One of the most exquisite showcases in all of nature's biological beauty exists in my own backyard. It's not quite land, not quite water. But in the soggy confusion between the two is a complex of ecosystems literally bursting with flora and fauna more diverse than a tropical rain forest. Here, the normal roles of plants and animals are often turned upside down: Great cats pad silently along muddy trails between shallow inland lakes patrolled by playful dolphins and toothy sharks. Flowering vines feast on branches dripping with moss and plants devour animals. Cacti can be found underwater and oysters in trees. Prairies of serrated sedge grass are bordered with magnificent old growth forest, all leaping out of dark, endless plains of water. It is the only place on earth where salt-water crocodiles live side by side with fresh-water alligators. It's a nightmarish place teaming with rodents, slithering snakes, cockroaches, leeches, spiders, and clouds of mosquitos, as well as a dreamy paradise of brilliant blossoms, exotic waterbirds, and stately Cypress trees stretching to the horizon. Or so it was, once upon a time.
It is the Florida Everglades. And although there are plenty of familiar bogs and swamps in it, the ecology arises from natural forces unique in all the world: For the Everglades itself isn't a swamp, it's a river.
The wetlands of South Florida have also served as the waterlogged stage for dramatic human conflict over hundreds of years. Tribe Vs. Tribe, Spanish Conquistadors and native Americans, Cowboys and Indians, slaves and owners, tycoons and conservationists, man against nature, and corporation Vs. environmentalist.
Michael Grunwald is the author of The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise. His work has earned him numerous national prizes, including the Society of Environmental Journalists award for his reporting on the Everglades. I had a chance to ask Michael about the history, current health, and future of this natural treasure. Sadly, his prognosis below suggests the great river may be vanishing, as surely as the insatiable human appetite for condos, golf courses, orange juice, and sugary confections continues to grow. Multiple Image Warning
Left: A rare and endangered Florida Panther in the Everglades; there may be less than fifty breeding pairs of these magnificent cats left in the wild in South Florida. Center: A Blue Heron wades through the edges of a pond. An alligator mother with young in the Everglades National Park (Enlarge). Almost 70 endangered species are barely hanging on in the Florida Everglades. Photos courtesy of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service & Everglades National Park. See also these gorgeous black and white photos from Clyde Butcher here
DarkSyde (DS): How did you get interested in the Everglades?
Michael Grunwald (MG): I'm a reporter for The Washington Post, and I spent the year of 2000 investigating the follies of the Army Corps of Engineers. That's when I learned that the Corps, which once helped destroy the Everglades, was trying to restore the Everglades with the biggest environmental project in history. I was fascinated by the idea that the shock troops in America's war against nature were trying to negotiate a truce. And soon I realized the story of the Glades was not just important but fun--an amazing saga of scoundrels and heroes and visionaries, hubris and good intentions and unintended consequences. The Everglades was America's last frontier, and great characters always seem to gravitate towards the frontier.
The continents 200 million years ago in the early Jurrasic/late Triassic after the break-up of an earlier super continent called Pangea (Pangea break-up animation). What would become North America was then located in western Laurasia. At this time, Florida is a relatively small tongue of rock that was hijacked by Laurasia from the proto-African continent. Shown above, Florida lays in the narrow, shallow sea that would become the mighty Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico
DS: I found it interesting in your first chapter or two that Florida is actually a piece of African bedrock, the platform for what we now call Florida was essentially ripped from that continent by the North American plate during the early Jurassic. What happened after that?
MG: Geologically, not much. It sat underwater for most of the next 200 million years as a shallow seabed. While sea levels rose and fell as glaciers retreated and expanded, while homo erectus developed into homo sapiens, South Florida just sat there, gradually building its limestone backbone from the skeletons of billions of marine creatures, and from the sea itself. That's why it's so remarkably flat today. There was none of the tectonic excitement that creates canyons or mountains or even hills. One Everglades scientist used to tell the story about the cowboy who saw the Grand Canyon and shouted: Something sure did happen here! His point was that it wasn't clear from looking at the Everglades that anything had ever happened there. In Everglades National Park, there's a sign announcing "Rock Reef Pass: Elevation 3 Feet." Not exactly the Matterhorn, if you catch my drift.
DS: And that flatness and the tiny slope towards the south is a big part of why the Everglades exists. Can you go through that dynamic a little?
MG: The natural Everglades looked like the world's largest and grassiest puddle, or maybe the flattest and wettest meadow. But it was really a river, a broad sheet of water trickling through a vast expanse of sawgrass, the widest and slowest-moving river on earth. That's because its drop in elevation, from Lake Okeechobee all the way down to the tip of the peninsula, was less than a few inches per mile. A man of ordinary height (and questionable sanity) could have slogged from top to bottom without getting his hair wet, but his ankles might have been wet the entire time.
And that's what made the Everglades the Everglades. If the topography had been a lot steeper, the water that is the lifeblood of the Everglades would have zipped out to sea, carving a narrower channel along the way, instead of spreading out, recharging its aquifers, fueling its flora and fauna, and keeping its wetlands wet. On the other hand, if the Everglades had been perfectly flat, the water wouldn't have flowed at all. And scientists have shown that the gentle, uninterrupted flow of the Everglades was vital to its natural function.
DS: A lot of folks think the Seminole Indians are native to the Everglades. But they were actually chased or herded there after an earlier set of tribes was destroyed. Who were those earlier people and what happened to them?
MG: A long-lost tribe of Native Americans may have established North America's first permanent villages on the fringes of the Everglades about 5,000 years ago, which is a testament to how amazingly good the fishing was at the time, because the mosquitoes around there are just brutal. By the time of European contact, a fierce tribe called the Calusa controlled most of South Florida; they are best known for killing the rapacious conquistador Ponce de Leon, a great service for humanity. By 1800, the Calusa had been wiped out by disease and slave raids, leaving room for other tribes who were driven south by Andrew Jackson and his Indian fighters. The various tribes that settled in north Florida became known as the Seminoles. But white Americans began to covet their fertile lands, and resent the hospitality they were showing to fugitive slaves. In the Second Seminole War, America's longest, costliest, and bloodiest Indian War--I call it our first Vietnam--the Seminoles avoided extermination by escaping into the Everglades. They never did surrender, even though they were outmanned by a 40:1 margin. Some of their descendants still live in the Everglades, although they can no longer subsist from its natural provisions; the Miccosukee Tribe, an offshoot of the Seminoles, has fought to restore Everglades water quality.
Left: A stand of Bald Cypress trees near Big Cypress Swamp in the Everglades and another on the right in Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, both near Naples, Florida. These two preserves of old growth Cypress are some of the only surviving stands left relatively intact. Photos courtesy of Wikipedia and the National Audobon Society
DS: It sounds like the Everglades were one hell of a region to 'tame'. Pretty much everyone that's been interested in the area has thought about draining it for various reasons. What were the effects of the early drainage efforts?
MG: Even early conservationists believed the Everglades was a worthless swamp, and that the essence of conservation would be draining and "reclaiming" and "improving" it into a commercial and agricultural empire. But drainage canals whisked scarce water out of the Everglades during the dry season, which caused a series of problems. The underlying muck was exposed to the air, mobilizing bacteria that consumed the soil, leaving behind a dust bowl in the middle of the swamp; Everglades residents used to joke that they had to wear goggles when it was windy out. The result was subsidence; South Florida began to sink, and a region just a few feet above sea level couldn't afford much of that.
The parched muck was also extremely flammable, and when it caught fire, it could smolder for years. Raging fires began to blanket South Florida in smoke so thick that schoolchildren in Miami had to cover their faces; it was a disaster for flora and fauna, except for the vultures. Sometimes the fires burned underground; one scientist, after developing an unexpected case of hotfoot, suggested that the region should be renamed the Land of A Thousand Smokes. Of course, the fires created subsidence, too.
And for all the problems these drainage canals were causing in the dry season, they weren't big or effective enough to prevent floods during the rainy season, which became a problem once people started living in the reclaimed Everglades. In 1928, a hurricane busted Lake Okeechobee through its flimsy dike and a literal wall of water raced down the Florida peninsula drowning everything in it's path. It killed at least 2500 people in the Everglades alone, most of them poor black farmhands. It was a lot like Katrina, but worse.
DS: That's when they called in the Army Corps?
MG: Yes, the Corps built a massive dike around Lake Okeechobee. It's never been overtopped, but it's also cut off the Everglades from its source. And after another hurricane in 1947 left South Florida underwater for weeks, the Corps replumbed the region with one of the world's largest flood-control projects--2,000 miles of levees and canals, plus pumps so huge they had to be cannibalized from nuclear submarines. The project--as much as air conditioning, bug spray, or Social Security--has helped lure 7 million residents and 40 million annual tourists to South Florida, as well as the heart of the U.S. sugar industry. But it's been a disaster for the Everglades and its ecosystem.
Several decades of development encroaching on the Everglades are painfully evident from space. The satellite image on the top right was probably taken in the 1970s, the one on bottom right in the last few years. The white areas on the east coast of Florida are suburbs and cities extending north starting with greater Miami. The reddish region under Lake Okeechobee in the more recent photo represents an enormous area that was once a rich wetlands, now drained for agricultural use. Map courtesy of South Florida Ecosystem Restoration Task Force. Satellite images from Michael Grunwald's The Swamp (Used with permission).
DS: If I've read your many articles and the book correctly, half of the Everglades has disappeared and the other half is in big trouble?
MG: Yes, half the Everglades has been drained for agriculture or paved for development. The other half is an ecological basket case--usually too dry, sometimes too wet, always too polluted. Its natural flow has been dammed and diverted by levees, highways, and canals. It's got 69 endangered species. It's been overrun by more than 2 million acres of invasive species--some of them originally planted by well-meaning conservationists who hoped to drain the swamp with trees. Nutrient pollution from sugar fields and suburbs has turned huge swaths of sawgrass into cattail monocultures. And freshwater discharges from Lake Okeechobee--necessary to prevent another dike failure--have ravaged the delicate balance of fresh and salt water in the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie estuaries, where red tides are killing dolphins and manatees in droves, and fish are developing weird sores.
DS: Now we have a new plan called CERP. What is that?
MG: President Clinton signed the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan into law with Governor Jeb Bush at his side on December 11, 2000, which was odd because that was the day Bush v. Gore was being argued at the Supreme Court. But that's how bipartisan the support for CERP was. It was a $7.8 billion plan--now $10.8 billion--to replumb the replumbing of the Everglades, to store billions of gallons of water that was being blasted into the estuaries every year, and redirect it to farms, cities and the Everglades in the right amounts at the right times. Lobbyists for Big Sugar and the Audubon Society walked the halls of Congress arm-in-arm to promote it as the salvation of the Everglades. But scientists at Everglades National Park have complained that its benefits for the Everglades are minuscule, delayed for decades, and dependent on several highly dubious technologies.
DS: What is the prognosis for the Everglades?
MG: The bad news is that the ecosystem is in a state of near-collapse. Lake Okeechobee is going to hell; it's the color of espresso. The Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie estuaries are just gross. And CERP is already way over budget, behind schedule, and off track; Congress is losing interest in funding it. The good news is that there are signs that Floridians are beginning to recognize that their way of life is not sustainable. Posh towns like Fort Myers, Sanibel, Stuart and Jupiter are in revolt over the decline of the estuaries; retirees are having trouble breathing at the beach. Governor Bush shocked enviros by taking their side in a battle over sprawl in Miami-Dade County. A plan to build a massive biotech campus at the edge of the Everglades--maybe the biggest project in Florida since Disney--was blocked by an environmental lawsuit; now it looks like it's going to move to a more sensible location. And remember: several million acres of the Everglades ecosystem is already in public ownership. So there's hope.
DS: Why is the Everglades so important?
MG: The Everglades is the ultimate test of sustainable development, of man's ability to live in harmony with nature. It's always been at the cutting edge of conservation--first when a hunting ban prevented the extinction of Everglades wading birds, then when Everglades National Park was the first park established for biology rather than scenery, then when an Everglades pollution lawsuit led to the largest nutrient cleanup in history, and now with the largest restoration project in history. Everglades restoration is already a national blueprint for multi-billion-dollar efforts to revive ailing ecosystems like the Chesapeake Bay, the Great Lakes, and Louisiana's vanishing coastal marshes. It's becoming a model for the world; the Corps is helping Iraqis try to restore the "Garden of Eden" marshes destroyed by Saddam Hussein. But it's not clear whether the Corps knows what it's doing. After all, it's not a Corps of Biologists.
And if man can't figure out a way to revive the Everglades--the world's most beloved and most studied wetland, in a region with plenty of rain and plenty of money--it's hard to imagine which ecosystem he's going to be able to revive.
Michael Grunwald is a reporter for The Washington Post and author of The Swamp. He has won the George Polk Award for national reporting, the Worth Bingham Award for investigative reporting and numerous other prizes, including the Society of Environmental Journalists award for his reporting on the Everglades. He lives in Washington, D.C.