Driving eastbound on Interstate 4 toward Orlando, you pass RV dealers, strip malls, gas stations, fast food, and apartment complexes. Occasionally, you glimpse bright-green bahiagrass pastures, cypress domes, and pine flats peppered with palmettos.
Florida is not the one without the other, but by all appearances the one — developed, urbanized, gray — is overtaking the other, wild, natural, and green.
I’m on my way to meet the Florida Wildlife Corridor team as it prepares to depart on its third expedition in six years, all of them aimed at finding and documenting how Florida’s wildlife makes its way from one patch of wild land to another amid the state’s unceasing development. This weeklong expedition, dubbed Heartland to Headwaters, will take off from the headwaters of the Everglades and trek northwest toward the Green Swamp — Florida’s two largest wetland systems. It will travel a thin thread of natural lands between the sprawling metropolises of Orlando and Tampa, a literal corridor of ecosystems critical to the state’s future.
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