50 years of stewardship: the ongoing struggle to preserve Everglades National Park.

"Here are no lofty peaks seeking the sky, no mighty glaciers or rushing streams wearing away the uplifted land. Here is land, tranquil in its quiet beauty, serving not as the source of water, but as the last receiver of it. To its natural abundance we owe the spectacular plant and animal life that distinguishes this place from all others in our country"

With these words, President Harry Truman celebrated the creation of Everglades National Park on December 6, 1947. Now, 50 years later, the significance of that act is reflected in the park's additional designations as a World Heritage Site, Biosphere Reserve, Wetland of International Importance, and Outstanding Florida Water.

Everglades National Park is home to the largest continuous stand of sawgrass prairie in North America, the predominant water recharge area for all of south Florida, 14 threatened and endangered species, the largest mangrove ecosystem in the Western Hemisphere, the largest designated wilderness east of the Rocky Mountains, and the most important breeding grounds for tropical wading birds in North America. There is, to paraphrase the "voice" of the Everglades, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, no other place like it in the world.

To appreciate the complexity of the managerial issues facing the stewards of Everglades National Park, it is first necessary to understand the workings of the park's lifeblood: water. Historically, the Everglades was bathed in a cycle of 50 to 60 inches of annual rainfall accompanied by periodic flooding (May through November), followed by a dry season accompanied by periodic drought and fire (December through April). Typically, fresh water accumulated in central Florida's Kissimmee River basin, meandered southward to Lake Okeechobee, and eventually overflowed its banks to form a 60-mile-wide "river of grass," moving down, and percolating through, an almost imperceptible slope of limestone until it reached Florida Bay and the Gulf of Mexico (see Figure 1). Along the way, through evaporation and transpiration, more than half the water wafted into the sky again to be carried north, falling once more as rain.

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This Kissimmee-Okeechobee-Everglades watershed was the wellspring for the "natural abundance" President Truman extolled in his dedication speech. It was a wellspring, however, that others began to tap increasingly, resulting in today's principal threat to the park's integrity.

Competing Demands for Water

The gradual disruption of the Everglades' hydrologic cycle started in 1882 with the "canalization" of the Caloosahatchee River to connect Lake Okeechobee directly with the Gulf of Mexico to the west Then, in the early 1900s, four additional canals were excavated across the Everglades itself to connect Lake Okeechobee directly with the Atlantic Ocean to the east.

More recently, as south Florida's population expanded, additional barriers to the north-south flow of water were created, including the construction of a levee along Lake Okeechobee's southern shore to protect nearby towns from flooding and to assist in the reclamation of wetlands for agriculture (primarily sugarcane).

Finally, two major highways were built across the Everglades, the Tamiami Trail, connecting Naples with Miami, and Alligator Alley, connecting Naples with Fort Lauderdale, which impeded the flow further, as did the development of a network of smaller canals diverting fresh water to burgeoning coastal communities. In effect, the natural flow of water from north to south was replaced by human-controlled plumbing (see Figure 2).

[Figure 2 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Nature's Delicate Balance

While water management practices in south Florida have benefited agriculture, flood control, and water supplies to the north of Everglades National Park, they have seriously jeopardized what President Truman called "the last receiver of it."

The problems inside the park are almost entirely due to human actions outside. They range from threatened flora to threatened fauna to threatened fresh water itself. The introduction of the Australian broad-leaved paperbark tree into south Florida, for example, resulted in a rapid invasion of sawgrass marshes and cypress swamps. Left unchecked, this exotic species formed dense forests, drying up surrounding wetlands. The tree now threatens to overtake the park and displace its native vegetation. This threatens, among many other creatures, the Florida applesnail, which depends on the wetlands to propagate itself, and, in turn, the already endangered snail kite (a hawk-like bird) that depends exclusively on the applesnail for food.

What this sequence reveals is but one strand in the intricate web of relationships characterizing the park's ecology. It is a web that has taken eons to weave. Yet, with each perturbation from the outside, the web is stretched and strained, often in unexpected ways.

It would be easy to assume that the park's salvation rests in the maintenance of a steady supply of fresh water. Yet, the wood stork, another of the Everglades' endangered species, depends for its survival on a periodic drying up of portions of the wetlands. This wading bird literally gropes for food, moving its bill around in the water until it bumps into something to eat. This technique requires a highly concentrated food source that comes only with the dry season. There are, then, counterintuitive forces at work in the Everglades that defy easy understanding and human manipulation.

The Looming Challenge

It is increasingly clear that the longterm health of Everglades National Park, and all of south Florida, depends on the re-creation of some semblance of the Everglades' hydrologic cycle. This means more than just conveying adequate water to the park. It means mimicking as closely as possible the natural flow of water. It means timing -- as well as duration and intensity of flow -- matters.

Facilitating this change would be difficult under the best of circumstances, but the variety of specialized interests in south Florida who have a stake in the region make the task daunting. Stakeholders include individual farmers, agribusiness, fishermen, developers, industries, residents, retirees, tourists, conservationists, and Native Americans who called the area "home" long before the creation of Everglades National Park.

This diversity of interest groups is magnified further by south Florida's rapidly expanding, largely Hispanic, multicultural population. The face of south Florida is changing dramatically, and with its new look come highly diverse opinions about the "right" and "wrong" way to move forward, about what "should" and "should not" be done. There are varying degrees of sensitivity toward an understanding of the ecological processes at work in the Everglades by the people of the region.

Compounding this difficulty is the fact that most of the approximately one million annual visitors to Everglades National Park come from beyond south Florida. Indeed, as many people visit the park from abroad as do from the state of Florida itself. Nearby residents who have the most to gain from an appreciation of the park's ecology may appreciate it least. To them, the park is a rather inhospitable place much of the year because of heat, humidity, and mosquitoes. At those times, it is left largely to itself.

Ecosystem Restoration

It is in this complex mix of economic, political, cultural, and ethnic differences that the stewards of Everglades National Park must find their way. Moreover, since the origins of most of the park's problems are located beyond its boundaries, the National Park Service must work cooperatively with other local, state, and federal agencies, as well as the private sector, to affect desired changes.

The recent establishment of the South Florida Ecosystem Restoration Task Force is illustrative. The task force is a partnership among federal agencies and state, local, and tribal governments. The mission of the task force is to restore, preserve, and protect the south Florida ecosystem while maintaining a sustainable economy. According to the Park Service, "this coordination among agencies of very differing orientation and responsibility is unprecedented at this scale." To date, the task force has focused on issues of science, infrastructure, management, and public information/involvement. Attention is now turning to the resolution of specific issues with particular emphasis on agriculture and nearby urban concerns.

Prospects for the Future

What are the prospects for the future of Everglades National Park? Problems within the park -- caused by recreational boating's impact on seagrass beds in Florida Bay or inadequate funding to repair the park's infrastructure -- appear mild when compared to the sheer weighs of the problems pressing down on the park from the outside.

Fueling these problems is south Florida's skyrocketing population. When Everglades National Park was established in 1947, the total state population was less than two million. Today, south Florida alone is home to five million people, and projections for the next half century reach as high as 10 million more. With each additional person, the pressure mounts for more drainage and more drinking water.

Sprawling development in south Florida brings other threats, as well. The most recent example comes from the Homestead Air Reserve Base next to the park's eastern boundary. Dade County officials have proposed turning the base into a commercial airport that could bring as many as 250,000 planes a year over the park on their way to the airport. The planes would then fly out over Biscayne National Park to the east. The effect of airport noise on nesting birds in the area and on the quality of park visitation is of major concern to conservationists. Their concern is exacerbated by the fact that most of Everglades National Park is managed as wilderness, a designation that does not settle well with motorized in trusions.

Of even greater long-term concern is the potential impact of global warming on the park. Scientists speculate that global warming could result in a rising sea level that would eventually inundate the Everglades in salt water. If that happens, the Everglades will be no more. Short of that, lesser near-term effects could still change the configuration of Florida's coastline, thereby jeopardizing mangrove swamps and their associated flora and fauna, including the endangered manatee.

Despite these larger concerns, the stewards of Everglades National Park remain cautiously optimistic about the prospects for the future. Their optimism is rooted in recent bipartisan political support and funding for the goals of ecosystem restoration.

It is as if there is a growing awareness that regardless of one's political, economic, cultural, or ethnic persuasion, there is a common ecological reality within which divergent groups of people in the region must learn to live and work together.

The power of public opinion to change the way of doing business in south Florida led to earlier successes this century in the recovery of wading birds hunted for their plumage and alligators hunted for their meat and hides. If that level of concern can be elevated from individual species to the ecosystem as a whole, then Everglades National Park may one day become an extraordinarily important model of cooperative stewardship, fulfilling a purpose much larger than that envisioned by its founders.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas' concern for the environment dates back to 1915 when she moved to Miami and began work on her father's newspaper, The Miami Herald. In 1947, her ground-breaking book, The Everglades: River of Grass, brought national attention to the fragility of the Everglades' ecosystem. She has since founded Friends of the Everglades and, at 107 years of ages, remains active in the battle for environmental preservation.

Clyde Butcher is considered to be one of America's finest landscape photographers. His concern for the Everglades is captured in his black-and-white images depicting the fragile ecology of south Florida. He lives and works in the Big Cypress National Preserve adjacent to Everglades National Park.