By Stephanie Hunt for Southern Environmental Law Center
photos by Joel Caldwell
It has been more than three decades since Antwon Nixon saw Oscar on an elementary school field trip to the Okefenokee Swamp, but he vividly remembers being mesmerized by the 13-foot, 1,000-pound alligator. “He was huge, swam around in the blackwater like he owned the place. I was infatuated,” says Nixon, a native of Folkston, Georgia, a tiny railroad town — population 4,600 — bordering the primeval wetlands of the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge.
When Nixon first learned about an Alabama company’s plans to mine titanium near the Okefenokee in 2021, years after that childhood visit, he thought of Oscar. “Something dormant in me became vibrant again once I realized the swamp was under threat,” he says. On a return visit to the rare wilderness in his backyard — the largest blackwater swamp in North America and home to one of the most well-preserved and intact freshwater ecosystems in the world — he found Oscar’s impressive skeleton on display in the visitor’s center. The nearly century-old gator had died of natural causes, but generations of his offspring now thrive amid the refuge’s more than 400,000 acres of pinelands, open wet prairies, and forested cypress swamps, and Nixon is determined to protect them, along with the red-cockaded woodpeckers, gopher tortoises, and other species who live there.
