Florida Tea Party Worries About Government’s Secret Manatee Conspiracy

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/usfwssoutheast/4606511750/sizes/m/in/photostream/">USFWSsoutheast</a>/Flickr

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


After propelling Republican Rick Scott into the governor’s office last fall, Florida tea partiers have found a new target: manatees.

My friend Craig Pittman of the St. Petersburg Times, a manatee reporter extraordinaire, writes today about how the endangered species has joined the list of tea-party targets, along with taxes, high-speed rail, and socialized medicine. From the story:

A Citrus County tea party group has announced that it’s fighting new restrictions on boating and other human activities in Kings Bay that have been proposed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

“We cannot elevate nature above people,” explained Edna Mattos, 63, leader of the Citrus County Tea Party Patriots, in an interview. “That’s against the Bible and the Bill of Rights.”

Federal officials “want to restrict the entire bay,” she contended. “They don’t want people here.”

Areas of Kings Bay, which is in Citrus County, have been designated as a federal wildlife refuge since 1980. Jacques Cousteau’s 1972 documentary Forgotten Mermaids featured the manatees of Kings Bay, and it’s one of the only places where humans can actually swim with the giant mammals. As Pittman notes, the number of manatees in the bay has increased from 100 when the protections were put in place to more than 550 today. They are a major tourist draw to the area, but there has been an uptick in manatee deaths from boating accidents in the past ten years.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service expanded the refuge to include all of the bay last month, citing a need to protect the animals:

“The number of manatees using Kings Bay throughout the year has simply outgrown the capacity of existing protected areas,” said Dave Hankla, the Service’s North Florida Ecological Services Office supervisor, adding, “and human use of the bay has increased beyond the impacts originally considered when the existing protections were created.”

But the local tea-partiers see a broader, more sinister effort at play:

“We believe that (federal regulators’) aim is to control the fish and wildlife, in addition to the use of the land that surrounds this area, and the people that live here and visit. … As most of us know, this all ties in to the United Nations’ Agenda 21 and Sustainability.”

Ah, that! Our own Stephanie Mencimer has covered the UN-related conspiracy theories that a number of tea partiers and Glenn Beck fans believe underlie all sustainability-related initiatives. The Citrus County group’s website warns that that Agenda 21 is “designed to make humans into livestock.” Surely a one-world government run by manatees must be part of the agenda, too.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate