Facing a Deadline to Save the Everglades

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

Near the western edge of the Everglades, there's a quiet spot where Gene Duncan goes to unwind. It sits at the junction of two canals, where a stand of willows and pond-apple trees provides a bit of shade. When Duncan, a water- quality expert working for the local Indian tribe, cuts the engine of his airboat, he can hear bullfrogs croak from the water lilies and the tails of - Florida garfish slap the water with a noise like popcorn popping. A pair of white ibis watch warily as alligators -- half a dozen of them -- drift toward the boat, lured by a man-made gulping sound that Duncan calls an alligator distress call. When they realize they have been fooled by a human, the giant reptiles turn tail and submarine silently into the canal.

From Duncan's little corner of paradise, the Everglades doesn't seem endangered. But just 40 miles to the northeast, the picture changes abruptly. Here there are no game fish, no white ibis and hardly any alligators. Where once a complex ecosystem flourished, there are only cattails, acre upon acre of them, stretching as far as the eye can see. Cattails are taking over the eastern Everglades, crowding out the saw grass and choking the algae at the base of the ecosystem's food chain. Cattails now cover 20,000 acres of what was once pristine wetland. Grown thick and tall (some more than 8 ft. high) in the phosphorus-filled runoff of nearby sugar and vegetable plantations, they stand as a symbol of the decades of mismanagement that have brought the famous region to the brink of environmental collapse.

The fate of the Everglades could be decided this week. A $465 million restoration plan, originally hammered out in the late 1980s, has emerged from nearly five years of litigation and faces a mediator's June 21 deadline. Federal and state officials, environmentalists, Native Americans and farmers are still haggling over who will pay for the cleanup and the timetable. If no settlement comes this week, the issue is likely to go back to court -- where it could linger for years while the ecosystem deteriorates. "What's at stake is the biological future of the Everglades and the Florida Bay," says Dick Ring, superintendent of the Everglades National Park.

The battle to save this southern jewel of the National Park System has stirred national concern. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt visited the park in February and came back "absolutely appalled." Since then he has endorsed the idea of reclaiming thousands of acres of private property to protect this prime parcel of public land, an approach that could signal a fundamental shift in the way U.S. parkland is managed. "We can't defend the Everglades -- or Yellowstone -- just at their boundaries," says Jim Webb, regional director of the Wilderness Society. "We have to deal with the whole ecosystem."

The ecosystem in question once covered the entire tip of Florida -- about 4 ! million acres of wetland stretching from Lake Okeechobee in the north to the Gulf of Mexico in the south. For centuries it was treated like a huge swamp to be drained, farmed and, ultimately, paved. Now the acreage has shrunk to 2 million, and what remains is under pressure from a population growing by 600 people a day.

It was not until the middle of this century that the nature of that ecosystem was understood. The Everglades, it turns out, is not a swamp at all but a shallow, sheetlike river, about 50 miles wide, flowing almost imperceptibly from Okeechobee to the sea. It is a leisurely process, a self- perpetuating cycle in which clouds draw moisture from the slow-moving stream, blow north and then rain down on the lakes and rivers that drain into the Okeechobee and back to the Everglades.

By the time hydrologists figured this out, it was almost too late. A huge earthen dam had been thrown up along the southern lip of Lake Okeechobee and a great swath of the northern Everglades transformed into prized farmland -- source of most of the U.S.'s cane sugar and 10% of its winter vegetables. To speed development and protect those farmlands from flooding, the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1950s began laying down a system of ditches so vast that astronauts can spot its outlines from space: 1,400 miles of levees, pipes and canals. Today nature's cycle had been largely replaced by a man-made plumbing system that is polluting the Everglades with the phosphorus-rich runoff that cattails find so nourishing.

The restoration project being debated this week is nearly as ambitious as the plumbing it is trying to fix. The driving forces behind it included former acting U.S. Attorney Dexter Lehtinen, who filed the first lawsuit, and Carol Browner, who headed Florida's Department of Environmental Regulation from 1991 through '92 and is now chief of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. To purify the runoff and restore some of the sheetlike flow of the original ecosystem, the state of Florida proposed setting aside around 35,000 acres of cropland to act as "filtering marshes." Irrigation water drained from the fields would be held in the treatment areas until natural action of plant life lowers the phosphorus content to acceptable levels.

For the past five years, the big sugar companies and vegetable growers of central Florida have fought the cleanup plan at every turn, filing about three dozen suits, appeals and challenges. (Browner used to refer to these actions ; as the "suit du jour.") The sugar growers complained that they had been turned into scapegoats and that the water-purity standards were unrealistically strict. A series of advertisements sponsored by U.S. Sugar argued that the restoration plan would spend half a billion dollars making swamp water cleaner than Evian bottled water.

The confrontation eased dramatically in May, when the sugar farmers, as part of an "environmental peace proposal," put their lawsuits on hold and agreed to pay for some of the cleanup costs. Perhaps it was the election of Clinton and Gore -- and the elevation of Browner to the EPA -- that changed their mind. Maybe they feared that they were losing the public relations battle and that their federal agricultural subsidies might be at risk. Or maybe they sincerely saw the need for compromise. Says Robert Buker Jr., a senior vice president at U.S. Sugar: "You can't shut down farming, but you can't destroy the environment either. They have to coexist." The growers have offered to put up $120 million toward the cost of pollution control in return for a new arrangement of filtering marshes that would take only 28,000 acres out of production (7,000 less than originally proposed) and supplement them with 12,000 acres of public land.

The negotiations could still hit a snag. Environmentalists already complain that the state is letting the sugar companies off too easily. Some growers could decide that it is cheaper to sue than to capitulate. And the Miccosukee Indians, who hunt frogs and give tourists boat rides in the Everglades, may insist that water-purity standards be raised, not lowered. But for the first time in five years, a solution is in sight that all parties could live with -- even the alligators circling Gene Duncan's airboat.

With reporting by Cathy Booth/Clewiston