By Tim Elfrink , published: June 04, 200

Rick Persson founded a group to save the canals.

Iron wires dangle from a boat in a cool brown river deep in the Everglades. On this breezy April morning, a few hundred volts crackle through the metal strands into the water.

Barron Moody sweeps a net through the murk and pulls up six bass stunned by the electricity. The fish shimmy side to side in slow confusion, their wet scales refracting yellow and blue in the sun. Moody tosses them into a half-full holding pool.

“It’s unbelievable, right?” says Moody, a grinning middle-aged man deeply tanned by his daily toil in the Florida sun.

Moody is a biologist from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, and it’s his job to keep an eye on the birds, gators, and bass that live in the River of Grass.

In a few hours, Moody will count the fish in his boat before returning them to the canal. A few years ago, his colleagues found 8,000 fish in one stretch of this 26-mile canal that begins where Griffin Road ends west of Davie. Fishermen were hooking almost two bass per hour.

You may not know it by its name, but the L-67A Canal is one of the best fishing holes on planet Earth. From its starting point in Broward County, the canal stretches south through Miami-Dade County and dumps out into the nothingness of the Everglades. Every weekend, locals and tourists haul boats here to float over the cattail-choked culverts and reel in big bass.

But it may not survive the next generation. If Everglades restoration projects go forward as planned, this canal will be backfilled with dirt.

“It’s a shame,” says Rick Persson, a retired Miami Beach firefighter leaning on the wheel of his sleek boat. He smiles at Moody’s bounty of fish. “Kids now won’t be able to enjoy this when they’re my age.”

Persson has fished the L-67A for more than 30 years. He used to hop in a pickup with his dad every weekend, hitch up a rusty old sloop, and drive home nine hours later sunburned and stocked with bass dinners for the week.

“When I started coming out here in the ’70s with a johnboat and a ten-horsepower motor, the canals were totally clear,” Persson says. “No one had quite caught on to how good the fishing was.”

Now that he’s retired, Persson travels the country to fish in big-money tournaments. Whenever he’s home, he drags his new yellow-and-black Skeeter bass boat to the waters where he caught the fishing bug. And most days, he ends up with a better haul than at all the more famous lakes and rivers he visits on the road.

As environmentalists absorb the biggest infusion of cash in a decade from the federal government and celebrate an historic half-billion dollar land-buy from U.S. Sugar, Persson and like-minded activists around the Glades are raising concerns about whether restoration will accomplish anything.

In a larger sense, they’re just writing the latest chapter in a centuries-old struggle between man and nature, a battle that humans decisively won in the 20th Century before we realized the cost of our victory.

In its natural state, the Everglades wasn’t a swamp but a massive, molasses-slow river. All the water in the Kissimmee Valley poured into Lake Okeechobee. From the vast shallow pool, water seeped south across millions of acres of muck.

The solution for how to fix this mess of a wasteland seemed easy: dam up Lake Okeechobee and build canals to shunt its waters east and west to the Gulf and the Atlantic. A long list of famous men went broke or died trying to make this work. Hamilton Disston dredged the first ditches in the late 1800s but died without seeing a profit from his enterprises. Henry Flagler, the oil magnate and father of South Florida, ultimately declared even his massive fortune insufficient to battle the Glades. And Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, the fiery, floppy-mustached governor, died from gallstones before his dream was realized.

Laying out all the American hubris toward the Glades, Broward once said: “Yes, the Everglades is a swamp. So was Chicago 60 years ago.”

Eventually, the Army Corps of Engineers dammed the lake, dredged miles of channels, and reclaimed hundreds of thousands of acres of swampland.

Of course, it didn’t take long for the corps’ success to lead to killer fires, dust bowls, and saltwater-infested groundwater from Boca to Miami. Until last summer, the Everglades’ salvation depended upon a plan voted into law in 2000 that has three key steps: dams and ditches would be removed, restoring some natural flow; Lake Okeechobee would be cleaned; and enormous reservoirs would be built to hold the lake’s runoff in the summer and pour water south in the dry months.

By last year, the 2000 plan had all but fizzled. The cost has soared from $7.8 billion to $10.9 billion, according to a report to Congress by the National Research Council. And the Army Corps has completed none of the draft’s 68 projects.

So last June, Florida Gov. Charlie Crist put all the projects on hold and announced that he had secretly negotiated with one of the Glades’ largest land owners, U.S. Sugar Corp. The company agreed to sell the state 187,000 acres for $1.7 billion. Last month, all the parties involved agreed on a final sale, scaled down to half size by the staggering economy.

Lost among the bitter fight over whether to buy sugar land are the fishermen who may lose their prized spot. On a recent afternoon, Persson and fishing partner Al Ovies cast into the shadows on a placid strip of the L-67A canal.

The pair make a convincing argument that undoing damage here doesn’t mean divorcing from the canals. Persson and Ovies met at a bass fishing club in the late 1980s. Dismayed about the restoration plan, they formed a coalition to save the canals in 2001 called South Florida Anglers for Everglades Restoration. They started attending South Florida Water District meetings and talking to corps officials.

“When we started going to meetings, I’m convinced a lot of these guys had no idea that anyone even fished these canals,” Ovies says. “They thought it was just a water conveyance they could get rid of and no one would miss.”

Ovies and Persson both agree that restoring the natural flow of water to Everglades National Park would be ideal. But both doubt that it’s possible. They worry that the corps will backfill one of the state’s premier fishing holes on an untested theory.

They’re not alone. Jon Fury, a biologist at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission since 1985, says he believes water flow to the Glades could be fixed by removing levees but leaving the canals intact.

Fury says he has found few places that match the L-67A as a fishery. By his math, the canal generates $1.1 million for Florida businesses every six months.

“To simply backfill these canals because it’s the easiest solution you see, I’d have to say hold on,” Fury says. “You’re going to ruin a really important fishery.”

But Tom Van Lent, an Everglades Foundation scientist, describes the L-67A and similar canals as “an artifact of what we’ve done to destroy the Everglades.” He is skeptical of any plan that would keep the canals. “Maybe we can have an occasional hole where bass can have a refuge,” Van Lent says. “But there’s not going to be the same access. You’re not going to be able to drive in from the city and launch your boat in 20 minutes from the dock right off the trail.”

That’s a tough pill to swallow for a man like Persson, who spent so many long languid afternoons on the canal with his dad, who died in 2005.

The old firefighter’s eyes are distant and glassy behind his sunglasses as he casts and reels, casts and reels, drifting down the same water he’s floated a thousand times before.

Suddenly, his arms go taught. Tendons flex out of his weathered flesh as his fishing line jerks hard. The line goes tight.

Persson jerks up, expertly driving the hook deeper into whatever’s fighting beneath the murky surface. He reels. A foot-long bass flips back and forth, fighting in the air.

This time, in this tiny conflict waged in a canal carved out of the swamps, man has won.

“Beautiful,” he says.

Till next time tight lines and good fishing….
From Bass Online Staff Writer
BassOnline.com / 888-829-BASS

Why the Everglades is burning, and how we sucked it dry

By Michael Grunwald

21 May 2008

It’s hard to believe, now that it’s been overrun by 7 million residents and 7 million strip malls, but southern Florida was once America’s last frontier. As late as 1880, the census recorded just 257 residents in a county covering most of the region — because most of the region was a watery wilderness called the Everglades. Mapmakers weren’t sure whether to draw it as land or water. Politicians dismissed it as uninhabitable swampland. Explorers described it as a “godforsaken” and “hideous” and “abominable” morass, “suitable only for the haunt of noxious vermin, or the resort of pestilential reptiles.”

When good wetlands go bad.

Those explorers never would have imagined that the Everglades would get so dry that it would burn out of control, or that desolate southern Florida would become a sprawling megalopolis. But those two weird developments are intimately related. The wildfires raging through nearly 40,000 acres of the Everglades this week are the direct legacy of the elaborate water-management system that made southern Florida safe for human civilization. The system has functioned according to design for decades, but it’s killing the Everglades, and it’s ultimately unsustainable for human South Florida as well.

Environmentalists like to say that the Everglades is a test; if we pass, we may get to keep the planet. I wrote a book about the death and possible rebirth of the Everglades that was basically dedicated to the proposition that southern Florida is where we’re going to find out whether humans can live in harmony with nature, and perhaps avoid the water wars that could otherwise dominate the geopolitics of the 21st century. The fires are a vivid, symbolic reminder that we’ve got a long way to go. History’s bill is coming due for a century of bad decisions, and we haven’t yet figured out how to pay it.

When It Drains, It Pours

For all its famous sunshine, southern Florida has always been one of the rainiest swaths of North America; with 60 annual inches, it’s significantly wetter than Seattle. And for thousands of years, most of that water ended up in Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades, a panoramic sheet of shallow water flowing through 100 miles of serrated sawgrass from the lake all the way down to Florida Bay. In fact, the fires that are now raging in the northeast corner of Everglades National Park are incinerating one of the wettest sloughs of the original “river of grass.” Another fire ravaging 25,000 acres around Lake Okeechobee is actually burning drought-exposed lakebed.

The scientific term for this phenomenon is FUBAR. Sloughs and lakes are not supposed to be flammable. Sure, there were fires in the natural Everglades, but they were caused by lightning strikes during summer rains, and were quickly extinguished by the waterlogged landscape. The Everglades is incredibly flat, declining just a few inches per mile, so its original wetlands were incredibly wet, storing rainfall and recharging underground aquifers in the summer so that there was still water on the ground when the rains stopped in the winter. If you were a glutton for punishment, you could have walked across the entire marsh without getting your hair wet, and without stepping on dry ground.

But starting in the 1880s, Americans determined to subdue Mother Nature started trying to drain the Everglades with canals, hoping to create a new paradise for agriculture and development. A few lonely voices warned that ditches could turn the swamp into a desert, but most Floridians agreed with Gov. Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, who declared in the early 1900s that if drained swamps could really burn, “the great bogs of Ireland would have been ash heaps long before St. Patrick drove out the snakes.”

But sure enough, the early ditches started sucking the marsh dry, ruining wells, damaging soils, and, yes, igniting fires so smoky that children in Miami had to cover their faces at school. And in the summer, southern Florida’s torrential downpours overwhelmed the ditches, converting farmland back to swampland, inspiring the first jokes about buying Florida land by the gallon. The jokes seemed a lot less funny in 1928, when a hurricane blasted Lake Okeechobee through a flimsy muck dike, killing 2,500 pioneers in the Everglades.

Enter my friends in the Army Corps of Engineers, the ground troops in America’s war against nature. They built the massive Hoover Dike around the lake, forever cutting off the Everglades from its wellspring. Then they built America’s most ambitious flood-control system, with more than 2,000 miles of levees and canals, plus pumps so powerful the engines were cannibalized from nuclear submarines. The project gave water managers power to move almost every drop of rain that fell south of Orlando, allowing them to whisk floodwaters into the lake, the Everglades, or its estuaries for the convenience of thirsty farms and communities that only wanted water when they wanted it.

These waterworks made southern Florida safe for 400,000 acres of sugar fields, as well as one of the spectacular development booms in human history. On the southeast coast, suburbs like Coral Springs, Miami Springs, Sunrise, Miramar, Weston, and Wellington began sprouting west of I-95, paving over the eastern Everglades. And on the southwest coast, Naples and Fort Myers started marching east into the western Everglades.

Unfortunately, most of that boom took place back when wetlands — which absorb stormwater, cleanse drinking water, and nourish wildlife — were still considered wastelands. The result is a dying ecological treasure, but also a megalopolis that still seesaws between dangerous floods in the wet season and harsh droughts in the dry season.

Today, half the original Everglades has been lost, along with its ability to smooth out high-water and low-water events. The other half is a mess — usually too dry, occasionally too wet, always polluted and discombobulated. The ecosystem hosts 69 endangered species, including the Cape Sable seaside sparrow, which exists only in Everglades National Park, and could use some flame-retardant pajamas this week. Water is supposed to be the lifeblood of the Everglades, but these days it barely reaches the park.

With Trends Like This, Who Needs Enemies

Meanwhile, since the leaky Hoover Dike is at risk of a catastrophic failure, and water managers don’t want a repeat of the 1928 disaster, they often blast billions of gallons out of the lake when it gets high, ravaging the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee estuaries to its east and west, wasting fresh water they need in times of drought. For example, they dumped tons of water into the sea to prepare for the 2006 hurricane season — just in time for a two-year drought that has left Lake Okeechobee three feet below its normal level.

That’s how southern Florida got into its current predicament. Raindrops that used to fall on wetlands, recharge aquifers, and dribble across the landscape all year long now land on yards, roads, and parking lots, migrate into canals, and get whisked out to sea. And now the exurbs have moved to the doorstep of the Everglades, where they constantly stick new straws into the aquifers. So now the Everglades is parched enough to burn out of control when some yahoo gets careless with matches. And millions of people in the surrounding suburbs suddenly have to worry about smoke and particulates as well as unbearable traffic, overcrowded schools, skyrocketing insurance rates tied to the omnipresent threat of a hurricane, and a disappearing sense of place.

The good news is that in 2000, Congress decided to fix all these problems, enacting the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan to restore some semblance of southern Florida’s natural hydrology. It’s a complex project, but the basic idea is to spend $12 billion on reservoirs and high-tech wells that will store rain that used to be stored by wetlands, then redistribute it to people, farms, and the Everglades when it’s needed.

The project passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in both Washington, D.C. and Tallahassee, because everyone agreed that the Everglades was a national treasure. It’s supposed to be a model for ecosystem restoration work in the Great Lakes, Chesapeake Bay, Louisiana’s coastal wetlands, and even southern Iraq’s Garden of Eden marshes.

The bad news is that the project is deeply flawed, particularly when it comes to getting water to the Everglades. And now it’s stalled by money problems, engineering problems, and political problems. The Everglades is as sick in 2008 as it was in 2000.

Eventually, it will stop burning. But it will still be dying.

From Staff and Wire Reports
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