Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
RESTORATION OF THE EVERGLADES
Efforts to save the Everglades began in the late 1920s, but were sidelined by the Great De-
pression. In 1926 and 1928, two major hurricanes caused Lake Okeechobee to overflow;
the resulting floods killed hundreds. The Army Corps of Engineers did a really good job of
damming the lake. A bit too good: the Glades were essentially cut off from their source,
the Kissimmee watershed.
In the meantime, conservationists began donating land for protection, starting with 1
sq mile of land donated by a garden club. The Everglades was declared a national park in
1947, the same year Marjory Stoneman Douglas' The Everglades: River of Grasswas pub-
lished.
By draining the wetlands through the damming of the lake, the Army Corps made huge
swaths of inland Florida inhabitable. But the environmental problems created by shifting
water's natural flow, plus the area's ever-increasing population, now threaten to make the
whole region uninhabitable. The canal system sends, on average, over 1 billion gallons of
water into the ocean every day. At the same time, untreated run-off flows unfiltered into
natural water supplies. Clean water is disappearing from the water cycle while South Flor-
ida's population gets bigger by the day.
Enter the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP;
www.evergladesplan.org ). CERP is designed to address the root of all Everglades issues:
water - where to get it, how to divert it and ways to keep it clean. The plan is to unblock
the Kissimmee, restoring remaining Everglades lands to predevelopment conditions,
while maintaining flood protection, providing freshwater for South Florida's populace and
protecting earmarked regions against urban sprawl. It sounds great, but political battles
have significantly slowed the implementation of CERP. The cost of the project has in-
creased over the years, and a mix of political red tape and maneuvering courtesy of feder-
al and state government has delayed CERP's implementation.
Not to throw another acronym at you, but a major portion of the CERP is the Central
Everglades Planning Project (CEPP), the rare public works project that is supported by
environmentalists and industry alike. The CEPP's aim is to clean polluted water from Flor-
ida's agricultural central heartland and redirect it towards the 'Glades. The River of Grass
would be re-watered, and toxic run-off would no longer flow to the sea. But as of the time
of writing, the CEPP's implementation was being delayed by the Army Corps of Engin-
eers. Governmental gridlock may damage the Glades in the 21st century as much as gov-
ernment policies did in the 20th.
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