ENVIRONMENT-US: Slow Rescue for Famed River of Grass

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Mark Weisenmiller

TAMPA, Florida, Feb 15 2007 (IPS) - Both the state of Florida and the U.S. federal government agree that the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Project (CERP), the largest wetlands restoration project in the world, is a critical endeavor that must be carried out.

The Everglades hold rare and endangered species, such as the American crocodile, Florida panther and West Indian manatee. It has been designated an International Biosphere Reserve, a World Heritage Site and a Wetland of International Importance.

But urbanisation, industry and agriculture, and an accompanying system of canals and levees, have diverted or polluted much of the Everglades’ fresh water – causing, for example, a 93 percent decline in some species of native wading birds.

Former President Bill Clinton signed the CERP bill into law in 2000. It contains 68 different types of restoration projects, but most have yet to begin because the state and federal government are quibbling over how much each is going to pay and other details of the plan.

“We haven’t had a reauthorisation by the Congress for the past six years for the Water Restoration Development Act (WRDA), which is needed before we can legally begin most of these federal projects,” said Traci Romine, policy director for Audubon of Florida, one of the many agencies consulted before the creation of CERP.

“We are cautiously optimistic, because the Democrats have taken over Congress and also because (U.S. Senator) Barbara Boxer has said that reauthorising WRDA is a priority. Prior to 2000, WRDA used to be reauthorised by Congress every two years,” she said in an interview.

Senator Boxer, a Democrat from California who is chairwoman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, has told reporters that she intends to lead the battle in Congress to push through the reauthorisation of WRDA. She will also be accompanying Florida Sen. Bill Nelson on a tour of the Everglades later this year.

When CERP was approved by Congress and the Florida Legislature in 2000, the plan was slated to take 30 years to complete and cost anywhere from 7.5 billion to 7.8 billion dollars. Now, seven years later, that figure has ballooned to 10.5 billion dollars.

Theoretically, Congress and the state of Florida were supposed to be equal partners in the project, which covers a massive 18,000-square-mile area. In reality, that has yet to occur, in large part because the federal government has failed to allocate enough money to begin work on the 68 projects.

At the annual Everglades Coalition Conference in mid-January, Florida Governor Charlie Crist promised that he would fight to revive CERP. “I’m a Republican but I gotta tell you, I care so deeply about protecting her (the Everglades)… I’ll never let you down, I promise,” Crist told the 300 attendees by videophone.

Jesus Rodriguez, a spokesman for the South Florida Water Management District, a state agency, said that, “To give you an idea of how the financing of CERP has gone so far, in about a five-year period, the federal government has put up around 300 million dollars and the state has raised considerably more than that. In one day last year, we raised 570 million dollars through a bond effort.”

Mark Perry, executive director of the Florida Oceanographic Society, a non-profit organisation dedicated to preserving Florida’s ecosystems, said he believed the new governor is genuinely committed to preserving the Everglades.

“Regarding the federal government, there has never been a question of how much they’re going to pay, but it’s simply a question of when,” he said.

Perry explained how the area was degraded over many years. “Back in 1907, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built a number of canals to drain it (the Everglades),” he told IPS. “This building of the canals lasted until 1911. Then we had two hurricanes in the 1920s, in 1926 and 1928, that together killed 2,000 people.”

“People back then figured something had to be done and so the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the Hoover dikes, which go around Lake Okeechobee, and this stopped the flow of water to the Everglades and it was this that really began the destruction of the Everglades.” The Hoover dikes are anywhere from 35 to 40 feet high.

Perry estimated that there is now about 1.7 billion gallons a day of fresh water pouring into the Atlantic Ocean, about the same amount of water that is consumed by the people of South Florida in one day.

“This loss of fresh water is a concern for all of us who are involved in trying to save the Everglades,” he said. “Also, over 60 endangered species were impacted (from the building of the Hoover dikes) although none, to our knowledge, became extinct.”

The Everglades comprise a vast marshy area whose northernmost point is Lake Okeechobee and southernmost point is Florida Bay. About 4,000 square miles is a national park.

The Everglades is not perpetually evergreen; depending on the season and the annual amount of rainfall, the overall colour scheme ranges from chestnut brown to Day-Glo green.

The CERP restoration projects underway include one in the Kissimmee River Valley, where the Army Corps of Engineers blocked up many of the canals to help restore the flood plain. Another involves the construction of numerous storm water treatment areas, which improve water quality by treating the polluted water before it gets to the Everglades.

Although developers are constantly encroaching on Florida’s wilderness areas to build new businesses and housing, much of the Everglades still resembles the sawgrass and waterlands described in Marjory Stoneman Douglas’ 1947 non-fiction book “The Everglades: River of Grass” and Marjorie Kinnan Rawling’s 1938 fiction novel “The Yearling” – full of tall, thin pine trees, hummocks (massive clumps of vegetation), and forests of mangroves.

However, over the past year, a number of developers have objected to proposed buffer zones around Florida waterways and wetlands on the basis that no scientific evidence exists to support the thesis that buffer zones are helping the state’s ecosystems.

“They’re (environmentalists) thinking of taking agricultural land away from the state and adding it to CERP without any scientific data,” argued Joseph Narkiewicz, executive vice president for the Tampa Bay Builders Association. “Look, we support protecting the wetlands but there’s got to be some scientific support for it.”

John Adernato, manager of the Everglades Restoration Project (ERP), explained that one of the main goals of CERP is to make sure that fresh water does not run off into the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico. The ERP is part of the National Parks Conservation Association, the only national organisation that works to protect national parks.

“If we don’t get buffer zones, for whatever reasons, then we wouldn’t be able to put water in the Everglades, which means not providing relief to the Everglades,” Adernato told IPS. “That means that fresh water gets lost to the Atlantic Ocean and also that the fresh water gets lost for possible drinking water for the people down here (in south Florida). With the state’s population expected to boom in the coming decades, the issue of having enough drinking water is an important one.”

He has an analogy that he uses whenever somebody tells him that CERP is too big a project to be completed. “Each project is a piece of a puzzle and if you don’t see the entire puzzle, you don’t see the entire vision. Sometimes some of the puzzle pieces (projects) need to be tweaked as we move forward, but the main task is to make sure that the puzzle gets completed.”