Business leader pushes eco-tourism to protect environment and bolster economy
Photos and text by Kathy Hagood

Brevard County’s latest growth spurt deeply worries Laurilee Thompson.

She’s afraid that unless we better regulate development we could hurt our $2 billion a year tourism industry and lose the very thing that makes our area desirable: quality of life.

“We could kill what sustains us,” said Thompson, who founded the Space Coast Birding & Wildlife Festival eight years ago to help educate Space Coast residents about the value of our diverse ecosystems.

As a fifth generation Floridian, Thompson has watched her beloved wildlife haunts degrade as population here has increased over the years.

“The water at Haulover Canal used to be perfectly clear, but now it’s murky. I used to catch bait shrimp there for my grandfather’s fishing pier during the summer,” said Thompson, who lives in Mims.

She knows Haulover, which draws visitors looking to spot manatees, and other natural areas are key to Brevard’s ecotourism industry.

Her family’s restaurant, Dixie Crossroads in Titusville, heavily depends on tourist traffic.

“I’m the perfect advocate because I can make the business case for preserving the environment,” she said.

Thompson points to communities like nearby Port Orange and Ponce Inlet in Volusia County, which have balanced development with preservation.

Thompson knows firsthand about killing the goose that lays golden eggs. In her own words, she used to be “one of the biggest rapers of the environment out there.”

She ran commercial long-line fishing boats from 1977 to 1987, fishing for swordfish, tuna, grouper and snapper from Cape Hateras, NC, to the Texas-Mexican border. Like the long-line fishermen in “The Perfect Storm” Thompson and her crew, including her now-deceased brother Tim, were sometimes out on the ocean catching fish for weeks at a time.

Thompson had an edge on many of the other boat captains and became one of the industry’s biggest producers. Her associate’s degree in oceanographic technology from Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne allowed her to apply scientific principles to her fish hunts.

“The fish didn’t have a chance,” she said.

Improvements in technology like sonar helped her and other boat captains phenomenally increase their catches. Although the bigger catches meant more money in the short term over the long haul the fisheries were depleted.

By 1987, Thompson was so frustrated by declining catches that she went to work as kitchen manager at her parent’s restaurant where she prepped, cooked, cleaned and managed the kitchen seven days a week.

“I left fishing because I was beaten up mentally and physically from coping with the decline in the fish stocks and living on the sea all those years. I learned first hand how you can destroy a resource when it’s not well regulated,” she said.

But that was only her first lesson.

Her father Rodney Thompson had begun popularizing rock shrimp in 1969 after he invented a machine to split their hard shells. He opened a plant to process about 10 million pounds of rock shrimp a year.

But by the mid-1980s, a Gulf Coast company modified a traditional soft-shell shrimp machine to peel rock shrimp. Because rock shrimp was lower in price than regular shrimp, other Gulf Coast processing plants followed suit.

Gulf shrimp boats soon came to our coast and began over-harvesting the rock shrimp off Port Canaveral and other areas of the Atlantic Coast, including using destructive bottom trawling in shrimp nurseries in the deep-water Oculina Reef.

Harvesting peaked in 1991. About 40 million pounds of rock shrimp was brought into Florida docks.

Thompson tried to warn her dad about the situation. At first he thought her concern was unfounded but as rock shrimp catches continued to decline and affected Dixie Crossroads, he began to speak out. In 1994 he began a campaign to stop bottom trawling in the Oculina Reef and to create a management plan.

His warnings were resented and ignored by commercial fishermen until catch rates declined to critical levels. By 2000, less than 3,000 pounds of rock shrimp were harvested.

Finally members of the industry woke up and worked with her father to create a management plan in 2001 that was unanimously approved by the South Atlantic Marine Fisheries Council.

“There’s an ‘I’m going to get mine’ mentality in the commercial fishing industry. Without regulations that apply to everyone, you’re not going to see individual fishermen do the right thing out of the goodness of their heart. The industry is too competitive. The same thing applies to developers,” she said.

But those lessons of depleting resources were only part of what spurred Laurilee Thompson’s passion as an activist. A visit by Ralph Bird, the president of the Indian River Audubon Society, is likely the thing that changed her life, she said.

She was cleaning lobsters in the kitchen at Dixie Crossroads when Bird walked in, introduced himself and asked her to be on his board of directors. Although Thompson had been a member of the organization for years, she had never been active.

“Why me?” she asked.

He explained he needed a business leader on his board. Thompson’s father agreed to let her off on the Tuesday night once a month the board meeting was held.

Before long that one change in her schedule ignited a fire in Thompson’s belly. She began getting involved in a variety of environmental preservation efforts and taking a leadership role in convincing the local business community and government leaders of the economic importance of our natural resources.

“When I saw that devoted group of Audubon members actually trying to make a difference and preserve what I loved about the place I grew up in, I wanted to take a more active role,” she said.

Because Dixie Crossroads is one of the area’s largest employers and because Thompson researched facts and figures on the business case for environmental preservation, even community leaders who tended to dismiss environmentalists often listened to her.

“There’s a stereotype that environmentalists want to stop development completely, but these days many of those who want to protect the environment understand the need for moderation,” she said.

She currently serves on a wide variety of boards and committees in addition to the Audubon Society including the Brevard County Tourist Development Council, the Brevard Nature Alliance, Merritt Island Wildlife Association and VISIT FLORIDA.

When Thompson realized in 1997 that Florida didn’t have a major annual birding festival, she gathered a group and organized one for that November. The festival has grown each year and attracts international, national and local speakers and attendees.

“When people get the chance to understand the biodiversity we have here and that our area is unique, they become more prone to want to protect our resources,” Thompson said. “We want to preserve what makes our area special and attractive to both tourists and residents.”