Opinion
Biden’s Chance to Save the Everglades
Reviving the South Florida ecosystem enjoys bipartisan
support and deserves federal funding.
By The
Editorial Board Photographs by Damon Winter
The
editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by
expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate
from the newsroom.
March 27,
2021
With
passage of the Covid-19 relief bill behind it, the Biden administration will
soon offer its encore, one or more big proposals reflecting President Biden’s
multitrillion-dollar Build Back Better, which will enlarge government’s role in
the American economy. Together, these budget requests will be bigger in dollar
terms than the relief bill, will address daunting problems like infrastructure
and climate change — and, inevitably, will revive the partisan divide that
plagues Washington.
There is,
however, one environmentally important project that boasts remarkable
bipartisan agreement and has important climate implications. It may be the most
ambitious ecosystem recovery project ever, not just in the United States but
anywhere, and it has the added virtue of being an act of atonement for past
government failures.
The project
in question, launched near the end of the Clinton administration, is an effort
to restore the biological health of the Florida Everglades. Originally funded
at $7.8 billion, the program is now more than 20 years old, and while some
progress has been made, it has moved in fits and starts. It is now at a
critical point, with several major plans on the cusp of success if the money
can be found. Decisions taken in the next few months may well determine whether
the Everglades project lives up to its promise of reviving the South Florida
ecosystem.
The project
is essentially a vast re-plumbing scheme aimed at replicating as nearly as
possible the historical flows of fresh water from Lake Okeechobee — flows that
a pioneer advocate named Marjory Stoneman Douglas called the River of Grass —
that once made South Florida a biological wonderland. These flows slowed to
trickle starting in the late 1940s when Congress ordered up a massive flood
control project to protect Florida’s booming cities, which looked like a smart
idea at the time.
The Army
Corps of Engineers responded by draining a half-million acres south of the lake
with a vast web of levees, canals and pumping stations — an impressive piece of
engineering that flushed Lake Okeechobee’s copious overflows out to sea and away
from the cities instead of letting it move slowly and naturally southward, as
it had for centuries. This made Florida’s eastern coast safe for development
and its midlands safe for agriculture, in particular for the big sugar
companies, but it was also an environmental disaster, robbing the Everglades
and the fishing grounds of Florida Bay of their traditional sources of fresh
water, and nearly killing both.
The
restoration scheme approved by Congress in 2000 was as ambitious as the
original flood control project, only its purpose was to reclaim the water and
steer it southward. Congress further stipulated that the plan’s overarching
goal would be the “restoration, preservation and protection of the South
Florida ecosystem” and that nature — not the cities, the developers or the
farmers and growers — would have first claim on the newly captured water.
Congress
agreed to pay for half the project, Florida the other half. There were
problems. The bill identified 68 projects, some of marginal value and all
needing separate authorization, which delayed the funding. There was squabbling
among the main players, including the state and the Army Corps of Engineers,
which insisted on endless studies. Most important, the enthusiasm for
restoration that was so palpable in President Bill Clinton’s White House and
Interior Department disappeared under President George W. Bush, and it was
never fully recaptured, even under President Barack Obama. One result is that
Florida has spent close to $5 billion on the project, Washington only $2
billion.
There have
been notable achievements nonetheless. One project, which antedates the Clinton
scheme, has restored the flow of the Kissimmee River north of Lake Okeechobee
to its natural contours before the Corps turned it into a ditch, replenishing
20,000 acres of wetlands in the river’s floodplain and removing harmful
nutrients before it empties into the lake.
Another
project has reclaimed more than than 50,000 acres of wetlands north and west of
the park so as to restore the sheet flow of water that has been tied up in the
canals. Perhaps the most dramatic success so far has been the construction of
two bridges along the Tamiami Trail, which runs east and west along the top of
the park, that have allowed water hitherto blocked by the highway to flow into
the park.
But there
is much more to be done, and two vital projects in particular await prompt and
robust funding. Both lie at the core of the effort to restore sheet flow. One
is a giant, 10,000-acre reservoir just south of Lake Okeechobee that is
designed to store and treat water before moving it south. The other is a third
breach of the Tamiami Trail, not a bridge this time but a giant culvert under
the road.
The main
force behind restoration has always been a desire to save the swamp, America’s
greatest subtropical wilderness, and the bird and animal life that lives there.
But as Marco Rubio, who has become the national park's most vigorous champion
in the Senate, said in a letter to President Biden earlier this month, a
healthy Everglades has other vital uses as well. It is a magnet for tourists
drawn to Florida’s environmental assets, and thus provides permanent jobs apart
from those created by the restoration projects. Its aquifers furnish drinking
water for millions of Florida’s residents. It protects against saltwater
intrusion caused by slowly rising sea levels, and its mangroves absorb and
store carbon dioxide.
Mr. Rubio
got every member of the Florida congressional delegation to sign on to his
letter. Most of them probably meant it. Although developers will always be
nipping at the edges, the Everglades is a mom-and-apple pie issue in Florida
nowadays. As the Miami Herald writer, novelist and environmentalist Carl
Hiaasen said earlier this month in his farewell column, “Billions are being
spent trying to save the besieged River of Grass, and every ambitious candidate
— Democrat or Republican — waxes rapturously about it. A few of them might
actually be sincere, but all of them know how to read the polls.”
Senator
Rubio asked President Biden for $725 million this year to jump-start the big
projects. Environmental groups like the Everglades Foundation want a four-year
commitment of close to $3 billion, about equal to the Army Corps of Engineers’s
estimates of what it will take to keep restoration efforts on track for the
next decade. Either way, these numbers would help Washington finally honor its
original pledge. They represent a low-cost but vital investment in the natural
world that Mr. Biden and his environmental team should find easy to make.
Damon
Winter is a staff photographer currently on assignment for Opinion. He received
the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário