February 3, 1970
Page 2210
THE FLORIDA EVERGLADES
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, most of the environmental news we hear today is bad news. The accumulated disasters caused by our heedless abuse of the environment threaten the quality of our life and life itself. Too often our alarms are too late to avoid irreparable damage.
Occasionally, however, we manage to act before it is too late. One example of this was the recent decision to abandon a proposed jetport outside Miami which would have threatened the existence of the Everglades. The causes of that decision have been described with great skill by Philip Wylie in an article entitled "Against All Odds, the Birds Have Won," published in the New York Times of Sunday, February 1, 1970.
I hope that Mr. Wylie's article will stimulate effective action, not only against other potential threats to the Everglades, but also for more sensible land and water resource planning and development and population distribution patterns for southern Florida and other areas where the balance of nature is so important to the quality of life.
I ask unanimous consent that Mr. Wylie's article be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
AGAINST ALL ODDS, THE BIRDS HAVE WON
(By Philip Wylie)
MIAMI. -- It seemed the only logical, sensible course of action. Thirty-nine square miles were purchased in central South Florida, $13-million was spent, a landing strip for training flights was constructed. Florida desperately, obviously, needed a new jetport; the site beside Everglades National Park was eminently reasonable – within swift reach of the booming cities on both coasts, once expressways were constructed.
Yet, it is not to be, The startling fact, rumored here for weeks, was confirmed by President Nixon in mid-January: No Federal funds would be granted for a jetport in the Everglades. The port, with its satellite industries and residential developments, would have to be built elsewhere.
And all to save an apparent wasteland – a super-swamp, an endless sea of shallow water sawgrass – from the pollution of jet sound and jet contrails, from the attendant on-ground sewage and industrial waste. All to save a 1.4-million-acre mega-bog, an infinite nothing where those tourists who are forced to stop for a tire change get out of their cars in wary dread. For the Everglades is known to abound in horrors, in alligators, poisonous snakes, clouds of mosquitoes and huge, biting flies.
Natural assets and wildlife preserves have been rescued before, just before the bulldozers moved in, but what was new here was the magnitude of the work already done, the money spent, the solid expectations suddenly rejected. What was novel was that the Nixon fiat had been made against tremendous commercial investment and popular demand and need – in the face of the jetport, its hotels and supermarkets and other cultural artifacts that would attract the whole world of air travelers and become 50 or 500 times as great a source of profits and taxes as the million or so tourists who now visit the Everglades each year.
What was portentous was the precedent: Had an example been set? Would the conservationists, the champions of ecology, outnumbered by perhaps 100 to 1, slandered for years as "fanatics who care more for birds than for people" – would these enemies of progress gain the upper hand?
The victory, of course, is not total. The existing landing strip will be used for training flights until a new site is found. The ecological effect of such flights is unforeseeable. Yet, for those who have fought the jetport, the President's announcement is a start, and more than a start – the men and women who were fascinated by the incredible bird life in the Glades, the others interested in conserving game to shoot at; those who hoped simply to preserve swatches of wilderness for the eyes of posterity and those who understood the unique ecology of South Florida's Glades, yet found it difficult to communicate their knowledge to anybody else.
One logical argument the jetport opponents had been able to summon up was easily expressed.
The aquifer from which the urban sprawl of coastal cities draws water might have been polluted by the development. These many-trillion-gallon stores of ground water lie only 100 feet below the porous rock of South Florida. Already, that natural storage cistern had been diminished by saltwater incursions to the east and west, caused by activities such as canal digging and drilling.
On the other side, it was pointed out that, even if the ground waters became contaminated, there was an alternate supply to the north. Yet, the threat to a vital water source was not easily talked away.
But all such arguments, and the alarums of bird lovers and hunters alike, might have gone for naught without the fast-growing American opposition to environmental pollution in general. It has made ecology big today. It has been said that every Congressman has become an ecologist overnight, though few could have defined the word a year ago. Now, it has political clout, even though Congressman and layman alike find the conception beyond their perception.
The relationship of life forms to their environment? It can be rattled off the tongue, but it still eludes the mind.
The Everglades are, ecologically, unique on the planet and extremely complex. A map of Florida will show why. The southern third of the peninsula will be marked "Everglades." This vast wetland is, in fact, three kinds of swamp. The northmost begins at Lake Okeechobee, a shallow body of tepid fresh water more than 700 square miles in area. The lake is (or was) the "head" of the Everglades supply of slow-flowing water, aptly called a "river of grass" by author Marjorie Stoneman Douglas.
This first segment of the Glades is the Big Cypress Swamp, though all the big trees save a sample owned by the Audubon Society have been cut and most of the cypress was always stunted and small, though often very old. Next comes the sawgrass region, the swamp that gave its name to the whole, an interminable prairie of brownish "grass" standing in shoal water, as a rule, and broken only by jungle domes called hammocks. The sawgrass is not grass but an abrasive sedge, and a man trying to bull through it would soon be stripped of clothing and then of skin.
The third swamp is a mangrove forest, the largest on earth, where labyrinthine waterways twist and branch and open into secret lakes. Mangrove is literally impassable for any distance, as its tentacle-like roots and stiff, entwined branches stand in slow-moving water that becomes brackish, then salty and, finally, the sea. All three swamps compose the Everglades – and it occupies the whole peninsula from edge to edge, a swamp of more than 5,000 square miles soaked by a river that is the world's slowest, shallowest and, since man has tinkered with it, perhaps the least dependable.
A SLIGHTLY TILTED COOKIE TRAY
Nothing anywhere on earth is even physically similar. Southern Florida is like a very slightly tilted cookie tray with low, coastal edges where dunes and outcrops of oolite, a soft, limey rock full of fossil shells, are elevated enough for building. The cities and satellite towns string down both coasts to the place where the statewide "river" begins to merge with sea water, now the oceanfront of the park. The hammocks that interrupt the sawgrass are caused by such oolite emergences. Some are miles long, others the size of a carrousel, and they support trees of many sorts, including West Indian species and most of what is left of the once-abundant mahoganies.
It is possible, of course, to build in the Glades. Many developments already encroach on them. The vast wasteland could be turned into a megalopolis with modern machinery.
Excavating fill for building sites would merely leave large stretches of water canals and lakes, an effect that could rival Venice and be huge enough for 10 million inhabitants, or more. And if the Everglades were to vanish beneath an aquatic super city, humanity could exist without missing a thing, save for a few lowly creatures.
Why guard such a priceless region from so rich a potential when, especially, the coastal strips are already solid walls of cement and the pressure of local population is desperate? With 20-odd million tourists shoving, too!
Why halt progress, especially when progress has already played havoc with the wet wilderness and may yet destroy it, the national park included? The Army Corps of Engineers has constructed enormous "water conservation" areas to the north, diked mega-ponds that store the rainy season's deluge for urban and agricultural use. These reservoirs were made to prevent flooding, also, and they have, so far, failed to supply the park with sufficient water in dry periods to sustain its flora and fauna.
The impounded water has drowned deer in the thousands. And fresh water needed to sustain the Glades and to maintain groundwater capacity for the million or so people now in South Florida runs off, mostly, to the sea, far north of the useful points.
A RECENT CLOSE CALL
Those "conservation areas" nearly killed the park in a recent drought. Loss of a national park would have been a "first" both for the engineers and for the citizens of the United States. Lucky rains supervened.
The muck lands, south of Okeechobee sustain sugar cane and winter vegetable enterprises. They are another hazard. The first farmers to see the black, friable soil thought it as fertile as the dark earth of the Midwestern prairies. It wasn't. Pure humus, leached of minerals, it requires heavy fertilization, and, as it is kept dry by ditching and canals, its oxidizes – literally burns up and blows away – so the drainage systems must be deepened constantly until bedrock is reached, in a decade or two. As the digging deepens, salt water intrudes from the surrounding sea. Salt water also intrudes wherever canals have been excavated. So South Florida, like Southern California, may eventually have to get its water from upstate.
Water conservation by immense impoundments to the north has also resulted in periods of diminished brackishness in the park and the mangrove expanses. Many fish and various Crustacea depend on freshwater dilution for breeding. Drought halts the fresh mix, and breeding suffers. But commercial fisheries can fail, and have failed without great public loss, and some sports fish breed elsewhere.
So there is nothing indispensable about the Everglades. The long struggle to make a good sample of the wonderland a national park was opposed by multitudes on general principles. They could not think of any commercial value for the Glades, but it was land and so should be open to private purchase. There was tannic acid in the maze of creeks and lakes, but not in a commercially recoverable form.
It was not very effective to point out that thousands of ecological niches existed in the vastness, places where plants of a single species grew, and only there, or that many life forms were present but as yet unknown to science and that the wild scene was beyond imaging – the egrets and ibises, ducks of every sort, water turkeys and real turkeys, panthers, foxes of a special breed, herons and gallinules, deer, bear, otters and endless sorts of flowers, orchids, air plants, poisonous trees and snakes.
It was almost useless to assert that this cornucopia of living wonders, if preserved, might someday supply the natural source of new and priceless drugs, for one example of the sane and possible. Such a not-too-far-out suggestion would be derided by drug manufacturers, who would assert that every natural drug from quinine to penicillin had been synthesized, a rebuttal that overlooks the fact that these miracle remedies were first found in nature.
THE REACTION INEVITABLY IS: SO WHAT?
You could lead a supposedly informed citizen into the Audubon Society's Corkscrew Swamp and show him native hibiscus in bloom and stands of cypress bigger around than a dining room table, and you could spend as much time as he would allow pointing out the rare, the gorgeous, the irreplaceable and the possibilities for all men in these, but his reaction would be: So what?
Trees are lumber, and a quagmire is a stinking breeder of pests. Prairies are to plough, rivers are for sewage and waste disposal, lakes are for dumping and transport and boating fun, scenery that lies over ore or petroleum deposits is to be removed or drowned in guck, and all swamps, of course, are for draining. This is land improvement and, unfortunately, even those who oppose it usually do so for superficial reasons – to watch birds, or hunt them.
The Everglades do not make a vital contribution to man's essential environment. The tremendous swamp is only a minor sample of wild environs that must be preserved if man is to continue his existence. The antipollution motif perhaps tilted the scale against that jetport. And even as an antipollution ruling, it is poorly stated.
What man must see, what this Everglades effort visualizes, is the essential human right to an environment free of pollution. Unless man gains that right, his pursuit of life, liberty and happiness will soon be impossible.
Most Americans are now urban dwellers and the great majority of those are ecological ignoramuses. They are wary when they step off paved surfaces, and they have no idea of the names of trees and wildflowers, let alone the animals, in the nearest wood. That state of mind bodes ill for the human future, for it is blank and even hostile toward the world on which man depends – the algae in the sea he calls slime, but which provides his breathable air; the flashing minnows, which mean a creek is viable.
And so man's chances are enhanced by that trifle, a clean breeze. Men want to banish the pollutants they can smell, hear, feel or detect by smarting nostrils. But who realizes that, if all the sense-perceived contaminants were gone, the job would be about 1 per cent complete?
THE LESSON OF THE EVERGLADES
Man's great illusion continues. Nature cannot be conquered or controlled by man, as men believe, because man is not in charge of it and never will be. Who is in charge of wind and rain, of green plants and photosynthesis, of birds, insects, and the seven seas? Nobody. Nature is in charge, exclusively and forever. The Everglades offer a textbook illustration of what mankind has not yet begun to face that is true
Nobody owns anything, and all anyone has is the use of his presumed possessions. That is the ecological law. It is true for Communists as for capitalists, for disadvantaged peoples as for the affluent and industrial societies. And it is absolute.
We do not own the Everglades or any part of that strange land, even if we have a deed to it. We are allowed its use. All we do own is what our individual skins contain. To save them we must save whatever chains of life are essential to our own.
The value of the Federal decision against a jetport rests in the symbol of the act. If the symbol is understood, its worth will be immeasurable. For man is soon going to be compelled to forego countless multi-billion dollar opportunities and change his plans for even more, not to gain a specific if obscure end of swamp salvage but for a greater though a scarcely comprehensible reason.
If all the ecologists could pool all they know and add all the data from every science, they would be unable to say what life forms and life systems are essential for man's survival. We know too little about the intricate, living understructure supporting our species to risk losing any wild living form, weed or pest or predator, lest one break in the planetary, life-sustaining system be fatal.
There never was a guarantee by nature that man should survive for any particular time. But there are many points in the natural order of beings where a lost or broken system might result in an inexorable act of nature fatal to man.
There are X numbers of similar niches and wild lands that may have an indispensable function for man. The problem is, we don't know them; it is the major, formidable, overwhelming problem in the whole business. We don't know. We would probably continue to live and thrive, to the extent we are thriving, if we paved over the Everglades. But the emphasis is on "probably."