioners’ approval instantly changed the underlying zoning of this land from one home per five acres—which would allow up to 300 rural homes on the 1,500-acre property—to as many as 4,500 homes on the same land. That translates to massive habitat obliteration along with fragmentation caused by thousands of additional vehicles and increased traffic.
We will soon be taking a deeper look at Collier County’s Rural Lands Stewardship Area (RLSA) on this page. This program is at the heart of many new developments spreading rapidly across eastern Collier County (also known as core panther habitat). For now, we want to make one point clear: no one who spoke against Corkscrew Grove East is opposed to setting aside land for preservation. What SFWA and our allies oppose is the destruction of large areas of critically needed habitat—much of it surrounded by key public lands—as “payment” for land that will be preserved.
At full buildout, the RLSA envisions converting as much as 43,500 acres (about the size of Washington, D.C.) in eastern Collier County to dense suburban communities—much of it within primary and secondary panther habitat. There is no credible panther science that supports this level of development within the species’ remaining habitat in Southwest Florida.
In future posts, we will take a closer look at the RLSA to explain how and why it never received full scientific review or approval from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and what years of rigorous panther research—including the Service’s own Florida Panther Recovery Plan—actually says about the habitat needs of Florida’s endangered state animal.
If you would like to support our current litigation against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for its failure to protect Florida panther habitat, as well as SFWA’s broader efforts to preserve panther and other wildlife habitat in South Florida, please see the link in the comments below.
Photo shows a large male panther (captured via trail cam) patrolling his territory in the Corkscrew Regional Ecosystem Watershed (CREW) lands directly across Corkscrew Road from the proposed Corkscrew Grove East development. Those torn ears illustrate what a panther in the wild goes through to protect its territory from rivals - and why quality panther habitat is worth fighting over.
