The Destruction of South Florida Environment — EATING THE EVERGLADES

      The south Florida environment we see today is the result of intense human intervention that started well over 130 years ago. That the human use of a previously natural environment has altered the landscape drastically in ways that are easily visible and undeniable shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. We all see evidence of the human alteration of the Earth every time we go outdoors. What may be a surprise is that, as a direct result of that human intervention, today the Everglades are dying and the entire south Florida web of interconnected eco-systems is at risk of total collapse. That’s no exaggeration. If you look at that landscape as a business visitor, a vacationer, or as a resident and fail to understand the changes that have occurred in the 20th and 21st Centuries and that continue as you read this page, you cannot fully understand either the landscape you’re seeing or what the future may hold for all south and central Florida. So, this segment requires Readers to change gears, to take a long look behind the scenes in an effort to understand the means by which the previously natural south Florida environment has been drastically altered. And to understand the complex and intertwined reality that today has left only painful options and no easy solutions.

        My goal in this segment is to explore today’s problems of restoring the Everglades to a more natural state without overwhelming Readers with technical complexities. The best way to accomplish that goal is to start slowly, at the beginning. With the evolution of south Florida from a natural wetland to a human-altered landscape dependent for its daily survival on civil engineers and water managers who neither knew nor cared anything about biology or the proper functioning of complex ecosystems when they started their destructive drainage and water control projects.

        In 1850, Congress jammed its fat fingers into the pie and changed the Everglades forever when it extended provisions of the Swamp Lands Acts of 1849 to the State of Florida. That one action conveyed 20 million acres of what were called “swamp and overflow lands” to the State, which was then supposed to “reclaim” those lands so it could collect taxes when people started developing them. You have to realize that at that time practically everyone thought that swamps were wastelands or wilderness that had to be conquered and reclaimed before people could use them. Or, if nothing else, to be drained to improve public health by getting rid of mosquitoes and other pests. So, how was that reclamation to occur? Through construction of increasingly elaborate drainage systems and levees that would convert wetlands to agricultural uses and settlements. Thus allowing the State to harvest the economic potential (meaning taxes) of what had previously been unusable natural resources. As a result, over the next decades millions of acres were sold and contracts for drainage provided the State a way to deed land in consideration of the cost of drainage, giving one acre for every twenty-five cents expended by private companies or wealthy individuals. Remember old Hamilton Disston? He was only the first of many land-obsessed, would-be Florida real estate moguls.

        By 1911, more than 15,000 individuals and corporations owned land in the northern Everglades. Keep in mind that at that date it is certain that the vast majority of the properties owned by those people were under water once a year at the absolute minimum. Water that almost certainly was in depths ranging from four to twelve feet. Ah, don’t you marvel at the power of con men to create real estate booms by selling Florida swampland like hotcakes? It was private enterprise unfettered by interference from a State that knew from the get-go whose side it was on. And it wasn’t on that of the unsuspecting public. Doesn’t that sound like a slightly warped version of the Republican Dream? Today, Readers with political axes to grind might think that the administrations responsible for creating anti-regulatory circumstances that allowed and even encouraged corruption would be Republican. Yet, in history’s harsh light, those conscienceless bastards were Democrats through and through, at least until recent times. Which proves that unfettered avarice and chicanery pay allegiance to no political party.

        Prior to large-scale drainage, the Kissimmee River flowed with magisterial languor from north of Lake Tohopekaliga to Lake Okeechobee, which then distributed the water farther south through the Everglades in extensive and almost continuous overland sheetflows to Florida Bay. That’s why the Everglades earned the name River of Grass from the passionate environmentalist, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas. 
        Because those sheetflows sustained the vast sawgrass plains and ridge and slough areas south of Lake Okeechobee. That water would then slowly evaporate as it moved toward Biscayne and Florida Bays or would be taken up and then transpired into the atmosphere by sawgrass and other water-adapted plants. The resulting water vapor was absorbed into the atmosphere and was distributed over the Kissimmee River Valley and Everglades-Big Cypress Basin until it condensed and fell out in the form of precipitation. And the cycle would start over.

        We know now that the natural hydrologic cycle was and is critical to the survival of the Everglades and every environment in central-south Florida. The complex mosaic of life that depends on this system is truly remarkable. If that cycle is disrupted, at stake is everything from habitat for periphyton (tiny but environmentally critical one-celled algae that form the basis of life in the Everglades), to rookeries for colonial wading birds, and drinking water supplies for human residents and visitors. Alas, what took thousands of years for nature to create would take but a few decades of concentrated human intervention to permanently alter and even to destroy.

        The initial period of modern drainage, which ran from 1906 to 1927, was marked by a flurry of construction projects that were intended to lower water levels in Lake Okeechobee and drain the northern Everglades. Making the land south of the Lake usable for agriculture and grazing. Profits, boys, profits. Belly up to the trough and get fat by eating the Everglades. To accomplish that end, a canal was built connecting the Caloosahatchee River to Lake Okeechobee. Additional canals were dredged from the Lake via the Miami, New, Hillsboro, West Palm Beach, and St. Lucie Rivers.

        The Grand Prize that land developers fixed their eyes on was the approximately three million acres of black peat and muck lands south of Lake Okeechobee. A 1911 U.S. Senate document concluded that, “Plans have been laid out for the drainage and reclamation of the Everglades by means of lowering the waters in Lake Okeechobee and the reduction of the water level in the Everglades, thus making available and habitable approximately 3,000,000 acres of exceedingly fertile lands, and funds have been provided to complete the work which is now one-third completed.”[1]

        Pork barrel politics at its finest. Florida Congressmen were learning how to belly up to the public trough and get fat. That marked the beginning of the era of a business-controlled State Legislature and large-scale, federally-funded pork barrel projects, an era that has yet to run its course.

        Although an eight-foot earthen dike had previously been built along Lake Okeechobee’s south shore to protect local residents and farmers from flooding, that construction would prove pathetically inadequate when the nut-cruncher of reality finally hit home. In 1928, a massive hurricane moved north along Florida’s east coast. Near Palm Beach it veered inland, dropping ten inches of rain as it passed through West Palm Beach. As the hurricane tracked west, its powerful winds, circulating in a counter-clockwise direction, pushed enormous quantities of water toward the southern end of Lake Okeechobee. The huge mass of water easily overtopped the earthen dike, first ripping away the clay cap and finally causing the dike to fail altogether. Water as high as 25 feet cascaded over villages and farmlands to the south. Most of the drowning victims, variously estimated from 1,800 to 7,000, were black migrant farm workers (many of whom were from Haiti) who lived around the city of Belle Glade and in western Palm Beach County and had had insufficient warning of the fast-approaching storm. They had no time to flee and died by the hundreds in the turbulent flood waters.[2]

        In response to the ensuing outraged demands for protection from what was proving to be a harsh and not easily tamed environment, the Federal Government initiated a new round of flood control measures. Human nature being what it is few people seriously considered moving away from such a hazardous but potentially lucrative opportunity. And why would they? The Federal Government was there to solve the problems for them.

        In 1930, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began construction of the Herbert Hoover Dike that would girdle the Lake and separate the Everglades from its freshwater supply. That single act marked the death spiral of the natural Everglades. The Dike, which ranged in height between 32 and 45 feet, effectively transformed Lake Okeechobee from a natural system that had fed the Everglades through almost continuous overland sheetflows into a very large bathtub whose waters were controlled by man-made canals and pumping stations. And the inevitable result? That massive human intervention would alter the natural Everglades watershed and cause severe and lasting environmental consequences that would, in turn, gradually but inevitably create severe problems for human settlement throughout south Florida. A big surprise to very few perceptive observers, a category, which, of course, excluded the Corps of Engineers, the Federal agency responsible for the drainage “improvements.”

        Between the 1930s and the mid-1940s, south Florida was pounded by an increasingly harsh drought-flood cycle in which each alternating period seemed to be worse than the preceding. And why? The natural water cycle of the Kissimmee-Okeechobee-Everglades-Big Cypress watershed had been ripped apart and was put back together with critical pieces missing. And the most critical missing piece was fresh water. Sort of makes you wonder if the Corps of Engineers is capable of learning from its mistakes.[3] More on that key topic later.

        Approximately 100 inches of rain fell on southern Florida in 1947. Few people ever anticipated that the end of what had been a devastating drought would eventually turn into the death-knell of the last remaining part of the natural Everglades. But in less than a month two hurricanes and a tropical storm would dump even more water on the already saturated land. Problem was, given the flat, flat landscape, that water literally had no place to go but to rise higher and higher. It wasn’t long before more than 90 percent of south Florida was inundated. Hundreds of people died. Thousands were without homes, water, or electricity. You can imagine the resulting political fallout. The battle-cry was raised by an angry public that knew exactly what they wanted from their elected representatives:


                            PROTECT US FROM OUR OWN STUPIDITY.

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[1] U.S. Senate, 1911, Document 89: “Everglades of Florida, acts, reports, and other papers, state and national, relating to the Everglades of the state of Florida and their reclamation.” 62nd Congress, 1st Session. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.

[2] For an interesting read about the disaster, see: Eliot Kleinberg, Black Cloud: The Great Florida Hurricane of 1928; Carroll & Graf, New York, 2003; and Michael Grunwald, “Water World,” The New Republic, 03-01-04. Author’s Note: As an aside, if that number of white people had died in a natural disaster, what is the likelihood that the event would have received greater media and historical coverage and would appear in our history textbooks?

[3] The above point is neither made facetiously nor merely for effect. For an analysis of how an adaptive ecological learning approach can facilitate more holistic understanding that is useful to decision-makers and political representatives, see: Clyde F. Kiker, J. Walter Milon, and Alan W. Hodges; “South Florida: The Reality of Change and the Prospects for Sustainability: Adaptive Learning for Science-based Policy: the Everglades Restoration,” Ecological Economics, vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 403-416, June, 2001. There is scant evidence, if any, that the Corps has adopted such a learning approach.