The Okefenokee is about to be honored, but some locals aren’t celebrating

The Okefenokee swamp is poised to join awe-inspiring U.S. landscapes including the Grand Canyon and the Everglades as the nation’s 27th World Heritage Site, a designation a United Nations committee will vote to formalize early Saturday in South Korea.

Despite the prestige, it’s an honor that some folks who live near the swamp would just as soon skip. It’s not that they don’t love the Okefenokee. They do. What they can’t bear is the United Nations.

Lawn signs urging “Keep the U.N. (UNESCO) out of the Okefenokee” have dotted the roads around Ware and Charlton counties for several years. The same slogan appears on t-shirts.

It’s a widespread sentiment around the swamp, said Ware County Commissioner Barry Cox, who spent 40 years running the county’s vehicle maintenance shop before being elected in 2024.

Ware is one of three Georgia counties that surround the swamp, along with Charlton and Clinch. All three are rural and deep red. Donald J. Trump received more than 70 percent of the vote in each county in the 2024 general election.

Trump’s “America First” agenda resonates here. The United Nations, not so much. Trump announced in July 2025 that the U.S. would withdraw from UNESCO – the UN body that directs the World Heritage Sites program – at the end of this year because it’s focused on goals “at odds with our America First foreign policy.”

A World Heritage Site designation “increases a site’s significance to the world,” according to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, which owns and manages the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge. “Becoming a World Heritage Site does not confer any ownership or management authority to the United Nations, USFWS wrote in a 2024 explainer. “UNESCO only monitors the current conditions and potential threats to the designated properties. The Refuge would continue to be wholly owned and managed by the US Fish and Wildlife Service.”

Constituents oppose it

Nevertheless, Cox opposes the World Heritage Site designation because his constituents oppose it.

“All I could hear was the people that I represent were scared that they was going to come in here and maybe start taking their land, or you know kind of ruling them what they could do,” he told The Current. “And to be honest with you, I went to one of the meetings that they had that showed, you know, about UNESCO, and it was kind of very unsettling to me, and that’s basically about all I know.”

The meeting he attended was sponsored by an anti-UNESCO group, but he couldn’t recall which one. Cox was unable to attend a meeting held by the pro-UNESCO faction, he said.

The Current tried unsuccessfully to contact the two main anti-UNESCO groups active on social media in South Georgia. Americans for the Okefenokee declined an interview, saying “After review, I don’t think we are interested in an interview with The Current GA at this point, but thanks for asking,” via Facebook messenger. Georgia Republican Assembly did not reply to multiple messages sent via Facebook messenger and through its website.

In June of 2025 Cox and his fellow commissioners passed a resolution addressing the World Heritage Site nomination. They voted to affirm the county’s “commitment that it shall not adopt, implement, or enforce any rule, regulation, policy, or mandate originated by, or traceable to, the United Nations or a subsidiary entity of the United Nations which infringes upon or restricts private property rights without due process in violation of the U.S. Constitution or Georgia Constitution.”

CFACT video

The anti-UNESCO contingent points to several examples of how public opinion is on their side. They’re laid out in a Youtube video produced by Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit that advocates for a free-market approach to environmental issues and rejects the scientific consensus around man-made climate change.

Gabriella Hoffman is a CFACT policy analyst and host of “Save Okefenokee from UNESCO Control,” the December 2025 addition to CFACT’s “Conservation Country Series” that focuses on the World Heritage Site nomination.

She points to the Ware County resolution as well as a similar one in Charlton County. Then there’s a vote in Ware County that Hoffman said provides evidence that “there was a lot more opposition than was being reported.”

That vote was a Republican party question posed by the county Republican party in the June 2024 primary. Party questions are nonbinding. They do not enact any policies but rather function as polls. And they’re not a random sample, scientific poll, said Andra Gillespie, associate professor of political science at Emory University. Instead they’re taking the pulse of party faithful, the people who turn out for primary elections.

The 2024 Ware County party question read:

“The Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge is being considered for the United Nations designation as a UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) World Heritage Site. The UN has an agenda which includes a policy for control of local school curricula, infrastructure plans, land use, transportation and housing. Knowing that this infringes on United States sovereignty, do you favor the designation of the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge as a United Nations UNESCO World Heritage Site?

Of the 3,144 Republican primary voters, 93% said “no.”

Charles Bullock, longtime distinguished professor of Public International Affairs at the University of Georgia, noted the question’s wording leads to this answer.

“Who in the world is going to vote for that?” he said. “Right? We’re going to be taken over by the UN.”

The CFACT video and a shorter version released in late June label the World Heritage Site designation a “land grab.” In the long video, Cox and other local residents appear on camera to voice their concerns.

“If I had 10 minutes with Donald Trump, we could talk about these issues as clear and concise,” Charlton County Commissioner Drew Jones told CFACT in the video. “I think it’s just flown under the radar, some maybe deliberately by the NGOs who pushed this, and I think Trump’s just busy.”

He also suggests there should be state and federal level laws passed “that just basically codify the fact these international organizations have no jurisdiction here.”

Metaphorical land grab

In speaking to The Current GA, Jones said his fear about the UNESCO designation is really a more subtle effect.

“I absolutely understand it would not be a direct land grab, but I think what people mean is metaphorically they would have some implicit influence on lands, public lands, and they shouldn’t,” Jones said.

The fact that U.S. adversaries including Russia and communist China are powerful within the U.N., with permanent membership on the U.N. Security Council, doesn’t sit well with local residents.

“I don’t think China or Russia, whoever, they’re not going to come, you know, manage the swamp, steal the swamp, poison the swamp,” Jones said. “But I just don’t even like the idea of them sitting around a table 50 years from now talking about this is a threat or that is. It needs to come from Atlanta or DC.”

Joe Hopkins did not participate in the videos but also doesn’t support the World Heritage Site designation. Hopkins’ family business, Toledo Manufacturing, owns and manages forest land around the swamp. His opposition boils down to what he sees as protecting his property rights.

“The idea of the U.N. or a U.N. agency having any kind of say over land down here concerns me,” he said.

He pointed to a proposed gold mine near Yellowstone National Park, the nation’s first national park and among the first to be named a World Heritage Site in 1978.

“You know it’s one thing to have 100,000 plus letters written because some guy wants to mine, but if you’re part of the United Nations, you may have 100-something countries writing letters,” he said.

But that’s not what tipped the balance against the New World Mine proposed outside of Yellowstone in the early 1990s, according to Public Land and Resources Law Review. The World Heritage Committee did visit Yellowstone in 1995 and placed the park on its “endangered” list, a decision the law journal said “carried little legal weight, (but) it did heighten national and international scrutiny of the mine proposal.” Instead, a ruling against the mine in a Clean Water Act lawsuit is credited with prompting the company to eventually abandon its plans and reach a settlement.

CFACT’s video points misleadingly to two studies to argue against World Heritage Site status for the Okefenokee.

“These designations often come, quote, at a cost to the local population’s human rights,” Hoffman narrates while referring to a study that looked at sites where local populations live with in the site’s boundaries. That’s not the case with the Okefenokee.

In the second case, Hoffman narrates “Stanford University lamented that UNESCO World Heritage has lost its way,” while showing a headline from a 2018 Stanford newsletter highlighting the work of anthropologist Lynn Meskell. In the article, Meskell argued the program had lost its way because countries cared more about benefitting from UNESCO’s brand rather than focusing on conservation and preservation.

And in a Q&A accompanying the article, Meskell rejected the notion that World Heritage Sites are under U.N. control.

“One problem is that there is widespread ignorance when it comes to UNESCO,” she said. Some people think that a UNESCO inscribed site is not U.S. sovereign territory and that the United Nations somehow controls those sites. That is incorrect.”

Bullock, the UGA political scientist, attributes the anti-UNESCO attitudes to strong localism.

“Folks say, you know, we don’t want anybody telling us what we can do with our property, or we can do with our schools. So yeah, you don’t want the U.N. to be able to do this.”

It’s happened throughout U.S. history, he said.

“If you go back to 1928 or 1960, when Democrats nominated a Catholic president, it was ‘we don’t want our politics to be run out of Rome,’” he said. “And another aspect of this localism would be, for better part of a century, ‘we don’t want the federal government telling us what we can do to run race relations.’”

The UNESCO committee is scheduled to vote on the Okefenokee’s World Heritage Site nomination at 3 p.m. local time in Busan, South Korea on Saturday. Watch a livestream or video of the vote here.

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This story was originally published by The Current and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.