NEWS & PUBLICATIONS

BY PHYLLIS MCINTOSH

   To photographer Clyde Butcher, Florida's Everglades are "a creeping, crawling, spiritual system," a place where "you can feel the throbbing of the life forces." But over the past 50 years, those life forces have diminished at an alarming rate. Populations of wading birds such as wood storks and white ibis have plummeted by at least 90 percent. Sixty-eight plant and animal species are threatened or endangered. Each day 1.7 billion gallons of precious fresh water escape into the ocean. Invasive exotic trees infest more than 1.5 million acres of drained land in dense thickets impenetrable to wildlife. And without the natural filtering action of wetlands, chemicals from farms and sugar plantations to the north contaminate water quality, foster rampant growth of cattails that choke out grasses where wildlife lives, and destroy algae on which fish and other aquatic species feed.

   This widespread devastation is the consequence of decades of human construction, launched in a misguided attempt to clear the Everglades for development that has redirected 70 percent of the water that once nourished the system. Finally, however, a plan has been adopted to halt the damage and restore the Everglades in what is described as the largest ecosystem restoration effort ever undertaken. What remains to be seen is whether the plan will be satisfactorily implemented.

   The problem started more than a century ago when the Everglades were widely viewed as useless swamps ripe for development if only destructive flooding could be tamed. In 1948, just a year after Everglades National Park was established to protect 1.5 million acres of an 8-million-acre ecosystem, Congress authorized the Central and Southern Florida Project to provide flood protection and fresh water to South Florida's expanding human population as well as for agricultural needs.

   Over the next several decades, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers constructed 1,000 miles of canals, 720 miles of levees, and 200 floodgates and other water-control structures. These structures resulted in the virtual removal of the slow, sheet-like flow of shallow water over millions of acres of wetlands—a system that had previously stored rainfall naturally, regulated freshwater flow into coastal estuaries, and provided habitat for a rich abundance of wildlife.

   By the late 1980s and 1990s, politicians and the public alike began to realize that all this human tinkering was a colossal mistake. A massive seven-year "restudy" of the undoing of the Everglades culminated in late 2000 with congressional approval of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP). This $7.8 billion plan consists of 68 components to be completed over 30-plus years under an unprecedented federal-state partnership between the Army Corps of Engineers and the South Florida Water Management District, with important roles by other federal and state agencies. Although the CERP is intended to provide continued flood control and drinking water supply for South Florida residents, the legislation makes it clear that restoration of the Everglades is the top priority.

   The idea, in a nutshell, is to put the right amount of water in the right place at the right time. To do this, three main efforts are involved: more than 240 miles of levees and canals that now block natural water flow will be removed; water currently being lost to the ocean will be captured and stored in surface reservoirs or underground wells until needed; and urban and agricultural waste water will be cleansed by special treatment plants or by filtration through portions of the 35,000 acres of newly created wetlands.

   These improvements should bring new vitality not only to Everglades National Park but to two other national parks in the region: Big Cypress National Preserve, immediately to the northwest, and Biscayne National Park, a mostly marine park off the Atlantic coast south of Miami. "We are finally looking at erasing park boundaries and reintroducing the parks to their surrounding ecosystem," says Shannon Estenoz, director of the Everglades' program for the World Wildlife Fund.

   To establish new connections, the Army Corps of Engineers will, among other things, remove a levee that now prevents free exchange of water between Everglades and Big Cypress and raise or breach a critical section of U.S. 41, the Tamiami Trail. (See table below.) Restoring wetlands and diverting or eliminating some canals should also deliver a cleaner and better-regulated flow of water to Biscayne National Park. Especially in the aftermath of storms, Biscayne Bay now receives surges of fresh water, often contaminated by runoff from the west, that alters salinity and water quality in offshore coral reefs and in the near-shore mangrove forests that shelter young fish and shellfish.

   Even though the plan is massive, the reality is that the Everglades will see the benefits from the CERP emerge slowly over many years. Congress has authorized only six pilot projects, designed to test some of the new technology, and ten initial restoration projects. Actual construction, even on the pilot projects, is not slated to start until 2003 or 2004—and the other ten projects, not for a year or two after that, according to Stuart Appelbaum, who directed the Everglades Restudy for the Corps of Engineers and is now chief of the Corps' Ecosystem Restoration Branch. "We expect most or all of the initial ten will be done by the end of the decade," he says. "We should then have the ability to save much of the water now lost to tide and see the beginnings of better connections between upstream areas and Everglades National Park."

   The first step, however, is to complete a cumbersome planning process. Officials must develop specific project plans, as well as an analysis of the environmental impact, while providing ample opportunity for public comment and input from agricultural, environmental, tribal, and other interests along the way. By the end of 2002, the Corps also must come up with specific ground rules to ensure that the environmental restoration gets top billing and that water made available to sustain the ecosystem will never be taken away to support development in South Florida. Experts agree that these guidelines will be an important litmus test for the future of the entire plan.

   Two requirements are "absolutely essential" for the CERP to succeed, says Ron Tipton, NPCA's senior vice president for programs, who directed the World Wildlife Fund's Everglades campaign from 1994 to 1999.

   The first, he says, is "an incredible level of federal-state cooperation, unprecedented in scope and magnitude." Second is "continued bipartisan political support between succeeding administrations and Congresses sufficient to guarantee the necessary political support over the next 25 to 30 years." Such bipartisan support will be needed because, despite congressional blessing for restoration in the CERP legislation, the Corps will still have to go back to lawmakers every two years for authorization of additional projects and every year for the money to implement them.

   Understandably, there are varying perspectives on the prospects for this project. Some Everglades residents like Clyde Butcher, who's been photographing the area for 18 years, are convinced the plan is more about providing water to the greater Miami area than about restoring the ecosystem. Even some park officials are wary. At Biscayne, scientists worry that the park, now often inundated with too much fresh water, may be shortchanged under the new plan and that fancy technology may not adequately protect water quality.

   But Bob Johnson, research director at the National Park Service's South Florida Natural Resources Center, is "optimistic." He predicts that at least 20 of the 68 threatened or endangered species will benefit substantially from the CERP. "It will start with the fisheries," he says, "because as we put more water in the marshes, the deep water sloughs should remain wet for seven to ten years at a time, as they did historically, and fish and invertebrates can restock. That will mean more food for wading birds."

   Johnson concedes that certain species like the Florida panther that need wide ranges and depend on terrestrial habitat won't do a lot better, because most of the uplands have been developed.

   Further, it will be impossible, he says, to "go back to the super colonies with tens or hundreds of thousands of birds, because too much habitat around Everglades National Park has been lost." Still, he is especially optimistic about seeing "a big boost in the wading birds that people historically identify with the Everglades."

   Scientists also hope that, as some areas are rehydrated, invasive trees such as the Australian melaleuca and Brazilian pepper will die out and be replaced by grass prairies, the preferred habitat of the critically endangered Cape Sable seaside sparrow.

   "We're clearly not going to put the Everglades back to where they were 100 years ago, because half of the ecosystem has been lost forever," says the Corps' Stuart Appelbaum. "What we do expect to do is restore natural functioning in the 50 percent we have left and recover the essential characteristics that make the Everglades unique.