Has Bush Abandoned the Everglades? (TIME) {article from August 07}

[eppur_se_muova]

By TIM PADGETT/MIAMI

The Everglades has been an endangered site ever since the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers started draining and diverting it in the mid-20th century, trashing eons of delicate natural plumbing to make way for Florida sugar farms and ranch houses. Only in 2000 did the Florida and federal governments finally seem to acknowledge that the 18,000-square-mile "River of Grass" was not a swamp but a unique and vital ecosystem. They embarked on a $10 billion, 20-year project to restore the Everglades to something like its original state.

So it turned more than a few heads in June when the United Nations' World Heritage Committee, which monitors the globe's important natural and cultural sites, removed the Everglades from its endangered list at the behest of the U.S. Department of the Interior. The circumstances behind the action have infuriated Florida Democrats and environmentalists — and cast more suspicions on the Bush Administration's penchant for bending science to suit its politics.

"This action is unacceptable," Florida's Democratic Senator, Bill Nelson, wrote this month to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, adding that it "warrants removal" of one of Kempthorne's top officials. But the Administration insists Nelson and Everglades activists are the ones putting politics over empirical evidence — and at the expense of poorer countries that are trying to save important natural resources more endangered than the Everglades.
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Now, after reviewing the discrepancies between the scientists and Interior, Nelson and a host of Everglades watchdog groups are crying foul. Nelson, who is calling for Willens to be fired, even plans to convene a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee that he chairs. Progress, he argues, hasn't been sufficient. The Everglades restoration project is still less than half finished and is still threatened by pressure from Florida developers; what's more, because of what critics call funding delays by the Administration and congressional Republicans, it is now years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. "The federal government really hasn't fulfilled its end of the bargain yet," says Mark Kraus, vice president and chief operating officer of the Everglades Foundation in Miami.

Scratching the Everglades from the U.N. list, the critics charge, conveniently deflects attention from that fact. And, they fear, it gives President Bush political cover when, as expected, he vetoes a $21 billion federal water preservation bill that Congress passed last week, which includes almost $2 billion more for Everglades restoration. (Bush feels the measure is too expensive.) Add to that the Bush Administration's reputation — from global warming to stem cell research — for ignoring if not rewriting science in favor of its conservative and pro-business agenda, and it's no surprise that Democrats and environmentalists are so upset.
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more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1652000,00.html?iid=sphere-inline-sidebar

Worth a read, as background to recent announcements.

[NNadir]

1. Time Magazine has a bizarre take on this matter.

For Bush to have "abandoned" the Everglades he would have had to have cared about them in the first place.

[eppur_se_muova]

2. Well, he's abandoned facile lip service to give the appearance of caring about the Everglades.

In Bu**sh**world, that's the same thing.