As you drive this refuge, it's worth understanding what a rare thing it is — because Sanibel is a beautiful tropical island an hour from a major city, and by every normal rule of Florida it should have been paved wall-to-wall with high-rises and strip malls decades ago. It wasn't. And that was a choice.
Back in the nineteen-seventies, the people of Sanibel looked at the county's plans to pack tens of thousands of people onto their little island, and they said no. They voted to break away and form their own city, specifically so they could write their own rules — and they wrote strict ones. No building taller than the palm trees, roughly a thirty-five-foot cap. No flashing signs, no big chain restaurants on every corner. Limits on how much could be built at all. And they committed to keeping the wild land wild — so that today more than half of this entire island, over sixty percent of it, is protected conservation land that will never be developed. This refuge is the crown jewel of that. So as you enjoy the quiet and the birds and the green, know that it didn't survive by luck. A community decided that some things are worth more than the money you could make paving them, and they made it law. It's the same spirit that made the refuge in the first place. Sanibel is what Florida chose, in a few places, to protect. Roll on and enjoy it.
Photo: Pete Markham from Loretto, USA · CC BY-SA 2.0
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