There is an uninvited guest poised to take up permanent residence in southeast Georgia’s fabled Okefenokee Swamp, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum should send the intruder packing.
One month before leaving office, the Biden administration’s Interior Department – without consulting local officials or residents – nominated the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge to be designated as a World Heritage Site under the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Seven months later, in July 2025, the Trump administration announced its withdrawal from UNESCO, a step that goes into effect on Dec. 31, 2026.
“Continued involvement in UNESCO is not in the national interest of the United States,” the State Department said in announcing the withdrawal. “UNESCO works to advance divisive social and cultural causes and maintains an outsized focus on the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals, a globalist ideological agenda for international development at odds with our America First foreign policy.”
If exiting UNESCO is such a good idea, and it is, precisely for the reasons the State Department stated, then why hasn’t the Okefenokee’s nomination to become a World Heritage Site been yanked by the Trump Interior Department?
Covering over 407,000 acres on the Georgia-Florida border, the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge is North America’s largest intact freshwater ecosystem. The Okefenokee features thousands of alligators, along with black bears, deer, waterfowl, cypress forests, and peat (decayed vegetation)-based floating islands known as “trembling earth.”
The Biden administration sought to assure the public that World Heritage Site status would not impinge on U.S. sovereignty over the Okefenokee. “UNESCO only monitors the current conditions and potential threats to the designated properties,” it said in a statement. “The Refuge would continue to be wholly owned and managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.”
But monitoring “potential threats” to the swamp by an U.N.-affiliated organization notably hostile to the United States is exactly what locals fear. While the wildlife refuge itself would still be managed by the FWS, what is to keep surrounding areas from being declared “buffer zones” to better “protect” the swamp?
All three Georgia counties surrounding the swamp – Charlton, Ware, and Clinch – have adopted ordinances opposing the UNESCO bid. “I don’t like any organization I would consider an entangling alliance,” Charlton County Commissioner Drew Jones told CFACT policy analyst Gabriella Hoffman. “There could be concerns about the property adjacent to the swamp. They could come along and say no hunting, no clearcutting, no herbiciding outside the refuge boundary. They could say, ’Oh, we need a buffer zone.’”
Those suspicions were raised last fall, when the swamp was visited by a delegation from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), a global coalition of government agencies, academic institutions, and other agencies. The IUCN is an official adviser to the World Heritage Committee, the body that will decide whether the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge becomes a World Heritage Site, if the Trump administration allows the nomination to go forward.
On Oct. 24, delegates from the IUCN met with residents for about an hour in nearby Folkston. According to Travis Sanctuary, co-founder of Americans for the Okefenokee, the meeting did not go as the IUCN had hoped. Reflecting the views of most of those present, State Representative John Corbett, whose district includes the Okefenokee, spoke out against the designation.
Indeed, the IUCN is hardly a disinterested party when it comes to setting global conservation priorities. On its website, the group posts a blog saying, “Over the past several years, IUCN Member EARTHDAY.ORG has led a campaign to embed climate education in countries’ [Nationally Determined Contributions], the core climate pledges under the Paris Agreement that guide policy, investment, and long-term planning.” The Trump administration, it is worth remembering, has withdrawn the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement.
“Climate change is now the biggest threat to some of the planet’s most beautiful locations: natural World Heritage sites,” UNESCO adds on its website. The IUCN, UNESCO, and their affiliated organizations should be seen by neighbors of the Okefenokee as akin to invasive species, determined to transform the local political ecosystem into a colony of just the kind of global elitism the Trump administration has so forcefully rejected.
That is why Interior Secretary Burgum should rescind the nomination and keep the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge safely within the America-First fold. This would align nicely not only with the exit from UNESCO; it would complement the Trump administration’s recent withdrawal from 66 international organizations, including the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. Trump’s Board of Peace — originally created to oversee the American-mediated ceasefire in Gaza and since expanded to cover other conflicts the U.N. has failed to resolve — is further proof that alternatives to sclerotic, self-serving international bodies exist.
UNESCO is just such an outfit and should not be allowed anywhere near the majestic Okefenokee.
Bonner Russell Cohen, Ph. D., is a senior policy analyst with the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT).
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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