Swamp ThingThe plan to restore the Everglades is not what you think it is.
Posted Friday, June 15, 2001, at 8:30 PM ET
The plan to save the Florida Everglades, the largest environmental project in the history of the planet, has been hailed far and wide as a bipartisan triumph. Last fall, Congress approved the $7.8 billion Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan with only two dissenting votes, and even right-wingers like Sen. Bob Smith of New Hampshire—who once quit the Republican Party because it was too liberal—marked the moment with old-fashioned big-government rhetoric: "The cost would amount to a can of Coke per U.S. citizen per year!" In Florida, an amazing coalition of enviros, sugar magnates, citrus growers, rock-mining firms, water utilities, Indian tribes, business groups, and developers back the CERP. Just last week, President Bush joined his brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, and a bipartisan bevy of Sunshine State politicians at Everglades National Park to hype the latest cash infusion for "this beautiful slice of heaven."
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StumbleUponBut as politicians and environmentalists scramble to claim credit for saving this national treasure, it's worth noting that their green bipartisan rhetoric has little to do with the reality of the 4,033-page plan. The CERP is Washington's version of the Holy Roman Empire: It's not a comprehensive plan, and it's only partly—some would say only barely—about Everglades restoration. Many credible scientists—including the top scientist at Everglades National Park—have warned that "this beautiful slice of heaven" would receive virtually no benefits from the first 10 years and $4 billion of the replumbing scheme. The CERP will definitely reroute water around South and Central Florida, but it is not yet clear how much of the water will go to the parched River of Grass and how much to well-connected industries, ravenous utilities, exploding suburbs, and all the other Florida interest groups that so enthusiastically support the plan.
To understand what's going on here, it helps to understand the Everglades. They are, indeed, a national treasure, a unique shallow-water ecosystem of sawgrass prairies and cypress swamps that provide habitat for dozens of endangered species. But in 1948, as I have described in the Washington Post, they were viewed primarily as a useless brown-and-green mosquito swamp, so Congress assigned the Army Corps of Engineers to drain them. The corps engineered a brilliant plumbing system of canals and levees and pumps that supplied the water for South Florida's residential boom while controlling the floods that had been devastating the region. Unfortunately, the project also ravaged the Everglades. Half the ecosystem has been lost over the years to water-intensive farming and development. The rest is an over-engineered mess, with too much water in some areas in wet years, not enough water in many more areas in dry years, and polluted water every year. Ninety percent of the region's renowned wading birds have disappeared. Thus, the demand for the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan.
The CERP, however, is really a Theoretical Florida Water-Supply Experiment. It relies extraordinarily heavily on "adaptive management," which is basically a bureaucratic euphemism for trial and error. It gambles boldly on unproven technology, most notably more than 300 aquifers that may not effectively hold water. It depends mightily on the broad discretion of two organizations with questionable environmental credentials: the South Florida Water Management District, a state agency dedicated to water supply and flood control, and the Army Corps, the federal public works agency that left the Everglades in such awful condition in the first place. (For more than you ever wanted to know about abuses at the corps, click here for my very long series of articles in the Washington Post.)
So this massive Everglades restoration initiative is a lot vaguer than its supporters say. That's one myth. Here's the other: It's not purely an Everglades restoration initiative. That is just its green façade. The CERP is also by law an urban and agricultural water-supply initiative, as well as an economic growth and flood-control initiative. The Clinton administration tried to insert a formal guarantee that environmental restoration would be the top priority of the CERP, but it was deleted. A Clinton proposal to guarantee extra water to meet the needs of the national park, the diseased heart of the ecosystem, was also rejected. So was an effort to prohibit construction of an intrusive international airport at the edge of the Everglades. But a proposal to let the rock-mining industry dig up 20,000 acres of additional Everglades wetlands was included. And while the CERP does assure much more water for South Florida as a whole, it does not yet specify how much of the extra water will go to the Everglades and how much to additional agriculture and development that will put even more pressure on the Everglades. In general, most of the water-supply elements of the plan are scheduled sooner, the restoration efforts later, and Florida officials are now lobbying to make sure that water guarantees for the natural system are kept out of the regulations being drafted for implementing the plan.
That's because Florida officials represent a lot of people who don't really want the Everglades restored, people who farm and mine and live in and near the Everglades, people who depend on water that gets sucked out of the ecosystem and don't want it turned back into a swamp. These people have money and power. Some sugar growers, for example, have so much clout that they can get a president of the United States on the phone for, oh, 22 minutes or so, even if he happens to be, say, breaking up with his intern at the time.
This is why the grand Everglades coalition was born. A few years ago, environmentalists began to realize that they would never get any Everglades restoration plan out of the Florida Legislature without the support of the region's economic interests. And those interests saw a spectacular opportunity to get the federal government to foot half the bill for their various water needs in the name of Everglades restoration. Pretty soon, Bob Dawson, the top lobbyist for the various Florida industries, was pushing the CERP through the halls of Congress with Tom Adams, the top lobbyist for the National Audubon Society.
"People thought, jeez, if these guys can get in bed together, this plan must be something special," says Dawson, a former Hill staffer who oversaw the corps during the Reagan administration. "But that's what it took to get it done. If it was just an environmental plan, it never would have gotten out of the bog."
So it's not just an environmental plan. It's a political plan, cobbled together through intense deal-making, offering something for everyone. For example, just about everyone agrees that the key to restoring the Everglades is to "get the water right," to reproduce the natural sheet flow that originally crept clockwise from Lake Okeechobee all the way down to Florida Bay before the corps diverted it with all that fancy engineering. (Click here to see maps of the flow past and present.)
But the CERP does not really do that. Everyone agrees that you should start by storing more water from the lake instead of squirting it straight out to sea. But then what? Scientists say that the obvious area to store water is right below the lake—currently occupied by the sugar plantations that happen to be the main source of water pollution that is helping to destroy the Everglades. So you could buy out the sugar land. Then you could remove the diagonal levee and raise the east-west highway that are the two main barriers to the original sheet flow. Click here to see several cool hydrological models of South Florida and a more detailed description of how the CERP will change the flow of water through the region. But such a truly natural solution that focused exclusively on the Everglades—sneered at by the engineers as "let her rip"—would have been anathema to sugar growers, rock miners, and the other special interests.
So instead of reproducing the natural flow in a natural way, the engineers at the corps and the water district propose to mimic it through more fancy engineering, so they can still control the water, and they can capture more of it for people who want to irrigate their fields or water their lawns. Rather than using the sugar land to store water, they hope to use aquifers—if someone can figure out how to make them work. (And decades from now, when the rock companies finish mining the eastern Everglades, their leftover quarries are supposed to serve as reservoirs, too—if someone can figure out how to make them work and how to make them safe.) In the end, the CERP's much-heralded effort to return the Everglades to a more natural state will actually add more man-made control structures than it will remove.
Still, most politicians and enviros, eager to impress donors and the public, have preferred to perpetuate the Holy Roman Everglades myth of a pure ecological restoration. (Here are a few exceptions.) Such are the politics of compromise. In fact, President Bush suggested last week that this everyone-sing-Kumbaya project could be a model for achievement in Washington: "Protecting the Everglades shows that bipartisanship is possible, but more importantly, crucial to doing the will of the American people."
But it is worth keeping in mind that regardless of all the rhetoric, regardless of all the money on its way to a certain political swing state, the Everglades have not been protected yet. And as one critic of the plan points out, when everyone is in bed together, there's a pretty decent chance that someone might get screwed.
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Reader Comments From The Fray:
[Grunwald] doesn't resent the rest of the nation funneling money into a scheme that only benefits one small region; what bothers him is that it's the people of that region who might end up reaping the benefits. He seems to wish only ill upon those annoying residents of Florida's "exploding suburbs", with their "ravenous utilities" and "well-connected industries"; instead he would have CERP's money spent on a "beautiful slice of heaven" inhabited by grass, alligators and his beloved wading birds.
Now, I once visited the Everglades with my family as a child, and I honestly have nothing against its magnificently varied wildlife. But I do wonder what kind of grudge Michael Grunwald bears against the area's human inhabitants, that he would deny them their hoped-for bountiful new homes, water and jobs merely for the sake of restoring to its former dimensions what the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers perceived in 1948 (quite accurately, as far as I--or Grunwald himself, for that matter--can tell) to be a "useless brown and green mosquito swamp". And I shudder for a nation whose elite opinion-makers have forgotten that its own greatest "national treasure" is not its lovely natural settings, but rather, first and foremost, its people
--Dan Simon
(To reply, click here.)
One of the ironies of this Everglades project is that we will be spending billions so that the sugar farmers can continue to raise sugar. The irony is that we are already spending billions subsidizing the sugar growers. American sugar is 50% more expensive than the rest of the world's sugar, which means that we shouldn't be raising this crop at all at this time. It would be tempting to simply stop paying subsidies to the sugar farmers, and let them go out of business, thereby saving billions of dollars. However, we are being held hostage by these farmers. As Congressman Mark Foley (R-Fla.) has said, "Sugarcane, the plant, is still the most benign crop grown in the Everglades agricultural area, requiring less water than rice, releasing fewer polluting nutrients than vegetables or cattle pastures. Studies show that the crops that might supplant sugarcane would pose a greater threat to the environment and, if the land became fallow, it would be quickly overtaken by melaleuca and Brazilian pepper." So the bottom line is that we are subsidizing farmers to grow a useless crop so that other farmers don't grow other useless, but more destructive crops. Furthermore, we are spending more billions to assure that this useless crop can continue to be harvested. Screwy does not begin to describe this situation.
--Cato the Censor
(To reply, click here.)
As a former Corps of Engineers project manager, I congratulate Mr. Grunwald for yet another fine expose' of the reality behind the Everglades restoration plan. I am not at all surprised to learn that the project favors the economic interests of the region rather than the environmental needs. This is, after all, the Corps of Engineers we are talking about here. The Corps has long suffered from an arrogant bias against simply letting natural hydrologic processes function as they should, believing instead that an engineer can improve on nature. I remember well my supervisor once telling me "you can engineer a solution to anything". What about just leaving it alone in the first place? That, of course, is hindsight. But I do fault the Corps for continuing to insist on structural solutions, largely untested, rather than simply trying to restore the natural hydrologic conditions of the Everglades.
--Dennis from Houston
(To reply, click here.)
(6/18)