If you had the power to buy back a billion-dollar property just to save an endangered animal, would you do it?

Well, that is what the US government did after it found that the over 25,000-hectare Picayune Strand State Forest in Florida had a few endangered species of panthers.

It brings up the argument of what countries like Ghana which have the power over its forests are doing to save them and its wildlife from the effects of illegal mining.

As part of the Multimedia Group’s media Co-op with the US-Foreign Press Center, Erastus Asare Donkor and Kofi Asare tour the Picayune Strand Forest bought back from private owners to save endangered Florida Panthers.

But when the US government weighed the importance of preserving some endangered animal species like the Florida Panther, the Red-Cockaded Wool Pecker and the Bald Eagle, it decided to take action.

Through the American constitutional provision known as the ‘Eminent Seizure’, it bought back the lands to protect nature.

Charley Vance, a graduate student at the Florida Gulf Coast University is monitoring the restoration of the wildlife and ecosystem here.