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Everglades Forever
IN SOUTH FLORIDA, hurricanes are the prime movers of land use planning. Periodically a big storm comes in off the Atlantic, smashing forests, wrecking roads and buildings, and flooding the land. Then, as the wreckage is piled up and carted away, there is a moment of opportunity to build something different, incorporating lessons learned from the storm, avoiding mistakes of the past, and even implementing new ideas of how to live in harmony with the constraints imposed by the land and the climate. Hurricanes, for all the human tragedy, bring opportunities for urban renewal.
It was in the summer of 1992 that I began to learn about hurricanes and renewal. In August of that year Hurricane Andrew blew ashore just south of Miami, leading with a seventeen-foot storm surge, followed by winds exceeding one hundred and seventy miles per hour. By most accounts it was the most powerful hurricane of the century, and as it moved inland it left a wide trail of destruction, leaving nearly two hundred thousand residents temporarily homeless.
On its way inland, Andrew demolished Homestead Air Force Base, located about twenty miles south of Miami near the tip of the Florida peninsula. Suddenly more than five thousand workers from the surrounding Cuban, Haitian, and Latino communities were left jobless. The Air Force added to their despair several months later by announcing that Homestead would not be rebuilt. The abandoned site, several thousand acres, would instead be made available for commercial redevelopment. But that was by no means the end of proposals for the area. Hurricane Andrew had opened up an opportunity for planners to take a fresh look at the future of the region. As pressures mounted to generate jobs by rebuilding, a group of Cuban Americans with close ties to the county commissioners proposed to take over Homestead and develop a jetport, dedicated to air cargo, that would draw industry and distribution facilities from throughout the Americas.
Florida environmentalists immediately objected. The Homestead site was adjacent to Biscayne National Park and a mere eleven miles from the entrance to Everglades National Park. A commercial airport would attract more freeways and sprawl, inevitably degrading both parks. South Miami-Dade, opponents argued, should become a transition zone of low-density residential development feathering out to open space as it approached the aquamarine waters of Biscayne Bay and the saw grass swamps of the Everglades. And since Homestead was a federal facility, environmental advocates expected the federal government to take the lead in promoting their vision of appropriate development.
Then suddenly, mysteriously, the debate was terminated. Within weeks the Miami-Dade County Commission voted unanimously to recommend that the Homestead site be transferred to their friends, the industrial jetport advocates. No hearings were held and no opportunity was given for public comment. No alternative plans were offered or considered. Word on the street was that the deal had the support of the president of the United States.
Angry opponents of the jetport had nowhere to go, at least for the time being. Back in Washington, other issues, such as the budget, health care, and gays in the military were occupying the press and Congress. But Florida’s environmentalists were not about to go quietly. And they had long memories, certainly extending back to 1976 when, after a prolonged public battle, they had successfully blocked a jetport west of Miami in what subsequently became the Big Cypress National Preserve section of the Everglades. As we shall see, opponents of the Homestead jetport would return to the issue in the 2000 presidential election campaign.
While these controversies were developing, another less spectacular disaster was slowly spreading across the Everglades itself, that vast wetland region about the size of Puerto Rico or Jamaica that occupies the southern end of the Florida peninsula. The cause was not a hurricane, but a relentless wave of subdivisions, industrial development, and agriculture moving inland from the coastlines, encircling and constricting the wetlands, draining away the waters, drying the land and killing off the water-dependent wildlife. The signs of starvation were everywhere, especially in the decline of the wading-bird populations that once graced the landscape. Visiting the region after taking office as secretary of the interior, I canoed through the mangrove swamps for hours without spotting more than one or two white egrets soaring among the towering banks of cumulus clouds. Then suddenly I would come upon a roosting tree, weighed down with birds so thick that the branches seemed covered with snowfall, a rare sighting of what was once commonplace. But most of the time the skies were empty, and I would wait many hours to spot an endangered Everglades kite cruising over the land in search of apple snails in the diminished stands of saw grass.
Everglades National Park is a relatively large park, about a million acres, but it is nonetheless a small part, less than 25 percent, of the original Everglades ecosystem. Exactly why a national park of this size and extent should be in such trouble was not immediately apparent. Since I was not eager to see the park’s ecosystem collapse and species go extinct on my watch, I flew to south Florida intent on discovering what the Park Service was doing wrong, and to correct the problem. I soon learned, however, that the Park Service was not to blame. The Everglades could not be fixed by appointing a new superintendent or adding more rangers or posting more signs asking visitors not to feed the wildlife. The source of the problem was not even in the park; it originated a hundred miles upstream, far outside park boundaries.
THE EVERGLADES is a vast wetland, so shallow and so flat that it resembles a tallgrass prairie. But it is in fact a river, a very wide stream of very slow-moving water that was once connected to Lake Okeechobee, a huge inland lake a hundred miles to the north that in turn is fed by the Kissimmee River, which originates in a string of shallow central Florida lakes. The sheet flows of water that sustained the lands within the park originally ebbed and flowed in a seasonal cycle fed by summer rains and by the waters stored in Lake Okeechobee and on the land itself. The wildlife of the Everglades — the alligators, crocodiles, panthers, bears, the wading birds, and the plant life — all evolved and adapted to the intricate seasonal cycles of flowing water.
In the nineteenth century, Florida settlers moved inland from the coast and began draining the lands around Lake Okeechobee to farm. Soon the hydrologic connection between the lake and the Everglades began to dry up. More wetlands were lost to limestone mining and to subdivision development. In 1928 completion of the Tamiami Trail, an elevated roadway from Miami to Florida’s west coast, created the equivalent of a fifty-mile dike across the heart of the remaining Everglades, breaking up and disrupting the sheet flows across the land. By 1990 more than half of the original flows into the Everglades had been diverted and drained away.
The initial boundaries of Everglades National Park were set in 1947, at a time when much less was known about the complex hydrology of wetland ecosystems and the rivers that feed into them. Park planners concentrated their gaze and their pencils on the land, not the water, and they assumed that a million acres — about the size of a big western national park like Grand Canyon or Yosemite — would be sufficient to preserve the character of the region and its wildlife.
It was becoming increasingly clear by the 1990s that those assumptions were wrong. The notion that the Everglades could function as an isolated remnant of the original ecosystem was mistaken. The national park, located at the terminus of the watershed, where the waters discharge into Florida Bay, is dependent upon upstream waters flowing south from the Lake Okeechobee region. As development spread into south-central Florida, more lands were drained, cutting off the park increasingly from its upstream sources of water. To save the park we would have to restore some semblance of the original flows by reconnecting waterways northward toward Lake Okeechobee.
Recognizing the need to reconnect the severed sheet flows meant acknowledging that development had already taken too large a share of the land and waters of the natural ecosystem. To restore adequate flows meant taking water back from existing agricultural uses, filling in drainage canals, and allowing some farms to revert to swampland. And it would be necessary to halt further encroachment by purchasing or condemning thousands of undeveloped subdivision lots within the natural floodways that bring water into the park.
These restoration ideas, premised on the notion that some development had gone too far and should now be reversed, were largely without precedent in conservation history. For a hundred years conservation had been about preservation — setting aside and protecting land before it was lost to development. Now we were looking at taking land back from development; and that sounded like a zero-sum game, taking from one side to give to the other. As a society, we have always assumed that land, once occupied, was ours, forever lost to the natural world, no matter how great the environmental damage that occupancy might cause. Even as development sprawled across the land, obliterating natural systems, hardly anything ever went the other way, back to nature, except a few crumbling ghost towns near abandoned gold mines in the western deserts.
To restore the Everglades we would have to challenge the assumption that permanent conquest and occupancy always resulted in a good outcome, no matter the land’s location or its use. We would have to organize a retreat from occupied territory, yielding the conquered land back to its original inhabitants. It was a new concept, sure to invoke fierce opposition.
Yet as open spaces have disappeared, as development has accelerated and the patterns of sprawl have spread across the nation, it has become clear that in many areas development has already undermined the integrity of surrounding natural systems — not just in the Everglades, or in great parks like Grand Canyon and Yellowstone, but also along the California coast, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, in the Front Range of the Rockies, in the Chesapeake Bay region, and along most of the country’s rivers. In the fast-growing coastal regions of Maryland and Virginia, the destruction of forest cover and polluted runoff from cities and farms has nearly destroyed the Chesapeake’s once abundant oyster and crab fisheries. On the other side of the country, in San Diego County, more than a hundred species of plants, mammals, and birds have been identified as threatened or endangered due to habitat destruction from expanding subdivisions. In the Pacific Northwest, in New England, many of the legendary native salmon stocks are declining toward extinction because of forest clearing, dam building, sprawling developments, and overextension of agriculture. Throughout the Midwest the tallgrass prairie ecosystems are virtually a thing of the past. It is time to weigh the benefits of marginal developments against the damage they might cause to surrounding ecosystems and to think seriously about changing the proportions between human space and wild space.
Faced with the shriveling Everglades ecosystem, embarking upon a restoration program would require the Department of the Interior to ask Congress for authorizing legislation and large appropriations to finance the work. This would mean asking Congress to help us open a new chapter in conservation history at the very time that political tides were running in the opposite direction: in the early and mid-1990s Congress was considering proposals to close national parks, to weaken the Clean Water Act, and to eviscerate the Endangered Species Act. We could not count on support from the White House. The president was caught up in protracted disputes over the budget and health care, and even in the best of times, he had never been greatly interested in environmental issues.
Outside Washington, property-rights activists were in the ascendancy, manifested by crowds of demonstrators who turned out almost everywhere I went, from New Hampshire to California. Florida, however, seemed an exception. The Florida press was alive with stories of the Everglades imperiled, detailing the deterioration of the ecosystem, the virtual disappearance of the Florida panther, the decline in wading-bird populations, and the extent of polluted water flowing from the sugar fields. Most remarkably, the Florida press was calling for federal leadership in resolving the Everglades’ plight. This at the same time that, in most parts of the country, I was confronting a rising tide of antigovernment opinion, fueled by Newt Gingrich and other conservatives who would soon win control of Congress. Why, I wondered, was Florida so different?
In March 1993 I went to Fort Myers to speak to the Everglades Coalition, an umbrella group of environmental organizations calling for Everglades restoration. I endorsed their wish list, which included land acquisition, cracking down on the sugar companies, and undertaking a comprehensive study of the region’s plumbing system, that vast network of dikes, pumps, and canals that extended across south Florida diverting and draining away water before it could reach the Everglades.
I was still skeptical, however, that anything could come of this group’s ambitious proposals, which I estimated would cost billions of dollars, when Congress was cutting budgets right and left. Even in the most expansive times, during a New Deal or the Great Society, a program of this magnitude would have been a tall order. But there was one thing about the audience that caught my attention and made me think twice about the chances for success. Sprinkled among the predictable attendees — young activists and elderly retirees — were some influential investment bankers and real-estate developers.
Among these was Nathaniel Reed, a lean, ruddy, aristocratic sportsman, proprietor of an upscale enclave at Hobe Sound on the Atlantic coast. Reed had been an assistant secretary of the interior in the Nixon administration, which initially gave me pause about his intentions. I soon discovered, however, that Reed was a Republican in the spirit of Theodore Roosevelt, passionately committed to environmental causes, the foremost being the Everglades. He would become one of my most trusted outside advisors.
In evenings over dinner on the terrace of his home on Hobe Sound, Reed expounded on the bond between Florida residents and the Everglades. Most of the people living in south Florida, he explained, were newcomers who migrated south to live in the tropics by choice. “And they are not about to sit by and watch it disappear,” he claimed. “In Florida the Everglades transcends politics. Everyone supports the Everglades — except big sugar.”
You could say much the same about the Grand Canyon in my home state, I replied. In Arizona everybody loves the canyon. It’s an icon; you see it plastered on everything from T-shirts to license plates to backdrops in television commercials. But that did not prevent the state’s governor from vilifying the Park Service and opposing efforts to protect the park. Reed shrugged, “All I can tell you is Florida is different.”
I eventually concluded that some of that Florida difference lay buried in the state’s long history of contending with hurricane disasters and the nature of the land. My instructor here was Marjory Stoneman Douglas, through her book The Everglades: River of Grass. In it she chronicles the struggle by early settlers to come to grips with the overwhelming reality of the swamps and the region’s violent tropical storms, efforts that eventually led residents into a mutually beneficial land management partnership with the federal government and the Army Corps of Engineers.
AT THE TIME of European arrival in the region, the Everglades covered most of what is now south Florida in shallow expanses of water. Early settlers moving inland from the Atlantic coast wrote of them as pestilent, mosquito-infested swamps just waiting to be drained and plowed into productive farmland. These early settlers eventually learned, however, that no amount of individual effort would be sufficient to subdue the land. It was impossible to drain a forty-acre tract in order to farm in the middle of a swamp. And even local community efforts, undertaken in the spirit of a New England barn raising, could not create farmland in the middle of an ocean of water that extended to the horizon in every direction. Transforming swamps into farms would require government help.
The first step was taken in Washington. In 1850 Congress enacted the Swamplands Act, which offered to divest federal title to swamplands to the states, provided the states in question would agree to drain and transform them into farmland. Florida accepted the offer and ignored the condition. Taking title to vast tracts of the Everglades, the state then handed the lands over to politically connected speculators who promised to assume the state’s obligation to drain the lands.
Speculators, in turn also ignoring the drainage obligation, created paper subdivisions and mounted campaign to sell lots to out-of-state buyers ignorant of the true condition of the land. By the beginning of the twentieth century these land-promotion schemes were collapsing in a boom and bust economic cycle (although only temporarily, it would turn out), and voters began clamoring for the state to take direct charge of a drainage program. An energetic Miami businessman named Napoleon Bonaparte Broward stepped forward to run for governor on a drain-the-swamps platform. He had a knack for analogies: if the Dutch could push back the North Sea to reclaim land that lay below sea level, he argued, it should be easy for the people of Florida to drain water from the Everglades, where the swamps were perched above sea level, by simply pulling the plug.
The voters agreed. After taking office in 1906, Broward persuaded the Florida legislature to establish a Board of Drainage Commissioners armed with the power of eminent domain and authority to levy a drainage tax of up to five cents an acre for dredging canals to sluice the waters out to sea. Within months, work gangs were blasting through the rock ledges along the Atlantic, and dredges were working their way inland digging giant drainage canals. Still, even with Broward’s energetic leadership, the conquest of the swamps proved slow going. The soft peat soils often turned to syrup, slumping into the canals and clogging streams. Primitive dredges frequently broke down, and workers fell sick in the relentless tropical sun.
Despite the difficulties, the program gradually produced results. The waters began draining out to sea, seeming to validate Broward’s boast that Florida could easily conquer the swamps and reclaim the land. Then several disasters struck. In 1926 a powerful hurricane tracked in off the Atlantic, ripping a swath across the peninsula, destroying thousands of homes and inundating most of the laboriously reclaimed farmlands. The waters receded, the lands dried, and homes were eventually rebuilt. Two years later another monster...
