The
cultural, economic, and ecological significance of the American Everglades
by Joseph Siry
An absence of
angularity in the nearly flat horizon of the Everglades accentuates the bird life 
and draws attention to the vegetation rising up
out of the mud and algae of this hundred mile wide utterly flat, subtropical
river. Wild beyond imagining these everglades are necessary for civilization
in South Florida. Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Key West have to drink fresh
water and that water was once stored in, within the vegetation and below the
bed of these now vastly diminished glades. The widest river on earth is damaged
and in need of repairs. These extensive and unprecedented repairs may require a multibillion dollar bypass surgery and the closure of industrial agriculture in the form of sugar plantations before the patient can be released from intensive care. While the birds are clues to understanding the incredibly productive fishery here, they also indicate this patient's prognosis. For the future of development in the state depends on the full recovery of these tropical prairies, hardwood forests, mangrove swamps, coral reefs, and near endlessly wild islands.
1 | 2 | 3| 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25
Without the Everglades,
freshwater evaporates and without sufficient drinkable water, life in south Florida shrinks,
population migrates away and only the hardy few would ever remain. The economic future
of over half of the state's population rests on finding sufficient water storage for human
consumption and wildlife. The everglades is a barometer of how effective that
search for storage facilities will be given rising population pressure, the necessity of agriculture,
and the demand for more living space. These glades are also a measure of our
commitment to a new aspect of ecological conservation that must become the foundation
of water resource allocation issues.
Established as a National Park over fifty years ago, the
Everglades remains on the critical list, a patient in need of radical bypass surgery because
of pollution and water withdrawals upstream, invasive exotic species, mining of the lime rock
for construction concrete, road building, mercury contamination of fisheries and extensive
agricultural reclamation. Over the past thirty years, as sea level has risen,
the salt-tolerant
red mangrove forest has extended inland by hundreds of acres to replace the once broad sawgrass
plains. Similarly in highly enriched freshwater marshes cattails have crowded out the native saw grass prairies because typha grasses roots tolerate high nutrient conditions with ample phosphorus and nitrogen in the water.
The rock lime of
Florida would be bare and parched without the water as this stretch of land lies beside the
salt sea in these otherwise desert latitudes of the earth. The shelf whereupon the glades sawgrass,
stunted cypress, and salt loving mangrove trees grow is the fossil debris of marine organisms
long dead whose compacted skeletons form the marl, or white clay supports the fish,
birds, mammals and plants of this sub-tropical grassland. The limestone that forms the
bedrock of this area was formed nearly nine million years ago in a shallow warm sea. Here
the land itself is biogenic or, formed by living things.
The glades' foundation
is made of once living sea creatures in whose shells, bones and living tissue the
calcium of sea water was strained, concentrated and deposited into fossils.
As Douglas reminds
us this rock foundation collected debris from the surrounding seas and when the sea level
dropped -- due to glaciation -- the glades emerges out of geological time from the sea and
the sun 10,000 years ago. Douglas writes that "In that decay" of vegetation "a wide band of
jungle trees sprang up." [P4 page 171]
Water and life
are wedded among flat tables where the sea and the river of grass intermingle and deeply exchange
nutrients that nourish the wealth of vegetation and animal life. This association of
saw grass, cypress and mangrove forests is what had once changed the limestone rock
base of south Florida into the hydroponics of this wild profusion of new, old, and decaying life.
For over fifty years, Marjory Stoneman Douglas' book entitled, The Everglades: River
of Grass, (1947) revealed the ongoing necessity of these extensive and diverse wetlands
in Florida's history and life. In the section of the book called "Life on the Rock," She suggests
that "The saw grass and the water made the Everglades both simple and unique." These
wet prairies of grasses, lichens, birds, and reptiles are nothing compared to diverse
array of the insects.
In that chapter
"Life on the Rock," Douglas fills her
pages with as many of the sample of everglades species
as the page is capable of holding. By doing this she demonstrates to the avid reader the
number of different species that adapt well to these alternate wet and dry seasons of the
tropical savannas. Becalmed in a desert hot sun the moisture of these glades relentlessly evaporates
to drive the accumulating clouds to burst into the life giving rain.
Douglas teaches
us about both the function and the wonder of glades wildlife by simply suggesting that
"One begins with the plants." By that she directly reveals the important role that vegetation
plays in providing human civilization with basic necessities of life. But just
as water sustains
the plant life so it forms the vital ingredient because water drives "a diversity of life" that has
colonized and "lives upon the rock that holds it. The saw grass in its essential harshness
supports little else." Half a century ago, Douglas recognized that the diversity, or richness
of species should compel us to save the land for posterity as an example of the
biotic wealth of these sub-tropical climates. She realized the transcendent values associated
with these glades. But she also warned about the essential role the water flow played in
the economy of South Florida.
Because only a fragment of the Everglades and its estuary
Florida Bay were protected as a National Park the future of the regions' wildlife remained
a problem. Saving large tracts
of land to protect ecological associations of plants and animals, was thought to be a
necessary initial step in conservation of resources when the glades caught Congress' attention
in the late 1930s. It took nearly a decade to actually move from the paper authorization
to the creation of the National Park by Congress and President Truman in 1947. During
that time significant parcels of high quality landscape and ecologically significant shorelines
were removed from inclusion in the 1.2 million acre National Park.
These lands included
Key Largo, South Biscayne Bay and what is today called the Big Cypress preserve,
originally proposed to protect 2.2 million acres. In the race between the sentiment to save
ecologically rare vegetational communities and the drive to earn a return on investments
three-fourths of the 8.8 million acres of original everglades was lost to the lure of a new gold.
This hard currency was waterfront land for housing developments to feed the post war
demands and the necessity for agricultural development to feed the growing cities
of Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach. With agriculture came an ever increasing
thirst for water which peaked in 1990 at over 2.5 billion gallons per day!
When Florida's
population was still small, Douglas admonished us that "The saw grass and the water made
the Everglades both simple and unique." But like any neighborhood, the glades are
also the place where numerous creatures live out there entire lives. Others migrate through
these extensive grasslands. Once the patrimony of native peoples, the glades today is
the center of a fierce fight between conservation and development that tests the American commitment
to the environmental restoration of natural habitats.
As a natural place Douglas tells
us that there is no replacement for the original glades. Not even the Pantanal of South
America is the same as the everglades at the south and lower ends of the Kissimmee River
and Lake Okeechobee. [page 170] The glades are also the mother of a series of grassland
prairies that once spread all across Florida. There water and calcium rich limestone mingle
begetting rich associations that support the birds and mammals that Douglas so well
catalogued. She captured the spirit of this place just at the time it was being set aside in the
traditional manner of protecting the mouth of this river as a National Park. Because of the
very pine trees that colonized the dried sand banks and the cypress that grew up in the wet sinkholes
or along lakeshores, early Florida pioneers were assured of sturdy building materials
that could withstand the humid climate and the rotting vegetation all around them. Over
seventy years ago, only the edges of the glades were settled and the technology of road
building across a wet swamp had just begun. Built of the sand and the sea, as Zora Neale
Hurston, the anthropologist, reminds Floridians, the state is a geological sand bar adrift
in a tropical sea peopled by the strangest freight of life this side of the Pantanal in southern
Brazil.
Broadly speaking
the trees of the eastern and western sides of the narrowed peninsula differ with custard
apple bottoms to the southwest in contrast to willow & elder bottoms to the southeast.
These stands have been severely eroded due to the spread of invasive exotic trees, principally
the Australian Maleleuca and the South American, Brazilian Pepper. These ornamental
trees have contributed to a simplification of the everglade's vegetation.
Today the "the
enormous darkness without light of the saw-grass river." described by Douglas, is threatened
from introduced exotic plants that have escaped cultivation, and crowded out native
trees. [P8] Here, the four thousand year old association of plant communities that
defied human trespass until the late 1920s. [P3] Instead of pine
on the highest rock ridges of the Caribbean Pine or Dade County pine, the suburbs have introduced
a pan equatorial tropical flora from all over the world to adorn the native flora of
south Florida. Some critics warn the transplanting is forming the basis of a future "homogecene
period" where a few dominant species of plants cause a consequent decline in animals.
As the saw palmettos
retreated in the face of Philippine and Pacific palms the decline in animals and especially
bird life became apparent. Residential growth adversely affected the deer populations
and particularly a variety in the Florida keys. Once included in an early version of the
Everglades National Park, Florida Bay shore along the Florida Keys was originally meant
to be protected. Construction of the overseas highway and the aqueduct to the naval base
assured that the density of population in the Florida Keys was poised to go from absence of
people to excessively destructive densities of people in fifty years. Like the glades the keys
emerge as a case study of the consequences of population growth. [P13 page 172] Key deer are
a subspecies of the mainland white tailed deer described by Douglas as "The small brown
Florida deer step neatly at the edge of pine forests like these." [P14]
From animals to
the smallest wildflowers, Douglas captures the shock of this limerock's living prairies
and forested hammocks as she describes the "tiny wild poinsettias with their small brush strokes
of scarlet." P14 These details of the vegetation so characteristic of Florida is to present
the everglades as a microcosm, such as a Wisconsin lake or Silver Springs. She conveys
the centrality of this river and to all rivers when she says that "in the middle of the saw-grass
river,even the pines grow tall to show where the rock lies." And this marriage of limestone
or soluble calcium and water is the heat engine that drives this fountain of clear,
shallow, nutrient rich water that feeds "The whole world of the pines and of the rocks hums
and glistens and stings with life." [P21]
Like many stranded
ecological systems the mix of predators influences the number and abundance of deer,
rabbits, raccoons and mice. Douglas remarks that the glades rattlesnake -- "has made him
the king among all these beasts."[P15] Vying with the alligator, salt water crocodile,
and the Florida panther, the snakes of the Everglades form a dynamic food web that ultimately
rests on the bacteria, algae and plants that sustain the invertebrate populations upon
which the economically vital commercial fisheries and the ecologically vital bird populations
feed. As almost a warning not to tamper with the glades Douglas writes that "Life
is everywhere here too, infinite and divisible." [P26 page 174]
Long gone in the
three booms following World War 1 are "The live oaks," once comprising "that great Miami
hammock, the largest tropical jungle on the North American mainland, which spread south
of the Miami River like a dark cloud along that crumbling, spring-fed ledge of rock." [P27
pages 174-75] As if they were obstacles in the way of progress the oaks became furniture
and finished paneling in the myriad houses built after the numerous hurricanes of the
1920s and 1930s. Amidst these forests were a diverse array of ferns with "their roots deep
in the rotting limestone shelves among wet potholes green-shadowed with the richest fern
life in the world." [P27 page 175] Thus Douglas, in a few pages, fills the everglades with
the array of life akin to some relic of warmer, swamp dominated times when insects, reptiles
and mammals commingled prior to the appearance of humankind.
Every thing in
Florida adjusts to either fire or water in a contest for space that defies the notion that nature
is a kindly, balanced parent. "About the live oaks is waged the central drama of all this
jungle," she writes recalling that, "the silent, fighting creeping
struggle for sunlight of the
strangler fig." This tree the Ficus aurea is dropped as a seed by feeding birds
in the treetops of
oak or Sabal palm forests and grows to eventually surround the trunk -- thus squeezing the nutrients
and life out of the live oak, palms or tropical hardwoods it grows around-- in this
desperate struggle for sunlight, water and space to grow. [P28] In this struggle of the
strangler fig and the live oak is a homily about conditions for life and human society throughout
this remodeled landscape. In adjusting to immersion in this baptismal water that jets
out of springs in the porous limerock, Florida's vegetation changes according the appearance
and evaporation of water. "The water oaks grow taller and more regular than the live oaks....
Both crowd down to the glossy water and make landscapes like old dim pictures where
the deer came down delicately and the cows stand, to drink among their own reflections."
[P34, page 176] Douglas knew that water shortages would occur as the Atlantic ridge
of Florida was bulldozed to accommodate six million people in sixty years.
Douglas today recalls
for us that "In the great Miami hammock, along the banks of almost every river, bordering
the salt marshes, scattered in the thinner pinelands, making their own shapely and recognizable
island-hammocks within the Everglades river, everywhere, actually, except
in the densest growth of the saw-grass itself, stands the Sabal palmetto."
The state tree
Douglas concedes "...is called the cabbage palm." She writes that "They make dense islands
in the sawgrass river." [P35], Out of our collective memory Douglas describes the mouth
of one of the springs that once flowed when the everglades was a coherent and functionally
regular waterway. This landscape is like a scene out of Africa, hot expanses of grasslands
uninterrupted except by hammocks of palmetto. Now this landscape is only preserved
in relic areas protected by state, county or national parks. The rapid growth
of the area forced
upon the now subdivided and leveed everglades a new role.
This role was to
function as a necessary agricultural producer of tomatoes or sugar grown on the rich organic
muck soil of the everglades that had accumulated from fast growth and decay cycles. And
with such agriculture came the necessity of a water storage area. Once derided as storm
drains or retention ponds the swamps and wet prairies would soon be needed for water
storage throughout the fresh water reaches of the state. Such places are marked as Douglas
reminds us, by "the enduring cypress." [P37 page 176]
The cypress trees
of Florida characterize a last refuge today for the endangered panther in the Big Cypress
Swamp preserve added to the glades in the 1970s to assist in restoring the fresh water flow
to ailing Florida Bay. Douglas combines the ambivalent values of this tree that led to its
widespread demise in all but the wettest and protected areas of Florida. She explains that "It
is a fine timber tree..., it is most strangely beautiful." [P37 page 177]
Like all beautiful,
natural things that people desire, the cypress was logged heavily, before the protection
was afforded remnant stands. Strangely haunting vegetation was described by Douglas as coniferous
forests supported by "the root like extension into the air, like dead stumps, called
cypress knees, which are thought to aerate the mud bound roots."
In her description
of the Big Cypress Swamp, Douglas wrote that "The brown deer, the pale-colored lithe
beautiful panthers that feed on them, the tuft-eared wildcats with their high-angled hind
legs, the opossum and the rats and the rabbits have lived in and around it and the Devil's
Garden and the higher pinelands to the west since this world began." [P42]
Visual distortion
furthers a mood of strange nocturnal sounds in Douglas writings where "The great barred
owls hoot far off in the nights..." [P42]
She describes hunts
that inevitably end in panther deaths because these cats "never to be tamed, are shot."
[P43] Here on this predatory frontier is another story by which she conveys the strangeness
of the glades even before they were dismembered from drainage, canals, pumps and
levees. In making land out of water humans made a relentless dilemma where once there had
been adaptive response.
As a biotic community
"the Glades' first citizen, the otter, his broad jolly muzzle explores everything,
tests everything, knows everything." she writes that "...this is his home."[ P44, P45
page 178]
Douglas writes evocatively of "Lake jungles, pine, live oak, cabbage palmetto,
cypress, each has its region and its associated life. As the islands in the saw grass pointed
southward in the water currents, their vegetation changes like their banks, from the
temperate to the subtropic, to the full crammed tropic of the south." The everglades in the
hands of Douglas emerged as the litmus test of Florida sense of itself and of its mission
as a group of settlers intent of preserving the existing remnants of this oft ballyhooed paradise. [P48
page 178]
The protection
of this watery realm of the Everglades was not effectively secured by the creation of the
National Park because of the commercial interference with the flow of water into the park.
From the 1920s with the construction of levees around Lake Okeechobee, to the building of
US highway 40 across the glades from Naples to Miami in 1930s, the race between developmental
erosion of ecological values and the lure of real estate left the Everglades Park
lands behind in the proverbial dust.
Until the late 1950s few save Douglas and her ecologically
enlightened circle of naturalists and birders considered the serious consequences of
this loss of shorelines, wetlands, and canals that robbed this National Park of its life sustaining
water. Because the park protected 830 species their lives hung by a thread of
life sustaining water. In 1843, a St. Augustine lawyer had convinced Congress of the
feasibility of draining the everglades, long afterward, right after World War Two the
dream became a reality due to extensive flooding during a wet year in 1947.
The world heritage
importance of the Everglades make this national treasure more than the sum of its ecologically
functioning parts. Twelve distinct habitats comprise the vegetational associations in
the region sprawling across the boundaries of the park, of the land, of even the water itself.
For example, the park embodies 800 square miles of Florida Bay as protected areas
of mangrove or shell islands the home of wading birds, sea birds and an occasional pelagic
or intercontinental migrating birds or turtles. Despite the region's rarity, isolation, and
wildlife it is being deamaged due to upland interference with run-off.
The Everglades
National Park is considered by ecologist Mark Harwell as the most endangered in the
country. Polluted water, fragmented habitats and unseasonal water pumping and then
dumping of contaminated water has killed the everglades as a fountain and Florida Bay as
the nursery of fish and bird life in south Florida.
Aware of the critical
situation a coalition of environmental groups encouraged the National Park Service to
file court action against the State water entity (South Florida Water Management District)
legally responsible for the allocation, flow and disposal of polluted water in the region
feeding the Everglades National Park.
To increase the pressure on a state legislature that
lacked the conviction and vision to restore the everglades, Florida environmental organizations
promoted an amendment to the State constitution with far reaching implications
since it embodies in law the notion that those who pollute should pay to clean up their
pollution. Although never enforced by a recalcitrant and uneducated legislature, that Constitutional
amendment marks the rift in the state that threatens to engulf the everglades and
destroy the river of grass.
As
the focus of ecological conservation the Everglades today is the litmus test 
case of our commitment to
restoring the environment in order to revive the natural and commercial economy. For without
sufficient water, sugar, tomatoes, golf courses and swimming pools alike will dry
up in the race to covet the remaining fresh water that inheres in the limestone rock because of
the action of vegetation under the blazing sun nourishing wildlife and fisheries. Wildlife
must be protected in water allocation or else we win the race for water only to lose the wading
birds who are the biotic souls of these wetlands.
1 | 2 | 3| 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25
return to start
Notes:
the Indians found
their first source of life.... ferny green cycads, plants older than this rock,
with yellow and orange
cones for flowers
and great thick roots. This is the Ôcoontie' of the oldest Indian legend."
[P18 page 173]
Coontie grounds
north of the Miami River, the succession from pine to Live Oak [P22 page 174]
migrations -- "it
is impossible to name all the warblers that pass through here." [ P23]
"dry Resurrection
ferns" in the limbs of Live Oaks. [ P25]
"the black and
white caracara, that the Mexicans take for their national eagle, cries harshly"
[ P26]
"and ferns innumerable."
leather ferns, "maidenhair and Boston ferns and brackens"
Harwell, Mark,
"Ecosystem Management of South Florida," BioScience, 47:8, September, 1997.
pp.
499-512. p. 502.
The list is long
but among the outstanding groups are "Friends of the Everglades," "Save the
Everglades,"
Florida and National
Audubon Societies, Sierra Club, World Wildlife Fund, and Isaac Walton League.
