What Does The CERP Do? 03 — EATING THE EVERGLADES

          If you want a clue as to the seriousness of the restoration component of the CERP, all you have to know is that it barely makes a token gesture at controlling the exotic plant species that have invaded close to two million acres of the Everglades. The worst exotics are melaleuca trees from Australia that can suck water from dry cardboard and grow in impenetrable thickets that either drive out or kill all competitors and that sustain no native wildlife. Or Australian pines that destroy beaches. And old world climbing ferns and Brazilian pepper that spread like viruses. But the CERP is silent on dealing with those environmentally destructive alien species. Because the CERP is an engineer’s version of environmental restoration. Don’t you love the hypocrisy of it all? A tip of the hat to Congress and our elected representatives as they grow fat while watching the Everglades being eaten by south Florida moneyed interests.

          Still another of the CERP’s highly publicized top priorities is the areal expansion of the Everglades. But in the civil engineers’ desire to play God their own earth-moving requirements will destroy 34,000 acres of existing wetlands. That’s 53 square miles for those Readers who may be interested. And, following mandatory U.S. NEPA regulations, exactly from where are the square miles of replacement wetlands going to come? The Corps doesn’t have an answer for that question. And exactly how and when will that replacement happen? Despite federal legal requirements, the Corps doesn’t know that either. Where in the ever so detailed CERP prepared by the crypto-green Corps of Engineers are all those critical details that are required by federal law? They’re not there. So don’t waste your time looking.

          Believing in the Corps as an environmental restorer is like an adult believing in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. To pile insult on injury, Karl Havens, SFWMD’s chief Lake Okeechobee scientist, has acknowledged publicly that the CERP offers only “limited help” in solving the admittedly horrendous difficulties of Lake Okeechobee, the Everglades’ badly diseased heart. And what analogy can be applied to help Readers understand that reality? Hey, it’s like replacing coronary arteries long after the heart has suffered systemic failure and is in collapse. And that is neither a joke nor an exaggeration.

          To even begin to comprehend those mind-boggling difficulties, the first thing you have to realize is that the CERP was crafted by a coalition of south Florida’s leading sugar and citrus growers, large-scale ranchers, land developers, lime rock miners, water managers, and politicians who had enticed several national environmental organizations into bed with them by promising major environmental improvements would be in place by 2010. Yes, 2010.

          The CERP was a deal sold on the strength that everyone would get something and no one would be hurt too seriously. Right. And if you’re an environmentalist you should now drop your pants, bend over, and brace yourself for the worst.

          The second critical problem is that CERP would be administered and managed by none other than the very people who decades previously, and without thought of consequence, had wreaked environmental havoc on the Everglades by building hundreds of miles of canals, levees, and dikes and monster pumping stations. And that would be the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and their buddies, SFWMD, which for years had the unmitigated gall to claim on their official logo: Protecting the Everglades since 1949. What a travesty. Double-speak at its finest: bad is good, poor is rich, the SFWMD is an environmentalist. Let’s hear it for George Orwell. The very same guys who had tried their damnedest to destroy the complex ecosystem we know as the Everglades are now charged with restoring it. Anyone out there not able to understand what’s so terribly wrong with that scenario?

          In truth, the CERP as designed is nothing more than the typical Corps flood control and water supply project dressed up like the painted whore it is. But lurking in the background of the Everglades Restoration project is an uncomfortable reality. The simple fact no one can deny is the historical Everglades can never be restored, no matter what the most ardent environmentalists would like or how many Federal or State dollars are available. Never. The needs of six million existing south Florida residents and 37 plus million annual tourists cannot be ignored. No wave of the magic wand will make them disappear. Although it may be possible to partially revive a certain part of the Everglades that remains, at this point with the CERP running the show, it’s entirely appropriate to imagine a distinctly minimalist result. But many scientists believe even that would require a lot more diligent and intelligent efforts than are currently available through the CERP or from the chuckleheaded civil engineers and water resource managers at the Corps.

          Today, more than half of the historical Everglades has either been paved over for urban settlement or drained for agricultural uses. And the companies that grow sugar are arguably the most politically sophisticated lobbyists in the U.S., donating generously to the re-election campaigns of hundreds of Congressmen and Senators scattered throughout the country. So, they’re not about to fold their tents and head elsewhere. Not that political donations are illegal. Which they obviously are not, donations to political campaigns being a form of speech, right? But look at what those contributions and their resulting political influence have wrought. The past, continuing, and future destruction of one of the most beautiful and fragile ecosystems in the world. It’s a trade-off the fat politicians of the State of Florida are very comfortable with because it funds their re-election campaigns and keeps them in office. Now there’s an instructive example of the American political system hard at work, a lesson in real-life civics. Grease is as American as apple pie.

          If, as is mentioned above, one half of the Everglades has been drained or developed, what has happened to the other half? Everglades National Park is that half and it has become the prototypical Cinderella-like stepchild: abused, unwanted, and basically unloved. Beaten and battered first one way then the other. Flooded when there’s too much water in the EAA. Turned into a dry, mud-caked basin when the precious fluid is needed for other more important uses, meaning for agriculture or to serve urban needs. Today the Everglades National Park is the real stepchild of south Florida. Anyone out there remember Cinderella and the glass slipper? Problem is, there are no Brothers Grimm to write a fairy-tale ending for the Glades. Only Walt Disney-types are waiting in the wings with an artificial ending.

          Despite Federal legislation supposedly protecting Everglades National Park, especially in terms of ensuring that it had sufficient water for its many and varied ecosystems to survive, the Park has never received what was promised or what was legislated. Not once, not ever. Despite the laws that insisted otherwise. The Park has always sucked hind tit and all too few cared that the life-saving milk, or fresh water as the case may be, dried up decades ago.

            There’s no question in anyone’s mind that the far greater part of CERP is devoted to new water controls that are designed to tweak the existing water management system rather than to restore the Everglades to anything remotely approaching a natural state. In the past four decades, the Kissimmee River, Lake Okeechobee, the northern Everglades, and the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie Rivers were devastated by that very type of brute force engineering mentality. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that most environmentalists are skeptical about a multi-billion dollar engineering exercise that adds even more artificial components to those already in place and steadfastly refuses to restore natural features. According to nationally and internationally respected bio-scientists, restoration of the natural system with as little “water management” technology as possible is the best solution. Just don’t spend any time waiting for that to happen.

          Acknowledging perhaps the undeniably reality that the Everglades is a river of grass, one of CERP’s most commonly stated and often repeated goals, one trumpeted proudly and loudly by Corps water managers, was to “get the water right.” But surprisingly, overland sheetflow, the central mechanical erosional process responsible for the existence of a great part of the historical Everglades landscape, was never on the initial Corps agenda to investigate as part of the CERP or on their list of continued restoration research activities. That is, not until they were pressured to address it by outcries from individual researchers and then from the most respected association of scientists and engineers in the country.

          Hydrologic research that was part of the CERP program was focused largely on restoring the natural location, duration, and timing of water levels and was not concerned with overland flow characteristics, which certainly was a very curious omission since sheetflow is one of the most effective geomorphic agents in shaping the landscape. Things didn’t change until Chris McVoy, a PhD soil scientist from Cornell, started working in Florida in 1996 for the Environmental Defense Fund and who later became an employee of SFWMD.[1] His research interest was specifically focused on one aspect of the natural environment of the Everglades: geomorphic agents that shaped the historical landscape. He did something no other scientist had thought of doing: assembling a huge database of more than 700 historical maps, aerial photographs, surveys, explorers’ field notes, and other accounts dating from as early as 1830. That detailed analysis led him to the conclusion that overland flow, also known as sheetflow, was a critical erosional agent that had gouged the Everglades landscape into a noticeable washboard pattern of parallel and alternating low and high ground called sloughs and ridges that provided habitat for a variety of wading birds, fish, reptiles, snails, saw grass, and water plants.

          McVoy’s efforts gradually began to be recognized among scientists working on the Everglades restoration project as the innovative and ground-breaking effort it was. Finally in August 2002, the Science Coordination Team (SCT), the CERP working group that was charged with the restoration research, bowed to the ever increasing national scientific pressure and decided to prioritize and draw attention to the overlooked physical and ecological dimensions of sheetflow. The SCT first released a draft white paper exploring the influence of water flow on the Everglades landscape and then issued a final report that came to the same conclusions. In the summer of 2003 the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences also released a report evaluating the SCT findings.[2] Their report found that water flow in the Everglades appeared to play a major role in ecosystem structure. Suddenly things had changed and the Corps was forced to look at sheetflow as a major factor in shaping the Everglades landscape.

          Today, the larger scientific community has weighed in on the side of McVoy and against the Corps civil engineers and water managers: “. . . there are compelling reasons to believe that direction, velocity, and rate of flow (i.e., discharge) have important effects on the parallel ridges, sloughs, and tree islands in the central Everglades. Ignoring flow introduces an important source of uncertainty in the implementation of the Restoration Plan.”[3] The conclusion is fairly clear even to laypeople who don’t know the first thing about hydrogeology or geomorphology: if the Everglades is going to be restored in a meaningful way, the water must flow again as it did prior to the Corps’s meddling. But the problem is that, as it stands, the $13 billion CERP doesn’t create nearly enough flow. And that’s because the CERP was created by Corps civil engineers and water managers instead of environmental scientists, which is one reason why sheetflow was never on their radar screen. That failure alone casts enormous doubt on the scientific validity of the CERP.

Implications

          So why all the fuss about something as esoteric as sheetflow? Because the CERP and all the related construction activities have already been approved by Congress and schedules, timelines, and budgets for construction and pilot projects have been set. The Tamiami Trail, constructed by Barron Gift Collier Senior in 1928, largely cut off sheetflow to the Everglades. If sheetflow is a major consideration in “getting the water right,” as the Corps has never tired of trumpeting, then restoring the natural sheetflow must become a CERP priority. If so, parts of the Tamiami Trail have to go as it now exists since the highway cuts off sheetflow to the Everglades National Park. Either that or substantial portions would have to be elevated, especially the eleven-mile section that forms the northern boundary of the Park. In 2004-2005, the Corps began looking at options for the future of the Trail, but their alternatives have been sharply constrained by an increasingly parsimonious budget, largely effects of the attack on Afghanistan, the war in Iraq and one huge tax cut after another. According to the Corps analysis, building an 11-mile elevated section of the Trail would cost $150 million. Although a mile-long bridge on the Trail will be built under the Modified Water Deliveries project, that’s the only elevated section that will be funded unless additional monies are appropriated by Congress. An additional 5.5 miles of bridging and other construction elements have been proposed as the Everglades Skyway. Four bridges ranging from a third of a mile to 2.6 miles will replace sections of the Tamiami Trail, beginning about one mile west of Krome Ave. in Miami-Dade County. The projected cost is $324 million. But as of summer 2011 Congress had not approved the funding bill.

          So the concept of elevating the highway to improve overland flow into the National Park remains in unfunded limbo and is not now part of the CERP process. The need for an elevated section is something the Corps civil engineers never considered in the CERP, which is a critical error and a perfect illustration of the Corps’s many glaring deficiencies in terms of its understanding of natural landscapes.

          Author’s Note: After years of stiff-arming the National Academies of Science and Engineering and working desperately to keep that organization at the edge of the action rather than on the inside, on June 14, 2004, the Federal government and the State of Florida finally folded their opposition and announced a formal agreement to allow an independent scientific panel to review the then $8 billion plus, 30-year CERP.[4] Previously, a panel from the National Academies of Science (NAS), the Committee on the Restoration of the Greater Everglades Ecosystem (CROGEE), was only allowed to review topics that were pre-approved by the same Corps of Engineers that promoted the CERP and designed the earlier and environmentally disastrous C&SF Project.

          Under the new agreement, the National Academies of Science review of the CERP, an assessment of ecological indicators, and the overall restoration progress will be reported biennially to Congress. The agreement to set up the review process was signed by the Corps (whose representatives must have been biting their tongues and muttering angry curses as they signed the document), the U.S. Interior Department, and the South Florida Water Management District.

           Naturally, in their joint press release everyone was making nice but you can only imagine the bloody infighting that had been waged for nearly a decade as the Corps did every single thing in their power to keep NAS at arm’s length or any greater distance that was possible. The very last thing they wanted was for biologists and other natural scientists looking over their shoulders and raising embarrassing questions about their water management mindset and their manifest failure to address key environmental concerns in the CERP.

          Let’s conclude by taking another look at the Lake Belt situation detailed above. Perhaps I can boil it down to its essence by identifying the intertwined elements so everyone can understand clearly what page I’m on and why my temper is up.

• Property rights fiercely held by one of the most politically powerful businesses in all of Florida: the mining industry.
• An imperiled, fragile, world-class ecosystem already grievously damaged by human occupance.
• State and local politicians and local governments without the will to regulate an industry that contributes hundreds of thousands of dollars to political campaigns.
• Federal politicians and an administration without the courage or the desire to stand up to political pressure and protect either its citizens or a unique environment.
• An indifferent, apathetic populace without the will to force the drastic political change that is necessary to save a fragile and unique environment.

          Sad, to say, those combined elements constitute a powerful formula for the continued destruction of the Everglades and inter-related ecosystems, like the Big Cypress, Lake Okeechobee, Biscayne Bay, and Florida Bay. With no end in sight.

          So, after all the cards have been dealt, what really is the CERP? Nothing more than an assurance of future paydays for south Florida developers, agribusiness, and the mining industry. The CERP is a very sophisticated shell game whose creators are confident is so complicated and so convoluted that the collective public, with its notoriously short attention span and limited concern for things environmental, won’t get interested in the first place. Or secondly won’t understand details that can be frustratingly complex. Their hopes are that even if the public stumbles onto the facts, the complexities will put them to sleep or leave them dazed and confused. So the sound bite artists and the flim-flam men have had their day. Smoke and mirrors have been the rule whenever the Everglades has been on the table for serious discussion. Remember, for the Slick Willies of this world perception is reality. Therefore, according to the political fat cats calling the plays in Washington and Tallahassee, if the CERP is perceived by the public as a restoration plan then it is a restoration plan. Viola.

          I may be too cynical but that’s bullshit, pure and simple.

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[1] Interested parties should consult the internet for the work of Chris McVoy on pre-drainage overland flow patterns. His basic argument is that sheetflow was sufficiently strong to sculpt patterns in the historic Everglades landscape. Which means that overland flow was a lot stronger than thought previously by Corps civil engineers and that the CERP wetland science must be way off base. Getting the water depth and timing right may only be part of the restoration equation. Which may prove to be a huge scientific and engineering problem for the CERP and its proponents because of the Corps’s abysmal failure to “get the water right” when the CERP was created. For more information see: Science Coordination Team, “The Role of Flow in the Everglades Ridge and Slough Landscape,” January, 14, 2003; available online at: http://sofia.usgs.gov/publications/papers/sct_flows/

[2] National Research Council, Committee on Restoration of the Greater Everglades Ecosystem, Does Water Flow Influence Everglades Landscape Patterns? The National Academies Press, 2003.

[3] Ibid.

[4] News release PA-04-12, 6-14-04. Online source: http://www.evergladesplan.org/docs/pr_nas_061504.pdf