By Joe Murphy
The 2026 race for Florida governor offers an opportunity to shape our state’s conservation future. Floridians must seize it. The time to act is now.
We desperately need more informed conservation voices leading the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) from the top. We must have new voices who come from the natural sciences and conservation management fields.
FWC has much to be proud of. The agency is staffed with employees who are smart, dedicated and effective. Its wildlife officers risk their lives daily to protect the natural wonders of Florida and do it with bravery and valor.
FWC manages diverse ecosystems across the state while ensuring Floridians’ ability to hunt, fish, boat and watch wildlife. FWC staff do good work.
Despite the best efforts of FWC staff, we are now in times when the commissioners who oversee the agency continue to test the public’s trust. Commissioners sometimes ignore Florida’s conservation needs with decisions that seem based more in politics than science.
The governor of Florida appoints the seven members of the FWC Commission. Without an infusion of conservation voices leading as commissioners, we will not meet the current or future challenges facing wild Florida.
We are about to elect a new governor. We need a governor who publicly commits, as a candidate and once elected, to appointing commissioners who have the conservation background to lead the agency.
Traditionally, these posts have gone to supporters of the governor or the politically connected. Currently, five of the seven commissioners have ties and connections to the development industry. No current commissioner has an academic or professional background in conservation science, land management, species conservation or ecology.
That must change. Florida is changing so quickly, with explosive growth in population and development, that we need the most informed leaders possible protecting outdoor traditions and wildlife. Climate change, sea-level rise, extinction, debates over water and growth, and increasing competition for scarce natural resources are the future in Florida.
Let’s be honest: This system has never worked. It has never been acceptable to appoint commissioners based solely on political patronage and not on qualification. Now, under the bright lights of the deep and profound challenges facing Florida’s conservation future, the error of these ways is more powerfully clear to all.
There are many issues in the last year that show the commission needs a change at the top, including the Florida black bear hunt and the recent failure of the commissioners to fully, completely and finally stop the capture of wild imperiled and threatened marine life for exhibit. The commissioners have also overseen the heartbreaking and mounting losses of species such as Florida gopher tortoises to development.
In any other setting it would be considered obvious that a board overseeing an area of Florida’s economy, population or natural resources would in part be led by issue experts in that field. This is no different.
Some of the current candidates for governor have expressed support for this idea. The public, the media, the conservation community and the outdoor recreation community need to keep calling on them to support this and commit to this – all of them.
In a state with more than 23 million people, we can find leaders to appoint to the commission who are politically palatable to the governor and also fully qualified.
There are many gifted folks in Florida colleges and universities who are nationally respected in conservation. There are numerous retired land managers, biologists, ecologists, and marine and aquatic scientists. Many of them are avid hunters and anglers. This can work.
Florida deserves no less. I refuse to tell my granddaughters that the Florida their grandparents knew, that my grandparents knew, is gone because we failed to act. When they ask me about wildlife lost to extinction, wild places lost to development and the outdoor traditions lost to politics and greed, I hope at least I can say we tried.
Whoever your choice for governor is, call on that person to make and keep this commitment. Florida can afford no less. Our conservation future hangs in the balance.
An FWC led by commissioners steeped in conservation, staffed with the employees in place now, can and will meet the challenges of the future.
Joe Murphy is a native and lifelong Floridian who lives in Brooksville, along the Nature Coast. You can follow him on Facebook at https://bit.ly/joemurphyfacebook. Banner photo: A Florida key deer and cattle egret (iStock image).
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Florida’s wild places have been sold out by the corporatocracy. Ever since it become a red state, conservation is an afterthought. There’s too much money to be made.