As part of the Orlando Sentinel’s 150th birthday, on the first Sunday of each month, we will report on a topic that helped shape the Central Florida of today and how we covered that topic. This month, we look at the environment.

Central Florida, among the most visited spaces in the world for the last half century, was once a wild, wooded and water-logged frontier, a sprawling but sparsely populated region unfortunately named “Mosquito County.”

It had dirt paths in 1850, but few roads and fewer than 500 residents.

That would change with railroads and citrus — catalysts in the first of many times residents would reshape the region’s environment.

In 1870, six years before the first newspaper debuted, the territory was home to nearly 2,200 people.

By then, the county had a more inviting name, Orange, a nod to its top crop rather than a persistent pest.

A writer, identified by a one-name byline of Sherman in the Orange County Reporter in 1884, praised the emerging city of Orlando, summarizing the views of early settlers he had interviewed. Among its assets were many entrancing, clear water lakes and “the salubrity of the climate and productiveness of the soil.”

“Comparative freedom from insects and poisonous reptiles,” he noted “was another consideration.”

The Central Florida environment has been both a magnetic and galvanizing force over the last 150 years: It is the lure that brought so many people and so much development here, the spectacular landscape that powerful actors have sought to enhance and exploit in the name of progress, and the identity we now seek to protect from the excesses of our growth.

In the years since Sherman’s declaration, the population has exploded to 1.5 million, lakes and rivers have grown cloudier (and some have become clearer again), crowded concrete highways have criss-crossed the landscape and acres of rooftops have replaced citrus and pastures. Tourism emerged as king, drawing an estimated 70 million visitors annually.

The highways, commerce and population have changed our environment — and often, not for the better. But in today’s Central Florida, there is at least common acknowledgement of the need for growth and the natural landscape to coexist.

Through the decades, the Orlando Sentinel has highlighted the region’s natural jewels and exposed a range of  environmental tragedies, often through the voices of residents who called attention to them, fought to fix them — and sometimes succeeded.

These are a few stories that tell larger truths of Central Florida’s perennial struggle to balance progress with preservation.

LAKE APOPKA

Over the last century, few places in Central Florida have experienced wild highs and tragic lows like Lake Apopka.

In its heyday in the 1920’s, 30’s and early 40’s, the freshwater lake was a natural attraction, covering 50,000 surface acres in northwest Orange and southeast Lake counties, second only in size in Florida to Lake Okeechobee.

It was heralded as a premier place to hook trophy-size bass. Its plentiful shoreside fish camps lured celebrity anglers like baseball legend Babe Ruth and movie stars Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable and Carole Lombard.

“It was a happening place way back then,” said Jim Peterson, an environmental scientist with St. Johns River Water Management District.

But during World War II, about 20,000 acres of Lake Apopka’s north shore were drained and converted into muck farms to grow vegetables needed to feed troops for a nation at war with Axis forces in Europe, Africa and the Pacific.

The farming operations leaned on pesticides to kill bugs and fertilizers to spur crop growth. The chemicals made their way into Lake Apopka, turning the crystal clear waters into a pea-green soup filled with globs of gooey algae.

In 1995, an Orlando Sentinel editorial lamented the sorry state of the lake: “Restoring Lake Apopka ranks among Florida’s most difficult environmental challenges. The lake is grotesquely green, teeming with fish that suck in scum to eat.”

The story got worse. In 1998, as many as 1,000 birds – mostly pelicans, wading birds and raptors – died around Lake Apopka, a tragedy blamed on poisoning from the pesticides used on the muck farms.

But the die-off occurred as restoration work was already underway on nearly 15,000 north shore acres the state acquired at a cost of $100 million to aid the lake’s recovery.

The worst of the agricultural excesses were stopped. The water management district engineered a 760-acre “flow way” which functions like a kidney filtering out algae, excess nutrients and suspended solids that degrade water quality.

And today the district, which is in charge of the lake’s restoration, regularly harvests thousands of pounds of gizzard shad, a bottom-feeding junk fish that stirs up and eats nutrients on the lake floor.

It has taken decades and millions more in public money to heal the ailing lake, which is again becoming a  popular tourist attraction. Over 200,000 carloads of people traveled last year on the free Lake Apopka Wildlife Drive, an 11-mile gravel road that gives visitors a chance to glimpse gargantuan gators up close or peek at a fulvous whistling duck, a roseate spoonbill or any of 300 other oddly named species of birds who nest in the marshes.

“But there’s still algae out in the lake,” Peterson said, sounding a note of caution about the lake’s future as new residential development creeps ever closer. “We know it’s a lot less concentrated than it was even 10 years ago, but it’s still out there.”

JIM THOMAS, ENVIRONMENTAL TITAN

From Lake Apopka’s tragedy emerged one of the region’s greatest conservation heroes, Jim Thomas.

Thomas, who died in 2021 at age 86, was lauded in a Sentinel’s obituary as a “titan of Central Florida environmentalism” for his tireless advocacy and selfless devotion to the region’s forests, waters and wildlife.

He founded Friends of Lake Apopka and championed the lake’s revival.

Joe Kilsheimer, a former Sentinel reporter who later served as mayor of Apopka and president of the Friends of Lake Apopka, said Thomas believed even during the lake’s bleakest times that it could be saved.

“And he was right,” Kilsheimer added.

Thomas, who was involved in other environmental causes, was widely credited by peers with sounding the alarm for broader conservation issues, including the potentially negative impact of explosive residential growth.

He also was a driving force to create the Oakland Nature Preserve.

The preserve covers 124 acres, including wetlands and forest at the southeastern edge of Lake Apopka in the historic town of Oakland, which had been an agricultural and railroad hub. The site had formerly been used for citrus farming.

Among other notable Central Florida conservation visionaries are Hal Scott and Ken Bosserman.

Scott, who died at age 66 in 1992, fought against numerous environmental threats, including offshore drilling, aggressive forestry and wetlands destruction.  A 9,515-acre protected preserve in east Orange bears his name.

Bosserman, who died in 2006 at age 57, was founder of the Friends of the Econ and dedicated his life to protecting the region and Econlockhatchee River, which has served as an unofficial boundary between urban and rural areas in Orange County. His name adorns a 241-acre passive park, also in east Orange.

FLORIDA AUDUBON

The Florida Audubon Society, the state’s first environmental organization and one of its most enduring and influential conservation groups, formed at a lakeside home in Maitland in March of 1900 with a pledge to protect birds in danger of extinction because their feathers were favored in women’s fashion.

Most of the influential 15 men and women who gathered at the home of Clara and Louis Dommerich came to Central Florida to escape northern winters, grow oranges and watch birds, a pastime they treasured, said Leslie Kemp Poole, an environmental historian who teaches environmental studies at Rollins College in Winter Park.

“They were the original snowbirds,” she said of the founders.

They were alarmed that flamingos, great blue herons, roseate spoonbills and other birds with colorful feathers were hunted for plumage or body parts to be used in high-fashion women’s hats, then a $17 million industry.

The Carolina parakeet, once common in Florida, was driven to extinction.

Poole, who detailed the Florida Audubon Society’s beginnings for the Orange County History Center, said the founders joined a national call for action to stop the wholesale slaughter of Florida birds and noted that one of its most strident advocates was famous for shaming anyone she found wearing a bird-plumed hat.

“As the century progressed, Audubon’s interests would expand to protecting and preserving all of the state’s complex and intricate flora and fauna and ecosystems – becoming the Audubon we know today,” Poole wrote.

FLORIDA’S EAGLE LADY

In 1979 Doris Mager, then 54, an Audubon volunteer who managed the Maitland-based center’s gift shop, earned national fame as the “Eagle Lady” by camping a week in a vacant nest to draw attention to the species’ plight.

Her stay in the nest in a longleaf pine 50 feet above the earth also spurred donations for a raptor center.

“We did not have a birds of prey program. And Doris really was the spark of life that moved Audubon into the birds of prey rescue and rehabilitation business,” Charles Lee, Audubon’s longtime director of advocacy, told the Sentinel for her obituary in 2023. “She started out in a very modest way, but the Center for Birds of Prey that we have today is really the result of her pioneering work.”

Now in its 47th year, the center located on Lake Sybelia monitors hundreds of eagles nests in Florida and rehabilitates hundreds of injured or orphaned eagles, vultures and other raptors with the goal of releasing them back into the wild.

After her brush with celebrity, Mager traveled the country in a van with her raptor companions, giving educational talks to community groups and school children, according to Audubon magazine which profiled her in 2019.

THE WEKIVA RIVER

On August 7, 2006, the Orlando Sentinel declared on its front page: “It’s now a scientific conclusion. The Wekiva River, one of the most cherished, watched-over and protected waters in the state, is sick from pollution.”

A state-commissioned study had found the 16-mile spring-fed waterway was overdosed with nitrogen and phosphorus — pollutants delivered by storm water, septic-tank discharge, treated sewage and other sources.

Just a few years earlier, Congress had designated the free-flowing Wekiva to be a “Wild and Scenic River.” Best experienced in a kayak or canoe, its waters and lush hammocks accommodate alligators, black bears, manatees, river otters and an array of avian life that includes barred owls, blue herons, warblers and wood storks.

The federal designation provides a strong form of protection for critical rivers in the U.S., preventing federal authorities from licensing new hydropower projects or dams that would negatively impact the river eco-system.

But those weren’t the threats facing the Wekiva.

Septic tanks and new development endangered the beloved mosaic of forest and wetlands.

In 1982, a group of citizens determined to protect the river basin chartered the not-for-profit Friends of the Wekiva River, Inc. Today their web site describes the basin in Seminole, Orange and Lake counties “as one of the few remaining, near-pristine river systems in Central Florida.” The group lobbied tirelessly to make those words come true.

“Our mission,” according to their website, “has never been to oppose growth, per se, but to insist that growth is well planned and considers the long-term future of the basin, its resources, and the quality of life for future generations.”

Current board member Jay Exum credits the zeal of the group’s founders for shielding the river by focusing attention on threats posed by overdevelopment. They helped change state laws and county land use plans.

“All of that flowed from grassroots movements. They’re the ones that shined the light on what could happen if governments didn’t act,” he said, referring to the not-for-profit’s founders. And he noted the key role of local journalism: “The Sentinel was a partner in that.”

In 1987, the newspaper published a series of editorials called “Florida’s Shame” that detailed the threats that unbridled development posed to the region’s natural resources and its future. The series, researched and written by editorial writer Jane Healy, earned the Sentinel the first Pulitzer Prize in the newspaper’s long history.

One installment, titled “Orlando’s Everglades,” focused on saving the Wekiva River.

“The river’s wetlands desperately need a buffer between them and development. And the Wekiva’s surroundings need to stay rural so the river does not become polluted by subdivisions,” Healy wrote. “The point is that the Wekiva can be saved, and now is the time to save it. Not in two years or in 10, but now while Orlando is booming. This economic boom will mean little in the long run if we fail to protect what’s so special about our area.”

Florida Gov. Bob Martinez, a Republican, paddled a canoe on the river in January 1988 to see its natural beauty up close. Afterwards, he described it as “an unspoiled natural jewel” and called for its protection. His river tour is considered a pivotal point in the conservation history of the river as it led to legislative initiatives to limit development pressure near the river.

Later that year, the Legislature passed the Wekiva River Protection Act.

About 15 years after that, state lawmakers unanimously approved another critical piece of legislation to reinforce those protections while allowing Central Florida to grow with sensitivity and intelligence. The Wekiva River Parkway and Protection Act of 2004 authorized construction of a beltway around Central Florida, also known as State Road 429, while imposing strict protections for the environmentally fragile Wekiva River basin.

The beltway, elevated in some areas to protect wildlife, cost $1.6 billion.

“Everybody did what they were supposed to do,” recalled Lee Constantine, a former state lawmaker and current Seminole County commissioner who led a gubernatorial panel created to develop recommendations to protect the river and build the beltway. “Now we’ve got a road and an agreement that people laud all over the United States, but especially in Florida, as the way you build a road in an environmentally sensitive area and build a consensus to do it.”

HOW DO WE GROW

But striking that balance is not always easy, and the movement for responsible growth has found at least as many failures as successes.

“Growth is coming to Florida and if it’s managed no better than it’s being managed now, that growth will destroy the Florida we know,” Healy warned in her award-winning work, criticizing an array of elected officials and developers.

Some developers yanked thousands of dollars of advertising in protest.

Publisher Harold “Tif” Lifvendahl and editor L. John Haile Jr. “didn’t flinch,” Healy recalled in a recent interview. “They stood up to some of our biggest advertisers. Those editorials, I truly believe, made a difference.”

By then, the salubrious environment that Central Florida’s earliest settlers found had already been transformed many times over. A notable culprit was the citrus industry, which turned Orange County into a major citrus hub and at its zenith in the 1970s occupied more than 80,000 commercial acres, largely for a variety of oranges.

But groves obliterated vast stretches of pristine land.

The industry took off as rail hauling displaced unreliable steamboat transportation in the late 1800s. But citrus faced its own threats over the years: the Great Freeze of 1894-95, the Mediterranean fruit fly infestation that took hold in 1929, ravaging diseases like citrus greening, and the most powerful force of all, surging growth that made agricultural land far more valuable for industrial and commercial uses, and especially housing.

Some of today’s fiercest battles involve the effort to contain that sprawl, as developers continue to literally push the boundaries separating urban areas and rural areas.

Though Orange County voters overwhelmingly approved a charter amendment in November 2024 setting a rural boundary to protect thousands of acres from suburban encroachment, developers and land owners have sued to invalidate the measure.

State legislators also have tried to thwart charter amendments limiting growth.

In perhaps the most profound of the recent battles, the Central Florida Expressway Authority touched off an angry revolt by pushing a toll-road extension through a piece of the Split Oak Forest.

That 1,689-acre forest, acquired in 1994 with $8.6 million in public funds to be “protected in perpetuity,” has served as a mitigation bank to relocate displaced wildlife, including gopher tortoises, which were often entombed, or buried alive in their burrows, to clear the way for construction work.

The new section of highway, however, is anticipated to accommodate an expected explosion of development. In a pitched 2024 showdown, road backers steamrolled their opposition and won approval to cut through the southwest corner of the forest, though they were forced to trade replacement lands larger than what the project took.

FLORIDA BLACK BEARS

Across the United States, there are key animal species – indicator species, they are sometimes called – whose own stories exemplify the tortuous path of environmental protection. The bald eagle. In the Pacific Northwest, the northern spotted owl. And so many in Florida, including the American alligator and the black bear.

The Florida black bear, one of 16 subspecies of the American black bear, is often lauded as a Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission success story, though the agency was sharply criticized for staging a hunt of the state’s largest land mammal last year. Hunters killed 52 bears in the 23-day bear hunt, the first in a decade.

But the bigger story should not be overlooked.

While bears are believed to have roamed peninsular Florida for thousands of years, their estimated numbers dwindled from thousands to just a few hundred in the 1970s, according to the Florida Wildlife Federation. The group blamed the decline over the last century to unregulated hunting and loss of habitat to development.

The Florida black bear was named to the state’s list of “threatened” species in 1974 but hunting of the iconic species was not banned until 1994, when the species gained a toe-hold helping its numbers to grow well into the thousands.

The rebound led state wildlife officials to lift the hunting ban for a single event in 2015, then again last year for what may become an annual harvest. State wildlife officials insist a limited, well-regulated bear season will not harm the species, though conservation groups disagree.

Habitat loss is even more difficult to manage.

The Sentinel published a feature in 2013 titled “Bearlando” detailing the ubiquity of bears in the Orlando area, with some area wildlife officials labeling Seminole County the epicenter of human-bear conflicts.

Bears were lumbering through neighborhoods, getting into garbage, garages and grills.

A few weeks after “Bearlando” was published, a 54-year-old woman walking two small dogs in Wingfield North, a gated Longwood neighborhood near a forested conservation area, was mauled by a bear with cubs.

The encounter led FWC to trap and kill several bears and prompted “bear-wise” rules to be adopted in some Seminole County neighborhoods where bears frequently roamed. The rules required residents to use bear-resistant trash containers as wildlife officials determined bears, typically shy, boldly wandered into neighborhoods in search of left-overs in garbage bins.

Those rules help diminish conflicts and the need to kill nuisance bears.

State wildlife officials now estimate the number of bears in Florida at about 4,050.

No region of the state has more bears than Central Florida, which a sleuth has put at 1,200 bears.

On Jan. 11, 2015, wildlife officers trapped and killed the biggest Florida black bear on record.

The mammoth animal, which had been roaming Seminole County neighborhoods for more than a month, weighed 740 pounds when he was captured in Longwood, FWC told the Orlando Sentinel. That was more than 100 pounds heavier than the state’s previous big bruin, a 620-pound black bear caught in Paisley in Lake county in 2013.

But the Longwood bear’s girth illustrates both the natural world’s resilience and its degradation.

It most likely did not balloon to 740 pounds by sticking to its staple diet of nuts, berries and sabal-palm hearts.Thomas Eason, a bear biologist and former director of FWC’s Division of Habitat & Species Conservation, guessed it feasted on leftover pizza crust and a high-calorie cornucopia of curbside garbage, too.

shudak@orlandosentinel.com