Florida Calls The Plumber
THE ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS can relocate anything except sunshine. That, in brief, is why modern Florida exists. It would be hard to find a spot anywhere in the lower 48 more inimical to human habitation than South Florida’s Everglades in its wild state: treacherous swamps, frequent floods, dense and dangerous vegetation, swarming insects, deadly diseases, hungry alligators, and the everpresent stifling blanket of heat. Yet there’s plenty of sun, and for that, many Americans—from farmers to city refugees to snowbirds—will happily see Mother Nature dosed with sedatives and put in a nursing home.
The process began long before the Corps got involved. As detailed in The Book of the Everglades , edited by Susan Cerulean (Milkweed Editions [paperback], 264 pages, $18.95), in 1848, just three years after Florida became a state, a federal law was passed “to authorize the drainage of the Ever Glades.” Although nothing came of that effort, in the 1880s Hamilton Disston, a sugar magnate, drained more than two million acres near Lake Okeechobee. In 1905, when Miami was still a small town, Gov. Napoleon Bonaparte Broward wrote: “It would indeed be a commentary on the intelligence and energy of the State of Florida to confess that so simple an engineering feat as the drainage of a body of land 21 feet above the sea was above their power.”
Indeed, the task of replumbing Florida has always seemed simple: Some canals here and there, a few dikes and levees, and you’ll have plenty of dry land and all the fresh water you need. Yet problems emerged almost as soon as the reengineering of the Everglades began. Drained land south of Lake Okeechobee is a rich organic muck ideal for farming—except that when exposed to the air, it slowly oxidizes and disappears. As early as the 1920s canal designers made their ditches extra deep to allow for this sort of erosion of their banks. Today the topsoil in some places is as thin as three feet. Some environmentalists suggest letting Lake Okeechobee overflow to replenish the soil, though people with homes nearby are unenthusiastic about this idea.
Vanishing soil is just one of the problems that human habitation has created in the Everglades. Others include the extinction of numerous plant and animal species, and the severe endangerment of many more; the crowding out of native plants by exotic interlopers; and the destruction of enormous areas of wilderness.
In the last two decades a consensus has begun to emerge that things have gone too far. Earlier this year President George W. Bush and Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida signed a joint federal-state plan to restore the Everglades. Yet the interdependence of Florida’s ecological systems means that solutions are not always obvious. Florida Bay, at the state’s southern tip, has been suffering for years from the diversion of fresh water that used to flow down through the Everglades, flushing out the bay and decreasing its salinity. The answer might sound simple: Just restore the freshwater flow. Unfortunately, today’s “fresh” water is filled with agricultural runoff, and a number of scientists believe that increasing the flow to the bay would only worsen its algae problems. One project currently under way will build about 300 aquifer storage and recovery wells to pump fresh water into the ground instead of letting it run into the Atlantic. But can the aquifer hold an extra 1.7 billion gallons without sustaining structural damage? No one is sure.
As is true of most collections, the pieces in The Book of the Everglades vary widely, from Indian legends to eloquent jeremiads by the novelist Carl Hiaasen. Taken together, though, the diverse articles show hints of a welcome trend: Floridians of all stripes are starting to realize that their goal should be neither to subjugate nature to humans, as was the dominant view for most of the twentieth century, nor to restore nature in its primeval state, as some extreme environmentalists advocate. Rather, they should strive to reconcile the two by reducing disruptions of nature to a minimum while still allowing for varied human activities.
