For decades, the world's largest wetlands have been diked, dammed, diverted, and drained. Here's how massive earthmoving, underground plumbing, and statistical modeling are getting South Florida back to nature - new and improved.
The Everglades are dying. Nearly half of their 4 million acres has been swallowed up by sprawl and sugarcane. Almost 70 plant and animal species hover on the brink of extinction. Since 1930, the wading bird populations - egrets and herons and spoonbills and the like - have declined a staggering 90 percent. The saw grass prairies, for which the region is famous, are in grave decline, and the once legendary game-fish populations aren't doing much better. Among the few that do remain, scientists have detected enough mercury in their fatty tissue to warn against consumption.
The ecosystem has been suffering since Florida's first settlers began draining the swamp in 1850, but it was the effort to fix the state's weather that really spelled the Everglades' doom. Florida has only two seasons: wet and dry. The wet season has always produced floods; the dry, drought.
This bad-news cycle ran unchecked until the 1920s, when a pair of back-to-back hurricanes produced floods that killed 2,500 people. Public outcry moved the government into action. The Army Corps of Engineers, the world's greatest earthmovers, were called in to do a top-to-bottom liquid redesign of the entire state. The "4 Ds" were the Corps' unofficial motto: Dike it, dam it, divert it, drain it. Over the next 50 years, they cut 1,800 miles of canals between Lake Okeechobee and the Florida Bay and installed 300 floodgates and 16 major pump stations to manage the water.
The Corps captured the Everglades. By taming the flood-and-drought cycle, the engineers made Florida's Atlantic Coast safe for development and its midlands safe for agriculture. But like most wild things, it didn't fare too well in captivity. What once had been one of the world's largest wetland ecosystems was jigsawed into 16 parts - separate and isolated. By 1990, it was clear that the Everglades were facing more than the loss of a few species. The underlying hydrology was out of whack, and the whole deal was fading fast.
It was not always this way. Until the mid-1800s, water flowed unhindered from the middle of the state. There, the Kissimmee River fed the third-largest freshwater body in America, the behemoth Lake Okeechobee, which in turn spilled over from the lake's southern edge, creating one even sheet of water - 100 miles long, 40 miles wide, and 6 inches deep - that traveled the rest of the way down the state.
This sheet moved south into the Everglades proper: saw grass prairies, tree islands, alligators, wading birds, and all the rest. The glades continued, and with them, the water, which came to mingle with the Atlantic's brackish tongue. There, the higher salinity changed the landscape: Saw grass prairies became a coiled maze of mangrove swamps until, farther still, the water reached the ocean's true edge. From there, it punched out into Florida Bay, smoothing shorelines on the dot islands known as the Keys, and continued out past the coral reefs. Those once-mighty reefs are now dying too, like the rest of it, unintentional victims of flood control.
To combat disaster, President Clinton, in his last year in office, signed the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan into law. It's scheduled to cost nearly $8 billion. Former secretary of the interior Bruce Babbitt, who helped usher the measure through Congress, contends that future historians will rank the Everglades Plan as one of the most important pieces of environmental law ever passed. But unlike, say, the Clean Air Act, which puts the burden on industry by limiting the release of pollutants, the CERP is a massive government engineering project on a scale never before attempted.
Scientists and engineers and politicians are still bothering with the details, but everyone agrees upon one fact: You can't just "go back to nature." The population of Florida has spread out as it's grown over the past hundred years, and in many places these days there's no nature to go back to. Instead, you have to bulldoze this land back to its original ecological function, Roto-Rooter the planet's plumbing, rethink and redesign and rebuild it. The plan calls for rechanneling a major river, transforming Florida's natural aquifer into a hundred billion-gallon freshwater storage tank, and developing a new type of filtration system that meets the toughest water-quality standards on earth.
Celestial dreamers studying Mars have coined a catchall for this process: terraforming. Down here in South Florida, where all that separates dry land from wet sea is a bit of limestone and landfill, there's a new word for what this crew's got planned: hydroforming.
The hydroforming starts 65 miles east of Tampa. Here, midway down the Kissimmee, the river snakes along. The water is dark, the day hot. Off in the distance, cattle egrets perch in oak trees, and nearer to the shore are great blue herons, their wings spread wide in flight. It's quite a vista, enough to make me believe this is pristine nature, untouched by man, undisturbed by civilization. But nothing could be further from the truth.
Lou Toth wears his hair long and looks like a weathered Peter Frampton. He is the chief scientist in charge of river restoration for the South Florida Water Management District and my guide on the Kissimmee. In this part of the ecosystem, restoration is an especially delicate balancing act. Toth must undo the damage inflicted by previous generations without losing command of the river.
Toth sits next to the outboard motor and keeps a hand on the tiller. "Two years ago," he says, "all this was cattle land, dried up. Water hadn't flowed here for 40 years."
In 1962, working on flood control instructions from Congress, the Army Corps set out to tether the Kissimmee. It yanked out a ruler, drew a straight line down the middle of the state, and got out shovels. By 1971, two-thirds of the floodplain was drained, and one-third of the river was filled in with dirt. The river's languid S-curves were replaced by one monster ditch: 56 miles long, 300 feet wide, and 30 feet deep.
"Before the Corps came along, this river was beautiful," says Toth. "It had some of the best fishing in the world, it was a treasure. Afterward, it was a muddy mess."
That muddy mess was expensive, costing taxpayers $30 million at the time. But that's nothing compared with the $500 million it will take to restore the Kissimmee. Forty percent alone will go toward buying back farmland that was once floodplain. Eighty-five thousand acres will be returned to the river; 22 miles of canal will be backfilled; two major dams will be removed; 9 miles of river will be redug; and the original water flow of Lake Kissimmee will be reestablished. The goal? Restoring 40 square miles of river and floodplain without the loss of flood control.
To maintain this control, the river will never be entirely free. The upper and lower thirds will remain dammed and channeled, but the middle - those 40 square miles - will flow unhindered. If it stays on schedule, the Kissimmee Restoration project will finish around 2010.
Until then, there's the 14-mile stretch of river that I'm floating down. Known prosaically as "phase one," this portion of the reconstruction project started in June 1999 and was completed in February 2001. Phase one was a trial run on a mad scale: 61é4 miles of canal were backfilled and 13 miles of meanders reconnected. In June, Toth dynamited Control Structure S-65B - one of six dams built on the Kissimmee. In time-lapse photography of the explosion, you can watch water gushing forth and farmlands disappearing. What you can't see are the things Toth is showing me now.
"Look at those broadleaf plants," he says. A few years ago, Toth tells me, you could have counted their numbers individually; not so anymore. Now there are whole fields of them, stretching miles from river to tree line.
Later that day, I'm drinking beer at the Riverwoods Field Laboratory, the research station from which Kissimmee restoration is carefully monitored. It's not much in the way of buildings: a rambling shack, a few computers, posters of wading birds on the walls. Out front, the porch gives way to a dirt field, with a butterfly garden tucked in one corner and a few pickups scattered around the yard.
"When we're done," says Toth, pointing from the porch, "all this will be gone, turned back into wetlands. Restoration here is pretty low tech, but I'll tell you something. If this low tech approach doesn't work, the high tech stuff they've got planned for the rest of the ecosystem doesn't stand a chance."
That high tech approach begins where the Kissimmee flows into Lake Okeechobee - a body of water so large it produces its own weather systems and so domesticated it hardly deserves to be called a lake. Its 730 square miles are penned in by an earthen levee 143 miles long and 20 feet tall. Built to reduce flooding and provide optimal growing conditions for the sugarcane plantations that hug the lake's lower banks, the levee dumps water into five massive drainage canals - four dug east to the Atlantic and one west to the Gulf of Mexico. Altogether, these canals send 1.7 billion gallons of freshwater out to tide each day.
While the farmers are happy and the floods abated, not enough water is reaching the Everglades. Likewise, a recent series of droughts has meant rationing for coastal residents. The new plan hinges on saving the daily deluge that now drains out to sea. "The idea is to bring the water back to the ecosystem," says Rick Nevulis, senior water-storage hydrologist. "There's a great tug-of-war between utility, agriculture, and ecology, so the politics are messy. But if we want a chance, we have to stop dumping water. We have to store it in the wet season for when we need it during the dry. Everything else comes second. We need water impoundments, and we need wells."
Water impoundments are man-made lakes. The plan calls for a total of 180,000 combined lake acres - split between 10 to 20 sites - designed to capture nearly 500 billion gallons of water. But that's only 60 percent of the water storage that the hydrologists need. They can't build more reservoirs without displacing people or farmland and thus risking the ire of Florida's politically powerful real estate and sugarcane lobbies. They can't dig the reservoirs deeper than 8 feet because the state sits on the country's most porous limestone - hit that and the water would simply drain away. The solution is to store excess water underground.
At the eastern edge of the Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge, 20 miles west of Boca Raton, there's a small clearing the size of a suburban backyard. Weeds grow around the edges, and at the center a skinny green pipe sticks out of the ground.
"What can I tell you?" says Nevulis. "It doesn't look like much, but it can store a whole lot of water." Instead of being shunted toward the Pacific, the rains get pumped down a thousand feet of pipe and into the rock. The aquifer is naturally filled with seawater, but when the freshwater enters, it pushes the brackish water back. The pressure works such that very little mingling occurs.
Each of these wells is designed to pump in or out 5 million gallons of water a day. There will be 333 separate wells, which means that at the height of the wet season, when all the wells are operating, some 1.6 billion gallons will be pumped into the ground every day. Hundreds of billions of gallons - enough to submerge all of Washington, DC, in more than 20 feet of water - will be stored underground over the six-month wet season, to be released in the dry months, effectively transforming the Floridan aquifer into the world's largest water tank.
"This kind of volume creates tons of unanswered questions," says Nevulis. "We're doing calculations to determine the effects of the added pressure. Will pumping year in and year out fracture the matrix? We just don't know."
Then there's the chemical and biological threat. Fecal contaminants in the groundwater may spread through the whole aquifer. Mercury in the surface water - the same industrial toxin contaminating the fish - reacts with the sulfates in the ground to create the far more poisonous methyl mercury. "One thing's for sure," says Nevulis. "If we can solve these problems, no one is going to go thirsty for a very long time."
As I move south, the sheer scale of the Corps' engineering project becomes clear. It began as rechanneling a river and diking a lake but became draining a swamp. Following the water below Okeechobee, I arrive at the place where the Everglades would start if the Everglades were left. Instead of wetlands, I find 450,000 acres of sugarcane. From an economic point of view, sugar has made Florida boom, but in ecological terms it's been a bust.
Blame it on the phosphorus that Florida's sugarcane farmers use as fertilizer. Phosphorus causes a drastic rise in green algae, killing off the Everglades' native blue-green variety. It also enables cattails - traditionally found here in small numbers - to outcompete the saw grass. As cattail density thickens, sunlight can't penetrate, and the blue-green algae begins to die. Without algae, the invertebrates go hungry and with them the small fish that feed on them, and then the larger ones, and so on, until the wading birds themselves either starve or head elsewhere for a meal.
To combat this problem, the restoration plan calls for a water-quality treatment train, a buffer between the phosphorus-using farmers and the phosphorus-hating Everglades.
The buffers, in fact, are six Stormwater Treatment Areas covering a total of 41,000 acres. These are phosphorus-eating wetlands, septic swimming pools big enough to float an oil tanker. Farmland runoff will be diverted through the treatment areas before being released into the Everglades.
Phosphorus is counted in parts per billion, and right now, the water flowing into the buffer has a ppb count of 200. The target is 10 ppb - scientists' best guess of the early Everglades' phosphorus levels.
"Ten ppb is on the threshold of what's even possible to detect, it's the toughest phosphorus goal anywhere on the planet," says Jana Newman, the senior scientist working on the treatment areas. "We're trying everything from green technologies to chemical technologies, but there's a cost factor here. When phosphorus is depleted, it gets more and more difficult to remove; down around 10 ppb, it takes 400 pounds of chemicals to remove 1 pound of phosphorus."
The Storage Treatment Area known as 1 West is the proving ground. It's a swampy rat's maze. Water enters through a giant pump station and travels along 18 miles of levees, concrete spillways, and culverts that push it into five man-made chunks of marshland, or cells. Each cell is stocked with a different mixture of cattails, submerged aquatic vegetation, floating plants, and algae. As water passes into the cells, the plants suck up the phosphorus, die off, and fall to the bottom, where they're entombed in heavy peat. When the water exits, its phosphorus count is measured. So far, 12 ppb is the lowest concentration achieved, but that number came during a drought in which the flow rate was exceptionally low.
So here we are - it's 2002 - and we've upgraded those old Roman aqueducts many times over. Two thousand years of septic ingenuity means that when we flush a toilet, it's not raw sewage that runs into the ocean. Clean water in and clean water out, and the miracle of chemistry in between. But in South Florida that equation has been turned upside down. They're using wastewater technology to clean rainwater - which used to be clean in the first place.
After looking at all this hardware, I'm eager to see everything that it's designed to save. So I'm boating through the Loxahatchee Refuge at night, after the park is closed. I want to experience it as it was, empty of man, full of saw grass and water.
"Saw grass isn't really a grass," says biologist Laura Brandt, who, along with colleague Frank Mazzotti, is playing tour guide. "It's a sedge. And sedges have edges." This is the last thing Brandt says for quite some time. She climbs into the pilot chair of our airboat, puts earplugs in, covers those earplugs with a pair of safety headphones, then fires up the engine.
The boat weaves through head-high saw grass tangles. It's a tough old plant, evolved to withstand a tough environment. The tops form spears, and tiny, sharp teeth run up both sides of the blade. Unsuspecting tourists have been known to gash their palms while copping a feel. The early explorers told tales of men lost for months in here.
Brandt motors on. The blades bend, then snap back, as we pass. Farther in, we start to see the tree islands, places where, over hundreds of years, the sediment level has risen and seeds have blown in and taken hold. The islands are teardrop-shaped, symmetrically aligned so that the fat end faces north and the taper faces south, pointing out the otherwise imperceptible flow.
Night is the time when everything that creeps and crawls comes out to feed. The creeping and crawling are just fine with Brandt and Mazzotti; that's exactly why they've come. They're on an alligator survey. Just the basics:size, population, dispersal.
"No one has ever done this research before. We want to save the Everglades, but really we know so little about them. The reason we're doing this survey is to make sure that the things we want to save are really being saved," says Brandt.
Then she flips on a powerful spotlight and plays it into the darkness. For the next three hours, we plod along. Brandt sweeps the light over the water's surface and, whenever there's a glint of refraction, it's an alligator: "Eye-shine," Brandt calls it. Then she motors over, and Mazzotti looks into the water, calls out the gator's size in meters, and takes a GPS reading. The data goes into a notebook, and then it's on to the next shiny spot.
At one point, we spy a marsh rabbit swimming from tree island to tree island. A few days later, when I'm back at Water Management headquarters, I mention the rabbit to one of the top scientists working the project. He looks at me like I'm crazy.
"An aquatic rabbit?"
"Yeah, you know, little Foo-Foo doing the breaststroke."
"No shit," he says. "I had no idea there was such a thing. We really don't know much about the Everglades - that's the real challenge."
Few people understand the challenge better than Jerry Lorenz, a marine ecologist with the National Audubon Society who studies spoonbills in the Florida Keys. Lorenz sees the ecosystem through the saw grass. And he's discovered that the big picture is bigger than anyone thought.
"In the '60s, when the system started to break down," says Lorenz, "we had no idea what was going wrong - let alone how to fix it." But over the past 30 years, ecology has morphed from a fuzzy, soft science into a rigorous statistical art. What started out as fragmented crisis management - an endangered species here, an oil spill there - has become a unified systems-based theory.
"Realistically, ecosystem ecology is quite young. What we have in South Florida right now is a bunch of separate ecosystems. If you want to save the whole thing by piecing them back together - what's called landscape ecology - then you're dealing with an entirely new field. Ten years ago, the whole philosophical underpinning that's driving the restoration didn't exist."
I am riding next to Lorenz as he pilots a small boat across the Florida Bay. He wears jungle fatigues, a bandanna to cover his head, and a long ponytail trickling out the back. We slide inland, up a feeder river, one of the many that connect freshwater to saltwater. In seconds, dense canopy blots out the daylight. Lorenz hardly notices: He's too busy shouting about spoonbills over the engine.
"You know, people at the Water District will say that this is about restoring the hydrology of the Everglades. Yet down here, at the end of the pipe, you can get the hydrology perfect for 360 days a year, but if you fuck it up for 5 days, then Florida Bay takes it on the chin. If you get a surprise storm and the farmers start bitching about excess water in their fields and that water gets dumped at the wrong time, say during breeding season, then the spoonbills are screwed. All the modelers and engineers deal in averages. They'll tell you five days is a blip on the radar, that it's inconsequential. Well, it's not ii inconsequential if you're a spoonbill in heat."
Scientists in the computer modeling department at the Water District offices mingle Lorenz's spoonbill data with that from all the other researchers, so they can fight against that five-day blip.
Sitting at a terminal in the department, I click a few keys and bring up a map of South Florida with the water shimmering through it. The screen's a colorful blur, but even slowed down or frozen altogether I can't see the fact that the big picture contains millions of data points. There are botanical facts gleaned from 18th-century survey records and expedition accounts and agricultural deeds. All this is interwoven with 30 years of hydrological data, including information about evaporation, canal flow, levee seepage, and water quality. There are disaster patterns from fires and tropical storms, topographic facts, population numbers, and all levels of biotic minutia: everything from the mating habits of aquatic insects to statistics on the Florida panther.
The model tells the engineers in the field what to do - which dam to blow up, how much water to store - but the model's predictions could be wrong. Thus, the only way to change the Everglades is to change it slowly, carefully, monitoring each step and being prepared to unstep at any moment.
It all seems so simple. Ecology became engineering to dismantle the past, thus ecology must become engineering to reassemble the future. Even with the wisdom gleaned from 70 years of quick fixes, there's no guarantee that we'll get it right this time. Back beside Lorenz down in the Florida Keys, with the ocean screaming out to the horizon, it hits me: All this technological effort is being used to rebuild a mythology.
No one really knows what the Everglades used to be - sure, there's the random fact scooped out of the muck of soil deposits, but there's no groundwater table for the Mesozoic era, there are no aerial photographs from the Dark Ages. The scientists and engineers are hydroforming blind, and the end product exists only in the imagination.
I spin around and look toward the land - but we've sailed too far to gain any perspective. I see neither mangroves nor saw grass prairies nor behemoth lakes nor meandering rivers. There's only the thin edge of the continent: a green line over the shimmer of water.
"It's just seems too damn big to fix," I say.
"Yeah," says Lorenz, "yet the plan is tiny compared to what it represents. The Everglades aren't the planet's only endangered ecosystem. The whole world is watching - if we fail here, then people aren't even going to want to try elsewhere.
