Sitting on the leaf-covered ground, visitors at Ichetucknee Springs State Park felt sunlight shining through a dense tree canopy, warming their faces. Wind rustled their hair, carrying with it the rich smell of wet earth.
During his 30 years as a Florida State Park ranger, Steve Earl guided visitors on silent walks to quiet corners of nature, encouraging them to, “unscrew their head and open their heart.”
“I kind of had a reputation as ‘the different’ ranger,” he said with a laugh.
Earl is part of a growing group of Florida nature-lovers and advocates encouraging springs conservation through human connection. They bring personal stories to a science and policy-dominated space, framing water as a relationship, not a resource.
Many have long-advocated through traditional channels, including city and county commission meetings and rulemaking workshops, but, Earl said, “we didn’t see a whole lot of results from that.”
“We kind of stepped back and said, ‘well, maybe there needs to be a different approach,’” he said. “You’re not going to be a steward of something unless you have a deep personal relationship with it.”
Savoring, not selling
From Juan Ponce de León’s search for the fountain of youth in the 16th century to routine baptisms at Paradise Park in the 1950s, Florida’s springs are longtime homes to both the sacred and the religious.
“Here is this water that we know so intimately, but at the same time it is something that we can see as set apart and revered and special,” said Victoria Machado, a visiting assistant professor of Environmental Studies at Rollins College. She is a 3rd generation South Floridian. Her awe of the outdoors led her to pursue a PhD in religion and nature at the University of Florida.
Machado and Earl were two of seven speakers to present at the “Sacred Springs” event on Feb. 6, organized by Lucinda Faulkner Merritt.
More than 70 people listened as stories of the sacred, the revered and the transformative filled the Florida Springs Institute, its walls plastered with mentions of “aquatic macrophytes” and “ecosystem metabolism”.
To create a culture of appreciation of the springs, said Merritt, “science is the bedrock, but it’s not enough.”
“You can't help but start to think these larger ideas when you are near the ocean or near the springs or in the Everglades, right?” added Machado. “It’s this sense of wilderness.”
Machado said Florida’s springs face multiple types of commodification, among them industries including bottling that sell a spring’s water, and those such as tourism – that sell its image.
A brochure from the 1950s encouraging tourism at Silver Springs (Via Florida Memory)
“More people are connected to the springs now,” she said.“That's where we're getting the concept of loving these springs to death.” Before attendance was regulated, Ichetucknee Springs State Park admitted more than 5,000 tubers per day. With more visitors came more connections, but also more cars, trash and harm to the ecosystem.
After studying human impacts to underwater plants in 1989, the park decreased its tubing capacity to its current limit of 3,000 people per day.
When the park closed during COVID-19, the Park Service noted a “remarkable recovery” of submerged aquatic vegetation in the Upper Ichetucknee River. Water clarity improved and algae receded in the Lower Ichetucknee, too.
Springs advocates don’t encourage parks to close. Instead, they promote a mentality shift reframing the springs as spaces with inherent value – spiritual or otherwise – rather than a resource to be managed.
Their strategy is evidence-based. A 2023 meta-analysis of more than 800 studies showed people were more likely to protect the environment when they reported a psychological connection with nature.
“Are our springs inherently sacred? I think so,” said Steve Earl, the retired park ranger. “Do they become even more sacred or profound the more that we recognize that and honor it?” he asked. “Yes.”
“A loved one”
Earl’s own relationship with the springs started 1983. “The day that I first met the Ichetucknee,” he said, “I recognized immediately it was the center of the universe.”
He was drawn in by its waters, which he described as a “turquoise crystal bowl of liquid gem.”
Earl moved next door to the park to be able to visit it every day. He began working part-time to have more time to explore the Ichetucknee, photographing, writing about and painting its waters. His five children learned to swim in the river’s headspring.
A ranger job at Gold Head Branch State Park took Earl to Clay County, but his heart stayed with the Ichetucknee.
“Of all my special places,” Earl said, “I consider it my most sacred place.”
Earl spent 30 years caring for the springs at both parks.
“Most people were there just to receive what they could from [the spring] without any notion of giving back,” he said. “They were loud. They were rambunctious and I understand some of that. It's exciting to be in a wild, scenic place. It does stir you.”
Whenever he could, Earl encouraged guests to pause and soak in the sounds, sights and smells of the springs, adding that they urgently need caretakers.
Earl has watched eelgrass recede, water cloud and species disappear in the Ichetucknee since his first visit more than 40 years ago, a process he likened to “watching a loved one slowly die of cancer.”
He cherishes and mourns the spring at the same time. “Even if things seem hopelessly bleak,” he said, “I think we still have to hold vision for what it can be once again.”
