Jokulhlaup, Buckyball, Chaos Theory

Jokulhlaup               1) Large outburst flash flood event of glacial origin. 2) Any unpredictable and catastrophic release of water from a glacier, such as when a glacially dammed lake drains catastrophically. 3) Glacial outburst caused by melt water from a sub-glacial volcano. Also known as Glacial Lake Outburst Floods (GLOF), these events are caused by one or more factors that adversely affect the dam’s structural integrity, including erosion, increase in hydrostatic pressure, rock fall, snow avalanche, earthquake or cryoseism, volcanic activity under the ice, or if a large enough portion of a glacier overhanging the lake breaks off and massively displaces water in a glacial lake at its base. The resulting floods often transport significant debris loads and can attain high velocity due to large volumes of water being released suddenly in areas having high relief, frequently causing significant environmental damage and loss of human life and property. As an eruption begins in Iceland, for example, pressurized magma moves slowly toward the surface, bringing volatiles and groundwater in its path to the boiling point. But the overlying glacier acts like the lid on a giant pressure cooker. The thicker the ice, the more it contains the pressure of the boiling water and the magma. But when the volcano finally erupts, magma as hot as 2,200° F instantly mixes with the superheated groundwater and the ice. The result is a monstrous eruption of steam, ash, lava, and volcanic fragments that rockets skyward upward in what amounts to a classic mushroom cloud. Real World Example: On November 5 though 8, 1996, scientists from the Science Institute at the University of Iceland flew over a jokulhlaup that had been released from the Skeiararjokull Glacier following a sub-glacial volcanic eruption. Only hours after emerging from the ice sheet, the jokulhlaup had a discharge of 5,000 cubic meters per second, which increased to 45,000 cubic meters per second within an hour and a half (another way for this to make sense to Americans not accustomed to metrics, is to think of the flow as 1.5 million square feet per second). Two large bridges, 1,150 and 2,800 feet long, were destroyed and six miles of roads washed away. A large, elongated plume of suspended sediment formed in the ocean beyond the jokulhlaup’s outlet. On the glacier itself, collapse, scouring, and subsidence associated with the jokulhlaup formed an ice canyon two miles long with an average depth of 300 feet. Luckily, owing to the advanced warning system Iceland has had in place for years, no deaths occurred as a result of the outburst flood. Countries affected by GLOFs include Iceland, Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, northern India, Chile, and Argentina. Author’s Note: Jokulhlaup (pronounced yokel lop) is an Icelandic word meaning sudden water release from glaciers. Duh.

Buckyball                 Enigmatic cluster or chain of carbon atoms discovered in a Rice University research laboratory in a collaboration of British astro-chemist Harold W. Kroto and American chemists Richard E. Smalley (1943-2005) and Robert F. Curl Jr. into the by-products of laser-vaporized graphite. Kroto, Smalley, and Curl then discovered that the combinations of hexagons and pentagons that characterized the new found hollow spherical structure were amazingly reminiscent of the geodesic dome designed by the engineer, R. Buckminster Fuller, for the 1967 Montreal World Exhibition. So they named the new molecule buckminsterfullerene, which today is shortened to fullerene or buckyball. The more straight-laced chemists write it as C-60 or Carbon60 (or simply as C60). About that time Tony Haymet, an Australian theoretical chemist at the University of California at Berkeley, coincidentally published a paper predicting the existence of an allotropic form of carbon that he called footballene, named after a soccer ball (known as a football to the world outside of the U.S.) with its hexagonal-pentagonal leather cover. In 1996 Curl, Kroto, and Smalley were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their discovery.

Author’s Note: The C-60 buckyball is the most famous of the fullerenes but by no means the only one. In fact, scientists have now discovered hundreds of different combinations of these interlocking pentagon/hexagon formations. However, it must be noted that the symmetry of C-60 makes it the most stable buckyball; other interesting variations include:

• Buckybabies — spheroid carbon molecules containing fewer than 60 carbon atoms
• Fuzzyballs — C-60 buckyballs attached to 60 other atoms such as hydrogen or fluorine or a combination of lithium/fluorine
• Giant fullerenes — fullerenes containing hundreds of carbon atoms in multilayer cages called “onions”
• C-70 — molecules with 70 carbon atoms, with an oblong shape somewhat like a rugby ball or an Australian Rules football
• Nitrogen fullerenes, especially C48N12, that hold promise for an impressive range of potential applications, from orthopedic implants to new pharmaceuticals to high explosives to propellants for supersonic aircraft/space vehicles

Actually fullerenes have been around for many thousands of years in small amounts, especially in burning candles or oil lamps whose flames vaporize wax molecules containing carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Some of those molecules are instantly consumed while others move upwards into the yellow tip where temperatures are great enough to split them apart, creating carbon-rich soot particles that give off gentle yellow light. Buckyballs can be found amid the resulting soot. As Harry Kroto and his colleagues discovered, buckyballs are found in places ranging from interstellar dust to burning candle wicks to geological formations on Earth. Consequently, although they can be classified as an exciting scientific discovery, they’ve turned out to be fairly common in nature, although not in great quantities. Along with graphite and diamond, buckyballs are a form of pure carbon.

Real World Examples: For the past two decades materials scientists have been eagerly exploring the properties of fullerenes. In 1991, Japanese scientists discovered that the buckyball structure can be extended to form long, slender tubes, or carbon nanotubes, that are single molecules comprised of rolled graphene sheets capped at each end. Computer simulations and laboratory experiments have demonstrated that those nanotubes have extraordinary resilience and strength and various unusual properties; for example, under load they can abruptly and reversibly snap from one shape to another and can be formed into very strong rope-like shapes. They also exhibit electrical conductivity that has led to experiments with tiny nanowires and nanoscale transistors. Although manufacture of such incredibly small molecular structures poses enormous technical challenges, numerous practical applications are now being pursued. Richard Smalley believed that carbon nanotubes could one day be woven into long transmission wires that would be far lighter, stronger, and more efficient than the existing electrical grid. He also saw nanotechnology as the key to producing solar and other renewable energy sources that could replace fossil fuels. In 1990 for the first time physicists Wolfgang Krätschmer and Donald R. Huffman devised a technique that produced large quantities of C60 by arcing a current between two graphite electrodes to burn in a helium atmosphere and extracting the carbon condensate with an organic solvent. The Kratschmer-Huffman technique is now being applied in hundreds, if not thousands, of laboratories throughout the world that are engaged in an entirely new branch of chemical research in such diverse areas as astro-chemistry, biochemistry, solid-state physics, superconductivity, and materials chemistry/physics.

Additional Author’s Note: The formal name for the C-60 molecule’s structure is truncated icosahedron, which is the same shape that is used in the construction of soccer balls. It was also the configuration of the lenses used to focus the explosive shock waves of the detonators in the Fat Man plutonium implosion-type bomb the American military dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945.

Chaos Theory[1]                    In the book In the Wake of Chaos, philosopher Stephen H. Kellert defined chaos theory as: “The qualitative study of unstable aperiodic behavior in deterministic nonlinear dynamical systems.” To put that thought into simpler words, Chaos Theory posits that it is possible to observe complex, unpredictable, and apparently random behavior arising from seemingly simple natural systems. Chaos Theory also asserts the reverse scenario, that an observer can study seemingly random systems and show order within the apparent randomness/chaos.

Unlike many other branches of mathematics and physics, Chaos Theory deals with nonlinear problems and thus is not exclusively dependent on numerical calculations in developing predictions. The issue is nonlinear problems are generally more difficult to study because the behavior of nonlinear systems cannot be predicted in a straight-line manner. In essence, Chaos Theory asserts that the future behavior of complex and dynamic systems (like weather) is incredibly sensitive to small variations in initial conditions.

In the early 1960s, MIT meteorologist Edward N. Lorenz discovered chaotic behavior as he worked on a computer analysis of weather patterns. In his effort to predict weather Lorenz used an early digital computer to solve a set of twelve mathematical equations that roughly modeled a given number of weather patterns. Because at that time computer runs of complex mathematical equations were very time consuming and costly, on his second effort Lorenz started the computer run at the mid-point of his analysis and rounded his original numbers from six decimal places to three. However, because the numbers entered were not exactly the same as in the first analysis, the calculations produced by the computer quickly began diverging from those of the original outcome. Lorenz then substituted very nearly the same initial conditions for his system of equations but found that regardless of how slight the initial variation, the numbers that the equations were generating always diverged drastically after a relatively short period of time.

That occurrence led Lorenz to the conclusion that complex systems such as the weather are incredibly sensitive with respect to the initial conditions of the system. In Lorenz’s own words:

It implies that two states differing by imperceptible amounts may eventually evolve into two considerably different states. If, then, there is any error whatever in observing the present state — and in any real system such errors seem inevitable — and acceptable prediction of an instantaneous state in the distant future may well be impossible. An alteration so small that it only affected the one-millionth place value of a decimal point, comparable to a butterfly flapping its wings perhaps, could throw off the whole prediction.

This incredible dependence on initial conditions was labeled by Lorenz as the “Butterfly Effect.” According to his analogy, if a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil it thus changes the initial conditions within the atmosphere (though by only a fractionally small amount) and thereby could cause rain in Texas. Think about that idea for a moment. Lorenz’s concept indeed reveals an astonishing world that is not readily apparent. Until Lorenz’s discovery, scientists had no reason to believe that the stability of a subsystem could be independent of the stability of the rest of the system. Nor had anyone thought that a nonlinear system could be stable when driven by chaotic signals.

Author’s Note: So, what good is chaos in natural systems and does Chaos Theory have practical application? Before the 1990s most scientists believed that chaos was unreliable, uncontrollable, and therefore unusable in any scientific application. It is true that no one can ever predict exactly how a chaotic system will behave over long periods. For that reason, engineers and scientists initially dealt with Chaos Theory by avoiding it. Today, that strategy is regarded as shortsighted. Within the past few years scientists have demonstrated that chaos can be manageable, exploitable, and even invaluable. Application of Chaos Theory has resulted in increases in the power of lasers, synchronization of the output of electronic circuits, control of oscillations in chemical reactions, stabilization of erratic heart beats of unhealthy animals, and the encoding of electronic messages for secure communications. Therefore, who knows what the future holds, other than more chaos? For an in-depth review of non-linear science including Chaos Theory, see: Alwyn C. Scott. Nonlinear Science: Emergence and Dynamics of Coherent Structures. Oxford University Press, 2003; and “The Development of Nonlinear Science,” paper given at the University of New Mexico, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Consortium of the Americas Seminars, October 10, 2005; online source: http://personal.riverusers.com/~rover/AScott(rev).pdf

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[1] Sources: “Chaos Theory: The Mergence of Science and Philosophy” by Manus J. Donahue, found online at: http://www.duke.edu/~mjd/chaos/Ch3.htm#first

And “Mastering Chaos” by William L. Ditto and Louis M. Pecora, found online at http://www.fortunecity.com/emachines/e11/86/mastring.html

Also see: http://www.alunw.freeuk.com/chaos.html

Maryhurst Prep 01 and 02

Maryhurst Prep 01

Of course I got into a lot of trouble during the next three years at Maryhurst. I might have been attending a prep school for Marianist Postulants but that didn’t mean I wasn’t full of piss and vinegar (which is how Grandmother Cundiff described me) and as wild as I thought I could get away with. My first exposure to Bro. Xav’s stern gaze came only a few months after I arrived. One of our teachers was an elderly priest who had retired from a university professorship in France. Fr. Carl Dreisoerner, as I believe his name was spelled. He was in his early seventies, a tall, very slender even sepulchral man who in mid-Autumn took to wearing unusual hats, including berets, and a long black cape, much in the old European fashion. At night he would pace along the sidewalk in the front of the building, saying his Holy Office until the light failed.

One particularly nippy evening in late October I observed him strolling along, a French beret perched jauntily on his head and a long, black woolen cloak swirling in the wind behind him. To that impressionable teenager he looked precisely like the movie version of Count Dracula. Naturally, I ran inside the Recreation Room and called to several of my cohorts to come see something that was totally weird. We ran outside nosily and I pointed to the good priest and made my comparison.

While everyone was laughing and hooting at Fr. Dreisoerner’s expense along came Bro. Xav, who evidently had heard everything. He confronted us and demanded to know what was so funny. Naturally, we all fell silent. After an uncomfortable moment or two I ‘fessed up. He took me inside to his office, closed the door, and gave me a lecture on Christian courtesy. That wasn’t so bad but he made me tell Fr. Dreisoerner what I had done and apologize for my lack of consideration. The old priest took it quite well, actually, and even asked me to say a prayer or two for him if I had the chance.

Bro. Xav wasn’t nearly so forgiving. He made me go to Chapel every night for a week while everyone else had evening recreation and pray for wisdom and maturity. The punishment was singularly unsuccessful in that it didn’t achieve the desired result. But I never made that particular mistake again. An unruly handful, yes. Stupid, no.

Maryhurst Prep 02

In my junior year I managed to get involved in a much more serious problem that threatened to have me thrown out of Maryhurst on my ear. And of all things it was over cigarettes. Which was really stupid because, as an asthmatic, I was a non-smoker and even hated the smell of smoke. But I was anxious to do a favor for a couple friends and that’s how it got started. Because I wanted them to think highly of me. Peer pressure. Yeah.

Either Larry W. or Chuck S., or both, found out that I was going to the Fiftieth Jubilee of the ordination of Monsignor White, the pastor at St. Paul the Apostle Church, which was my home parish. Naturally, as a Postulant I was invited, as were all the other parishioners studying in seminaries or religious orders. I would have plenty of opportunity to buy cigarettes for my buddies. Cigarettes, of course, were on Maryhurst’s extensive list of forbidden pleasures. Sure, I said, without a single hesitation. So anxious was I to please. Both Larry and Chuck were excellent athletes whose respect I valued. And Chuck was also a very bright guy I liked. Therefore I couldn’t see any valid reason not to oblige them. After all, rules were meant to be broken. Any way, who would know? Right.

After attending the Jubilee, which turned out to be an extraordinarily boring event, I returned to Maryhurst, cigarettes in hand. Immediately after dinner about five or six of us retired to the privacy of the apple orchard to smoke the forbidden fruit, as it were. And how they enjoyed them. It was almost comical to watch those young teenagers acting like such jaded adults, pulling with determined nonchalance on their cancer sticks, trying so hard not to cough from the unaccustomed heat.

The shit hit the fan after Evening Recreation was over and we were back in Study Hall. Joel C., one of the smokers, came hustling over to my desk with a look of imminent death on his face. Out of the corner of his mouth came the words I never wanted to hear, “It’s our asses. Bro. Xav knows everything. We’re all in deep shit.”

My stomach rolled over several times before taking a dive for my toes. At that instant none other than Bro. Xav appeared at the Study Hall doorway and, with a frown as dark as a thundercloud, beckoned me to his office. By that time everyone in the Study Hall knew something big was up. A longer walk I have never taken in my life.

Once in his office he sternly asked me when was the last time I had a cigarette. I answered honestly, in a voice that trembled, that I never smoked one in my life. Naturally he didn’t believe me until I told him that I was asthmatic and couldn’t smoke. It didn’t take too long for the sordid truth to come out. That when asked I had agreed to buy the contraband and smuggle it into Maryhurst. Wow, was he angry. He gave me a long lecture about betraying his trust, making me feel like an absolute shit. Then he nailed the others, even though I had refused to identify them. We never found out for sure who blew the whistle. Certainly one of our fellow Postulants had seen us engaged in suspicious activities (my guess was one particular “old” boy who was a goodie-two shoes as some Postulants would have said ever so politely, or a true brown-noser and ass-kisser as I put it) and had reported us to the authorities. An informer, as my Irish Grandmother Cundiff would have put it, her lip curling in a contemptuous sneer.

I don’t remember the punishment we got but it had to have been major. Bro Xav called my parents with the bad news and they chewed me out big-time. I was miserable for a week or so. Then, like the kid I was, I forgot it until it was time for Report Cards, which to my horror were read out loud in front of the entire student population. I received two unsatisfactory conduct marks. Three “Unsatisfactory” marks on one Report Card meant that you were expelled forthwith. I had dodged the bullet by the smallest of margins and tip-toed around on my best behavior until after the next Report Card. Soon after that incident, when several Brothers from McBride visited Maryhurst, they chided me about letting the school down. They were sort of kidding but I got the message. Shape up, shithead, or you’re history.

Introduction to Maryhurst Prep

In the early spring of 1958, my freshman year in high school, I was invited to Maryhurst Preparatory School, located at 1101 South Kirkwood Road. The purpose of the visit was to determine if I liked what I saw enough to want to become a Postulant in the Society of Mary, which was the first step toward becoming a member of that religious order. It was also a chance for the powers that be to see if they thought me an acceptable candidate, though that idea came to me only later, after several years had passed.

One of the Brothers picked up me and another boy whose name is lost in the fog of time and off we went to Kirkwood, an old established satellite community southwest of the City of St. Louis. Right off the bat we were each assigned to the care and supervision of a Maryhurst freshman. Mine was Gerry M., a tall, gangly slightly overweight boy who had a sweet smile and a quiet, even disposition. We hit it off immediately despite the great difference in size and temperament. He was over six feet tall and probably came close to 200 pounds. One of the first things we did after a brief orientation indoors was to tour the grounds.

By way of introduction, prior to 1920 Maryhurst had been the country estate of a rich industrialist named Brown who was an amateur but serious horticulturalist and silvaculturalist. He had an abiding love for trees, shrubs, and flowers and sufficient money to indulge himself fabulously by transforming the previously unremarkable rolling uplands into a storybook garden. He converted a large portion of the not quite 100 acres into an arboretum, which he called Brownhurst (hurst being the German word for forest), featuring plants from all over the world, even exotic orchids. After the Marianists acquired the property, much of the original equipment and facilities remained and were put to a variety of uses in the newly renamed Maryhurst Preparatory School, which was a boarding school where the boys lived from mid-August through mid-June.

By 1958, Maryhurst was a boys’ paradise filled with baseball diamonds, soccer-football fields, tennis-basketball courts, swimming pool, park-like woods, apple orchards, modern print shop, and fields of potatoes, strawberries, corn, beans, carrots, lettuce, etc. And even a chicken house with assorted feathery residents busily providing eggs. The front part of the property was dominated by the main building, a five-story, reddish brick structure that resembled a less architecturally complex and much more attractive version of Chaminade High School, a Marianist institution several miles to the north in the City of Frontenac. To the first-time youthful visitor it was an awesome sight. As you entered the property on a gently curving drive from South Kirkwood Road, ball fields were on the right and a large forested park filled with maple, hickory, pine, and oak trees was on the left. Owing to the profusion of trees, the building could not be seen clearly until you were almost on top of it.

That first sight is forever burned into my memory. Towering above and seemingly into the distance it was, and remains in my mind’s eye, one of the more impressive buildings I have seen, although nothing of its architecture could be called remarkable or even distinctive. The brick was dark reddish brown and the shape of the building vaguely a 1920s institutional gothic, but at the same time it was warm and non-threatening. It occupied a gentle rise amid a sea of greenery punctuated by flowery jewels cared for by the postulants, under the mock-stern eye of Brother Frank Perk, an older Working Brother who functioned as the chief gardener and farmer. The formal front of the building contrasted with the relaxed atmosphere of the rear, with the kitchen, scullery, receiving area, and curving service drive where I later learned to play volleyball and the most viciously competitive game of four-square (also known as bounce-ball) ever witnessed.

On the day of the tour my guide, Gerry M., led me all over the grounds. Among the sights were a number of structures located several hundred yards from the main building. Almost hidden by a grove of enormous evergreen and oak trees was an old wooden tower that served fifty years before as a vertical greenhouse. Gerry said that Bro. Frank had told him that the lower stories were part hothouse and part nursery and the upper were used for storage and contained a complex, mechanical system that may have watered orchids and other delicate, tropical plants.

Naturally, the second I laid my eyes on this incredible structure I was fiercely determined to explore the inside. Equally naturally, Gerry told me it was locked, no doubt wanting to protect himself in case anything went wrong. But that meant nothing to me. I was certain he wanted to get inside as much as I did but was afraid to risk the consequences. I never hesitated. After all, I was an invited guest. A visitor. What could they do to me, even if I violated the rules? All I had to do was to plead ignorance, especially if Gerry was cool enough to keep his mouth shut.

I climbed the steps and tried the door. Sure enough, it was locked. As soon as I saw the little smirk on Gerry’s face I knew I’d be inside within three minutes. Having smashed many windows in the course of my young life (and also having learned to replace the glass properly under the lash of my father’s harsh gaze and impatient instructions) I knew how to take them apart as well. Using my trusty Boy Scout knife — which was always in my pocket and was not against school regulations to carry it, different times indeed — to pry a strip of old, brittle putty loose, I simply pried a lower pane out of the glass panel in the door, and carefully set it on the step. I then reached through the opening and released the lock from the inside. In less than a minute I was standing triumphantly in the middle of the first floor in the building.

Poor Gerry stood on the small porch for a couple seconds, locked in the horns of a nasty dilemma. If he followed me in he was in deep shit for breaking the rules. But if he didn’t and I got hurt while he stood uncertainly outside with his thumb up his ass not knowing what to do, then he would be in really serious trouble. So he quickly followed me in, determined to keep me out of as much trouble as was humanly possible. Ha! Little did he know, as later years at Maryhurst would prove.

We walked around every floor, finding a junkman’s paradise. Flower pots of all sizes lined the stairs and the landings. Old, dusty, cob-webbed equipment was everywhere. Neither of us had a clue as to what it was originally used for and didn’t care. In the middle of a bone-fide adventure you don’t stop to pose unanswerable questions.

It didn’t take us more then a few minutes to get all the way to the top floor — it was either the sixth or seventh story. In the middle of the nearly empty room was a rickety ladder leading to a trap door in the roof. In a blink of an eye we were standing together at the top of the ladder, peering out the trap door we had forced open over the landscape below. We were rewarded with an incredible view that with passing time has ceased to exist. The old farm buildings looked strangely out of proportion from that perspective, so radically different from the way they appeared a few minutes before as we walked past them.

The entire grounds of Maryhurst and far beyond spread out like a blanket before us. Visually, it was a magic carpet ride. The roof of the main building floated in a sea of green trees. A group of Postulants playing baseball looked ridiculously small and downtown Kirkwood, about a mile distant, was all but obscured by early spring vegetation and by topography’s swells and swales.

When we finally came to our senses and wandered down from the tower we were tired yet thrilled by our adventure. Cobwebs and dust stains covered our clothes so we cleaned off very carefully because I didn’t want Gerry to get into trouble, and neither did he. He made me promise not to tell anyone what we had done or, “It will be my ass,” as he succinctly put it. I remember being so impressed by his casual use of vulgarity that I momentarily forgot my excitement. What he couldn’t know was that I had been hiding all sorts of good times from my parents and was already an expert in dummying-up around authority figures.

The rest of my impressions of that day are vague. I sat in a study hall for an hour reading a novel while everyone around me did homework. The desk was one of those relics from the 1930s, attached by long wooden runners to the desk in front and the one behind. Each desk had an inkwell for old-fashioned ink pens and a hinged lid that lifted straight in the air so the monitor at the front of the room could see instantly if you were opening it to retrieve some contraband. That’s about all I recall of that magical day but that experience was more than enough to make up my mind. I was ready for a new high school.

On Floods and Humans

The recent floods on the Mississippi River captured my interest and have pushed me into reflecting on a number of things. One, of course, is how stupid we are to build in what is so demonstrably a natural hazard zone. A second is how stupid we are to build levees and water control structures that guarantee flooding will only get worse in the future.

After thinking about those two elements it struck me that they are related in a way I had not initially realized. With new insight I see in my mind’s eye that both forms of stupidity combine to indicate a fundamental flaw in humans that does not bode well for the species or for the Earth.

As a species we are blind to future consequences of our actions because we are blinded by what we as individuals want now. Humans are capable only of recognizing and acting on the demands of the individual in the present. It’s all about our uncontrolled “needs” and desires that amounts to types of narcissism and hubris and indifference to other things all rolled into one colossal species specific reality.

We know what we want and do not care what we have to do, what we have to destroy, to get it. We as a group do not care what our actions are doing to and will do to the environment. As a few specific individuals, maybe, which is why we have organizations like the Natural Resources Defense Council or the Sierra Club. Yes, those liberal, idiot tree huggers.

But as a group we don’t give a rat’s ass. That’s exactly why the forests of Europe are gone. Why the Aral Sea is shrinking into nothingness. Why Lake Texcoco is gone. Why the Great American Prairie is gone. Why carrier pigeons, buffalo, and beaver are gone or nearly gone. Why the Everglades is no longer a viable ecosystem.

Because we want what we want and have the ability to take it and fuck the consequences. Which is why we face drastic times in the near-, mid-, and long-term future with global warming. We are blinded by what we want now.

The other day I drove to the grade school our children attended. My little Hyundai was surrounded by a herd of monster SUVs and vans. Dozens and dozens of SUVs and vans and practically no mid-sized or compact cars. We don’t give a shit about energy consumption or pollution in our daily lives. Not really. If we did no one would be driving those monsters. And that’s exactly why global warming has our future by the throat. Because the future is not present to us today. We only know what we want now and are able to grab.

The future isn’t real. Only now is real. Let someone else worry about the future. We’re too busy living in the present to give a shit.

GEOSCIENCES SOURCE BOOK — Definitions with Daffynitions

Abyssal Zone             Dark ocean region ranging from 6,500 feet to 19,500 feet deep with temperatures less than 39° F. About three-fourths of the deep-ocean floor lies in this zone, which is too far from the surface for photosynthesis to take place. Once believed to be devoid of life, the abyssal zone is actually home to an assortment of highly adapted and specialized fish and crustaceans, some of which are blind but others have evolved their own light sources. Daffynition: Don’t need to define it since you’ve been seen in bars just like it trying to hook up with some bottom dweller.

Acadian Orogeny               Convergent mountain-building event that occurred around 425 million years ago (Devonian) in which continental slivers accreted to the eastern edge of what is properly termed the Proto-North American continent (Laurentia). The Orogeny occurred when the Avalonian island arc, moving northwest, and Baltica (Proto Western Europe), moving west, crashing against the southward-Laurentia, creating the northern Appalachian mountains. The event is also known as the Appalachian or Avalonian Orogeny. Author’s Note: With the suturing of Laurentia and Baltica, the Acadian Orogeny marked the beginning of the closure of the southern Iapetus Ocean and the formation of Pangaea. Daffynition: Though we’ve all had an orogeny or two I don’t think many of them ever built up to the Acadian level. But I wish.

Accordant Summits               Ranges of hills or mountain peaks that have the same or nearly the same elevation; part of William Morris Davis’s no longer accepted erosion cycle concept in which a raised peneplain is eventually eroded into a series of peaks with about the same elevation. Daffynition: Well, maybe I should just let this one pass in a rare exercise in good judgment.

Accreted Terrane               Block of land that collided with a continent at a convergent margin and stayed attached to the continent; terrane that did not form at its present location on a continent. Real World Examples: the Canadian Cordillera, Franciscan Mélange in southern California, the Klamath Mountains in Oregon, and the Endicott Mountain in Alaska’s Brooks Range in Gates of the Arctic National Park are wonderful illustrations. Author’s Note: But, wait. Here’s an interesting question. From whence came the basement of Florida? Answer: Gondwanan origin for the pre-Cretaceous basement of Florida is thought likely from a study of U-Pb ages<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[1]<!--[endif]--> (515 Mya to 2860 Mya) for single zircons separated from subsurface samples of lower Paleozoic sandstone of the Suwannee basin (in Alachua County around Gainesville) and the Neo-Proterozoic Osceola granite (in Osceola County, which lies south of Orlando). The two dominant zircon age groupings correspond age-wise to the Pan-African and Birimian or Eburnian (Africa) and to the Brasiliano and Trans-Amazonian (South America) orogenic cycles, clearly placing the basement of Florida in Gondwanaland near the West African or Trans Amazonian-San Luis cratons in the early Paleozoic. Hey, and you thought you knew all about the Sunshine State. Daffynition: Some scrofulous jerk who’s attached himself to a young hottie in a watering hole, party, or concert just will not let go.

Accretionary Heating        Thermal energy resulting from bolide impacts upon a planetary surface. Daffynition: What you feel for that delicious young thing that keeps on growing on you.

Acid Precipitation          See acid rain. Daffynition: “Yo, dude, it’s fucking raining LSD.”

Acre-foot                   Volume of water required to cover one acre of land to a depth of one foot. One acre-foot is equal to 43,560 cubic feet, or 325,851 gallons, or 1,233 cubic meters, or a shit-load of water any way you measure it. Real World Example: When farmers irrigate their fields they typically use between two and four acre-feet per year per growing season, depending on their geographic location, climate, and crop needs. So, if you are a flower grower in Maricopa County (in the thirsty Sonoran Desert) west of Phoenix with 700 acres of roses that you continuously crop, since the growing season lasts all year, it’s easy to figure out how much of that liquid gold you’ll need to bring the crops to harvest, assuming three to four crops per year. Daffynition: The size your foot feels after someone has just shoved it up your ass.

Advancing Glacier             Large ice mass that accumulates snow/ice at a rate that results in the lower edges being pushed outward and downward. Daffynition: Total dork moving in your direction at a hot singles bar, chilling everything around as it creeps along.

Aeolian Landform              Landforms produced by the deposition or erosion of weathered surface materials by wind including, among others, the following landforms: erg, sand dunes in general, deflation hollows, reg, and desert pavement. Daffynition: inert mass that lays around waiting to get blown (Yes, Sister, I know the proper verb tense).

Agate                Very fine grained (cryptocrystalline), translucent type of variegated chalcedony quartz that forms in concentric layers or bands in a wide variety of colors and textures; translucent microcrystalline variety of quartz usually found as striped or banded filings in cavities of volcanic and other rocks; often found as a round nodule, with concentric bands like the rings of a tree trunk. Author’s Note: The type known as moss agate features very delicate, dendritic-like patterns that resemble moss. Agates are frequently associated with opal. Many agates are cut and polished as semi-precious stones or as art objects. The word is derived from Middle English and Old French by way of the Romans, who borrowed it from the Greek, akhates. Daffynition: The nickname of some lame-ass Texas college football team.

Agglomerate               Pyroclastic rock comprised of a chaotic assemblage of coarse angular volcanic fragments cemented by a matrix of volcanic ash. Daffynition: Assemblage of coarse jerks who always seem cemented to the hottest babe in the bar.

Agglutinate              1) Pyroclastic deposit consisting of an accumulation of originally plastic ejecta that were welded together by molten glassy materials. 2) Fragmented foraminifer tests cemented together. Daffynition: Depositional process largely affecting female college freshmen. Used as the verb, to agglutinate.

Air Blast             Physical effects, including sudden, high winds and enormous overpressure, produced on the Earth’s surface by a relatively large meteorite that had been burned up in the atmosphere; this type of blast can be more powerful than a Category 5 hurricane, as powerful as a moderate sized nuclear explosion, and is capable of destroying natural and built landscapes. Real World Example: On June 30, 1908, an air blast from a meteorite struck near the Stony Tunguska River in Siberia, about 55 miles north of Vanavara, devastating 800 square miles, felling nearly all the natural vegetation, including thousands of acres of evergreen forests. The force of the explosion has been estimated at 40 megatons of TNT, or 2,000 times the force of the atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima in 1945. Daffynition: What you feel after getting rejected by the hottie of your dreams.

Air Pollution             Toxification of the atmosphere through the addition by means of human agency of one or more noxious substances in concentrations high enough to be hazardous to humans, other animals, vegetation, or natural materials. Author’s Note: The term pollution includes particulate emissions, industrial aerosols, nitrous oxide emissions, smog, formation of ozone layers, etc. Daffynition: Alert issued after the fat guy sitting in front of you rips an ugly one.

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<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[1]<!--[endif]--> Source: P.A. Mueller, A.L. Heatherington, R.. Shuster, J.L. Wooden, A.P. Nutman, and I. Williams. “Precambrian zircons from the Florida basement: A Gondwanan connection.” Geology, vol. 21: pp. 119-122, 1994.

Grade School Daze 03

The only girls I kissed as a very early teen were at a combination Halloween-Birthday party in seventh grade. Was the party thrown by . . . was it Rita Z. or Mary somebody? Can’t recall. But I remember thoroughly enjoying that night, the whole party, not only the occasional kiss. It was a magical evening. Dressed as a pirate, I felt sufficiently attractive that I actually talked and joked with all the girls there. And especially with Carol S., who I thought of, with my heart ready to burst, as my girl-friend. Even though she and another one of my school-mates, Frank A., had only recently “broken up” as it were.

To me, Carol was smart and athletic as well as attractive. And even better she whispered to Rosemary C., who immediately turned around just as she was supposed to and told me that Carol liked me too. Oh gloriously happy day!

Naturally, I went a little wild over the kissing in the dark, behind a sheet drawn across the basement. Not obviously wild, but certainly in my most secret of hearts. I probably kissed three or maybe four girls, tops. As did most of the other boys. God, it was the stuff of dreams. Soft tender lips, bodies slightly touching in the dim light. It was a night whose perfection I thought unmatched.

It didn’t take long for the shit to hit the fan. Try the very next school day. The girls at the party got into trouble at school (the dreaded nun patrol found out everything) for playing spin-the-bottle and post office and quickly transferred the blame onto the horndog boys who were present, me included. As a result, our names and reputations were instant mud. Aspersions were cast upon us from on high. My already weak social position was undermined past salvation and my budding relationship with Carol S. withered and died on the spot.

Frank A., who lived only three short blocks from her and had the golden opportunity of walking her home every day after school, quickly wormed his way back in her good graces (he had not taken such obvious pleasure in what the nuns called “wanton” kissing and “wild” dancing at the party because he had been on the outs with Carol and had not been invited). Shit on once again, I was resigned to continuing my career as a mushroom.

So by eighth grade I found myself even more ostracized than before. I did not dance at all with girls because basically I was too unsure of myself. Also, other than my neighborhood friend, Rosemary, I didn’t know any girls well and therefore never learned how to dance, or how to communicate with girls.

Okay, that’s a small exaggeration. Rosemary was right across the street and tried her damnedest to teach me to dance. But I was so terribly self-conscious and shy around girls that I simply couldn’t bring myself to participate in anything so bold as holding a girl in my arms. Therefore, on our eighth grade class picnic at the end of the year I sat around the park where we had gone, feeling wretched and watching everyone else have a good time dancing to the tunes pouring from the jukebox.

Sounds exactly like a proto-typical early teenage experience but the pain was personal.

Grade School Daze 02

At the end of every year St. Paul Grade School had a picnic for the girls in the choir and the boys who served Mass. The famous Singers and Servers Picnic that was, for us young horndogs, our annual lust fest. It was perennially held at Blanchette Park in St. Charles. We would arrive at the Park in the school bus at about 10:00 and leave at 4:30. Our day was filled with activities. Swimming, baseball, basketball, mudball fights on the cliffs for supermecy, softball against the girls with the boys batting opposite-handed and frequently losing, to our collective dismay. I had always been attracted to girls with an athletic bent, especially those with slim legs, well-defined muscles, and tight butts. Oh yes, it was certainly a lust fest.

It may have been on one of those picnics that I first really discovered sex. It seemed to happen in the seventh grade. Suddenly the girls had breasts and curvaceous hips. Almost overnight it seemed. Carolyn H. sprouted one of the most noticeable chests among her classmates. In the tight sweaters of the day they were like turrets on a battleship. Proud, jutting out like pointing footballs.

Naturally, all the boys talked about them. About what wondrous growths they were and how they felt under your hand. Whoa. To have actually touched one. Of course, many of the guys bragged about how they had gotten in so-and-so’s bra at the movie theatre. Equally naturally, we almost never believed stories like that. Knowing that was exactly what we would say if we had been in the same movie as any girl we knew with a nice set.

But we really didn’t get to see much of them except at the Singer-Server picnic because boys and girls back then didn’t socialize much over the summer. All we saw of each other was during the school year. Entirely clothed. But the picnic brought out the swimming suits. And all the horny boys like me trying to cop a feel with our elbows or anything that wasn’t overtly obvious, like the back of your hand. Actually, from the vantage point of today’s open and unfettered sexuality (check out Texts From Last Night on the internet if you want proof), it was quite hysterically innocent.

My particular sex goddess in the seventh and eighth grades was Jeanne E. She was tall, blond, beautiful and had a reputation for going to the movies with boys from the neighboring public school because they were more mature. Which meant to us she was fast. For those days. Of course, I worshipped her from afar and probably never once spoke to her directly She certainly was taller then I. And surely outweighed me as well since I was so damned skinny. Hell, I didn’t weigh 100 pounds or reach five feet tall until the end of the summer before high school. So, why would she notice me? My voice didn’t change until well into freshman year either. I certainly was no prize physical specimen. Then as now.

Dennis O’C. ― a fellow classmate who was a friend from the Boy Scouts and a big, physically well-developed boy for his age ― and I were walking on the sidewalk near school one day when we saw Jeanne approaching alone. As usual, my heart leapt into my throat, rendering me semi-comatose. But Dennis never lost a step or a chance to score.

“Hey, Jeanne,” he called out, much to my absolute horror since all I ever did around such beauty was shrink into the wallpaper. “If you ever start falling apart, do me a favor, and save me a piece.”

My God. He actually said it the euphemism we all used for sex. A piece. As in a piece of ass. And all she did was laugh scornfully and blow him off with, “Not in your dreams, Denny.”

Yeah, but what about my dreams? I nearly fainted right there on the sidewalk. A piece of Jeanne E’s gorgeous ass? The thought was too much to bear.

At Mass some time near the end of our eighth grade year I found myself in a pew sitting next to Dennis. I casually looked over at him and couldn’t help but notice our legs, which were right next to each other. His were the size of an adult’s. And mine were that of a kid’s. I remember thinking that he was grown up and I was still a child. The thought quite depressed me.

Grade School Daze 01

Author's Note: My apologies  to Readers for getting these the next three Tales out of chronological order. It was a senior moment.

While in bed one night many years ago watching a basketball game on television, I remembered an event that happened in seventh grade that still bothers me if I think about it today. It was in some ways trivial and at the same time deeply wounding. The St. Paul Men’s Club sponsored the seventh and eighth grade boys basketball teams in the Catholic Youth Council (CYC). However, the jock set was only interested in who played on the eighth grade team as the league rules allowed students from both grades to play on that team but restricted the seventh grade team to students in that grade. Which meant the best seventh graders played up.

In seventh grade I tried out for and made the seventh grade squad, and even started at the guard position, to my great personal satisfaction (it was a point I was anxious to prove to my father). But, where it counted the most, with my peers, I was accorded absolutely zero status since the best seventh grade players had already tried out for and made the far more prestigious eighth grade team, which played in a more competitive league. But in an important way that really didn’t bother me since I was happy to have the chance to demonstrate that I was an athlete of some standing, however minor.

Playing on the team was an experience I cherished. It was a lot of fun. Our practices were every Tuesday and Thursday nights and the games were on Saturday mornings. I loved the intense excitement, the competition, the cheering parents, winning. And even losing wasn’t all that bad, because as starting guard I got to play every game.

About two-thirds into the season the two leading players from the seventh grade team were always invited to join the eighth grade squad. Joy of joys, as the second leading scorer I was one of the two players picked. My heart was swollen with pride. The coach told the two of us to come the next Saturday to a scheduled game at St. Mary Magdalene Gym, on South Kingshighway.

That day is crystal clear in my mind. How excited I was. So unsure of myself, not having had a chance of even practicing with my new teammates, yet happy as a lark. I had finally made it to Big Time athletics. And had a good chance at becoming a member of the elite jock corps everyone at school looked up to. Especially the girls. I couldn’t believe my great good fortune. Boy oh boy, I was as excited and proud of myself as a kid could be.

On the way into the locker room everyone was laughing and “horsing around,” as my father would have called it, like the kids we were. As I sat on a bench proudly putting on the new uniform out of the corner of my eye I noticed Tim K. staring intently at me. He was a fellow seventh grader and was someone I would never have counted as a friend. Tim, and his twin brother, Terry, had been on the eighth grade team from the beginning of the year and both were better basketball players than I. Tim, in particular, was a cocky, smart-mouth jock type who I disliked because he was always putting people down in a very public manner. Inflict maximum humiliation must have been his motto.

I glanced over at him and realized he was no longer merely staring but was gaping at me in open-mouthed disbelief, his eyes wide with amazement and shocked incredulity. I ignored him for as long as I could then asked him what his problem was.

He laughed and called out in a loud voice, “Hey guys. Look at this pathetic jerk. He’s got the nerve to come up from the crummy seventh grade team and he’s wearing black tennis shoes and ARGYLE SOCKS!” He yelled the last two words at the top of his lungs.

For the briefest second there was an agonizing, absolute silence as the enormity of my offense spread through the room. As a new member of the team who had been moved up by the coach’s invitation instead of making it on his own ability at the beginning of the season, I was vulnerable to attack. My every weakness was susceptible to exploitation, which had not been long in coming.

The terrible silence was broken by hoots of derision and ridicule that seemed to last forever. I bowed my head and continued tying my tennis shoes as though I was indifferent to the catcalls. But my body betrayed my shame by flushing a bright scarlet. I wanted to die. Hot tears threatened to burst through the cofferdams I made of my eyelids but I fought successfully against them.

For weeks I had begged and pleaded with Mom and Dad to buy me a pair of white tennis shoes and athletic socks like all the other players had. They steadfastly refused, saying there was nothing wrong with my present shoes or socks. They weren’t halfway worn out yet. What do you think we’re made of, they asked, money? Are you so proud you can’t wear what your father worked so hard to buy you? Unfortunately, when I was invited to play for the eighth grade team I was so excited I forgot to renew my pleas.

All I remember of the game is that we won by a respectable margin. We were fairly far ahead by the fourth quarter so I got in for nearly six or seven minutes and scored two baskets. Early Monday morning I slipped the clean uniform through the mail slot in the door of the coach’s room with a note saying I no longer wished to play on the eighth grade team and didn’t want to go back to the seventh grade one either. It was the end of my putative grade school athletic career.

The incident remains a bitter memory. Perhaps I should have stayed and proved that it didn’t matter what my clothes looked like. That the kind of person I was was much more important than what I was wearing. But I knew my parents would never buy the shoes or socks I wanted and Tim K. would not stop his constant taunts and put-downs. I had seen him in action too many times before and didn’t have the inner strength or energy to oppose him. Quitting was the only solution I could see that would allow me to keep what little pride and self-esteem I had.

Throughout my life as a parent, when my children played organized sports or danced in a ballet school I watched vigilantly to make sure that their clothes and equipment were up to date and appropriate. I had learned first hand the unforgiving cruelty of youth and tried to shield them if at all possible from the worst situations.

Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) — EATING THE EVERGLADES

Overview

Today in south Florida when you talk about the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan — from this point on the initials, CERP, will be used — it’s a challenge to find agencies or organizations that agree with positions taken by similar organizations. Everyone is convinced that the other side is populated with conscienceless bastards who lie through their teeth at every opportunity. Coalitions form and are dissolved in a matter of months. Former partners accuse their former associates of unethical motives and reprehensible actions. And I’m talking about respected scientists, national environmental groups, business leaders, politicians, Federal and State agencies, and intensely involved but fairly typical citizens.

When the scientists at the Everglades National Park publicly maintained that the CERP created by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will not provide the claimed environmental benefits to the Everglades, what’s a regular person to believe? Hey, it’s business as usual regarding the Everglades, only much worse and far more desperate than ever because for that endangered ecosystem it really is the 58 minute of the eleventh hour. And the stakes are enormous.

Although my intention is to present the materials in this segment in a straightforward manner, that goal is complicated by intensely held opinions and subjective judgments. That’s because we’ll be looking at a serious, highly complex problem that has many facets, not all of which are open or above board. Many of those elements are characterized by technical problems of exasperating difficulty and by experts who disagree among themselves on the facts as well as on the range of potential adverse effects, mitigation measures, and policy implications. Whoever claimed that science was objective has never studied the south Florida landscape.

Sad to say, an easy way to simplify the proposed restoration effort and still do justice to all the issues has not yet been discovered. At least not by me. Having said that, I’m committed to providing as balanced an overview as I can of what has happened in south Florida, why, and what it all means for today, tomorrow and into the future.

If you’ve had the stamina to make it through the first EATING FLORIDA segments, you know where my heart is. On the side of the environment. I desperately want my grandchildren and their grandchildren to be able to breathe fresh air, swim in clean streams, and marvel as a majestic Everglades snail kite soars past in search of a juicy freshwater apple snail. Despite that mindset, I promise to make an attempt to be as objective as possible in this presentation. Cynical and sarcastic soul though I am. At least my point of view has been revealed for all to see. Which is to ensure that the Everglades will survive into the future as much restored to its former natural state as is possible, even while suspecting that full restoration will prove impossible and that this incredible environment may be doomed as much as by our collective indifference as by the rapacity and greed of powerbrokers. And of course by that of their pet politicians.

As you will see, this material is difficult for a couple reasons. First, the subject is complicated, if only by the nature of its convoluted and highly controversial history. Second, if you’re a relative neophyte to the subject, you really don’t know who or what to believe. And that’s a critical problem. Third, the efforts being proposed to restore the Everglades are both extraordinarily technical and as grossly political as they get. In truth, this topic cries out for a more intensive, investigative approach as a full volume on its own, not just a couple lousy chapters in a blog intent on exploring many other closely related but not identical topics (for a well-written and informed viewpoint, see). But, that’s not in the cards. So we just have to make do. And for me, that’s an opportunity to provide as accurate an explanation as I am able within a relatively few pages. While keeping things as interesting and as objective as possible.

To acquire a basic understanding of southern Florida’s cornucopia of environmental tribulations, interested Readers should begin by reading Michael Grunwald, The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006. Grunwald hits most of the bases and, despite his professed vocation as an investigative reporter, he merits the status of a critical but objective observer. That doesn’t mean he’s without a viewpoint. But he doesn’t beat you over the head with it. Unlike some writers I could mention. Meaning me.

You can also get the CERP and related documents straight from the horse’s mouth by going to the Corps’s web site at www.evergladesplan.org, though you must remember what you are reading are politically informed documents. If you have a high-speed connection you can download the entire document.

CERP Background

By universal judgment, for 46 long years the “water management improvements” designed and constructed by the Corps of Engineers for south Florida directly caused widespread, large-scale environmental destruction across the entire south Florida region, especially the Everglades and associated ecosystems. And that included the densely settled coastal areas from Homestead north to Port St. Lucie. Today, surprisingly, even the Corps agrees with that assessment. Though they now claim that those problems were “unanticipated” or “inadvertent.” While holding up their hands to proclaim their righteous innocence.

Finally, even the calloused Florida politicians could no longer close their eyes to the devastation of the Everglades and pretend they were living in Oz. Hey, saltwater intrusion that pollutes the aquifers providing cities with drinking water is a problem that will not go away on its own. And neither will the collapse of coastal ecosystems that support sport and commercial fishermen. Or a myriad other environmental disasters created by the Corps’s foolhardy and thickheaded refusal to consider the inevitable adverse effects on biological systems that resulted from their boneheaded engineering “improvements.”

CERP’s most direct ancestor is of course the 1948 Central and South Florida Project (C&SF), which as a physical reality was fully in place and functional by the early 1970s. From the 1970s through the early 1980s, when widespread and pernicious environmental problems popped up and refused to go away, the Corps and the State desperately tried to restructure the Project so its many problems could be handled by the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD). That effort to deal with the internal problems, which were caused by the division of the historical Everglades into what the Project’s engineers claimed were separate and unrelated pieces, failed spectacularly. Author’s Note: scientists call that error compartmentalism.[1]

Environmental groups and many scientists studying south Florida wetlands interpreted what was happening in the Everglades as its death spiral. From the mid-1980s to the present, the Corps, the SFWMD, and the State attempted, on a piecemeal basis, to restore at least some small portion of the natural values of the Everglades. But again, they were appallingly unsuccessful.

In 1992, recognizing that the condition of the Everglades was increasingly desperate, Congress authorized the Corps, through the omnibus Water Resources Development Act, to determine whether modifications to the C&SF Project were necessary owing to changing physical and socioeconomic conditions. But CERP’s most closely related antecedent was a trial balloon released in early 1996 by Governor Lawton Chiles’s Commission on a Sustainable South Florida. The Commission, established in 1994, was a carefully chosen set of serious players in the political arena. State, regional, and local government representatives. State agency managers. Agricultural and cattle interests. Home builders. Attorneys. Business leaders. Seminole tribe representatives. Oh, yes, and a few environmentalists of an amenable sort.

The Commission Chairman, Richard Pettigrew, a former speaker of the Florida House, realized the chance of the Legislature passing an Everglades restoration plan that was opposed by developers, mining firms, or agribusinesses was a big fat zero. With that unassailable reality hanging over his head like the sword of Damocles, he applied his years of political legerdemain to the task and pulled off a unanimous vote. Naturally, all the major compromises in the final document favored south Florida agricultural and business interests. Big surprise there. However, after decades of being promised that genuine help for the Everglades was just around the corner, the environmentalists on the Commission had reluctantly arrived at the conclusion that a little something was substantially better than tons of empty promises. Which was what the Everglades had been getting for many decades. The short, dirty end of the stick. So with heavy hearts and many second thoughts they climbed in bed with the business and agricultural interests and hoped for the best while squeezing their cheeks and preparing for the worst.

It was obvious that the State had neither the money nor the technical expertise to go it alone. So, hat in hand, and with the strong support of the Florida Congressional delegation, they trotted their dog and pony show to Pork Barrel Heaven: Washington, D.C. Having been primed previously by the Florida delegation and by the 1992 WRDA, in late 1996 Congress authorized the Corps to perform an official Comprehensive Review Study (known by friends and foes alike as the Restudy) of the C&SF Project. According to Corps documents, the mandated purpose of the Restudy was “to determine the feasibility of structural or operational modifications to the project essential to the restoration of the Everglades and the South Florida ecosystem, while providing for other water-related needs such as urban and agricultural water supply and flood protection in those areas served by the project.”

If you read that above quote carefully you may have noticed the problem. The fallacious and environmentally onerous goals of the original C&SF Project were never called into question. No Federal, State, or local politician wanted the original Project’s purpose reexamined. That approach would have been too radical and far too politically explosive. After all, the Big Sugar lords who controlled their Everglades Agricultural Area lands like medieval fiefdoms had been among the most active players calling for the Restudy. And, since those key owners/executives were great pals of Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and both Bushes, their fingerprints were all over the reasons the restoration project was structured the way it was. They had too much to lose to let it become a genuine environmental restoration effort. Which is why they were pleased as punch that the Corps, Congress’s highly controllable butt-boy, was assigned to do the Restudy and not the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Congress held the Corps’s balls so tightly in their clenched fists there could never be any question as to what they would finally recommend. The Corps generals and engineers would never bite the hand that fed them so well or could punish them so severely if necessity arose. Therefore, their unquestioning loyalty and slavish obedience was a foregone conclusion.

Naturally, after the intense political manipulation and Congress’s specific directions, the Restudy came up with the same old same old Corps ingredients: structural solutions to flood protection, drainage canals, levees, pumping stations, and water supply for agriculture and urban uses. What a tremendous surprise. Oh, don’t forget; and just barely enough environmental restoration thrown in to keep the tree-huggers, like their new best buddy, Audubon of Florida, from jumping ship. More later on those collaborators.

The Corps’s final report was submitted to Congress in July 1999. Naturally, considering the authors, no surprises were to be had. The Corps trumpeted that the “Comprehensive [Everglades Restoration] Plan contained in this report will, when implemented, restore, protect, and preserve a natural resource treasure — the South Florida ecosystem.” Another intentional misrepresentation from the people who’ve consistently lied about the environment for more than ten decades.

In the earliest stages after its creation by the Corps, the CERP enjoyed nearly universal support. Certain environmental organizations (especially the so eager to collaborate Audubon of Florida) agreed to support the CERP only if major environmental improvements were in place by 2010, which was the project’s half-way mark in terms of spending. Suddenly that was a done deal and strange new relationships blossomed. Lobbyists from Audubon of Florida and the sugar industry, who under normal conditions were on the opposite side of whatever issue was under discussion, wound up walking arm-in-arm through the halls of Congress promoting the CERP. As if they actually had something in common.

The environmentalists had been seduced and then mesmerized by the promise that 79 billion gallons of freshwater would be supplied annually to the Everglades National Park. A life-giving infusion that was desperately needed for the survival of the Everglades. But as months passed and the lobbying and political pressure mounted, the promise of those 79 billion gallons gradually morphed from a guarandamnteed certainty to a “future” study that would determine the Park’s real freshwater needs. Suspicions confirmed. Things were slowly reverting to normal for the Everglades: promises galore in the here and now but no future delivery.

The environmental strategy of south Florida powerbrokers and politicians has always been the same. Use the dire state of the Everglades to pump up public interest, and then, after everyone is on the bandwagon, drop the Park’s needs like a hot potato and get on with the real agenda. Which is making sure the powerbrokers get fatter. Oh, and don’t forget more campaign contributions for those always agreeable Florida legislators. Have to keep them fat and happy, too. Pass the wetlands, please. Burp.

After the downgrading of the 79 billion gallon promise of freshwater came yet another hammer blow. The environmental organizations’ other main concerns, how to allocate the project’s water to guarantee ecological progress by 2010 (a deadline that passed without any significant progress being recorded) and a crucial set of future regulations that would “ensure the protection of the natural system,” were removed from primary consideration and shuffled off to the sidelines. With fresh promises that they would become the basis of a future federal-state agreement, now known as the Agreement between the Bushes, which was signed on January 9, 2002.

As an aside, after the signing of the Agreement, the White House released a fact sheet that stated that the restoration, while serving the Everglades first, would still benefit those who live around them. “When fully implemented, it [the CERP] will provide the region with an additional 1.7 billion gallons of fresh water per day, ensuring an expanded water supply to meet the growing needs of South Florida communities and farms,” the White House stated.

Two points should be made about these statements and what they reveal. First, nowhere in the CERP or the Agreement does it state that the needs of the Everglades will be served first, second or whatever. Nowhere. The key word used in the CERP is overarching, which can be pressed into service in many disparate ways, as lobbyists and politicians know well. And second, the White House statement allows us to see Bush’s critical mindset. That the 1.7 billion gallons of freshwater will meet the growing needs of south Florida communities and farms. Right. And can’t we all see where that will lead.

Although Everglades restoration was sold to environmentalists and the public as the Plan’s overriding purpose, in the end the CERP was only legally committed to meeting the “water-related needs” of South Florida. It was business as usual, or to put it another way, water management as usual. At this point all you Gentle Readers should be thinking surface water storage reservoirs, stormwater treatment areas, aquifer storage and recovery, seepage management, canals, levees, and pumping stations. All of which are intended to make sure agriculture and urban development wind up with way more than their fair share of the approximately 1.7 billion gallons of fresh water that is discharged per day on average from the Everglades ecosystem to the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. Not more water for wood storks or Everglades snail kites, that’s for damned sure.

Problem was, those agriculture and urban development needs had never played a key role in any important discussion during the national lobbying campaign to generate support for the Plan. The focus was always on a slogan Senator Bob Graham coined to de-parochialize what was from the get-go a south Florida water supply project. All those involved in drumming up support for the Plan were supposed to loudly trumpet “America’s Everglades” every time the subject came up.

The public relations gurus thought that, correctly as it turned out, unless that slogan was on everyone’s lips lawmakers from the parched Southwest and West might start grumbling about why Congress was willing to pay for a multipurpose water project for a subtropical paradise that was blessed with around 60 inches of annual rainfall. To top it off, local water officials were even told not to say anything about the key flood control and water supply issues contained in the CERP. The word was out. “Just talk about saving the Everglades. Keep your mouth shut about everything else. Don’t worry, your water needs will be taken care.” It proved to be a very successful strategy. Cynical and double-dealing as hell but most effective.

Regardless of whether today’s pseudo-green Corps is intentionally lying through its teeth about what the CERP is intended to do in an effort to salvage its shaky reputation by re-writing history (my personal opinion) or is merely trying to lay down a thick smoke screen to cover its past guilt and present incompetence (the most charitable interpretation possible), the reality no one can deny is that the wetlands of south Florida have either been destroyed or savagely altered by land use and water management practices put in place by the Corps since the 1900s. It is also true that those pre-drainage wetlands can never be fully restored. Let me state that again. Fifty percent of the wetlands of south Florida have disappeared as a result of the Corps’ water control engineering and can never be restored. Never, never, never. And that also is a nearly universal scientific judgment with which both the Corps and SFWMD officially concur.

The very best that can happen is that parts of the Everglades will be allowed to recover certain marginal aspects of their former healthy, pre-drainage state. But, in the Corps’s CERP scenario, the result will be an environment that is totally human-dependent (meaning a non-natural system relying on water management technology) and will only “resemble” the pre-drainage Everglades. So, what we will have is an artificial, cultural landscape that would look in part like the real thing but could never function naturally again. It will be a pseudo-natural, Disneyesque Everglades that mimics the real thing and looks good to ignorant tourists lured to south Florida for the express purpose of lightening their wallets. Thanks to the thoughtless demands of millions of people over the last nine decades to exploit a beautiful but fragile environment through living and working in south Florida. And getting fat at the expense of the Everglades without giving a rat’s ass about the inevitable consequences of their actions.

Implications

The CERP started life as the centerpiece of Bill Clinton’s and Jeb Bush’s environmental legacies. Next, President George W. Bush started referring to CERP as the best example of his “new environmentalism for the 21st Century.” But during the Bush Administration the CERP all but disappeared from the halls of Washington as funds that had been promised were redirected to the war effort.

Where does it stand now? In truth, very little progress has been made on the Federal front, with construction having begun on only four of 68 projects identified by the feds and not a single project has been completed. The lack of federal funding during George W. Bush's administration left many restoration projects comatose on the launch pad. At least a portion of those stalled funds has been promised under President Obama, thanks in part to federal stimulus spending, but actual progress is happening at a glacial pace.

You might think that most people living in south Florida would eventually figure out what’s going on. Nope. The environment is just not a sexy topic that will hold the interest of the average voter for more than a minute or two. And it won’t until something drastic happens to change that situation. The question to ask yourself is who but fat-cat developers and their equally fat pet politicians would benefit from a Disney Everglades that entertains tourists? No one. And maybe that's the real answer to my question above. Ordinary south Florida residents will only care about restoring the Everglades because it means money in their pockets. It's the Rule of 85 in action.

As horribly difficult it is for me to express this opinion, I believe environmentalists should write off the entire Kissimmee-Okeechobee-Everglades Basin as a functioning ecosystem and focus their limited resources elsewhere. As it is they are fighting over a zombie that occasionally appears to be alive but isn't and can never be resurrected. The Zombie Glades. Marjory Stoneman Douglas and Art Marshall are probably rolling over in their graves. They put up a wonderful fight for a once glorious ecosystem but it's over. The fat bastards won by eating the Everglades. It breaks my heart.

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[1] Several nationally prominent research scientists have concluded that barriers to true ecosystem restoration have arisen when institutions like the Corps establish operating premises that are less than system-wide in scope. The Corps has intentionally compartmentalized flood control, water management, and ecological values. By compartmentalize I mean they treat those elements as if they were absolutely separate, unrelated, and distinct. Elements that are compartmentalized are by definition isolated from each other and are not allowed to interact. That’s great except when you’re dealing with natural systems in which water flow, quality, periodicity, and quality are all tied together in the creation and sustenance of a unified but fragile ecosystem. See Lance H. Gunderson, Crawford S. Holling and Stephen. S. Light. Barriers & Bridges to the Renewal of Ecosystems and Institutions. Columbia University Press, New York; 1995.