Florida community literally runs on sunshine
Solar-powered development home to humans and wildlife offers eco-tours for visitors
Along a dirt road leading into Florida’s past, I stopped to marvel at its future, or at least one vision of it. I was headed to Babcock Ranch EcoTours, where visitors pay to tour a working ranch and swampy backwoods on a state-owned preserve, when I pulled over to peer through a chain-link fence onto the edge of a spectacular sea of solar panels — 343,000 to be exact, stretching across 178 hectares.
While the 75-megawatt facility owned by Florida Power & Light attracts no fanfare here, a few miles down State Road 31 its primary customer, Babcock Ranch, has been making headlines for a while. The master-planned development in southwest Florida, between Punta Gorda and Fort Myers, touts itself as the nation’s first solar-powered town. It welcomed its first residents in January and hopes to reach 500 by the end of the year. Eventually, 50,000 are expected.
On a springlike day in late December, I checked out both the ranch and the town, which felt a little like hopping from Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom Jungle Cruise over to Epcot’s Project Tomorrow. It might be tempting to pit the land against the town in a battle of preservation versus development, but the story is not so simple. For one thing, the land isn’t pristine. Babcock Ranch was owned by Edward Babcock, a lumber baron and former Pittsburgh mayor who bought the spread in 1914. In the 1930s, Edward’s son, Fred, added vegetable farming and an earlier incarnation of swamp tours.
In 2005, Fred’s heirs sold their 37,000 hectares to Florida developer Syd Kitson, who then sold off 30,000 hectares of the land to the state in a $350-million transaction.
The result was a parcel of conservation land now called Babcock Ranch Preserve, where the tours are held. In 2016, the state turned over much of the land management to Tarpon Blue, a private cattle company, and announced plans to increase recreational offerings. For now, there is the swamp tour — a 2.4-kilometre walking trail and 25 kilometres of equestrian trails.
I started my visit at the preserve, which includes a gift shop and rustic restaurant, and hopped aboard a “swamp buggy” (a stripped-down school bus in camouflage paint) to explore some of Florida’s flora and fauna. Our guide and driver, Terry Covert, expertly spotted wildlife. We had travelled only for a couple of minutes before the first shriek-worthy sighting.
“Look at those little alligator hatchlings,” Covert said, stopping the bus. A congregation of adorable baby gators piled atop each other in the sun along a swampy area.
As we drove deeper into the ranch, Covert pointed out a bevy of birds, including sandhill cranes, egrets, anhingas, various herons and a redshouldered hawk. More screams of delight erupted as a pack of feral pigs improbably ran toward the bus.
At one point, we were let out to walk a short boardwalk over a swamp dotted with cypress trees and knees leading to an enclosure holding a Florida panther. Covert told us how a wild female panther and two kittens recently had been sighted on the ranch — a positive sign for the endangered species.
We passed a swampy lake teeming with gators sliding across the surface and sunning on the shores, the largest group I’d seen outside of the Everglades.
It hadn’t occurred to me that I’d also see gators at Babcock Ranch, the town, but a couple of hours later, I spotted a few in the water. I also saw herons, egrets and sandhill cranes, though construction cranes and the beep beep beep of equipment backing up are just as noticeable for now. Ultimately, half the project’s 7,200 hectares will be reserved for parks, wetlands and lakes.
Babcock Ranch is very much in its infancy, and has that sparse, newdevelopment look. I visited the town centre, called Founder’s Square. That houses a cluster of commerce, including an outdoors outfitter, upscale general store and café, icecream shop and Table & Tap, a farmto-table restaurant on the shore of 110-hectare Lake Babcock, as well as a waterfront park with band shell.
After spending a day at both Babcock Ranches, I was curious to know what conservation photographer Carlton Ward Jr. thought of the arrangement. Ward comes from a long line of Florida ranchers and has spent countless hours at Babcock Ranch Preserve for a National Geographic project, using trap cameras to document the presence of panthers.
Ward called the arrangement positive in the long run, a setup that can aid conservation amid the inevitable development.
“Babcock Ranch is really a tale of two Floridas,” he told me. “There’s the speculative side of ‘build it and they will come’ and there’s the side still allowing for ranching and protecting the wild part of the state.”