Young Johnny Jones, out on an adventure, hacked his way through half a mile of tall sawgrass to reach the open space of a wide wet prairie.  “Just before I broke out I heard a loud noise like a shot from a cannon,”  he relates.  “It was the noise from the wings of ducks. It seemed like millions of ducks. They took off in a funnel like a cyclone, only bigger. They blocked out the whole sky.”

There were teals and mallards and pin tails, and other birds too: herons, egrets, stilts. 

Jones was in the Florida Everglades, one of the world’s largest wetlands.  It was the early 1950s, when the Everglades was still full of wildlife. In those days nature frequently offered great displays to the few persons able to penetrate the flat, lonely wilderness: wary Florida panthers wading channels between tree islands; crowds of Anhingas, the snake birds, spreading their wings to dry in such numbers they bent tree branches; alligators stacked like cordwood while sunning on shore.   The shallow waters and soggy plains churned with life. Red shouldered hawks watched the scene knowing instinctively that they never would go hungry.

Jones had reached his destination by slogging over slippery ground. He wore light-weight tennis shoes to make it easier to pull his feet out of the sticky muck.  Because of a recent dry-down, the ground was split by huge cracks, now filled with water and hard to see. “I had to feel my way with a stick to keep from falling in.,”  he remembers. “You could sink up to your rear end.”

Jones was at the top of the Everglades, just south of Lake Okeechobee.  Today the land is planted in sugar cane that covers nearly half a million acres in the Everglades Agricultural Area. The land was drained not long after Jones’ visit by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as part of the Central and Southern Florida Flood Control Project  The Everglades Agricultural Area, former flood plain of Lake Okeechobee, once stored billions of gallons of water.  Today it is the principal source of Everglades pollution. In this huge wetland 700,000 acres were drained at the urging of property owners who wanted to farm the rich organic soil that lay beneath the sawgrass and water.  Other Everglades areas also were drained.  Farms, suburbs and even cities have replaced scrub forests, mangrove swamps, cypress stands and islands of West Indian hardwoods.

Some of the world’s largest pumps, along with thousands of miles of canals and levees,  reduced the 3 million-acre Everglades to half that size.  To keep the drained land dry, more than a billion gallons of fresh water are pumped to sea every day, often leaving the Everglades parched. This is happening in an area that depends entirely on rain for its water supply. Lowered water levels cause non-native species. (exotics) to spread. Huge forests of melaleuca, Australian pine and Brazilian pepper cover thousands of acres of Everglades. A new plant pest, old world climbing fern, is growing so thickly on trees it causes them to topple.  In the Everglades Agricultural Area the muck is disappearing, as muck will do when drained. So much of the drained Everglades water is pumped into Lake Okeechobee that the lake suffers from pollution and unnaturally high water levels that drown the shallow edges so important to wildlife.

Much of the water left in the Everglades is laden with phosphorus, nitrogen, mercury and other pollutants.  The phosphorus is the principal concern of Everglades scientists. It brings in cattails, an alien (ED; BUT NOT AN EXOTIC)  species that grows in thick clusters neither wildlife nor the sun can penetrate. Underneath, dissolved oxygen is lowered to the point that wildlife can’t breathe. “Eventually, all you have is cattails and bacteria. Everything crashes,” said Joel Trexler an ecologist at Florida International University. More than 60,000 acres of the Everglades are covered by cattails.  Once they have become established, there is virtually  no way to get rid of them.  Phosphorus also damages floating mats of microscopic algae, or periphyton ,  that are the base of the Everglades food chain.  Mosquito  fish, fresh water shrimp and other small animals feed on it. They in turn are eaten by wading birds and other creatures.

Most of the raucous rookeries along Everglades streams have disappeared. The wading bird breeding population has dropped by 90 percent. The panther population is down to between 30 and 50, and most now live outside Everglades Natinal Park in Big Cypress National Preserve and other areas to the west.  The big cats are on the federal Endangered list.  So is the Cape Sable Seaside sparrow,  which nests  the muhly grass. The Everglades’ dusky seaside sparrow went extinct in 1987 after unavailing efforts to breed the last male with a lookalike Scott’s seaside sparrow, a close relative.  The snail kite, another unique species,  is in danger because its food, the apple snail, is disappearing from the green stalks growing out of fresh water marshes. Other endangered species in the Everglades include the American crocodile, which lives on Florida Bay and a few other places; the wood stork, which can nest successfully only when the water level allows prey to collect in ponds; four species of sea turtles: the green, Atlantic Ridley, hawksbill and leatherneck; the West Indian manatee and the red-cockaded woodpecker.

To save what is left of the Everglades and restore some of it to a semblance of its former condition, the state and federal governments have agreed to an $8 billion plan on which they will split the cost evenly.  The Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP),  is  part of the original Corps of Engineers Project approved by Congress in 1948.  The restoration will take more than 25 years, will be carried out by the Corp with state cooperation,  and is called the largest effort of its kind ever undertaken in this country.  At the urging of Governor Jeb Bush, the Florida legislature has committed the state’s share of the funds.

The main goal is to capture the water now being wasted by pumping to sea. This amounts to more water than is used in southeastern Florida for all purposes. The saved water would be stored for use in the Everglades,  farms and urban areas. There is disagreement over where some of the water would be held. According to the plan, priority for use is supposed to go to the Everglades, to restore the shallow flow of freshwater through the system, which the late author Marjory Stoneman Douglas famously described as the “River of Grass”.  This flow is the engine that drives the Everglades system.

“Unless this flow in the Everglades is restored, the Everglades will die,” declares Johnny Jones, now retired from the Florida Wildlife Federation, which he served as director for many years.

 A bill to authorize the restoration plan recently made its way out of the U.S. Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee. With the help of Committee chairman Robert C. Smith (R-New Hampshire), it is expected to win Senate approval. What will happen in the House is uncertain.  Most conservation groups feel the bill is a good start and were saying in mid-August that they will support it with the hope of improvement later. They would like to see a better guarantee that the much-deprived Everglades will get first crack at the water it needs. They also would like to have the Interior Department play a stronger role.  The other side complains, as did Washington lobbyist Bob Dawson representing a coalition of “economic interests”, that the bill could allow undesirable future changes in who gets how much water. Dawson’s coalition consists of powerful municipal utility and farming groups, including Everglades sugar growers.

In a letter to Smith, two important Everglades groups called the Senate bill “a very sound piece of legislation.”  They are the Barley Group headed by Mary Barley, a leading opponent of the sugar industry in the Everglades, and the Green Group composed of the administrative heads of many national environmental organizations. A joint letter said the two groups “will continue to work with your able staff on refinements and clarification.”

Supporting the bill is the Everglades Coalition, composed of 42 national and local groups that includes Defenders of Wildlife, the National Audubon Society, Environmental Defense Fund, National Resources Defense Council, National Wildlife Federation, World Wildlife Fund and the Sierra Club. .”

 Environmental groups opposing  the bill include the Biodiversity Legal Foundation, whose environmental analyst Sidney B. Maddock complainsamong many other things that “critically important native habitats are almost completely ignored”.  Friends of the Everglades, a grass roots group founded by Marjory Stoneman Douglas; the Legal Environmental Assistance Fund and the Florida League of Conservation Voters sent a letter to Smith saying the bill “makes it far too likely that what is contemplated by all of us to be a restoration project will turn out to be a public water supply project.”

Sugar lobbyist Dawson said in a letter to Florida congressmen that farmers expected the restoration project “to allow them to respond to a changing economy with new water needs.” 

 “To strip the value of their land by defining them as new users for which water has not been assured under this bill is fundamentally unfair, inconsistent with the plan and bad public policy,” he said.

The bill covers all bases.  “The overreaching objective of the plan is the restoration, preservation and protection of the South Florida Ecosystem while providing for other water-related needs of the region, including water supply and flood protection,” it declares.

 One of the big problems with the Everglades is its location. Its east boundary lies right up against the glittering Florida East Coast, crowded with more than five million people and still growing. There is no handy place to expand except into the Everglades. The state has not used its powers to draw a protective boundary around the Everglades. Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties continue to move                  their development boundaries westward. A former Governor’s Commission on the Everglades recommended increasing density in urban areas as a solution to this threat, but there is not much movement in that direction.

Planned for the top of Lake Okeechobee is a series of above-ground reservoirs and underground storage areas in a new, untried system called Aquifer Storage and Recovery. Such storage might work for farms and urban areas but would not help the natural Everglades, which needs water moving over wide spaces. The captured water could be held in the River of Grass itself and in expanded natural areas such as wetlands, streams, ponds and lakes.  Today the natural flow not only is short of water but is blocked by canals and levees that segment the Everglades. Some levees will be leveled and some canals filled in. 

All parts of the Everglades need help. The system begins at Lake Okeechobee and ends more than a hundred miles south at Florida Bay.