Remembering the Everglades

Last week the state of Florida announced a monumental conservation agreement as big as anything ever achieved out west-a  $1.75 billion deal to buy 187,000 acres of farmland from U.S. Sugar and use much of it in the Everglades' $10 billion restoration project.

There is nothing like the Everglades on the planet-what writer Marjory Stoneman Douglas called a "river of grass" once flowing across the entire southern end of Florida.  The 20th century was not kind to the vast landscape of saw grass, mangroves, freshwater ponds, and hammocks. Mostly it was industrial farming of sugar that did it in with land drained by long canals and kept productive by chemical fertilizer and pesticides.

Much of the wastewater from these farming practices was back-pumped for decades into vast Lake Okeechobee causing algae blooms and polluted drinking water. From Lake Okeechobee the water would flow south into the doomed Everglades.

Recently Florida state courts ruled U.S. Sugar could not continue the pollution. This laid the groundwork for negotiations.

"The Everglades," TIME magazine says, "is a test; if we pass we may get to keep the planet."

I hope we pass. Exploring the Everglades was part my core curriculum as a young environmentalist, a magic excursion first experienced on a Wofford independent interim my junior year at with my Spartanburg friend David Scott.
The course was designed as a flora and fauna survey of the vast park.  What it turned into was an adventure deep as anything available in Alaska. We hiked, canoed, and sloshed through every area of the park we could access. We caught snakes and alligators and crawled on our bellies through pluff mud to take pictures of wading birds.

We camped and cooked hotdogs over open fires and dreamed of what we might see the next day. There were wild cougars in the park, and we just missed seeing one when it crossed in front of a tourist Winnebago on the main park road to Flamingo.

After that mid-70s January interim I went to the Everglades the day after Christmas the next five years.  It was a ritual road trip designed around bird watching, canoeing, and critter catching.  I'd drive south from Spartanburg with David. Most of the years we'd meet Ab Abercrombie, the Wofford faculty sponsor for our first trip to the park.

We'd arrive in the middle of the night at Everglades National Park's northern border, camp there, and hike 12 miles the next day down the Shark River Valley tram road. The next ten days we'd look to add to our bird lists. We'd try to add bigger snakes and alligators to the inventory of the ones we'd seen the year before.  

I don't remember on my first trip a deep understanding that the Everglades was in trouble. I knew the million acres protected by Everglades National Park was only a fraction of the original system, but I was too young and too much in love with the wildlife and experience to fully understand.

It was only after multiple years visiting the Everglades that I began to see that this vast landscape was in peril. I watched the bird populations decline before my eyes. I saw the effects of changing weather. I saw the dangers of invasive species on native wildlife. My time in the Everglades shaped the way I see my own backyard.

It's been 15 years since I've been in the Everglades. I took my own students there on an early ‘90s interim to introduce them to the magic "river of grass" of my youth. Somehow I haven't returned, but maybe now it's time.

So it was good to see this familiar landscape back in the news this week for positive reasons. Some would argue that putting $8 billion into restoring a wild ecosystem isn't where we need to be headed, but I'm glad we've taken this project on. The Everglades has always been, to steal Wallace Stegner's famous phrase, my "landscape of hope."

Sugar farm or wild river of grass? I'll take the Everglades wildness any day.