This story originally was published by Southerly.
Betty Osceola, an elder of the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians, lives in Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida, where a small Texas-based oil developer wants to build seven new wells. Burnett Oil Company slipped in its application Jan. 22, days before President Joe Biden signed an executive order pausing new oil and gas leases on public lands. "I wasn’t surprised," Osceola said through a bitter laugh — she knew it would happen eventually.
Big Cypress is part of the Greater Everglades and spans 729,000 acres — a size comparable to Rhode Island — across the heart of South Florida. Ecologists describe it as a mosaic of distinct yet interconnected wetland ecosystems: hardwood hammocks, pine flatwoods, sawgrass prairies, marshes, sloughs and gloomy cypress domes with cottonmouths and ghost orchids and endangered panthers.