TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/092589/09258900.043

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 8KB | 133 lines

NATION, Page 26

Last Gasp for the Everglades

A surprise lawsuit may keep Florida's wetlands from choking on

pollution

By James Carney


    Once it was a forbidding wilderness of marshland and saw grass
that had to be drained and tamed before southern Florida could
realize its rich potential. Today the Everglades -- what is left
of it -- is surrounded by an urban sprawl of 4.5 million people.
Thriving sugarcane farms carved out of its northern reaches drain
pollutants into its water; Air Force jets boom over its skies. The
1.4 million-acre Everglades National Park, created in 1947, has
become an endangered relic in the nation's fourth most populous
state. "Make no mistake," says outgoing park superintendent Michael
Finley, "the Everglades is dying."

    But not without a fight. Last fall, while candidate George Bush
was proclaiming himself an environmentalist, the Republican U.S.
Attorney in Miami sued the state of Florida for breaking its own
laws by pumping pollutants onto federal lands. State officials,
including Republican Governor Bob Martinez, were stunned. Florida's
farmers, who harvest nearly half the cane sugar produced in the
U.S. and contribute $2 billion a year to the state economy, cried
foul. In the past month the battle intensified when the South
Florida Water Management District, the main defendant in the suit,
proposed a new pollution-control plan aimed at persuading U.S.
Attorney Dexter Lehtinen to back off. Lehtinen's reply: "We are
going forward with the litigation aggressively." The battle may
drag on for years and end up as the most expensive environmental
lawsuit ever.

    If successful, the suit could be a landmark for national parks
trying to reach outside their boundaries to protect their
ecosystems. The "river of grass," as the Everglades was named by
naturalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas, is one of the largest wetlands
systems in the world, and the most imperiled. Despite the
protection of the national park, the population of wading birds has
dropped from more than 2.5 million in the 1930s to 250,000.
Thirteen Everglades animals are now endangered species. Only about
30 Florida panthers remain, and in recent years several have been
killed on roads cutting through the area. Half the original
Everglades has been lost to development. Now the biggest threat
comes not from bulldozers but in nutrient-laden runoff from
sugarcane and vegetable farms that lie to the north, between the
Everglades and its chief source of water, Lake Okeechobee.

    The Federal Government contends that Florida, despite
overwhelming demands on its limited natural resources, can
re-create the ecological balance necessary to keep the Everglades
alive. The water that replenishes the marshland once spilled out
of Lake Okeechobee in a shallow sheet 50 miles wide, moving slowly
south for 180 miles before emptying into Florida Bay. But since the
mid-1960s, the lake overflow has been channeled through a massive
flood-control project -- 1,400 miles of canals and hydraulic pumps
that can drain a field or rush water to urban centers on command.
Using computers, engineers now try to mimic the natural flow into
the park. If water levels fluctuate even by a matter of inches, the
ecology of the Everglades can change radically. The same holds true
if the water is polluted.

    "There's nothing simple about trying to replicate nature," says
Jim Webb, regional director of the Wilderness Society, "but it has
to be done." Florida's research shows that high levels of
phosphates and nitrates from farm runoff have transformed more than
20,000 acres of Everglades saw grass into cattails. These
intruders, which thrive in high-nutrient water, suck the oxygen
from the marsh and suffocate aquatic life at the bottom of the
Everglades food chain. On shallow ponds and canals, nutrient-fed
algae grow so thick that they block the sun from underwater plants.
So far, most of the damage is confined to Loxahatchee National
Wildlife Preserve -- an Everglades habitat abutting the farms --
and state conservation areas just north of the national park. "It's
like a cancer," says park superintendent Finley, "and the cancer
is moving south."

    U.S. Attorney Lehtinen, 43, grew up in Homestead, next to the
park, and was appointed federal prosecutor for South Florida in
June 1988, just when George Bush was campaigning for the White
House by promising "no net loss of wetlands." An Army paratrooper
who was badly wounded in the face in Viet Nam, Lehtinen was a
Democratic state legislator when he married a Republican colleague,
Ileana Ros; a year later, he switched to the G.O.P. Last month
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen won election to Congress to fill Claude
Pepper's seat. As a legislator, Lehtinen earned a reputation as a
hot-tempered, brainy conservative who preferred taking on the
Establishment to joining it.

    Critics of the Everglades suit charged -- correctly -- that
Lehtinen went to court without consulting either the Justice or the
Interior Department. Governor Martinez asked Attorney General Dick
Thornburgh to settle the suit or drop it. Last December Lehtinen
was summoned to Washington for a review of his actions. It seemed
the suit would be scrapped, but Lehtinen, by agreeing to drop the
most sweeping charges, returned with both Justice and Interior on
his side.

    "I didn't invent the environmental laws," says Lehtinen, who
denies that he is using the Everglades to promote his political
fortunes. "All we are asking is that the state of Florida abide by
what is already on the books." To comply, however, the state will
have to take on the powerful sugar lobby. While not a defendant,
sugar is clearly the suit's target. For Florida to meet Lehtinen's
water-purity standards, farmers would have to convert at least
40,000 acres into marshes to filter their pollution. Instead, the
sugar industry has questioned the U.S. Attorney's motives and
disputed his scientists' data. "The first question is, Which sugar
mill will you put out of business? Who will you put out of work?"
asks Andy Rackley, general manager of the Florida Sugar Cane
League. If growers are forced to give up land, he claims, the
entire industry could collapse.

    The water-management district is also angry. John Wodraska,
the district director, claims that the lawsuit is a nuisance that
only delays his staff from working on a plan to save the
Everglades. Moreover, the suit is costing a fortune in both state
and federal funds. Beyond the Justice Department's considerable
expenses, the water district's board has spent $980,000 on legal
fees and expects to dole out at least $175,000 more a month. Yet
a majority of board members seem as recalcitrant as the farmers.
"If (Lehtinen) wants to fight, let's go ahead," said board member
Doran Jason at one meeting. "There has to be a change," counters
Nathaniel P. Reed, a former top Interior official who once served
on the water district's board. "If sugar doesn't agree to the plan,
the environmental community will go to war."

    More is at stake than the future of a habitat for alligators,
wading birds and other swamp life. "This is not just an argument
between greedy farmers and anxious environmentalists," says the
Wilderness Society's Webb. "It's a planning issue of fundamental
proportions. It's the future of South Florida." If the river of
grass turns into a sea of cattails, the water supply for coastal
cities from West Palm Beach to Miami could dry up, and a sunny
subtropical paradise could become a barren wasteland. Floridians
are coming to realize how much they too depend on the vast
marshland that once seemed so useless.