Shannon Estenoz’s roots in the mangrove-rimmed wetlands of South Florida run deep. She is a fifth-generation native of Key West, who has dedicated her career to restoring the Everglades. As national co-chair of the 41-member Everglades Coalition and director of World Wildlife Fund’s Everglades office, Ms. Estenoz led the successful campaign to secure the landmark bipartisan legislation authorizing a 30-year, $7.8-billion program to restore the Everglades.
Ms. Estenoz worked tirelessly to convince state and federal agencies to craft the comprehensive Everglades restoration plan that gives priority to ecosystem restoration. As a member of Governor Jeb Bush’s Commission for the Everglades, the South Florida Water Management District’s Lower East Coast Water Supply Committee, and an alternate member of the Governor’s Commission for a Sustainable South Florida, Ms. Estenoz relied on her training as a civil engineer to question long-held assumptions about flood control and water supply requirements hindering Everglades restoration.
In all of her work, Shannon Estenoz has won the admiration and respect of her colleagues in the environmental community, government, agriculture, and industry. She is inspired by the desire to insure that the Everglades remain for her son Nicholas to enjoy, and she deeply believes the words of Marjory Stoneman Douglas: “Perhaps, even in this last hour, in a new relation of usefulness and beauty, the vast, magnificent, subtle and unique region of the Everglades may not be utterly lost.”
— William Robert Irvin, World Wildlife Fund, Washington, DC