Hope flick­ers for the unique and beau­ti­ful, but dam­aged, Flori­da Everglades

By Gwen­dolyn Craig

In the midst of the fields and lakes of saw­grass, man­groves, alli­ga­tor beds and bird rook­eries of the Ever­glades, the weath­er is dic­tat­ed by a world far away, across the ocean.

“African weath­er arcs across the Atlantic and just before it gets to the Gulf of Mex­i­co, it hits South Flori­da, the Yucatan and Cuba,” said Joe Brow­der, for­mer chair­man of the Ever­glades Coali­tion and first con­ser­va­tion direc­tor of Friends of the Earth. “The African weath­er sys­tems hit these three land mass­es. It rains like crazy and rains like crazy again. That’s what makes the land-based ecosys­tem in the Ever­glades so bio­log­i­cal­ly com­plex and rich. There’s just no place in the world where you have the old world send­ing ener­gy and mois­ture to the new world, at a place where tem­per­ate North Amer­i­ca and the trop­ics touch.”

It is this idio­syn­crat­ic, but beau­ti­ful ecosys­tem that will be lost if restora­tion efforts

fail to save it. Most peo­ple are gen­er­al­ly opti­mistic about the progress, but there is plen­ty of wor­ry and plen­ty of con­tention. Over $13 bil­lion have gone into the first phase, the Com­pre­hen­sive Ever­glades Restora­tion Pro­gram, which orig­i­nal­ly had a price tag of about $8 bil­lion. Sev­er­al oth­er projects not part of CERP, have tak­en time and mon­ey and publicity—the $197 mil­lion land deal with Unit­ed States Sug­ar Cor­po­ra­tion, and the $81 mil­lion ele­vat­ed Tami­a­mi Trail project.

“That bridge is a sign of vir­tu­al­ly every­thing that is wrong about Ever­glades restora­tion. It’s just a bridge that hon­est to God is just pick­ing up a shov­el, start­ing a bull doz­er, to show they’re doing some­thing,” said Dex­ter Lehti­nen, for­mer U.S. attor­ney for South Flori­da, who has rep­re­sent­ed the Mic­co­su­kee Tribe of Native Americans.

Oth­ers are more excit­ed about the amount of progress made in the last few years. “Con­struc­tion is up and run­ning, and that’s real­ly sat­is­fy­ing,” said Shan­non Estenoz, direc­tor of the Ever­glades Restora­tion Ini­tia­tives for the Depart­ment of Inte­ri­or. “There have been times in the last 15 years where things were not going as well, and I’m down­right gid­dy these days.”

One of the trick­i­est parts in the restora­tion effort seems to be keep­ing CERP and these oth­er out­side projects in synch. That has not always worked, espe­cial­ly when some key play­ers are not sat­is­fied with CERP, and oth­ers are not sat­is­fied with the out­side projects.

CERP is a con­tro­ver­sial bill passed in 2000 by Con­gress and the Clinton

Admin­is­tra­tion. It includes 60 com­po­nents to be com­plet­ed over 30 years. Orig­i­nal­ly the price tag was $7.8 bil­lion, but it has since increased to about $13.4 bil­lion over the years.

One rea­son for some of the crit­i­cism CERP has received is the agen­cies man­ag­ing it—the U.S. Army Corps of Engi­neers and the South Flori­da Water Man­age­ment Dis­trict. The

Corps, which does a lot of the dredg­ing, con­struc­tion and exca­vat­ing, and the water man­age­ment dis­trict, which con­trols the lev­els of the water through­out the Ever­glades and near­by cities, are great­ly con­cerned with flood con­trol. Just a few inch­es of rain can call in water man­age­ment work­ers into the office in the mid­dle of the night so they can get pump sta­tions run­ning to decrease the water lev­els. With South Flori­da a prime hur­ri­cane spot, the sec­ond to largest pump sta­tion in the world, Pump S5A, works con­tin­u­ous­ly to keep homes from flooding—CERP isn’t all about restor­ing the Everglades.

Some peo­ple, like Brow­der, think the restora­tion effort has turned into a pure flood con­trol project, meant to tai­lor to the agri­cul­tur­al areas, cities and real estate mar­kets. Sav­ing the actu­al Ever­glades would just be a bonus, if it happened.

“This is one inter­con­nect­ed sys­tem,” said Stu­art Appel­baum, the chief of plan­ning and pol­i­cy divi­sion at the Corp’s Jack­sonville Fla. office. “It’s kind of like whack-a-mole. You pop one down some­where and anoth­er one springs up because you’re not think­ing about the sys­tem. So what I think a lot of what we do now is to think through the sys­tem. Before what they’d try to do is solve one prob­lem and cre­ate one some­where else.”

Two CERP projects that Estenoz said are com­ing along well, are the Picayune Strand Restora­tion Project, and the C1-11 Spread­er Canal Project. The Picayune Strand project locat­ed in Col­lier Coun­ty is designed to restore wet­lands and nat­ur­al water flow in the area. The C1-11 project encour­ages water flow to Flori­da Bay by using pump sta­tions and canals.

The restora­tion of the Lake Okee­chobee water­shed is one CERP project that has been a mix­ture of progress and regres­sion. The lake, which is 730 square miles and the sev­enth largest fresh­wa­ter one in the nation, has pris­tine water, green grass and flocks of birds

with­in por­tions of its body. Oth­er parts are slabs of muck and dead shrubs. It’s a work in progress.

The water in Lake Okee­chobee is being pol­lut­ed by agri­cul­tur­al run-off. The lake, which requires extreme­ly low lev­els of nutri­ents, has become inun­dat­ed with amounts of phos­pho­rous high­er than what it can tol­er­ate. This caus­es less com­mon plant species, such as cat­tails, to take over in some areas of the lake and downstream.

Lake Okee­chobee is like the heart of the Ever­glades. It swells in the rainy sea­son and con­tracts in the dry sea­son, pump­ing lifeblood—water—through a series of arte­r­i­al canals. If the phos­pho­rous lev­els remain too high, the lake will poi­son the rest of the Ever­glades. While agri­cul­tur­al com­pa­nies have done a great deal to low­er their lev­els, sci­en­tists want to see phos­pho­rous amounts at no more than 10 parts per bil­lion. One part per bil­lion is the equiv­a­lent of one sec­ond in 32 years. Though it may seem a minis­cule amount, it makes a world of difference.

The Mic­co­su­kee and Semi­nole tribes in Flori­da have been extreme­ly liti­gious involv­ing water pollution.

“They bring a real­ly unique and impor­tant per­spec­tive to all of these issues,” said Estenoz. “They, like all of us, strug­gle with fig­ur­ing out solu­tions that every­one can live with.”

U.S. Sug­ar has reduced its phos­pho­rous lev­els in drainage water by about 79 per­cent, but it is still not enough. Many would like to see U.S. Sug­ar and Flori­da Crys­tals, the oth­er major sug­ar man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­ny in Flori­da, do more.

This is where some of the out­side land deals not part of CERP, come in. In 2010, U.S. Sug­ar Cor­po­ra­tion sold 26,800 acres of its land to the state for $197 mil­lion tax­pay­er-paid. The land was to be used for Ever­glades restora­tion. The deal stip­u­lat­ed that U.S. Sug­ar would sell its remain­ing 153,000 acres to the state, pro­vid­ed it could be paid for with­in 10 years.

This deal has been met with mixed emotions.

Judy Sanchez, senior direc­tor of cor­po­rate com­mu­ni­ca­tions and pub­lic affairs for U.S. Sug­ar said that she does not think the deal will go through, based on the poor econ­o­my and the fact that two years out of 10 have gone by. Sanchez is not the only one who feels this way.

“We have enough land in the agri­cul­tur­al area to keep us going for a long time,” said Estenoz. “I agree with Judy Sanchez, but it’s not like I’d put a pay­check on it. I dis­agree that buy­ing land is more impor­tant. The Ever­glades needs us to build projects right now. Buy­ing land doesn’t get us results right now. The 27,000 acres that we bought in 2010 put us over the edge. We’ve reached a thresh­old amount of land to get mov­ing, and I think we’re there.”

Lar­ry Perez, the sci­ence com­mu­ni­ca­tions out­reach coor­di­na­tor for Ever­glades

Nation­al Park, was enthu­si­as­tic about the land deal with U.S. Sug­ar. He was not as enthu­si­as­tic about Sanchez’s prediction.

“Wow. That would be a tremen­dous fail­ure,” he said. “I have not heard that. God knows that was a hard fought bat­tle to begin with, just to get the small, the rel­a­tive­ly small amount of land that we wound up get­ting for the pur­pose of restora­tion, so that would set us back. What those parcels of land that we got between the park (Ever­glades Nation­al Park) and the lake (Lake Okee­chobee) do is pro­vide a chan­nel for that, an oppor­tu­ni­ty to store, clean and poten­tial­ly, depend­ing on how it’s engi­neered, move that water south into the sys­tem. So it’s an immense­ly impor­tant purchase.”

“The more land you have the more nat­ur­al your restora­tion will be,” said Jonathan Ull­man, the South Florida/Everglades senior orga­niz­er at Sier­ra Club. “We real­ly need a lot more land than we have, a lot more.”

Except the 27,000 acres of land the state pur­chased is not being used for Ever­glades restora­tion at the moment. It is being leased back to U.S. Sug­ar. The state had just enough mon­ey to buy the land, but either plan­ning for projects is tak­ing longer than expect­ed, or there is not enough mon­ey to fund them.

“Promis­es are made and promis­es are kept and if you want to get to the heart of the mat­ter, that is the heart of the mat­ter,” said Brow­der, who believes acquir­ing land is extreme­ly impor­tant to restoration.

Anoth­er close­ly watched ven­ture out­side the realm of CERP is the ele­va­tion of the Tami­a­mi Trail. The bridge project, which is spear­head­ed by the Nation­al Parks Ser­vice and the Army Corps, will ele­vate one mile of the road that con­nects Tam­pa and Mia­mi, and is sup­posed to increase water flow.

“This is mon­u­men­tal, lift­ing up this road,” said Ull­man, who’s been a part of the project for the last 10 years.

In 2011, Con­gress approved a five-and-a-half mile stretch to be added to the one mile in progress. It did not allo­cate fund­ing, how­ev­er. While on the whole the pass­ing of the bill is good news to many, there is plen­ty of work to be done.

“The chal­lenge with Tami­a­mi Trail is that you need water to move under it,” said Estenoz. “CERP has to move water into the Ever­glades. We’d try to coor­di­nate the design of those two projects.”

Lehti­nen, who has been an out­spo­ken dis­sent­ing voice about the bridge, is espe­cial­ly con­cerned with the lack of sci­en­tif­ic study around the project, as well as the clause in the Con­gres­sion­al bill that states the Army Corps shall con­struct the bridge “notwith­stand­ing any oth­er pro­vi­sion of law.”

“Does that mean you can com­mit mur­der when you build this bridge?” Lehti­nen said. “What does it mean?” Lehti­nen added that the bill only men­tions water deliv­ery to Ever­glades Nation­al Park, which is just one sec­tion of the Ever­glades as a whole.

“The Nation­al Park Ser­vice is doing more harm to the Ever­glades, more than U.S. Sug­ar,” he said. “They will make sure to save the park, but we’re going to lose the 65 per­cent of the rest of the Everglades.”

While peo­ple are hold­ing their breath to see how the Tami­a­mi Trail will turn out, the biggest fin­ished suc­cess sto­ry restora­tion par­tic­i­pants are excit­ed about is the Kissim­mee Riv­er project.

The Kissim­mee Riv­er used to be 103 miles long and flowed from Orlan­do into Lake Okee­chobee. Dur­ing the wet sea­son, the river’s one to three-mile flood­plain pro­vid­ed habi­tat to thou­sands of birds, alli­ga­tors and fish. In 1948, the riv­er was trans­formed into a 56-mile canal, as part of Congress’s orig­i­nal flood con­trol and water restora­tion pro­gram, the Cen­tral and South Flori­da Project (C&SF). Water-lov­ing plants and ani­mals began to dis­ap­pear. Pop­u­la­tions of water fowl nose-dived 90 percent.

The project under CERP restores 40 miles of the riv­er and 27,000 acres of wet­lands by back­fill­ing the canal cre­at­ed by the 1949 project. The cost is split between the Army Corps and the South Flori­da Water Man­age­ment District.

“The Kissim­mee Riv­er has made amaz­ing progress,” said Estenoz. “Good news from top to bottom.”

It is a good note to end on, but the end of the restora­tion is not near. Suc­cess sto­ries are few, hopes are many, and every day brings new challenges.

“It’s not as easy as it looks, but the answers are pret­ty sim­ple if we could just undo

some of the things that we had done,” said Ullman.

Undo­ing is dif­fi­cult, espe­cial­ly when today’s pop­u­la­tion of South Flori­da is approx­i­mate­ly 5 mil­lion people.

It is no secret that the Ever­glades is in dan­ger of dis­ap­pear­ing. More than a cen­tu­ry of man’s manipulation—drainage, con­struc­tion, dec­i­ma­tion, flood control—has changed the mor­phol­o­gy of the marsh­land so much that it will nev­er return to its nat­ur­al state. The goal now is to keep it alive, even if it means man-made or man-con­trolled life sup­port for how­ev­er long we can sus­tain it.