“Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bonds.”  Thomas Jefferson

Our Resource Conservation and Development (RC&D) Council Web site is designed for the residents of all north central Florida counties including our friends in the 10 Suwannee River RC&D Council counties. We hope it helps both city and rural dwellers, citizens of this great land, to stand up and accept the challenge of the new times we are facing together. Our office is on a 200 acre pine plantation. The address is 22004 N.W. County Hwy. 2054, Alachua, 32615. The telephone number is now at the office of its Chairman, Mark Van Soestbergen and is 352-367-1144. To become a member you need $25. This allows you to vote at the annual meeting whch is held on the last Tuesday of November.

Our first full board of directors was elected in November 2009. Our Project Committee does the nuts and bolts work of seeking, discussing, approving and developing new projects in four project areas. Every other month in the “Brain Food” tab above, we will have a book review, an essay or a new project outline bringing readers what we call “deep ecology.” The pictures in the Photo Gallery represent areas where the Council believes we can serve our community through Land Conservation, Soil and Water Conservation, Community Development, or Land Management. (Check out the “stories” associated with each picture.)

We want to keep things as organically simple for you as possible.  The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said, “The only simplicity to be trusted is the simplicity to be found on the far side of complexity.”   We attempt on this Web site to reach the “far side of complexity” by first linking work done in the past (in the arena of land and water conservation and renewable energy) to wealth creation for today and tomorrow. Men of outstanding achievement like Don Post, Alex Green, Wayne Smith and Gordon Prine – all UFers – prepared the way and are still among us and their 160 plus years of toil at UF live on. We ask visitors to see and understand how fragile we all (eventually) become alongside our regional environment today.

Finally, our bird: the Swallow-tailed Kite is used in the Council’s letterhead and symbolizes the freedoms and virtues we feel need to be cultivated in the great state of Florida and North Central Florida region. The Swallow-tailed Kite breeds from the southeastern United States to eastern Peru and northern Argentina. Once its range was much larger, but the destruction of its favored habitat by farming and deforestation has led it to retreat to the swampier areas in the South. A key conservation area is the Lower Suwannee National Wildlife Refuge in Florida.

 

The RC&D Council meets the last Tuesday of the month. Our next meeting is February 28th, 2012 at the state headquarters of the USDA’s Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) in Gainesville. The agenda for the January meeting is still posted in the side-bar to this page under “Next Agenda.”

Postscript: “Human deeds, unless they are remembered, are the most futile and perishable things on earth.” (Hannah Arendt)