Bud Adams, slim and dressed in blue jeans and a blue button-down shirt
and cowboy boots and a cowboy hat, drove his Ford Explorer around his
ranch in western St. Lucie County, looking at his land and his cattle.
His truck, with manure caked in the tires, jounced in the ruts of rough
paths. He's been the president of the Florida Cattlemen's Association.
He's been named landowner of the year by the Florida Fish and Wildlife
Conversation Commission. He's a member of the Florida Agricultural Hall
of Fame. Now he showed his guests his bounty, pointing to heifers and
calves, herons and hawks, egrets and turkeys, baby gators and boxes of
bees, centuries-old hammocks of cypress, pine and palm. He stopped the
truck. A hot breeze blew through Spanish moss. He plucked a fat
grapefruit and knifed off its top and sucked on a juicy wedge. This land, unpolluted and pristine, was here before he was here. All he has done, he explained, is keep it intact. "So far," he said. What Adams wants, here near the end, coming up on 89 years old, is
for the ranch land that bears his name, some 40,000 acres spread over
four Florida counties, to remain the way it is — for his children, for
their children, for the children's children. Three-quarters of the people who voted in Florida on the first
Tuesday of November want the same thing. The language on the ballot for
the Florida Water and Land Conservation Initiative, Amendment 1, stated
the aim: "to acquire, restore, improve, and manage conservation lands."
But the crux of the question: Did interested citizens of Florida want
the state to spend billions of dollars of taxpayer money to buy
environmentally important property and then just let it be? The answer
was overwhelmingly yes...
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