The Sway of Cattails and Politics
A Florida law that alters water-purity rules could determine the
fate of the Everglades, as well as the outcome of local and national
elections.
By John
Thor Dahlburg
Times Staff Writer
10:12 PM PDT, August 22, 2003
THE EVERGLADES, Fla. — From the helicopter flying at 500 feet, the
intruder is soon visible: a fringe of cattails, undulating lazily in the
hot breeze of a Florida summer's midday.
For Gary Goforth, an environmental engineer on the chopper, the lush,
densely packed plants stretching in a bright green smudge alongside the
L-7 Borrow Canal are an unwelcome sight. They are a noxious force, as
well as a warning that this expanse of Florida's vast, watery wilderness
is ill.
Cattails, Goforth says over the crackling intercom, suck up oxygen,
block sunlight and hinder the growth of fish, crayfish and wading birds.
In parts of the already badly shrunken Everglades, says the Texas-born
official of the South Florida Water Management District, the alien
vegetation has been altering the "fundamental building blocks" of
nature.
Hundreds of miles separate the monotonously flat, sun-washed interior of
Palm Beach County from the corridors of power in Washington and
Tallahassee, Florida's capital. But what transpires here and in the rest
of the Everglades in the months to come could have great consequences
for multibillion-dollar plans to undo damage done by humans to the
environment, as well as for state and national politics.
This spring, nine years after passage of a landmark state law — the
Everglades Forever Act — designed to reverse decades of devastation to
southern Florida's landscape and animal life, Gov. Jeb Bush signed a new
law changing the rules on how cleanliness of water flowing into the
great marsh will be measured.
The new state law was stridently opposed by environmentalists, a federal
judge, members of Florida's congressional delegation and even some in
Bush's own Republican Party. Opponents call it a virtual license for
Florida's sugar barons to keep discharging polluting farm residue into
the Everglades for 10 more years.
Runoff from the cane fields, overly high in phosphorus, is a major agent
in the disruption of a fragile natural equilibrium established over
millennia. Phosphorous-loving cattails fester, and habitat and food
sources for wood storks, great blue herons, ibises and other species are
choked off, experts say.
"It is not a suitable environment for wildlife," said Rick Cook, public
affairs officer at Everglades National Park, the country's only
subtropical preserve, which spans the Florida peninsula at its southern
tip. "It's almost impenetrable, even to airboats going in for research
purposes."
The issue of waterborne nutrients and their effects on these remote
wetlands at first glance seems arcane, or of concern only to ecological
zealots. But for many people in Florida, protecting the Everglades is
tantamount to a sacred trust.
In this state, "you can't be seen as supportive of environmental
destruction," said Lance deHaven-Smith, a professor and political
scientist at Florida State University. Among voters here, deHaven-Smith
said, the governor and President Bush "are really seen as one person,"
and if Gov. Bush appears hostile to the Everglades, it could hurt the
president in his reelection bid next year.
The new Everglades law has already engendered a stack of furious
newspaper editorials and roiled public opinion. Nathaniel P. Reed, an
assistant secretary of the federal Interior Department in two Republican
administrations, accused Gov. Bush and lawmakers in the
Republican-dominated Legislature of caving in to demands from sugar
companies, among the most generous sources of political donations in
Florida.
"They failed to understand there would be an uproar throughout the
state," Reed said.
Bush has counterattacked by saying opponents of the law are more
motivated by politics than science, and by reiterating his commitment to
saving the Everglades. But in the face of widespread and mounting
criticism, he pushed amendments to the new law through the Legislature
in June.
As for the companies that grow about 20% of America's sugar on black
muckland south of Lake Okeechobee, one executive said they were doing
their utmost to be environmental good neighbors, and that their foes
didn't understand the stringent demands made on them by the new
legislation.
"There is no group more motivated than the farming community to having
the water that leaves our farming region contribute to a healthy
Everglades," said Jorge Dominicis, vice president of Florida Crystals
Corp., a major sugar producer.
For Marjory Stoneman Douglas, the Florida author and environmentalist
who died in her sleep at age 108 in 1998, the Everglades were the
shimmering, unparalleled "River of Grass," a unique, fragile treasure to
be preserved and cherished by all Americans. No other landscape on the
North American continent is like it, biologists and wildlife experts
say.
Southward from Lake Okeechobee, a meandering river flows, 50 miles wide
and no more than 2 or 3 feet deep. Its water, purer than the rain, has
become over the last 5,000 years the warm and liquid medium for an
astonishing variety of flora and fauna.
Here, white-plumed egrets wheel through dazzling blue skies, alligators
lurk in the sawgrass and jarflies furnish an incessant chirping
soundtrack. The Everglades are home to 68 species of animals designated
as endangered or threatened.
Since the 1880s, at least half of this once seemingly boundless marsh
has been lost to farms, housing, shopping centers, roads, golf courses
and other manifestations of Florida's ever-growing population. Today,
according to the state Department of Environmental Protection, only
about half of the original Everglades remains. But at 2.4 million acres,
these expanses of sawgrass prairie, sloughs and tree islands still
encompass an area far greater than the state of Delaware.
The Everglades, and the water that created them, constitute "the basis
of all life, man and wildlife, in Florida south of Lake Okeechobee,"
Reed said.
Starting in the 1940s, to meet the demands of flood control, drainage,
navigation, irrigation and humans' growing thirst for water, the
Everglades were ambitiously replumbed with 1,000 miles of canals, 720
miles of levees and 16 gigantic pumping stations. The once lazily
flowing River of Grass became more like an automobile expressway, with
devastating effects.
Now, areas that receive some of the heaviest rainfall in the continental
United States are subject to drought, as nearly three times the daily
water consumption of Los Angeles is rerouted and dumped into the sea to
prevent flooding in populated areas.
Water flows to the Everglades have dropped by nearly three-quarters, and
the numbers of herons, storks, egrets and other long-legged birds living
here have fallen by as much as 90%.
Simultaneously, there has been a rise in habitat-altering phosphorus.
Runoff from naked, peat-rich soils in the 700,000-acre agricultural area
to the north has been a major contributor to sullying the Everglades'
once-pristine waters. Because of manufactured control structures, the
water flows faster as well, reducing the time sawgrass and other plants
have to filter the phosphorus.
"We thought, years ago, that we were doing a good service in building
dikes and levees and canals," said David B. Struhs, Florida's secretary
of Environmental Protection. But the phosphorus content of the water
soared, from historical lows of 6 parts per billion to as high as 200,
and in places, cattails encroached on the native brown-green sawgrass,
including inside Everglades National Park.
"Under normal conditions, you can find a few cattail stalks even in the
most pristine areas of the Everglades," said Charles Lee, senior vice
president of Audubon of Florida. But when nutrient levels in water
climb, he said, the plants "go out of control."
For years, the state and federal governments did battle in lawsuits
about the pollution coming from cane fields and other farms south of
Lake Okeechobee. That ended in 1991 when Gov. Bush's Democratic
predecessor, Lawton Chiles, marched into a Miami courtroom, admitted
Florida was pumping dirty farm water into the Everglades, and said the
state was ready to "surrender."
In the ensuing 1992 consent decree, Florida pledged to take a number of
steps to reduce phosphorus in the water entering the 1.5-million-acre
park and the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge. Two years later,
state lawmakers passed the Everglades Forever Act, mandating a legal
ceiling for phosphorous. The limit was supposed to go into effect Dec.
31, 2006, and Gov. Bush advocated a rigorous standard — 10 parts per
billion.
That was how things stood until last spring, when dozens of lobbyists
for the sugar industry swarmed over the state Capitol, seeking changes
in the Everglades Forever Act.
"We lobbied it, absolutely," said Dominicis, speaking on behalf of the
Florida Sugar Cane League, an industry association. The result, he said,
is a brand-new "model" law setting strict requirements for sugar
companies.
"Big Sugar panicked," said Reed, now active in environmental
organizations including the National Audubon Society. "They decided to
seek a law that would relax the existing law and the timeframe for
compliance."
In Florida politics, sugar is one of the heavyweight players. A study
this year by the editorial board of the Orlando Sentinel, one of the
state's major newspapers, found that the industry's registered lobbyists
and their clients doled out more than $13 million in political
contributions in Florida during 2002 alone.
No state grows more sugar cane than Florida, and the sweet substance it
yields has become the state's fourth-largest cash crop, generating about
$500 million a year, said Terry McElroy, spokesman for the state
commissioner of Agriculture.
From fieldworkers to the grocers who sell them food, the sugar industry
estimates it creates 25,000 Florida jobs, mostly in rural areas where
there are few other opportunities for work.
In the often gridlocked Legislature in Tallahassee, the new law on the
Everglades was quickly approved by large bipartisan majorities. The
original bill, Struhs said, was a draft by the sugar industry itself.
But he said his department managed to make more than a dozen changes
more beneficial for the environment.
It may be up to the courts to decide what the highly technical,
sometimes confusingly worded result means. In rough terms, Struhs said,
it defines what "net improvement" in water quality will signify. From
2006-2016, Struhs said, the sugar industry will be not be judged by
phosphorous levels but by the investments, technological upgrades and
actions undertaken by growers to try to make the water cleaner.
Dominicis of Florida Crystals Corp. called it a tough law. "People are
going to look back in three years or so, and when the water quality is
down in that 10 to 15 part per billion range, they're going to be
saying, 'This is incredible,' " the sugar company executive said.
For environmentalists, the action by the Legislature and governor was a
blatant betrayal of the 1994 Everglades Forever Act and its requirement
that by 2006, all water flowing into the River of Grass meet a
government-imposed standard for purity.
"Basically, the state went behind closed doors and negotiated with the
sugar industry for an extra 10 years for the sugar industry to clean up
its water," said Mary Munson, national co-chair of the Everglades
Coalition, an umbrella group of 41 environmental and conservation
organizations.
Ripples from the controversy were quick to reach Washington and beyond.
U.S. Rep. David L. Hobson, an Ohio Republican, wrote to Gov. Bush in
June warning that the most ambitious attempt in history at environmental
repair, an $8-billion project for restoring the Everglades, may be
postponed because of doubts that Florida remains committed to cleaning
up the water as soon as possible.
The Everglades project, to be paid for equally by state and federal
governments, is widely seen as a model for other proposals to undo human
damage to the Rio Grande Valley, Chesapeake Bay, California coast and
other areas, said Ron Tipton, a senior vice president for the National
Parks Conservation Association, a nonpartisan watchdog group. "People
are closely watching what happens in the Everglades," Tipton said.
In Miami, a federal judge broke with his customary judicial reserve to
say that Florida's new law reneges on a promise made by the state to cut
phosphorus levels under the consent decree with the federal government.
Before the measure had even passed, Senior U.S. District Judge William
Hoeveler publicly criticized it as "clearly defective," and said Bush
was "misled by persons who do not have the best interests of the
Everglades at heart."
The governor's press office in Tallahassee would not comment on the
controversy. But Bush predicted earlier this year that by 2006, about
95% of the water in the Everglades will contain 10 parts per billion of
phosphorus or less.
Many Democrats in the Legislature voted for the new Everglades law, but
the party has seized on it as a potent issue to wield against Gov. Bush
and his brother. "Our state's most natural treasure is in peril," state
Rep. Ron Greenstein, who cast a yes vote in May, told a news conference
in June. He voted for the law, Greenstein said, because he believed the
courts would throw it out if it were defective.
In the verdant, aqueous hinterland of one of America's most populous
states, the wading birds have ended their nesting for the year. Summer's
clear, harsh sunlight is periodically broken by lashing thunderstorms.
White egrets glide above tree islands, living flashes of grace and
beauty in this deceptively monotonous world.
In 2000, the older Bush brother carried Florida by just 537 votes, a
reed-slender margin that nevertheless was enough to make him president
of the United States. Perhaps the 2004 race for the White House will be
swayed by what happens here, among the glinting, tepid water and the
sawgrass where many cattails now grow.
"If George W. gets into a close race, within 2 to 4 points of his
opponent," said Jim Kane, a Fort Lauderdale-based pollster, "the
Everglades issue might be significant." |
