Don’t Kill Australian Pines in Fort DeSoto Park
Many flowers and shrubs here enhance our beautiful state, which would otherwise be scrubland. The Cayman Islands would be nothing without the Australian pines, and they flourish throughout the Caribbean, giving welcome shade and helping to absorb carbon dioxide.
Florida is full of exotic species, which give the land color and beauty. Not all exotics are bad.
It seems these beautiful trees with their feathery leaves are destined to be eradicated from Shell Key by 2012, and nearby Fort De Soto is rapidly losing these wonderful shade trees, leaving us with no protection from the sun near the shore (and very little elsewhere in the park).
Fort De Soto Park was voted the No. 1 beach in the country in 2005 by Dr. Stephen Leatherman and won the honor from a travel group this year.
But with the current policy I suspect there will only be an outcry when the pines at the north end of the park are killed, leaving the most popular destination for beachgoers in the park without shade.
By then it will be too late.
After growing peacefully and shading us so nicely for more than 100 years, we are going to cut them down needlessly. See the Friends of the Pines Web site to learn the facts and regulatory laws about these trees: www.australianpines.org.
Over the past 10 years Australian pines have slowly been ringed with a chain saw in the park and left to sit for years looking bare and unsightly until the elements eventually felled them.
Parts of the park are looking quite ghoulish, and it appears from the following document that we are doomed to lose them all.
This document pertains to neighboring Shell Key, but the eradication of the pines in Fort De Soto Park is keeping pace with Shell Key: www.pinellascounty.org/scienceforum/pdf/ESF_August_16_07_recomm.pdf.
I wonder if Fort De Soto Park will retain its No. 1 rating when Pinellas County is through?
How about all the additional cases of melanoma that will result?
Christopher Davies, Tierra Verde 
 

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