From the NY Times: Nov 4 2003
In the Everglades, Environmental War Endures
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
(snip)
The background is simple enough. For thousands of years, water from 730-square-mile Lake Okeechobee, just north of the Everglades, spilled south in lazy sheets toward the ocean. That constant, slow coursing created marshy rivers and saw-grass prairies that nurtured myriad species of birds, snakes and fish, plus deer, panthers, alligators, bears and manatees.
But the fate of this soggy habitat changed significantly in the boom years after World War II, when homeowners in new subdivisions demanded drinking water and flood protection. At the same time, Florida's growing sugar industry started taking over what had been the Northern Everglades (now formally designated the Everglades Agricultural Area) and craving water for farming. So engineers constructed a maze of canals to divert much of the lake overflow toward the cane fields and away from newly populated areas. During seasons of heavy rain, like the unusually wet summer that just passed, the canals also keep the sugar fields from flooding.
As a result of all this, the Everglades — which comprise some two-thirds more land than the 1.5 million acres within Everglades National Park — have been shrinking for decades. They are now about a fifth of their original size, and much of the shrinkage has occurred in the last 50 years.
A great deal of the water that still reaches the Everglades is polluted with phosphates from agricultural and household runoff, spawning cattails that choke the marshes and crowd out native plants and animals. The wading-bird population is only 10 percent of what it was in the late 1800's. Many species are disappearing, including the Florida panther, the wood stork and the Cape Sable sparrow.
Other than scientists and environmentalists, it is hard to tell who cares. The drawn-out, convoluted Everglades drama seems to have captured few imaginations in South Florida, whose state of mind is far more attuned to sun and surf than to buggy marsh. "Most people think it is a yucky, mucky place," said Lyle Thomas, president of Loxahatchee Everglades Tours, which he started as a "responsible" alternative to the sometimes reckless airboat operators along Highway 41.
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More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/04/national/04EVER.html