Ecotourism in Florida - Without a Paddle (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine August 2003

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The Water Issue: Restoration Dreams
Without a Paddle (Cont.)

THE FIRST TIME I MET STEVE ROBINSON, he took me on a hike just off State Road 9336, which skirts the southeastern edge of Everglades National Park. He showed me how to deal with saw grass (rub up against it and you're fine, rub down and it slices your skin like butter) and gave me a seminar on periphyton, nature's finest fish food. A spongy, Dijon-colored city of algae and microscopic creatures that floats on the surface, periphyton cleanses the Everglades of excess nutrients and pollutants. The chemical equation is pretty simple: Saw grass likes neutral water, and periphyton neutralizes acidity. Without periphyton, the saw-grass prairie is overrun by invasive vegetation like cattails (which is already happening in parts), the river's flow is interrupted, and the periphyton gives way to slimy green algae, which doesn't nurture fish the way the periphyton does. Fish diminish. Birds diminish. The Everglades withers.

On our second day out, we pull into a campsite that drives this point home: a series of concrete chutes and floating barriers built in the late seventies by the South Florida Water Management District to test the effects of phosphorus and nitrate runoff from the Everglades Agricultural Area, 700,000 acres of sugarcane fields and citrus farms parked on the south side of Lake Okeechobee.

The effects are still glaringly obvious. No saw grass grows behind the chutes where the nutrients were loaded. Instead of periphyton, there are floating mats of green algae. To Steve, this sight is an indication of the compromises made in the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan. Currently, the phosphorus levels in agricultural runoff range from 50 to 300 parts per billion; CERP is supposed to impose a reduction to ten parts per billion by 2006. That's an ambitious goal, but it seems to have been shoved into political limbo. In late May, omnipotent ag-industry lobbyists, led by U.S. Sugar, pushed the Florida Legislature into passing a bill—which Jeb Bush signed into law—giving them a ten-year extension to comply. Florida senator Bob Graham, a Democrat who hopes to challenge Jeb's big brother in 2004, called the bill "a divorce filing in the federal-state partnership for Everglades restoration."

"I've been wading in waters like this my whole life," Steve tells me as we inspect the chutes. "I've never seen so few fish. These were historically very productive waters. This new plan, while a wonderful step, isn't going to change any of that. We've 'saved' the Everglades five times since I've been around, and I haven't seen an improvement yet. They want to fix it the same way they broke it: water manipulation, control of nature. They don't want to allow natural fluctuations—'My heavens, we can't do that. The animals and fish might die.' Well, I hate to break it to them, but that's already happened. I say let nature take its course. If you can accomplish more by doing nothing, then do nothing. Open everything up and let the water flow."

Right now, most of the water that used to flow so gently across this delta is shunted into the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico as a flood-control measure—1.7 billion gallons of unused freshwater every day, an amount made even more unfathomable by the fact that South Florida suffers regular water shortages from drought. As this water makes its way through canals to the sea, a host of pollutants—sewage, agricultural runoff, garbage, and outright criminal contamination—join the flow, altering Florida's coastal waterways to such a degree that the U.S. mainland's "only living coral reef," in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, is fast becoming America's largest dead coral reef.

CERP is—or was—supposed to change this. Instead of dumping all that water into the ocean, the Corps and the SFWMD have a cunning plan to pump it into South Florida's aquifer. Their method? A series of aquifer-storage-and-recovery (ASR) systems, 330 to be exact, that are being incorporated into the existing matrix of water-control structures. Basically, up to 1.6 billion gallons a day will be pumped 1,100 feet underground, where, theoretically, it will push aside the naturally brackish water, forming a kind of freshwater bubble that will simply hang out until it's "recovered" for agricultural use, drinking water, and recharging the Everglades.

Sounds great, except that no one's quite sure if it's going to work. The National Research Council, a federally funded consortium of independent scientists, warns that the increased water pressure may fracture the limestone that seals the aquifer. "We really don't know what's going to happen to that limestone over time," says Hal Wanless, head of the geology department at the University of Miami. "Pumping that amount of water in and out on a year-round basis might just destroy the aquifer."

It's worth noting that of the 100 municipal underground treated-wastewater-injection units in use in Florida, 33 percent leak into the aquifer. When you consider that a healthy flow of freshwater isn't projected to return to the lower Everglades until 2018, the future looks bleak. "There's no 'restoration' in the restoration plan," says Stuart Pimm, a conservation ecologist at Duke University who has advised the Corps. "This whole thing is a sham."

Stu Appelbaum, CERP's program manager, gets a little miffed when folks tell him that. "What do people mean by 'restoration'? Put it back the way it was? Obviously we're not doing that," he says. "Restoration does have a precise meaning, but in common usage it means 'Get something back as best you can.' While we're not going to put the system back to the way it was 100 years ago, we are going to make up for the mismanagement of the 20th century."

Appelbaum sees himself as part of a new wave: the greening of the Corps. He believes he's doing something that his children will be proud of. That may be. His work is certainly a far cry from the Corps' dam-dredge-and-dike heyday, but it's still a doubtful enterprise. As Senator Graham told me himself, "anybody who thinks that there is an insurance policy that this project will sustain itself for the next 20 years is a very optimistic person."

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