You Can Stop Overdevelopment

Sanibel Island is approximately the same size as Manhattan. Granted, Manhattan is 23 square miles of bedrock as opposed to Sanibel's 17.5 square miles of soil and sand. Not that anyone could confuse the two islands. Hailing a cab on Periwinkle Way might take a week. Finding a roseate spoonbill feeding along Broadway would take even longer.

Manhattan has a density of 67,000 people per square mile. Sanibel falls far short, with 346 people per square mile. Even during tourist season, when its population swells to 33,000 people, it remains a smidgen over 1.5 million residents shy of Manhattan.

The compelling difference between the two islands is created by design and forged by battle. Sanibel is widely acknowledged for its commitment to preserving its natural environment. It's among 20 communities nationwide cited as case studies of "nature-friendly communities" in Christopher Duerksen and Cara Snyder's 2005 book, Nature-Friendly Communities: Habitat Protection and Land Use Planning. Its lack of development sets it apart from other barrier-island resort areas.

Though Sanibel is known worldwide for its natural beauty, its attraction is not the conventional well-manicured landscaping found in most affluent resorts. Visitors expecting beach cabanas lining tidily raked, white-sand shores will be disappointed. What they find instead are beaches heaped with shells for which the island is famous and striped with wrack lines-debris tossed ashore by the waves that becomes the shorebirds' banquet.

Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation (SCCF) education director Kristie Anders, who has lived on Sanibel and North Captiva for 23 years, recalls her first impression of Sanibel. Sailing from the Florida Keys, she had passed the battleship-like skyline of Marco Island, the building-lined shores of Naples and Fort Myers Beach, and then Sanibel came into view-an island of green where the skyline was the tree line.

"I was like, 'Wait, there are houselights but no streetlights.' It was eerie," she says. "I didn't know spaces like this existed."

She calls Sanibel unique both environmentally and sociopolitically. "Not only beach and bay, but its interior freshwater wetlands is Everglades-like and unique to barrier islands," she says. "As far back as the '30s, you have a community of people concerned about preservation of natural resources, and it was embedded in the culture of the islands."

It still is. "You'll see [drivers] tolerating someone stopping to let a gopher tortoise walk across the road. You see people walking the beach collecting trash, and visitors will do the same," she says. "There's a general sense of celebration of wildlife and seeing and treasuring it, and because the community sends that message out to visitors, visitors take up that same joy in experiencing it."

Laws of Nature

"Let nature take its course," is the guiding dictum on Sanibel. A host of regulations, policies and incentives, based on the city's revolutionary Comprehensive Land Use Plan, ensure the island's wildlife habitats and natural resources are left intact.

That environmental ethic is inherent in city laws and codes. Building regulations are stringent; property owners are required to landscape with native plants; and a bevy of regulations protect wildlife.

To dissenters, those regulations can seem heavy-handed, but it's a testament to the island's environmental ethic that they are embraced by businesses and residents. To join the Sanibel and Captiva Islands Association of Realtors, agents must complete a course on the natural history and ecosystems of the islands. New residents and business owners are urged to participate in a similar course. Thousands of those in love with what Sanibel stands for volunteer with the many nature-oriented organizations on the island, including the conservation foundation, J.N. "Ding" Darling National Wildlife Refuge, the Clinic for the Rehabilitation of Wildlife (CROW) or the city's own wildlife or vegetation committees.

Planting the Seeds

Had the City of Sanibel not incorporated more than 30 years ago, in November 1974, the Manhattan/Sanibel comparison might be easier to make. In the 1950s and '60s, development-hungry factions were ready to let the dogs loose and make quick work of this pristine barrier island.

Lee County had laid out plans in the mid-'60s that would have allowed more than 90,000 residents; that's nearly three times the number now crowding the island during peak season. Add to them your mandatory strip malls, grocery stores, hotels, motels, gas stations and all the trappings of modern humanity and there you have it: Manhattan, or at least Miami Beach by the Gulf.

But it didn't happen. Conservation-minded residents got in front of the bulldozers and held their ground-almost literally.

Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation: A Natural Course, researched and written by Betty Anholt, Gwenda Hiett-Clements, Kristie Anders and SCCF executive director Erick Lindblad, describes the history of the organization and its role in the island's conservation ethic, and it documents such a showdown: Just a few months before Sanibel's incorporation in 1974, Opal and Willis Combs, armed with a crossbow, faced down bulldozers ready to plow a road through their Woodmere Preserve, a hand-planted showcase of native plants. The road was never built.

The first hint of the island's conservation-minded future had come soon after the era of Florida's infamous plume hunters, who during the late 1800s decimated bird populations in South Florida to supply milliners with the popular feathers. Sanibel offered rich hunting grounds for these hunters. Alarmed by the disappearing flocks of egrets, herons and storks, Sanibel's handful of residents in 1913 declared the island a state bird reservation.

By 1937, the full-time population had declined to barely more than 100 people, but the islands still attracted tourists, as they had since the late 1890s. One of these so-called "rusticators" (people fleeing cold winters and urban life for warm, rustic areas) was to become the most influential Sanibel resident of all time: nationally known cartoonist and conservationist Jay Norwood "Ding" Darling. He had served President Theodore Roosevelt as head of what later became the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, according to A Natural Course.

In 1935, when he first visited Captiva, he was taken with the natural beauty of the islands. In 1937, he gave an "inspired speech" at a meeting at the Fisherman's Lodge on Captiva that drew most of the islands' residents, says the book, and the Inter Island Association for Conservation was born.

Darling brought strong leadership to a group that already saw value in protecting the environment, says Anders. "The people were local residents: farmers, fishermen, small-business owners and winter residents," she says. "A lot of people on Captiva were engaged in or at least knowledgeable of conservation. They had seen the Dust Bowl and [wildlife] populations in other parts of the country plunge because of radical changes in the environment."

Within the next decade, Darling's political influence and the groundswell of support for conservation helped persuade the state legislature to declare both islands wildlife refuges, the federal government to create the Sanibel National Wildlife Refuge, and President Harry Truman to close Sanibel and Captiva islands to hunting, under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, according to SCCF's A Natural Course.

Battle Heats Up

But the lands leased from the state had no guarantees for perpetual conservation. Shortly after Darling's death in 1962, the "Ding" Darling Memorial Committee formed to get public lands dedicated as a wildlife sanctuary in his honor. Five years later, the J.N. "Ding" Darling National Wildlife Refuge, consisting of more than 3,100 acres (it is now about 6,000 acres and occupies almost one-third of Sanibel), was turned over to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. The Memorial Committee regrouped to become the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation, with a mission to protect the natural resources of the islands.

"[These were] folks that knew the best way to preserve land was to buy it or own it," says Anders. "That recognition was pretty forward-thinking."

As developers made big plans for sleepy Sanibel, concerned islanders in 1959 formed a planning and zoning authority. Many fiercely valued the seclusion and unspoiled nature of their island, which quickly put them into conflict with Lee County and developers such as Hugo Lindgren, a well-funded developer with plans to develop his Sanibel property.

Lindgren worked with Lee County to finance the building of the causeway, which would make it infinitely easier to visit-and develop-the islands, and he organized the Island Water Association to help supply his subdivisions with potable water. As Lindgren's crews were dredging a canal, they dug too deeply, hitting the saltwater table and seriously damaging the island's precious freshwater ecosystem.

It was one more catalyzing incident in a political climate that spurred Sanibel residents to take control of their own destiny. Captiva Island, just to the north of Sanibel and connected to it by a bridge, declined and is still part of unincorporated Lee County.

The county battled Sanibel's move to incorporate, but in November 1974, with 85 percent of Sanibel's registered voters casting ballots, two-thirds of them voted to incorporate.

Porter Goss, former owner of the Island Reporter newspaper and now the director of the CIA, was a driving force behind incorporation. He won the mayoral seat, and, under his leadership, the new City Council established an immediate development moratorium. It also "fast-tracked a revolutionary new land-use plan that was based on ecological principles," say Duerksen and Snyder in Nature-Friendly Communities.