Friends of the Everglades has some additional objections to those stated in the letter with the Biodiversity Legal Foundation and the Florida Biodiversity Project to the proposed Congressional legislation on Everglades “Restoration”.

            These objections revolve around the Everglades Agricultural Area, which is responsible for most of the problems facing the Everglades today.  Despite this fact, the Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA) virtually is ignored in the Restudy and the bill to implement it now making its way through Congress.

The EAA is the principal source of Everglades pollution, the principal barrier to restoring vitally needed sheet flow through the system, and poses the principal threat of urban development in the heart of the Everglades. The U.S. Geological Survey reports that the land in the EAA will be too shallow to farm “within decades” and a sugar executive has declared that if the EAA “can’t grow sugar cane it will grow condominiums and golf courses.”  Neither the Restudy nor the proposed legislation address these issues.

The Everglades Coalition, of which Friends of the Everglades is a member, has passed a resolution asking that government purchase the EAA as it goes out of sugar production. The Restudy calls for only one water storage area in the EAA­­—on a 60,000 acre tract of eroded land already purchased from a willing seller. Yet even this reservoir might not be built because of objections from sugar farmers.

Under the guise of flood control the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers drained 700,000 acres in the heart of the Everglades about 50 years ago at the behest of property owners who wanted to farm the rich peat and muck which lay beneath the sawgrass wetland.   Now the land soon will be down to bare rock because of a process called subsidence, which inevitably occurs when peat and muck are drained. What will happen when the soil is gone? The Restudy doesn’t say.

                                                                               Sincerely,

                                                                               Juanita Greene,
                                                                               Conservation Chair
                                                                               Friends of the Everglades