In Defense of Urban Wild Space in Miami

As you move west along Miami’s Coral Reef Drive in your air-conditioned car, gas stations and strip malls and neat residential developments flashing past your windows on the right-hand side, you probably wouldn’t even notice the land that’s under dispute in this sprawling city. But look off to your left and you’ll see a wall of green: the edge of an 88-acre tract where developers want to build what they’re calling Coral Reef Commons. It would feature a 158,000-square-foot Walmart, a Chick-fil-A, a Chili’s, and 900 apartments.

That plan has hit a snag in the form of officials from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, who say the land encompasses one of the last remnants of a rare type of habitat called pine rocklands. According to the Miami Herald, which has been reporting in depth on the story, 165,000 acres of such forest once flourished between the Miami River and what is now the city of Homestead to the south. Only 2 percent remains. Occurring only in one other place, the Bahamas, pine rocklands provide habitat for a variety of endangered flora and fauna, including the Bartram’s hairstreak butterfly and the Florida bonneted bat. Outside of the Everglades, just 2,900 acres remain scattered across the booming region.