by Maud Dillingham

In the 19th Century, opportunists envisioned in the Florida Everglades a lucrative, pan-season vegetable and fruitbasket -- as soon as the water could be run off the great sawgrass plains and their rich peat soil. By 1848, optimistic reports by Indian fighters and explorers led to the Federal Swamplands Act, giving 20 million acres to Florida with the stipulation that land-sale proceeds be used for drainage.

Drainage defines today's Everglades, including Everglades National Park. There isn't a person alive who knows exactly what the "original" Everglades looked like. We can only compare what remains with historical accounts, like the 1848 Congressional drainage resolution, a document that signifies the beginning of the end for the pristine Everglades.

Something like an international disaster has been declared over the negative environmental effects of the labyrinthine Central and Southern Florida Flood Control (CS&F) Project. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began the project in 1948 after devastating floods, adding to the hundreds of miles of existing waterworks. Ironically, just one year earlier, the Park had been established to protect the very ecosystem that the Corps would irrevocably change. The historic wet and dry seasons that molded the Everglades have become abstractions with the disruption of the region's natural water flow by canals, pumps, locks, dams, dikes and levees.

Over the years, drainage construction has been stalled by political divisiveness, economic depressions, wars, hurricanes, floods and fires. Such challenges will also affect the costly and complicated restoration effort...but that is a compelling history yet to be written.

The Everglades: 5,000 Years Young

by Maud Dillingham

Humans have lived in southern Florida at least since Paleoindians hunted woolly mammoths on a cool, dry savannah 10,000 years ago. Four-thousand-year-old shell mounds built by coastal Late Archaic people have been submerged by the still-rising ocean. The Calusa Indians (see cover) were industrious and clever, building mounds high enough to stay dry in floods and digging a canoe trail from the Caloosahatchee River to Lake Okeechobee.

The Everglades formed only 5,000 years ago and are said to be dying at the hands of humans, who have survived climate change and the extinction of other animals. We have been altering the landscape for thousands of years. But modern people are both blessed and cursed with an awareness that we did not ask for. Today's Everglades represent human accomplishment (or folly, as some believe) and idealism: our transformation of an "uninhabitable" place into an artificial civilization, and our privileged guilt about the instinct to favor our species' comfort above that of all other life forms.

It may be arrogant to assume responsibilty for the "death" of an ecosystem as ephemeral as the Everglades. Hurricanes, fires, droughts, floods and sea-level fluctuations have shaped them, periodically wiping the slate clean. Homo sapiens is a force of nature, too, but he or she is supposed to know better. We cherish the poetry of a heron flying across the waving sawgrass in a sunset's glow, and we want the cheaper cost of ground water as opposed to that from a desalinization plant. The bottom line is that we could not live with ourselves if we were sure that our "progress" had killed this still-wondrous place, and we did nothing to keep from terminally fouling our own nest.

The Everglades are for Everyone

by Maud Dillingham

In 1997, Cesar A. Becerra, president of Echoes of South Florida and producer of the Everglades lecture series, lectured to dozens of groups around the state about the history of Everglades National Park. He lead discussions with schoolteachers about how to teach the subject of the Everglades; he organized lectures by Everglades experts, book readings, film screenings, exhibits and field trips. But above all this, the most important thing he did was to be interviewed about the park's 50th anniversary by several Spanish radio stations and newspapers in Miami.

"Los Everglades son muy importante," he told Caracol Broadcasting, Inc. "Lo que entendemos hoy es que el agua que viene del Lago Okeechobee tiene que estar limpia antes que llega al parque National." Translation: The Everglades are very important. Today we understand that the water coming from Lake Okeechobee has to be clean before it reaches the national park. The response to Cesar's Spanish publicity was large. Suddenly, Echoes of South Florida's answering machine began recording a lot of Spanish messages, requesting calendars and information about The Everglade Magazine.

Spanish-speaking people make up 52 per cent of Dade County's population, and one-third of the Dade/Broward County area. Clearly, efforts must be made to get the word out in Spanish (and other languages) as well as English concerning the reasons for and cost of restoring the Everglades. More than that, the simple joy of experiencing the beauty of South Florida's back yard must be communicated to people who speak English as a second language. The environmental movement has too long been associated with "white Anglo" people, even in multi-cultural Miami.

Learning to Love Swamp Buggies

by Maud Dillingham

Driving across the Everglades recently, we saw a cozy picture of human diversity: People of various colors and ethnicities fishing from the canals. Miccosukee Indians living next to Everglades National Park rangers. Tourists from many countries buying souvenirs from locals. This jumbled rainbow of humanity evoked warm and fuzzy feelings that the great American experiment has succeeded: Here were all these different people coexisting harmoniously. Better yet, they were enjoying the Great Outdoors. Don't we all want the same thing for our beloved Everglades?

Yes and no. Everyone feels entitled to use the area, but some are intolerant of any use different from what they perceive of as "correct," as we learned recently at the Everglades Conservation and Sportsmen's Club's 47th annual Wild Hog Barbecue. We heard tales of woe about unknowledgable rangers, questionable federal land management practices, dwindling access to the wilderness, and government harassment of landowners. "I've been in the Glades for 50 years," hunter Allen Ellis told us. "But they won't listen to me. I'm not a 'scientist.'"

Ellis owns a camp 20 miles north of the Tamiami Trail in the Big Cypress National Preserve. It takes him six hours in a buggy to get there. Joining him and his friends on a short buggy ride around the Club's lush 80-acre property, we could see why. He drove slowly and gently, and from our bird's-eye height we could see close at hand dozens of bromeliads on the cypress trees.

Leaving the barbecue, we saw a sight that might raise an environmentalist's hackles: a four-wheeled scooter, a big-wheeled "monster" pick-up truck and a sky-high swamp buggy. Then we passed a couple of trucks carrying two huge, official Preserve buggies. A buggy is a buggy is a buggy. An us-or-them attitude ruins things for everyone.

Paradise Lost

by Maud Dillingham

Whenever I leave South Florida to explore the rest of the state, I'm shocked both by how much untrammeled nature remains elsewhere and how profoundly the former Everglades have been disturbed. Above Lake Okeechobee, there are wild, winding rivers and beaches that haven't been widened with tons of extra sand. Graceful oak trees and beautifully austere native pine forests typical of the old or "real" Florida still dominate the countryside.

In South Florida, drainage has been deemed necessary for human habitation, rendering the entire region artificial, and, ironically, profoundly dehumanized. No nature seems to be good enough. Public works projects to drain this huge wetland have left deep, ugly scars. Native trees are leveled to make way for showy exotic palms. There's a movement to designate the Tamiami Trail as a scenic highway, but much of the road is hemmed in by a levee on one side and shrubby growth on the other, both of which block the view of the wide sawgrass plains! Rigid, desolate canals are everywhere. Industrial wastelands and suburban sprawl give way to a claustrophobic empire of nuisance Melaleuca trees. Farms, those bucolic homesteads of yore, have been replaced by monotonous, corporate-owned "agricultural areas." Even in the "country," this vanquished terrain is sculpted, maintained and harvested by huge, soulless machines. Sugar refineries and trash-to-energy plants puff and churn in the distance, Orwellian lights pulsing in the dark.

Ever "progressive" at the expense of nature and quality of life, South Florida, supposedly a garden spot, is making great haste to lay out a concrete and asphalt carpet for a continuous stream of new residents. We are busily creating a megalopolis in paradise -- the very monster many of us were trying to escape when we moved here.

A Day in the Everglades

by Liz Resch, Environmental Educator, Massachusetts

Until I visited my friends Maud and Cesar last in April 1997, I had only heard of the Everglades and read about them every week in The Everglade Magazine. I pictured a swampy, wet area with cypress trees and Spanish moss. My only previous visit to Florida had been to the Okeefenokee Swamp, so I imagined a larger version of that. We hiked some of the Florida Trail, heading north from Oasis Ranger Station in Big Cypress National Preserve. We had the expertise of Steve Woodmansee and Carlos Nunez, who informed us of the many different plants. Late April turned out to be the dry season, so we encountered very little mud. The ground was dry and dusty at first, then turned rocky with oolitic limestone which looked like cement with strange, uneven holes in it. I found out the holes were caused by the acidity of decomposing leaves thousands of years ago.

The most common plant we encountered was sawgrass, whose tall thick blades are sharp to the touch. We saw pine trees, live oaks, a bay tree with fragrant leaves, and a type of wild coffee. The many cypress trees had interesting knees sticking up out of the ground near each tree. They are one of the few conifers that shed their needles every fall. I am familiar with tamaracks, also known as larches in the Northeast, and apparently the cypress is the only other North American tree that does this.

Almost the only animals we saw were thousands of huge, brightly-colored grasshoppers called lubbers. Contrary to my expectations of a mucky swamp full of mosquitoes, there were hardly any biting insects that day. Another creature I anticipated seeing was the alligator. I did see some along the Tamiami Trail, but not on this particular hike. The variety of plant life was the most memorable part of the trip to me, and the diversity of the species that live there is one of the most important reasons to protect the Everglades.