Tuesday, December 09, 2014

Consequences -- St. Augustine History And Nature Must Be Preserved and Protected













St. Johns County Commissioners have thrice issued "emergency" declarations about beach erosion of homes in Ponte Vedra Beach, once on April 17, 2014 (not televised) and on November 4, 2014 (Election Day) and on December 8, 2014 (yesterday). The declarations accelerate permits for bulkheads.
County Commissioners did not endorse the St. Augustine National Historical Park and National Seashore on November 1, 2011, voting against endorsing it unanimously, 5-0.
God forgive them.
One of the stated purposes of the St. Augustine National Historical Park and National Seashore bill is "to respond to coastal erosion with a coherent management plan."
Staff made no recommendation.
Outside the ordinary course of business.
Tea Partiers accused Robin Nadeau, Faye Armitage, Judith Seraphin, me, et al. of being "Nazis and Communists," comparing me to Hitler, Stalin and Goebbels for wanting a St. Augustine National Historical Park and National Seashore.
These rebarbative Republicans should hide their heads in shame.
We know their names.
Had the St. Augustine National Historical Park and National Seashore -- first proposed by Mayor Walter Fraser, Senator Claude Pepper, et al in 1939 -- we might have had federal funding. www.staugustgreen.com
Instead we have residents with homes about to wash into the sea facing the insouciance of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP), which my late friend David Thundershield says really stands for "Don't Expect Protection."
Waiting for our SJC officials to apologize for their rudeness on 11.1.11, a date that will life in infamy.
I forgive SJC officials their Philistinism, but they must now lead, follow or get out of our way. Now.











As former Governor and U.S. Senator Bob Graham (a member of the 450th Commission) eloquently writes in his book, America: The Owner’s Manual – Making Government Work For You (2010), citizens have a right to be heard and heeded. That is what America’s Founders intended.
It is right and just that action on the St. Augustine National Historical Park and Seashore be “fast tracked,” in Capitol Hill argot. At last our St. Augustine history and nature must be protected, and not neglected by our federal government, as first proposed by Mayor Walter Fraser and Senator Claude Pepper in 1939. Read more here.
Our former Vice President and Oscar® and Nobel Prize winner Albert Gore, Jr. has rightly compared Americans to a dysfunctional family in dealing with environmental issues, quoting Sir Winston Spencer Churchill, who said:
The Government simply cannot make up their minds, or they cannot get the Prime Minister to make up his mind. So they go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.... The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences.
[Winston Churchill before the House of Commons, November 12, 1936 regarding appeasement of Nazis, quoted in Albert Gore, Jr., Earth in the Balance (1992) at 196 in context of desuetude and indecision in U.S. environmental policy.]





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