On Americas's big day, July 4, we celebrate M.C. Davis, a former gambler and businessman, whose amalgamation of 54,000-acres in the Florida Panhandle makes him the largest private land owner of conservation land in the southeastern United States...........Like Media Mogul Ted Turner(the largest private landowner in the USA with all of his holdings in conservation easements), Davis is an example of a person who thankfully has contracted an incurable case of biophilia(the connection human beings subconsciously seek with the rest of life)...............For the past 20 years, Davis has been restoring ecosystems that agriculture and timbering have destroyed east of Pensacola..............After randomly pulling into a high school to listen to a talk about the fledgling Florida black bear restoration in the state, Davis decided that his fortune should be put to use "saving nature"............And indeed he has"put his money where his mouth is", thus far investing $90 million to create this Longleaf Pine natural area...........Davis" time on the planet is limited as he has stage 4 lung cancer..........Nonetheless, he has a 300 year timeline for his money, leaving it all to conservation trusts to continue additional land preservation into the future after he is gone..............In Davis" own words----"I'm hoping that we're capable of leaving some huge biological warehouses that — if and when our country fails, and all of them do sooner or later — that hopefully the impacts wouldn't be total"................. "That nature just doesn't have to start from scratch"...................Join me in saluting a true Patriot--M.C. Davis..............We need more like him across North America!!!!!

Gambler-Turned-Conservationist Devotes Fortune To Florida Nature Preserve M.C. Davis made millions gambling and buying up land and mineral rights. Now, he's restoring ecosystems destroyed by agriculture and timbering in his private preserve, one of the largest in the U.S. click here to Read this story

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Matt Aresco, a biologist and director at

 Nokuse, points to one of the

 millions of longleaf pines crews have 

planted on the plantation. 

Longleaf pines once covered about 40 

million acres across the

 South. By the 1930s, all of those original

 trees were cut down