The transaction now complete, I thanked the couple once again for the service they rendered. Having successfully confiscated the large serpent, I bantered lightheartedly with the pair as we slowly sauntered out to their car in the parking lot. My purpose for the escort was more than mere chivalry—I was eager to note the make, model, and tag number of their vehicle. Shortly thereafter, I would pass this information along to our law enforcement division with a recommendation to be alert for suspicious activity.
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Prohibitions that guard against the damage or removal of wildlife in national parks protect nearly all living organisms within their borders—regardless of whether they are plentiful, endangered, native, or from another part of the world altogether. Though such regulations find their authority in governmental policy, they find ultimate justification in our modern understanding of basic ecology. With every new investigation, scientific observation reveals in greater relief how intricately all biological organisms are bound to the living and nonliving agents around them. Each, though clearly discernable from one another, acts as a critical strand in the proverbial web of life we are taught about in grade school. When one strand is pulled, stretched, twisted, or broken, the effects are felt to varying degrees across all its connections. Thus, maintaining the historic integrity of entire landscapes usually requires that each individual component from the largest predator to the smallest piece of wood, be allowed to fulfill its function in its natural place of origin.
Figuring out exactly what constitutes the natural state of a given ecosystem, however, can often prove difficult. Generally, our measure of wildness varies inversely with the proximity and influence of people. That is not to say, of course, that we are not an important cog in earth’s biological machinery. Over tens of thousands of years, human cultures have surely lived upon and exerted their influence over nearly every acre of the Americas. Yet only our most recent centuries have brought wholesale change to the landscape. Our relatively newfound ability to harness supplemental sources of energy now permits the total conversion of forests, deserts, and wetlands into permanently managed, artificial environments that cater largely to human comfort and efficiency. The irrevocable conversion of vast swaths of land has been accompanied by a growing realization that urbanization disrupts cycles and processes that directly and indirectly benefit all species—including city dwellers. Today, landscapes devoid of obvious human alteration are typically interpreted as “pristine,” and are afforded ever-increasing value for their preservation of natural resources, biodiversity, environmental processes, and recreational pursuits.
As our built environments continue to grow in unprecedented speed and size, greater appreciation is felt for preserving the historic integrity of what wild landscapes remain. It is that same lofty goal that inspired the designation of our first national parks, and continues to drive their management even today. In 1916, the United States Congress formally created the National Park Service. The fledgling agency was to assume stewardship of some of America’s most iconic landscapes, including Yellowstone, Yosemite, Crater Lake, and Mount Rainier. As guidance, Congress charged the new agency with a specific mission—preserving landscapes “intact for the benefit and enjoyment of future generations.”
Currently, the United States boasts nearly 400 distinct units managed by the National Park Service. They range in size from the 13.2 million-acre Wrangell–St. Elias National Park and Preserve in Alaska to the .02-acre Thaddeus Kosciuszko National Memorial in Philadelphia. Collectively they span more than two dozen management designations, including national seashores, recreation areas, military parks, cemeteries, lakeshores, scenic rivers, historic trails, and battlefields. Without a doubt, however, those that have received the greatest fame, and have etched themselves most clearly upon our consciousness, bear designation as national parks.
Indeed, the Grand Canyon, the redwood forests of the Pacific Northwest, and the Great Smoky Mountains all evoke images of larger-than-life landscapes that boggle logic and common sense with their scope and grandeur. The early years of our national preservation movement focused largely on the attractively textured terrain of the rugged American West, which often afforded vistas of such overwhelming scale they practically begged for protection in perpetuity. Every American, whether living or unborn, deserved a chance to witness the surging froth of Old Faithful, gaze upon the snow-capped peak of Mount Rainier, or marvel at the austere granite face of El Capitan. Such aesthetic marvels are often cited as catalysts in the creation of the national park idea. But in time, priorities would take a radical turn, leaving mere scenic beauty to take a backseat to new considerations of ecology, sustainability, and the preservation of wilderness.
For some, a first glimpse of the celebrated Florida Everglades can prove spectacularly underwhelming. The Everglades, after all, enjoys a worldwide renown similar to that of Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon. But whereas these popular destinations might greet visitors with picturesque mountain ranges, glimpses of charismatic fauna, or a palette of brightly colored foliage, the Everglades presents itself as a visually monotonous landscape sheathed in drab, muted tones. Unlike the conspicuous herds of bison, deer, or elk that have come to characterize some of our best-known landscapes, mosquitoes are often the most abundant fauna to be encountered in the sticky, hot environs of south Florida. And while parks in the American West boast landscapes so imposing they reduce visitors to insignificant specks of carbon, the Everglades suffers so slight an elevation that reaching its tallest peak requires one only to stand up. From such a vantage point, it is easy to look down one’s nose at what some have seen as little more than a miasmic, pestilence-filled swamp worthy only of reclamation.
Roughly 6,000 years ago, the workings of a dynamic climate and rising sea level began to forge the familiar south Florida land mass we recognize today. Over time, this mantle would support colonization by a bevy of plants largely from the south, animals largely from the north and, eventually, people from everywhere. The Everglades, in its present form, is a precocious infant—a youthful ecosystem only several millennia old, yet maturing quickly into an energetic, productive environment capable of surviving the harshest adversity while simultaneously providing generously for its innumerable dependents. To meet these demands, however, the Everglades itself depends upon the most basic of all necessities—a predictably cyclic supply of fresh water.
Fortunately, the extreme southern reaches of peninsular Florida stretch close enough to the Tropic of Cancer to be amenable to this request. While winter months bring mild temperatures and a relative paucity of rainfall, the hot, humid days of summer are routinely punctuated with powerful afternoon thunderstorms that infuse the marsh with water. Every year, the clouds overhead are wrung dry—delivering over five feet of water to the thirsty landscape below. Much of it falls on the open face of massive Lake Okeechobee—a seemingly boundless natural reservoir whose true capacity is limited sharply by its surprising lack of depth. As the wet season continues to unfurl, unrelenting storms fill both the lake and the Everglades to capacity, spilling waters on a path of least resistance that courses nearly one hundred miles to the south on an overland march to the sea. This lengthy journey is somewhat aided by a steady, though nominal, loss of elevation totaling only around nineteen feet. The waters of the Everglades, though slow and almost imperceptible, are always on the move.
Whereas swamps are usually characterized by the occurrence of stagnant water, the Everglades is truly a river in its hydrology. Unlike the raging rivers that find their origins in the confluence of mountain streams, the waters that wind their way through south Florida’s marshes and forests do so at an almost imperceptible rate. In the absence of obstruction and constraint, the sluggish waters do not keep to a single riverbed, but rather, reach out broadly on the landscape to inundate millions of acres along the way. All told, 4,000 square miles are said to have been touched by the waters of the historic Everglades. And though slight, the presence of a detectable current in those waters provided the necessary grounds for author and activist Marjory Stoneman Douglas to christen the system with its other familiar moniker—the River of Grass.
Though the peculiarities of the Everglades may not always bend to our liking, they have—over thousands of years—proven hospitable to an astoundingly diverse collection of life. Early naturalists gave