The chance of sighting a manatee, Florida panther, or the rarest of butterflies entices some to spend their lives exploring the wilds of south Florida. Yet, ironically, the promise of near-certain encounters with wildlife also prompts others to shun the Glades entirely. The Everglades have received legitimate fame for hosting dense congregations of critters of ill repute. They are home to innumerable snakes, including four venomous species. They are the only location in the world where both alligators and crocodiles thrive side by side. And insects can be so copious in the summer, some have said you need to throw a rock through the bugs just to get a decent view.
For some, it is probably fortunate there is no other Everglades in the world. Yet as unremarkable as it might seem, it is perhaps the relative scarcity of places like it that lend it truly remarkable value. Perched delicately between earth’s temperate and tropical biomes, the Everglades have amassed an unparalleled wealth of resources worthy of preservation. Recognizing an important opportunity, the United States Congress authorized creation of Everglades National Park in 1935 with the stipulation that the park “be permanently reserved as a wilderness, and no development of the project or plan for the entertainment of visitors shall be undertaken which will interfere with the preservation of the unique flora and fauna and the essential primitive conditions now prevailing in the area.”
Since that time, the park has been recognized for the wealth of resources it protects. Within its borders can be found the largest sawgrass prairie in North America, an estuary of national significance, and the largest protected mangrove forest in the Northern Hemisphere. Dozens of rare species are found within the park, and no doubt many more yet await discovery. Quietly and without fanfare, the orchestrated interplay of the living and non-living drives the uninterrupted continuance of vital ecological processes—gas exchange, nutrient cycling, water filtration, erosion control, carbon sequestration, and the like. And though underappreciated as a repository of human culture, the park preserves the ancestral homeland of remarkably advanced civilizations that have long since gone extinct.
Everglades National Park has received global recognition for its inherent values and enjoys protection under three distinct, international accords as a World Heritage Site, Wetland of International Importance, and a Man in the Biosphere Reserve. True to the intent of the park’s enabling legislation, the National Park Service has worked diligently to spare the landscape from further physical modification. And in 1978, roughly 1.3 million acres of the park were designated the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Wilderness Area—affording them the highest level of federal protection currently possible.
Given these efforts, the natural world should find refuge in the confines of Everglades National Park. Here the biological and chemical processes that forge life should continue to run wild and unimpaired. In the absence of synthetic materials, internal combustion engines, impermeable surfaces, chemical pollutants, and artificial lights, native populations of plants and animals should continue to thrive and interact as they have for thousands of years.
Yet despite decades of struggle to protect the Everglades against development, the south Florida wilderness has been dammed, diked, and drained nearly to death. For well over a century, well-intentioned water management schemes have successfully yoked the formerly intractable waters of the Everglades watershed. Today, an intricate system of canals, spillways, pump stations, levees, and wells provides a deceptively dependable supply of fresh water that has fueled the explosive growth of industry and population centers in the southern peninsula. Today, nearly half the original extent of the Everglades has been supplanted by agricultural fields and urban subdivisions, which are afforded flood protection through the deliberate and wasteful redirection of “excess” water to the sea in staggering quantities.
Billions of gallons of fresh water are shunted to the coast annually, plaguing the ecological health and vitality of the estuaries that receive them. And while oysters, shrimp, and shorebirds are forced to contend with unnatural gluts of fresh water, other organisms are condemned to suffer lengthy droughts further downstream. For decades growers, politics, and the occasional tropical storm have governed how and when south Florida’s accumulated rains were distributed. At virtually any time of the year, without regard to Mother Nature’s historical preferences, the flip of a switch could send a deluge north, south, east, or west. Rarely were south Florida’s natural areas the beneficiaries of such technological prowess. Rather, some years, Everglades National Park was denied any inflow of life-giving water whatsoever.
Circumventing the very cycles with which the furred, feathered and photosynthetic denizens had become attuned proved disastrous. Wading birds, no longer privy to the gradual draw-down of water that pooled the prey necessary to nourish their young, saw precipitous drops in their populations. Snail kites and Cape Sable seaside sparrows were driven to near extinction, subjected to artificial flooding that drowned their respective prey and young during consecutive dry seasons. Wildfires, historically hampered in marshlands by long periods of inundation, ran rampant in areas that lay parched for months. And further downstream the estuaries of Florida Bay and the coastal fringe, denied periodic infusions of fresh water from the north, saw pronounced changes in salinity, seagrass, and species composition.
Our efforts, though triumphant in bending the flow of waters to our wishes, showed little mercy towards the creatures that once thrived when the river ran wild. While some advocated boldly for the voiceless denizens of the marsh, they were often outliers among a populace that sought to capitalize on newly available lands. During subsequent decades, however, expressions of anger and compassion would become far more popular. Fueled by the crippling degradation wrought not only upon the Everglades but upon landscapes across the United States, communities began to reconsider the price of economic prosperity. During the 60s and 70s the United States passed some of the most progressive environmental legislation in the world, testimony to the dawning of a new age of consciousness regarding our relationship to the biosphere. This nationwide awakening extended to the furthest reaches of the country—including south Florida.
The last two decades of the twentieth century brought radical changes to our relationship with the River of Grass. Conservation organizations worked feverishly to salvage iconic species from near extinction, including the American crocodile and the Florida panther. Legal battles raged over water quality issues as pollutants streamed into the Everglades from agriculture upstream. Water wars became increasingly commonplace as communities jockeyed for supply during times of drought and fought angrily to keep floodwaters off their interests during the wet season. The south Florida flood protection system, originally built to service a population of around two million residents, was now in service to six million. And through it all, some areas were housing triple-digit population growth in a never-ending sea of suburban sprawl.
The inescapable reality that south Florida was growing unsustainably spurred new discussions on how to steward the area’s resources in less damaging ways. State and federal interests began crafting projects and strategies for returning flows of clean water to what remained of the Everglades—in patterns and quantities reminiscent of the historic system. And rather than focusing on individual tracts of land, restoration partners advocated for a holistic overhaul of the entire management system that regulated the Everglades watershed. The broad-scale effort was formalized in 2000 with the authorization of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP), a multi-decade, multi-billion-dollar commitment to return America’s Everglades to their long-lost glory—while, of course, accommodating the water needs of an ever-burgeoning population. After a century of ruling the Everglades watershed with an iron fist, the time had come to extend an open palm and strike a friendly accord.
Over twenty billion dollars are expected to be invested towards the revitalization of the remnant Everglades. The anticipated completion of CERP will mark nearly a century of conservation efforts—one hundred years of toil in an effort to protect the River of Grass for generations to come. And yet as our