Kick Ass: Selected Columns of Carl Hiaasen

Tainted bass a warning for all of us March 10, 1989

What a winter for the Everglades. First the sawgrass catches fire, and now the fish are contaminated.

Health agencies have warned anglers not to eat any largemouth bass or warmouth caught in Conservation Areas 2 and 3. They've also suggested reduced consumption of bass pulled out of the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge.

The reason: Samples of these fish show high and potentially harmful levels of mercury.

Such a warning is unprecedented for any freshwater species in Florida. When bass (the state fish) are in jeopardy, it's a startling signal that something very bad is happening out in the black muck of the Glades.

The story goes way beyond the culinary concerns of weekend fishermen. What's happening—invisibly, bewilderingly—is the poisoning of the source of our water and of the food chain that it supports. Animals that ingest mercury don't necessarily die, but they sometimes stop reproducing.

The sprawl of the contamination is boggling. They're not talking about a backyard pond or a patch of marsh or even a whole creek. The danger zone encompasses more than 1,200 square miles of vital watershed.

Tainted bass have been found as far north as Loxahatchee and as far south as the L-67 canal in Dade. The fish, about 70 in all, were collected with electronic stunning gear. They weighed between 2 and 8 pounds each. Experts were shocked at the amounts of mercury discovered.

The government considers any level exceeding 0.5 parts per million to be cause for concern. Anything over 1.5 is unfit for human consumption.

No wonder health workers were alarmed, then, when one of the sample Everglades bass tested at 4.4 parts mercury per million. Some sites yielded fish with levels averaging 2.5.

Much has been made of these statistics because people want to know how much mercury is safe to eat. Fact: Bass aren't supposed to have heavy metals in their flesh.

In humans, mercury poisoning can damage the central nervous system.The most famous and tragic outbreak occurred in the 19505, when mercury-laden effluent from a factory contaminated the fish in Minamata Bay, Japan. Thousands of people who ate the fish suffered severe mercury poisoning that led to blindness, paralysis and birth defects. More than 300 died.

The Everglades scenario is not so extreme. The average person would have to eat a mess of tainted bass to be affected, but the health risk is larger for pregnant women and nursing mothers.

Actually, the edibility of these fish is the least of concerns. The more urgent riddle is where the pollution is coming from and what it portends for the ecology of South Florida.

"There is no theory at this point," says Frank Morello, a biologist with the Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission. "It's just a mystery."

The possibilities are far-ranging. Mercury can travel airborne from coal-burning power plants. It's also a common residue of agricultural fungicides, which have been known to be flushed into the Glades.

Over time mercury accumulates in living tissue, and the high levels found in the bass suggest a serious long-term pollution. Sediment samples might provide some clues, if not answers. The trick is tracing the source of this slop and identifying the offenders.

In a way, the invisible nature of the mercury threat makes it easy to underestimate. It's not like a red tide or a chemical spill. You won't see lots of bloated bass or dead panfish floating around the docks; in fact, you won't see much of anything.

A sudden fish kill looks more dramatic, but it tends to be brief and contained. The slow poisoning of an entire ecosystem is more sinister and potentially more catastrophic.

The hushed beauty of the Everglades is deceiving. It is so rich with life that we naturally assume all the life to be healthy.

For now, mercury and all, there are plenty of lunker largemouth bass to be caught. But the way it's going, someday we'll be fishing for them with magnets instead of worms.

News isn't so sweet for Big Sugar March 5, 1990

The sugar industry, despoiler of the Everglades, got some not-so-sweet news last week.

Powerful federal agencies have come down strongly on the side of U.S. Attorney Dexter Lehtinen, who is suing to make Florida clean its water.

A report of the U.S. Department of Interior, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency says Everglades pollution is at "crisis proportions," and the state's plan to stop it is too weak.

The prime pollutants are phosphates, and the chief culprit is Big Sugar. Because cane companies donate lots of money to politicians, their disgraceful irrigation techniques have been overlooked for years.

Lehtinen ruined the party with his unprecedented lawsuit, which was filed 18 months ago. It charged the South Florida Water Management District with pumping filthy farm runoff into Everglades National Park. And it charged the state Department of Environmental Regulation with doing virtually nothing to stop it.

The message of the suit was so simple: Make the growers quit fouling our water. It hardly seemed like too much to ask.

But it was. The great state of Florida has spent more than $1 million in legal fees to fight the case. Makes you proud to be a taxpayer, doesn't it? The lawyers get rich while the water gets worse.

All sides agree that the public will be better served if an agreement can be reached out of court. As usual, politics is mucking up the priorities.

Gov. Martinez wants the lawsuit to disappear because it's politically embarrassing. The board of the water district (which Martinez loaded with farmers and developers) wants the lawsuit to go away because it could cost Big Sugar a fortune.

Florida had insisted it would come up with a comprehensive plan to save the Everglades, if only the feds would back off. Given the sorry history of water management, it was difficult to be bubbly with optimism.

Sure enough, the district's new Surface Water Improvement and Management plan was greeted by environmentalists with resounding derision. SWIM would give Big Sugar until the year 2002 to clean up its act, using 40,000 acres of public wetlands as filtering pools.

Water managers said they didn't know what SWIM would cost, or how much of the expense would be borne by agriculture. Big Sugar's response: We'll be happy to help clean up our slop if Uncle Sam pays every penny of the cost.

What a deal. It's like emptying a septic tank into your neighbor's bathtub, then demanding money before you'll mop it up—and finishing the job 12 years later.

The sugar growers' arrogance is well-founded. Thanks to the state, they get all the fresh water they want. Thanks to the feds, they can sell their crop at artificially inflated prices.

It isn't farming, it's glorified welfare. Naturally Big Sugar wants the public to pay for its pollution remedies—we've been paying, one way or another, for everything else.

State agencies always had the power to halt the polluting, but never had the political spine to do it. The staffs of the water districts are handcuffed because board members are political appointees who know more about irrigating campaign treasuries than vegetable fields.

The great thing about the U.S. attorney's lawsuit is that it forces the issue: Why should the Okeechobee growers be allowed to do what no other private industry can?

Knowing what we now do about the slow death of the Everglades, it's appalling that the sugar debate has lasted so long. The ultimate price of such cowardly politics could be a future of rationed, tainted drinking water for our kids.

We owe the Big Sugar companies zero; they owe us. They should filter the runoff on their own land, at their own expense, starting now.

But they won't do it, and the state won't make them. That's why Lehtinen sued.

It certainly got everyone's attention, and not a moment too soon.

New wetlands plan rooted in bad policy May 20, 1991

In a political retreat that could mean disaster for parts of South Florida, the Environmental Protection Agency is proposing new rules that would allow massive development of once-protected swamps and marshlands.

Under pressure from developers and farmers, the EPA recently redefined "wetlands" in a way that excludes up to 10 million acres nationwide. If the new definition is adopted, it could abolish federal protection for large sections of the East Everglades, and for thousands of acres of marshes bordering the conservation areas in southwest Broward.

Developers have been drooling lasciviously over these unspoiled tracts, and now they'll be gassing up the bulldozers. The EPA says the definition of "wetlands" should be narrowed to meet three guidelines:

• The land's soils must be composed of muck or peat;

• The surface must be flooded by tides, or saturated by rains for more than 14 consecutive days during the growing season;

• More than half of the plants growing in the area must be among the 7,000 species commonly found in wetlands.

Unfortunately, those criteria can no longer be applied fairly in South Florida. Here, pristine wetlands have been invaded by melaleuca, Brazilian pepper trees and other water-guzzling exotics. Areas once rich in peat and soggy underfoot are now parched.

Paving is no solution; replenishing is a better idea.

The necessity of saving wetlands is so obvious that George Bush made it a campaign issue, and pledged there would be "no net loss" of marshes and swamps during his administration. It's distressing, then, to see the EPA, the Department of Agriculture and the Army Corps of Engineers all cave in.

The political pressure is overwhelming. In many places, the feds are the only serious obstacle for run-amok developers. Look at Broward. To describe the county's land-use policy as spineless would be kind; even calling it a "policy" stretches the definition. Anything developers want, they usually get. The Sawgrass Expressway is a shining example.

When the government announced tough wetland rules two years ago, powerful people were upset. It screwed up their plans to turn the marshes and wet prairies of southwest Broward into a vast panorama of cheesy condos, strip malls and high-density housing developments. The holy mission to make Broward uglier and more crowded than Dade was temporarily put on hold.

Now the feds have gone soft. Bowing to complaints that the current definition of "wetlands" includes land that isn't very wet, EPA chief William Reilly last week said: "We're only interested in saving genuine wetlands. There was a backlash over the previous policy because of what appeared to be overreaching … "

Needless to say, the "backlash" didn't come from the masses. It came from folks with connections.

Before the weaker definition of wetlands takes effect, the White House must approve it. Significantly, the Interior Department refuses to endorse the EPA's recommendation.

In South Florida, the dynamics are simple. Developers are running out of land, and they will fight for every acre. Land-use attorney Don McCloskey beautifully articulates his clients' selfless philosophy: "Government cannot use my private property to save the world."

So much for the Everglades, and for the underground aquifer that gives us water.

The EPA's logic is politically convenient: Marshes that already are damaged don't deserve protection.To be deemed valuable, wetlands had better be wet, and free from foreign vegetation.

The irony is classic Florida. Melaleucas originally were imported in a grandiose scheme to suck the Everglades dry. Though that plan was thwarted, it looks as if the stubborn exotics finally will get their revenge. The trees won't have to drink a drop, they'll just have to stand there.

Developers gleefully will be counting them, one by one, to prove that their land isn't worth saving.

Glades need a hero before options dry up January 12, 1992

Big Sugar might help save the Everglades, in spite of itself.

The longer that cane growers refuse to clean up their waste and the more unfiltered scum they pump into the watershed, the greater the public backlash. No cause has so enlarged and galvanized the conservation movement.

Cheers went up when acting U.S. Attorney Dexter Lehtinen sued Florida for letting growers pollute Everglades National Park. More cheers went up when Gov. Lawton Chiles recently settled the case.

The agreement called for a modest cleanup that gives Big Sugar years to comply. The industry's arrogant response: 18 lawsuits against the Department of Environmental Regulation and state water managers.

People got mad—even people who didn't fish or hunt, who didn't care much about alligator nests or the sight of wild flamingos at sunrise. People who simply knew a scandal when they saw one.

Big Sugar gets all the water it wants for practically nothing, dirties it with tons of phosphates, then spits it back at nature. That's not the only reason the Everglades is in trouble, but what's wrong can't be fixed until the cane growers get on board.

"What we're talking about," said DER chief Carol Browner, "is a significant replumbing of South Florida."

When the Everglades Coalition met this weekend in Key Largo, the conference drew nationally known conservationists, biologists, planners, lobbyists and water experts. There were lawyers, too—mean, tough, hungry lawyers. That's what it takes these days to battle the special interests.

The mood was sober because the situation is dire. Half the original Everglades has been lost to drainage and development. Fish and mammals are dying from mercury poisoning. The number of nesting wading birds is down to 7,000 annually (in 1931 it was 100,000). Brazilian pepper trees have devoured 100,000 acres of native vegetation.

Everyone agrees the Everglades is dying from pollution, droughts and urbanization. The worst predictions are coming true at the worst possible time. Just when Tallahassee awakens to the crisis, the state finds itself broke and panicky.

Without heroes in the Legislature, there will be no money to clean up the Everglades. No money to find out where the lethal mercury is coining from. No money to purchase endangered wetlands. "It's kind of scary," said Lt. Gov. Buddy MacKay. "The economics of growth may now be coinciding with the politics of decline."

That's an amazing admission from a Florida politician, and maybe MacKay wouldn't have said it at a convention of home builders. But he's absolutely right.

For 40 years the natural marsh was diked, dammed and diverted to benefit farmers and developers. Today 4 million people in Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties rely on the Everglades system for their drinking water. Nature's plumbing can't handle it.

Big Sugar can be blamed for stubborn avarice, but the industry makes one irrefutable point: Overdevelopment has done more to destroy the Everglades than all the cane and dairy farmers put together.

Cleaning agricultural runoff isn't hard, it's just expensive. The people problem is not so easy to clean up. MacKay wonders what happens when South Florida's 4 million becomes 6 million, and the 6 million becomes 8 million. Where will they get their water?

They probably won't. The plight of the Everglades has transcended images of panthers and bald eagles. Now it means something even the most thickheaded legislator can understand: no water. Suddenly growth management is more than a slogan, it's an imperative.

In his speech, MacKay compared Florida to a big gangly teenager. "We don't have the foggiest notion of what we want to be when we grow up."

Unless other politicians start listening, the one thing we'll definitely be is thirsty.

Big Sugar's sly cleanup plan is dirty pool April 12, 1992

The Florida Sugar Cane League, not famous for its environmental conscience, suddenly has unveiled a plan to clean up the Everglades.

A late April Fool's joke? Nope. Big Sugar says it's serious.

The huge corporations that grow cane finally admit they shouldn't dump so much scummy fertilizer into South Florida's drinking-water supply.

To prove their deep concern for the public welfare, they've offered to reduce by 151 tons the amount of phosphorus being pumped off the farmlands into the Everglades. The only catch: Big Sugar, not the state, would be in charge of the anti-pollution efforts.

How considerate of the cane growers, not wishing to trouble government with the task of enforcing its own laws. Instead, we all should just relax and rely on the sugar barons to make the water clean and safe. That's about as likely as Lake Okeechobee freezing over.

Big Sugar's newfound commitment to the environment is explained in one word: fear. First, the U.S. attorney sued Florida for allowing the Everglades to be polluted. After a lengthy legal battle, both sides settled on a $400 million cleanup program that requires cane growers to pump dirty farm runoff into large nitration ponds.

Sugar companies say the plan will tie up valuable land and cost agriculture 20,000 jobs. Led by U.S. Sugar and Flo-Sun Inc., the industry has fought back with a hail of lawsuits. Big Sugar has steadfastly resisted all previous attempts to make it pay for its own putrid practices. A Greek chorus of expensive PR men and lobbyists have insisted the phosphorus in farm runoff is as harmless as rain.

That nonsense won't wash anymore, and Big Sugar knows it. By offering their own cleanup plan—"an olive branch," in the words of one sugar executive—the industry is making a last-ditch effort to appear reasonable and to keep control of its own drainage pumps.

Says Joe Podgor, of Friends of the Everglades: "It's like a traffic cop has pulled you over, and now you're trying to sweet-talk your way out of it."

Fittingly, the latest stall tactic came in the same week that the Everglades was named one of the 10 most endangered rivers in North America. A national conservation group, American Rivers, blames agricultural pollution and urbanization as the major threats to the vast shallows that provide fresh water for about four million South Floridians.

Some respected conservation groups aren't wild about the state's plan or Big Sugar's self-serving alternative. Friends of the Everglades, for instance, favors a complete scientific remapping of South Florida's plumbing, combined with "hard-core enforcement" of existing pollution laws.

Profitable habits are hard to break, and the sugar industry has long enjoyed a sweet deal: cheap water, migrant labor, government-inflated price supports—and the Everglades as its backyard cesspool.

The arrangement is cemented each election year by generous contributions to pliant politicians. According to the Center for Public Integrity, 17 sugar PACS gave $2.6 million to congressional campaigns between 1985 and 1990. Money doesn't just talk, it shouts: Of 29 U.S. senators who got $15,000 or more from Big Sugar interests, 85 percent voted to keep the price subsidies.

It's no wonder that cane growers, coddled for years, were stunned by the federal lawsuit over pollution. And with little experience at (or need for) compromise, it's no wonder that Big Sugar's counteroffer is so weak.

Backs to the wall, cane growers miraculously discover a way to keep 151 tons of phosphorus out of the Everglades!

Incredible. When these guys aren't flushing fertilizer, they're shoveling it.

Future of keys rests in the fate of Florida Bay February 21, 1993

If you went to the Keys this weekend, you probably noticed that the once-clear waters of Florida Bay have turned the color of bile.

A vast and destructive algae bloom has floated out of the backcountry and settled in near Islamorada. Looking northwest from the Overseas Highway, you saw a milky green-brown soup surrounding the mangroves, a perverse parody of Christo's decorated islands. Crossing the tall arch to Long Key, you noticed a foul-looking stain stretching gulfward to the horizon.

What you saw is Florida Bay dying.

It started with the turtle grass, essential cover for shrimp, baby lobsters and small fish. In 1987, the grass turned brown and began falling out in clumps, then strips, then acres. The dead grass rotted in the warm water, releasing nutrients that fostered algae. Meanwhile, where the lush grass once grew, the bay bottom turned muddy and barren.

Today the die-off is so huge that between 300 and 400 square miles of Florida Bay is called the Dead Zone. Scientists say its effects are spreading, and the prospects are dire: The collapse of a uniquely bountiful estuary, and the potential crippling of a multimillion-dollar tourist and fishing economy.

There's no quick answer. Grass beds are sensitive and slow-growing; replenishment takes a long time. Part of the problem lies miles away, in the Everglades.

For centuries the southward flow of fresh water emptied purely into Florida Bay. Then the geniuses who manage our canal systems began diverting water to benefit developers and farmers. That folly was implemented under the guise of "flood control."

With its flow of fresh water disrupted, Florida Bay got saltier each season. The hypersalinity, combined with drought, caused drastic changes. Some biologists believe additional harm came from fertilizers and pesticides which flushed through the Everglades into the bay.

What you now see out your car window is unlike anything that's happened before. From an airplane, the sight is even more dramatic and dismaying.

In past years the blooms were smaller, localized. They came and went in a couple months. This one was born in October, and continues to spread like an 50-square-mile amoeba.

Chilly weather hasn't killed it, only moved it from the remote middle part of the bay—Everglades National Park—toward the populated islands. Each night at the fishing docks, backcountry guides grimly exchange information on the movement of the algae; on some days it's a challenge to find clear water.

The cloudy bloom not only looks like sewage, it blocks out vital sunlight, causing marine life to flee or perish. Sponges are dying by thousands—clots of them can be found bobbing in the algae. That's bad news for future lobster harvests; the juvenile crustaceans require healthy sponges for food and protection.

Even more alarming is that strong winter winds have pushed broad streaks of the algae out of the bay through the Keys bridges, into the Atlantic. The offshore reefs, already imperiled, could suffocate if the microbic crud thickens.

Imagine what would happen to the boating, diving and fishing—in other words, the entire Keys economy. Disaster is the only word for it, like an oil spill that won't go away.

This weekend the nation's top environmental groups are gathered in Tallahassee for the annual Everglades Coalition. The task is to devise a way to remap South Florida's plumbing to repair the Everglades.

Incredibly, it's the first time that the agenda includes a serious scientific discussion of the fate of Florida Bay. Pray that it's not too late.

Douglas would trade medal for preserved Glades December 2, 1993

A bone-numbing north wind blew across the breadth of Everglades early this week. At the farthest tip, near Cape Sable, the sky flashed with wild birds: herons, curlews, ibises, blue egrets, white pelicans, sandpipers and a few roseate spoonbills.

They swarmed to the mud banks and oyster beds as the tide ran out, diving, wading, and wheeling overhead in such numbers that one could hardly imagine the place is dying. It is.

A long way off, an amazing woman named Marjory Stoneman Douglas was sleeping at the White House as an honored guest of the first family. On Tuesday she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for a life's work trying to preserve the Everglades.

Medallions are nice, but Mrs. Douglas probably would trade hers in an instant for one solid promise from Mr. Clinton. Water is what the Everglades needs—a restored flow, streaming pure from Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay.The way it was 103 years ago, when Marjory Stoneman Douglas was born.

That any of her Everglades remains untouched is the miracle. What Mrs. Douglas and her colleagues accomplished will never be done again. Not a chance.

Look at a map. The entire southwest thumb of Florida is a park—2,300 square miles that can't be malled, dredged, subdivided or plowed into golf courses. President Harry Truman made it official in 1947, the same year that Mrs. Douglas came out with her masterpiece, River of Gross.

Originally the park was 460,000 acres, a small piece of the total Everglades.The remainder was to be channelized by the Army Corps with the unabashed mission of conquest. In 1950 the park doubled its size, and has since grown to 1.5 million acres.

Saving so much raw real estate from the clutches of banks, developers, and speculators would be impossible today. Even if such a vast spread existed, the forces of greed would never surrender it for preservation.

The creation of Everglades National Park culminated a crusade that began in 1927, when Mrs. Douglas was just one voice on a local committee pushing for it. She admits that she knew "next to nothing" about the Everglades. When she started researching her book, she'd visited the place only a few times.

Today she is its patron saint. Ironically, her highest honor comes when her beloved Everglades is most imperiled. Although it can't be paved, it is being starved. Man-made canals with man-made faucets govern the ebb of its lifeblood; decisions rest with bureaucrats sympathetic to special interests.

The headwaters of Mrs. Douglas' river are spoiled by the sewage of millionaire sugar barons. What moves south is siphoned to suburbs, cities and a handful of vegetable farmers. The water that reaches Florida Bay is an anemic trickle—a 10th of what it once was. The bay, muddy and algae-clogged, languishes.

Those grand birds that rise from the mangroves on a wintry breeze are but a fleeting fraction of what once thrived here. Yet it would be untrue to say that the sight isn't a cause for hope. Given half a chance, nature rebounds swiftly.

Soon the Clinton administration will reveal more details of its controversial Everglades restoration plan, which includes a cleanup settlement with Big Sugar. At stake is more than bird life. It's our water, our economy, our whole future.

For political impact, the Everglades deal will be promoted as tough, bold and urgent. It had better be exactly that, or Mr. Clinton will have to contend again with Mrs. Douglas.

She might not be the type to return a presidential medallion, but she could definitely hang him with it.

Sugar bosses fight to keep real sweet deal April 30, 1995

Powerful politicians want to spoil Big Sugar's sweetheart deal by eliminating the program that artificially props up the price.

Sugar barons hate the word "welfare," but that's what it is: guaranteed income, at the expense of foreign growers and American consumers.

Last week a congressional subcommittee meeting in Belle Glade heard from scores of regular folks who said that wiping out federal price guarantees would wipe out their way of life.

The sugar companies say so, too: They just can't hack it in a free-market economy.

Judging from all that whining, you'd think they were barely scraping by—U.S. Sugar, Flo-Sun and the other growers. You'd think their saga was one of a small farmer, struggling to eke a living from the fickle soil.

That's the image being peddled these days, as Big Sugar lobbies to keep its place on the federal gravy train.

And it's impossible not to feel sympathy for the working people of Clewiston, Pahokee and Belle Glade, who rely on the industry's prosperity. Those folks are truly scared, and they made an impression on the visiting congressmen.

Big Sugar's other face was not so visible. Take the Fanjul family, for instance, which owns 170,000 acres of Okeechobee cane. Its tale is not such a humble tearjerker.

As heads of Flo-Sun, brothers Alfie and Pepe Fanjul have gotten grossly wealthy because the U.S. government lets them charge eight cents per pound above the world price for sugar, and imposes strict import quotas on foreign competitors.

Forbes magazine estimates the program enriches the Fanjuls by $65 million a year. Their combined fortune is said to exceed $500 million. They live luxuriantly in Palm Beach, and contribute heavily (and, up to now, productively) to both Democrats and Republicans.

Interestingly, the Cuban-born brothers have never applied for American citizenship. They keep Spanish passports, which means their foreign assets aren't subject to U.S. estate taxes.

Oh, it gets better.

Recently the Fanjuls discovered the benefits of minority set-aside programs. They own most of a financial company, FAIC Securities, that's getting a cut of the juicy municipal bond business from Dade and Broward.

Set-asides were conceived to help local minority-owned firms compete with underwriting giants such as Merrill Lynch. Broward finance director Phillip Allen told Forbes it was "irrelevant" that the Fanjuls were non-citizen multimillionaires.

It's naive to think that the anti-sugar sentiment in Congress was born of righteous indignation. The impetus for "reform" comes mainly from candy makers, soft drink companies and other commercial users of sugar.

Big Sugar's supporters contend that eliminating price supports won't help consumers, and they're right. Coca-Cola isn't famous for passing its savings along to shoppers.

The best argument for axing the price supports is fairness. If Congress is slashing welfare, the blade ought to come down as brutally on corporate moochers as on social programs.

The sugar barons always howl about doom and disaster. They cried the same way when they were told to clean up the water they dump in the Everglades.

The truth is, they won't go out of business unless they choose to. A glimpse of the Fanjuls' lifestyle is glittering proof that Big Sugar isn't a struggling, shoestring operation.

Killing the price guarantees undoubtedly would have a major impact, and probably lead to a radical paring of expenses. For starters, the sugar barons could save millions by cutting back on lawyers, lobbyists, yachts, polo ponies.

Whoa. Now we're really talking disaster.

Sugar barons' campaign: Not sweet but low November 10, 1996

Big Sugar did a masterful job of crushing the penny-a-pound tax amendment. All it took were $24 million and a stupendous pack of lies.

With ammo like that, it would be possible to convince a majority of voters that dogs have wings.

Political campaigns are often orgies of deception, but the battle over Amendment 4 set a grimy new benchmark. Twisting the truth is commonplace in election years; abandoning it completely is unusual.

That's what happened when the sugar barons decided their only hope of victory was to scare and confuse the public. The best way to do that was to make stuff up, and they did a brilliant, if despicable, job.

As a result, there are people walking around Florida today who actually believe they would have paid the penny-per-pound sugar tax instead of the growers.

Because that's what Big Sugar told them over and over on TV It was the largest of many lies aimed at a stratum of voters who might be charitably described as impressionable.

The manner in which the sugar industry defeated the penny-tax proposal is relevant only for what it means to the Everglades, which would have been the beneficiary of Amendment 4.

Since the referendum, which cost a stupefying $36 million, both sides have been talking vaguely about mending fences and getting down to the urgent task of cleaning up South Florida's water.

U.S. Sugar, in particular, has indicated a willingness to move ahead in harmony with conservationists. It would be great news, if it were true. The question is, how can you believe a word these guys say?

Look at the execrable campaign they just ran. Look at the avalanche of lawsuits they've unleashed to block or delay key facets of Everglades restoration.

On the other hand, you've got to wonder if the sugar barons are tired of being portrayed as the Antichrists of the environment. These aren't stupid people. Cynical and ruthless, to be sure—but not stupid.

They know most Floridians want their wetlands pure and protected. The lopsided vote in favor of Amendment 5, which requires polluters to pay for Everglades cleanup, was a sharp reminder of the public's passion on that subject.

As a matter of fact, environmentalists hope to use Amendment 5 to pry more money out of the sugar industry. At the same time, EPA Chief Carol Browner says the feds want Big Sugar to fork over a bigger share.

Last week's impressive victory at the polls didn't get the sugar barons out of the political woods, nor did it improve their image. If they hope to hang onto their lucrative price supports, they need to appear more concerned about their waste water. They need to appear more reasonable and responsible.

And they need to make more friends. Cooperating actively with the Everglades cleanup would win them many.

Conservation groups should be similarly motivated to sit down at the bargaining table. The first incentive is economic—lawsuits and political campaigns are a drain of precious resources.

The second incentive is time, which is running out for our watershed. The sooner the replumbing begins, the better the chance of a successful restoration.

Many environmentalists acknowledge that nobody wins if Big Sugar bails out of Florida. Properly filtered, agricultural runoff is less damaging to the Everglades than the fallout from urban encroachment.

There's no reason why the farms can't stay and the great river can't be repaired and replenished. Let's hope the next $36 million is spent on the water, not on television commercials.

Everglades National Park 50th Anniversary Homage to a magical place October 19, 1997

The cabin hung on wooden stilts in a marsh pond, the stilts rising up through lily pads as big as hubcaps.

Getting there was tricky but my friends Andy and Matt knew the way—gunning a johnboat down subtle and sinuous trails, the sawgrass whisking against the hull. If you were foolish enough to stick out your hand, it came back bleeding.

The stalks were so high and thick that they parted like a curtain when we plowed through. The boat's bow acted as a scoop, picking up gem-green chameleons and ribbon snakes and leopard frogs. By the time we reached the cabin, we'd usually have spider webs on our heads, and sometimes the spiders themselves.

We were kids, and it was fantastic. It was the Everglades.

One night we stood on the canted porch and watched tiny starbursts of color in the distant sky. At first we couldn't figure out what they were, and then we remembered: It was the Fourth of July. Those were fireworks over the city of Fort Lauderdale.

But we were so far away that all we could hear was the peeping of frogs and the hum of mosquitoes and the occasional trill of an owl. We didn't need to be told it was a magical place. We didn't need to be reminded how lucky we were.

I don't know if the old shack is still standing in Conservation Area 1B, but the eastward view certainly isn't the same. Instead of starlight you now get the glow from the Sawgrass Mills mall, a humongous Ford dealership and, absurdly, the crown of a new pro hockey arena.

We wouldn't have thought it possible, three teenagers gazing across wild country that swept to all horizons. Ice hockey on the doorstep of the Everglades! We couldn't have imagined such soulless incongruity and blithering greed.

Fortunately, somebody was smarter than we were. Somebody 30 years earlier had realized that the most imposing of natural wonders, even a river of grass, could be destroyed if enough well-financed intruders set their minds to it.

And somebody also understood that Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties would inevitably grow westward as haphazardly as fungus, and with even less regard for their mother host.

So that, politically, the only part of the Everglades that could be set aside for true preservation was its remote southernmost spur, and not without a battle. As impenetrable as the area appeared, speculators nonetheless mulled ways to log it, plow it, mine it or subdivide it.

That the U.S. Congress and state Legislature ever went along with the idea of an Everglades National Park remains astounding, 50 years after its dedication.

Nature helped its own cause. Hurricanes hammered South Florida in the 1930s and 1940s, so most land grabbers weren't in the market for more submerged acreage. It was hard enough hawking the soggy, stamp-sized lots they already had.

Seasonal flooding and fires had become such a threat to coastal development that extravagant technology was being directed toward a radical solution: containing and controlling all water near the farms and newly sprouted towns.

Thus preoccupied, most entrepreneurs remained wary of the buggy, moccasin-infested wetlands below the Tamiami Trail. That particular wilderness was, if not unconquerable, presumed not worth the high cost of conquering.

So in 1947 there came to be a spectacular national park, 1.3 million acres and destined to grow.

Ironically, it wasn't long afterwards that the rest of the Everglades, an area five times the size of the park, came under attack from the dredge and the bulldozer—a methodical and arrogant replumbing. Hundreds of miles of canals and dikes were gouged through the sawgrass meadows, pond apple sloughs and cypress heads.

Once the big "water management" project got under way, not enough people considered what might happen to the park itself, to the south. Too few understood its vascular, life-or-death connection to the sugarcane fields of Clewiston, the limerock mines of Medley or the tomato farms of Homestead.

As a consequence, hundreds of millions of dollars are today being requisitioned to undo the damage and "restore" both the flow and purity of the Everglades. Nowhere in the world has such a massive, complex hydrological repair been attempted. If by some miracle it succeeds, your children and their children probably will never run out of clean water.

And, as a fine bonus, they might get to see a healthier Everglades National Park.

As vulnerable and anemic as it is, the park remains impressive and occasionally awesome; still rightfully mentioned in the same breath with Yellowstone and Grand Canyon.

Visually, its beauty is of an inverse dimension, for the Glades are as flat as a skillet, the trees mostly tangled and scrubby, the waters slow and dark. The monotony of its landscape can be a deception, as endless and uninviting as arctic tundra.

But for anyone finding themselves on that long two-lane road to Flamingo when the sun comes up, there's no place comparable in the universe.

True, the Everglades have no regal herds of elk or buffalo to halt tourist traffic—you might briefly be delayed by a box turtle plodding across the blacktop, or by a homely opossum. Yet for the matchless diversity of its inhabitants, the park is truly unique.

That's because it is essentially the tailing-out of a great temperate river, transformed on its southerly glide from freshwater prairies to an immense salty estuary, Florida Bay.

Entering by canoe at Shark River, you would be among woodpeckers and mockingbirds, alligators and bullfrogs, garfish and bass, white-tailed deer and possibly otters. Most of them you wouldn't see, but they'd be there.

And by the time you finished paddling—at Cape Sable or Snake Bight or the Ten Thousand Islands—you would have also been among roseate spoonbills and white pelicans, eels and mangrove snakes, sawfish and redfish and crusty loggerhead turtles.

Buffaloes are grand, but name another park that harbors panthers at one end and hammerhead sharks at the other. Name another park where, on a spring morning, it's possible to encounter bald eagles, manatees, a jewfish the size of a wine cask, an indigo snake as rare as sapphire, and even a wild pink flamingo.

I feel blessed because the park's southern boundary reaches practically to my back door. One June evening, I walked the shore of a mangrove bay and counted four crocodile nests; in a whole lifetime most Floridians will never lay eyes on one. Another afternoon, in July, I helped tag and release a young green turtle, a seldom-seen species that once teetered toward extinction.

And only weeks ago, near Sandy Key, I saw a pod of bottle-nosed dolphins doing spectacular back-flips for no other reason but the joy of it. Nobody was there to applaud or snap pictures; the dolphins were their own best audience, exactly as it ought to have been.

Such moments are remarkable if you consider what has happened to the rest of South Florida in the past half a century. It seems miraculous that the Everglades haven't been completely parched, poached or poisoned to stagnation by the six million people who've moved in around them.

The more who come, the more important the national park becomes—not only as a refuge for imperiled wildlife but as a symbolic monument for future human generations; one consecrated place that shows somebody down here cared, somebody understood, somebody appreciated.

A fantastic place from which your children and their children will, if they're lucky, never see the lights of an outlet mall or a car lot or a ridiculous hockey stadium. Just starburst glimpses of birds and baby gators and high-flying dolphins.

Lawmakers sell Glades down river May 7, 1998

To cap off the most worthless legislative session in recent memory, Florida lawmakers passed two last-minute bills that could sabotage Everglades restoration.

They rammed one through under the phony banner of property rights, but it's not your property or your rights they care about. It's Big Sugar's.

The new law substantially jacks up the cost of the Everglades project by requiring land purchases to be negotiated under the state's condemnation law, instead of the U.S. government's. That lets large landowners stiff taxpayers for attorney fees, consultants and witness expenses.

Many millions of dollars will be added to the price of land needed to reconstruct South Florida's freshwater drainage system. The chief beneficiary of this latest gouging would be Flo-Sun, the sugar conglomerate with vast holdings near Lake Okeechobee.

A relatively small chunk of cane acreage is essential to the Everglades puzzle, which is why water managers want to purchase it. Thanks to lawmakers, Flo-Sun now stands to make an even fatter-than-usual killing.

The rip-off has a perversely splendid irony. Big Sugar spent decades using the Everglades as its toilet, and receiving U.S. subsidies all the while. Now that it's time to help clean up the mess, the sugar barons don't want to play by Uncle Sam's rules.

Oh, they're happy to take federal bucks for their property, but they don't want the feds to limit how much.

So: First we pay the sugar tycoons while they're polluting our water supply. Then we pay them even more for selling us back what they screwed up in the first place. And who says welfare is dead?

The Flo-Sun bill is such egregious larceny that it has been attacked by two local congressmen, Democrat Peter Deutsch and Republican E. Clay Shaw, who both fear it will drive the cost of Everglades restoration so high as to cripple it.

The last hope lies with Gov. Lawton Chiles, who with a stroke of the pen should snuff the Flo-Sun giveaway, along with another disastrous bill pushed by U.S. Sugar and adopted in the Legislature's final craven moments.

That measure gives lawmakers a virtual item-by-item veto over all future changes to the Everglades project, even if no state funds are involved. It's plainly designed to subvert the comprehensive study of South Florida's watershed now being completed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Remember that the Corps and the South Florida Water Management District were empowered by Congress to replumb and repurify the Everglades—an enormous engineering project to which every taxpayer in America is contributing.

The last and worst thing to happen would be another layer of interference—not just extra bureaucracy, but grubby political meddling that could bring the restoration process to a grinding halt.

It's no surprise that Big Sugar, like Big Tobacco, is scared by what's happening lately in Washington, D.C. It's also no surprise that cane growers are turning for a bailout to their favorite slobbering lapdogs, the state politicians in Tallahassee.

Historically, the Legislature has been a faithful friend to Big Sugar and most major agricultural interests. Anything they wanted to dump in our drinking water or spray on the ground was pretty much OK with lawmakers, which is one reason our rivers, bays and estuaries are so sick today.

Allowing the Legislature to now appoint itself chief caretaker of the Everglades would be like putting Ted Kaczynski in charge of the postal service.

If Chiles doesn't do something, the Everglades Forever Act is doomed to be another hollow promise. They'll need to rename it Big Sugar Forever.

Masterpiece foretold a legacy May 17, 1998

It was the first Friday this century that the Everglades awoke without Marjory Stoneman Douglas. In the bay where the great river empties, the sun rose vermillion over the Calusa Keys and hung there fixed like some holy ornament, ember-bright in a lavender rim of haze.

Near Whipray Basin an osprey enthroned on a wooden stake flared its wings and scanned the shallows for breakfast. Snowy egrets and blue herons high-stepped grassy banks in search of shrimp. Lemon sharks and spinners prowled the channels.

Closer to the mainland, at a place called Snake Bight, lives a flock of rare wild flamingos, pink and skittish confetti in the mangroves. Not far away a creek mouth is patrolled by several lean alligators and a single plump crocodile. At times the mullet run so thick that the water froths with predation.

Such spectacular eruptions of life and death—all flowing from one river that's a choking wisp of its old self; a river that by every scientific measure is dying itself. It might have been dead already, dried up and perhaps even plowed, were it not for the ardor of Marjory Stoneman Douglas.

You know about her book; a monumental book, The Everglades: River of Grass. But how many important books are published, acclaimed and then forgotten? For Douglas, her masterpiece wasn't the culmination of a life's work, but the beginning.

The book came out in November, 1947, a month before the dedication of Everglades National Park. What a park, too, the entire lush tip of the Florida peninsula, preserved forever! How easy it would have been for Douglas and her cohorts to congratulate themselves and let it end there, with that grand achievement.

But she was unlike many journalists. She owned a grown-up attention span. Even after the book became celebrated she remained not only intrigued by her subject, but passionate about it.

And she knew from science and common sense that the park alone wasn't enough, and would in fact be reduced to baked tundra and slime ponds if the rest of the Everglades was not similarly protected. She kept writing books, of course, but she also sent letters and made speeches and generally raised hell.

Long crucial years went by when not enough folks took notice, particularly those in Tallahassee and Washington. Meanwhile, the Everglades went from fire to flood to drought, and more and more of its water was siphoned for new cities, subdivisions and farms.

Douglas was discouraged, but never beaten. The older she got, the stronger and more insistent her voice became. Finally in the '705, when water woes began to jeopardize development, politicians discovered the Everglades.

And here's what they learned: A broad and avid constituency already existed, thanks to some blunt-spoken, floppy-hatted old woman who wrote a book a long time ago. Lots of people, it seemed, already cared about the Everglades. They wanted very much to save it.

So suddenly every Tom, Dick, and Corner who ran for office in Florida was waxing lyrical about Mrs. Douglas' river of grass. In shirtsleeves they pilgrimmed to Coconut Grove for a prized private audience and, if they were lucky, a photograph.

Because a photograph with the famous lady herself was worth votes. This they'd figured out, these genius politicians: People really loved those Everglades. How about that?

Douglas, naturally, used such occasions to make plain her skepticism. Do more, she would say. Do it faster. Being an icon was tolerable only because she could be an icon with teeth.

So part of her must have been pleased, after half a century of gnashing, when billions of dollars finally were pledged to fix the whole works, from Lake Okeechobee to the Ten Thousand Islands.

Can they be "restored?" Impossible. Patched up, cleaned up, re-jiggered—maybe. Shamefully little has been done so far, but Douglas leaves vocal legions who promise to keep the heat on.

She wasn't a misty-eyed dreamer but a wary realist. She understood the slagpit of politics, and what was needed to make a ripple. And she would not have continued fighting to the age of 109 if she'd believed the cause was lost.

Undoubtedly she would have found pleasure in the warmth of Friday's teasing sunrise over Florida Bay, and in the skittering baitfish and aristocratic wading birds and all-embracing solitude. But she'd also have reminded us that what we were seeing, no matter how singularly exquisite, was but a waning shadow of what existed not so long ago, in the slow blink of earth-time.

The last chapter of Marjory Stoneman Douglas' book is called "The Eleventh Hour," and in it she warns of time running out. "There is a balance in man … " she wrote 51 years ago, "one which has set against his greed and his inertia and his foolishness; his courage, his will, his ability slowly and painfully to learn and to work together."

To do more, in other words. To never give up.