Environment, bipartisanship lose best friend
With the passing of Nathaniel “Nat” Reed at the age of 84 last week, Florida lost more than the best friend the environment could have had.
To achieve what he did, which ranged from saving the Big Cypress Swamp from a ruinous jetport scheme to helping write the Endangered Species Act, he made and enjoyed friendships across the political aisle — a concept that now seems to divide America like the Berlin wall once sundered Berlin.
Although he was a lifelong Republican and born to wealth in a family that counted the Bushes of Connecticut as close friends, Reed made allies wherever he could find them and admired bipartisanship in others.
One of his treasured experiences was a late-night airport encounter during the 1978 gubernatorial campaign between Jack Eckerd, whom he was supporting, and Democrat Bob Graham, who won and whom Reed subsequently served in various capacities.
“The two men walked to each other and embraced, and we stood there in a circle for 30 minutes with a certain amount of hilarity and a certain amount of really friendly but firm debate as to how they viewed the state of Florida and the campaign,” he told an interviewer in 2008. “That the two men who were campaigning as tough as you could get against each other could have been as civil with each other at the moment was an indelible memory for me.”
Reed came to love the environment while growing up on a Martin County island resort his father established with an oil fortune. Early on, he protested so vigorously at a meeting of the South Florida Water Management Board, which, years later, he would chair, that he was thrown out. In 1962, Gov. Farris Bryant, a Democrat, named him chair of the State Board of Antiquities, where he worked successfully to secure for the state a quarter share of the treasures from sunken Spanish galleons.
He ventured into electoral politics out of disgust with Haydon Burns, a Democratic governor who, like most predecessors, had helped developers ravage the state. Reed volunteered in the 1966 campaign of Republican Claude Kirk, Jr., who was elected knowing and caring nothing about the environment. But at that juncture, ignorance was a virtue because Kirk depended entirely on Reed, who became his dollar-a-year adviser. The environment is rightly regarded as a luminous chapter in the otherwise dismal history of Kirk’s administration because it brought about the end of promiscuous dredging and filling of estuaries for the sake of selling more waterfront lots.
At one point, Kirk scoffed at Reed for his working relationship with Reubin Askew, a Democratic senator from Pensacola. Kirk considered Pensacola powerless and Askew a “mumbler.” “He passes my bills,” Reed said. Reed had persuaded Kirk, and then Nixon, to thwart the jetport, a grandiose scheme that called for six-mile-long runways on 39 square miles in the Everglades, and then to halt construction on the equally controversial Cross Florida Barge Canal.
At the Department of the Interior, he fought to protect eagles, stop indiscriminate poisoning of coyotes, and persistently crossed swords with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Bureau of Reclamation.
Returning to Florida, he chaired a commission that recommended preserving billions of dollars worth of wild lands and helped to found the environmental group, 1,000 Friends of Florida. This is only a short list of what he did for Florida and the world.
He died doing something he loved best: fishing for salmon in Canada. He fell and hit his head, a fatal injury. He had just caught a 16-pound salmon. After weighing it, he released it.
Reed’s achievements perhaps owed in large part to having never sought elective office for himself, except as a Jupiter Island town commissioner. On one occasion when he did consider running for governor, Republican Party leaders, fearing his independence, were less than encouraging and he abandoned the idea.
In the wake of his death, one must wonder whether his type of bipartisan citizenship is gone forever, to the nation’s detriment. Sad to say, it seems so. But if there was once such a time, there is no reason why there can’t be another. All it will take is more Americans like Nat Reed.