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A fearful bog

A new book tells us the sad history of human meddling in the Everglades.

By CRAIG PITTMAN
Published March 12, 2006

WEST PALM BEACH - In 1892, a team of surveyors set out across the Everglades to see if a railroad line could be built from Fort Myers to Miami. A few days of struggling through the thigh-deep muck and razor-sharp saw grass convinced them that this was no place for a survey crew, much less a railroad.

"The bog is fearful," the expedition's log noted. Later one crewman recalled, "I thought that we were great idiots to come into such a place when we had no wings with which to fly out."

These days, the "fearful bog" is only half as big as it used to be. Yet the River of Grass still retains the power to make everyone who tries to master it look like a king-size idiot.

For proof, dig into an entertaining new book published this month, The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida and the Politics of Paradise by award-winning Washington Post reporter Michael Grunwald. Though it's his first book, Grunwald does a fairly thorough job of portraying the dreamers and schemers who have tried to bend the Everglades to their will, usually with disastrous results.

Don't take the title literally. The heart of the Everglades is technically a marsh. Grunwald's topic is not so much the biology of the Glades as the fact that every attempt to alter it inevitably becomes mired in a swamp of unintended consequences.

Grunwald begins and ends the book with the latest attempt to fiddle with the River of Grass, this time for its own benefit. The Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, or CERP, aims to repair the damage done between the 1940s and 1960s by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which built 1,000 miles of levees and canals, 150 water-control structures and 16 major pump stations to make South Florida dry enough to be habitable.

The plan calls for holding back more than 1-billion gallons of water a day that's now flushed out to the tide. Then it could be redirected to mimic the natural flow through the River of Grass - and incidentally provide enough drinking water to double South Florida's population.

Although CERP was approved amid great hoopla five years ago, for the past year there have been persistent whispers that CERP is on its last legs.

Staunch supporters such as South Florida Water Management District member Mike Collins contend the rumors of CERP's demise are greatly exaggerated, but he added, "It ain't totally healthy, either."

Gov. Jeb Bush is asking the Legislature this year for $135-million to keep the restoration project moving. But state officials say the effort to save the Everglades has become, well, bogged down.

"There's a tremendous amount of frustration," said Carol Ann Wehle, executive director of the water district, the state agency that's supposed to oversee CERP with the Corps of Engineers.

However, one corps official in charge of CERP, Dennis Duke, insists that 2006 will mark the true birth of Everglades restoration, not its last hurrah.

"To me, this is kind of The Year," he promised.

CERP was envisioned as the most complex and expensive environmental restoration project in history. Making it work will require multiple state and federal agencies to coordinate the construction of dozens of separate components by 2036.

Stuart Appelbaum, who leads the corps' planning effort, likes to say that saving the Everglades isn't brain surgery. It's much more complicated.

More expensive, too. Corps officials initially told Congress it would cost less than $7.8-billion. Instead it's climbed to $10.8-billion.

CERP is hardly a strong and steady lifeline. Crucial portions of it rely on unproven technology, such as using hundreds of deep wells to store the water as bubbles in the aquifer. Should that fail, no one has come up with any alternatives.

One of the most expensive and controversial components allows limestone miners to dynamite thousands of acres of wetlands in the eastern Everglades. Then their 80-foot-deep quarries could be turned into reservoirs, although no one knows how to stop the porous walls from leaking.

The plan has been sharply criticized by Everglades National Park biologists, who contend it's not going to aid the park as much as help development.

Yet when it was unveiled, Grunwald notes, CERP won the endorsement of both Big Sugar and a consortium of environmental groups known as the Everglades Coalition. Their lobbyists walked the halls of Congress arm-in-arm to push CERP through, Grunwald notes.

Grunwald leads off The Swamp by recounting the bizarre scene in December 2000 when then-President Bill Clinton signed the CERP bill while Gov. Jeb Bush looked on, even as the U.S. Supreme Court was hearing arguments over who won the presidential election in Florida. Clinton used 18 different pens, Grunwald notes, and handed the first one to Bush.

"This is a great day," Clinton said, beaming. "We should all be very proud."

Despite all this bipartisan optimism, CERP was a house built on a couple of major fault lines:

* It depended on the state and federal government working as equal partners, splitting the cost and responsibility right down the middle.

* It focused on fixing the water flow, not its quality. Federal officials expected the state to comply with a federal court order to clean up a pollution problem that was converting the Everglades' saw grass marshes into a widening expanse of cattails.

Since Clinton handed out his pens, the corps has moved more paper than dirt. Meanwhile, the state has been found in violation of the court order on the pollution cleanup, not long after the Legislature extended the cleanup deadline.

In an internal memo first reported by the St. Petersburg Times last year, a top corps official wrote that, in the halls of Congress, "I'm hearing statements that "CERP is dead."'

That should have come as no surprise. After all, as Grunwald's book points out, if anything can go wrong with man's plans for the Everglades, it will.

Originally, the Everglades' natural plumbing worked just fine. Rain falling on Central Florida would flow south through the winding Kissimmee River to Lake Okeechobee. The excess would spill out of the lake and meander through saw grass, forming a river 50 miles wide and a few inches deep.

The soldiers chasing the Seminoles through the Everglades in the 1830s failed to appreciate the delicacy and elegance of this arrangement, calling it "a most hideous region to live in, a perfect paradise for Indians, alligators, serpents, frogs and every other kind of loathsome reptile."

But the soldiers also reported that beneath the water flowing across the Everglades was a rich layer of muck that, if drained, would undoubtedly produce a year-round agricultural bounty. So for more than a century, politicians and promoters tried repeatedly to get rid of the water.

Grunwald tells this story well. He shows a keen eye for the hucksters selling Florida swampland, the public officials who touted development while on the take and the engineers who refused to acknowledge flaws even when unforeseen flooding killed thousands.

He debunks some myths, most notably that the man who actually started draining the Glades, Philadelphia magnate Hamilton Disston, lost his shirt and blew his brains out. Grunwald found evidence that Disston died a wealthy man, and not by his own hand (and credits his sources in his extensive footnotes, which are often as entertaining as the text.)

But there's an imbalance in the book that's surprising considering its origin.

The Swamp grew out of an outstanding four-part series that Grunwald wrote for the Post in 2002. CERP's problems had been well covered by Florida newspapers by the time the Post stories appeared, but his series marked the first time all of CERP's dirty linen had been hung on the same wash line. To the Post's national readership it seemed like a revelation.

However, CERP occupies a surprisingly small part in Grunwald's book, a fact he apologizes for in the footnotes. In an e-mail, Grunwald explained that he shifted focus because "the current fights over restoration (while fascinating in their details as well as their characters) were a part of a much larger and richer story about man and nature in the Everglades and everywhere else. The story of the Everglades felt like a more important story than the story of CERP."

Still, it would have been nice to see more about CERP and its people. A Reconstruction-era scalawag named William Gleason, who proposed draining the Everglades but never did, gets three pages. But important modern figures such as Appelbaum rate only passing mentions, and the controversies over the rock-mining reservoirs and the deep wells get no more than a couple of sentences.

When he does address CERP, Grunwald emphasizes the politics - and how quickly its support began to crumble.

In 2003 the Legislature, facing a swarm of 42 lobbyists employed by Big Sugar, voted to delay the deadline for the pollution cleanup by at least a decade.

Congressmen from both parties objected, as did the federal judge overseeing the case. But Gov. Bush signed the bill, cooling congressional support for federal funding for the Everglades.

Meanwhile, disputes unrelated to CERP have stalled congressional action on bills that would authorize the corps to start moving dirt on a host of projects, including CERP. Normally those bills are passed every two years, but six years have gone by since the last one.

"It's like you've got plans for a new automobile, but you have to get each individual nut and bolt approved by the company's board of directors," said former Sen. Bob Graham. The best way to break the logjam would be to pass a separate Everglades authorization bill, he said, but so far no one has tried that.

The White House, busy with two wars and a hurricane, has done little to push for action. In fact, President Bush's proposed budget for next year calls for giving the corps just $50-million for CERP, less than half of what the state is offering to spend.

So in late 2004 Gov. Bush launched a program called Acceler8. The state would borrow $1.5-billion, he said, and build eight CERP projects right away.

But the projects chosen for Acceler8 have been criticized for focusing more on storing water than restoring nature. And congressmen have questioned whether the state is cutting corners that may hurt the endangered species CERP is supposed to help.

On Feb. 22, the agencies involved in CERP clashed during a meeting at the water district's headquarters in West Palm Beach.

Colleen Castille, secretary of the state Department of Environmental Protection, warned everyone the state's Acceler8 push would proceed "no matter how much opposition there's going to be." Then Wehle and Collins complained about what Collins called "wading through 35 miles of paperwork" to get federal agencies to do anything.

Suddenly Castille and the top corps official in Florida, Col. Robert Carpenter, strode out. A reporter found them sitting in an otherwise empty cafeteria, engaged in an intense discussion.

Castille said she too was unhappy with the federal efforts. The rules of CERP say that before building the 68 CERP components, each one needs a separate Project Implementation Report. In five years, only two reports have been produced, she said.

Red-faced, Carpenter promised 17 more would be ready by year's end. But he conceded that even the planning for CERP has been slowed by red tape.

"It's like trying to run a race with a 50-pound weight on your back," he said.

In The Swamp, Grunwald gives a vivid description of how Disston's crews began the work of draining the Glades, and he later shows in heartbreaking detail the consequences after the corps finished the job.

He also nicely depicts how in the '60s the tide began to turn as people such as geologist Garald Parker and biologist Art Marshall began talking about what had been lost and how to get it back.

Plenty of progress has been made since then. Everglades activists fought off a pair of jetports. Big Sugar made enormous strides in cleaning up its pollution. The corps began restoring the straightened Kissimmee River, and the state has bought about half the land needed for CERP.

But if Congress and the Bush administration fail to act again this year, the rest of CERP may sink into a bureaucratic mire as deep as the one that trapped the survey crew in 1892.

"It doesn't look hopeful," said Joette Lorion, a longtime Everglades activist who now works for the Miccosukee tribe, which lives in Everglades National Park. "While everyone's haggling, the environmental destruction continues."

Times staff researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

[Last modified March 11, 2006, 10:29:02]