Politics crush the Everglades... by gimleteye

In Sunday's Miami Herald, Ana Menendez writes a column about last week's visit by Senator John McCain to the Everglades. It is one of her best and has a pin-point hallucinatory feel entirely appropriate to the context. The press crew waited in the broiling heat for McCain and assembled dignitaries to speed by on an airboat labeled "Patriot". He passed by, gamely waving, and then was off.

"The adventure that began on a manmade spoil island near Miami Beach ended at an ecosystem that may be preserved one day for all posterity as a corporate-sponsored exhibit at Miami Children's Museum." I couldn't have said it better.

The Democrats sent out former Senator Bob Graham to deliver the talking points against eight years of unfulfilled Everglades promise in a mostly Republican Congress. Graham focused on the shortcomings of the omnibus Water Resources Development Act, that periodically sweeps up necessary environmental restoration projects like the Everglades in a torrent of pork barrel politics.

The best idea to emerge from the McCain visit was that the federal commitment to the Everglades needs its own stand alone bill. OK. But how will that happen with pressure from the Great Lakes, from Chesapeake Bay, from the California Delta region, from Narragansett Bay, to the Mississippi, and New York Harbor? All these are polluted ecosystems. In fact it's hard to name a single coastal estuary that our democratic institutions haven't trashed: not exactly a ringing testament to the democracy and freedom we intend to plant in other parts of the world.

The career of Florida's most distinguished Democrat, Bob Graham, has been defined by the Everglades. Still, with family wealth from dairy and sugar farming and development in former Everglades wetlands, the compromises that then Senator Graham advocated to "restore" the Everglades have not yielded much. Sure, Floridians wanted to drain part of the swamp so we could live here without worrying about getting wet in periodic, even devastating floods: but we didn't mean to kill off the whole thing--the estuaries where we fished, the Everglades that fed a fabulous panoramic landscape from bays to rivers and streams.

We wanted to save the Everglades, but politicians oversold the likely results of their labor and allowed campaign contributors to underbid the price for their support. Another way of saying, killing off the Everglades didn't take much money and there is no telling how much money it will take to restore the River of Grass, or, what's left of it.

Even when Senator Graham was founding the state program to save the Everglades, champions like Marjory Stoneman Douglas believed more, much more needed to be done. She was right to worry: what the Everglades teaches us is that the environment cannot withstand the predations of politics, or, of laws designed to leave so much wiggle room that every corporate interest from rock mining to sugar farming can say that they are really green at heart.

"We drifted slowly along. The senator's boat vanished only to mysteriously reappear behind us. And, before we could make sense of anything, the tour at Everglades Safari Park was over. McCain spoke briefly to the gathered press. 'The disappearance of the Everglades could have consequences that are enormous...' And then he was off to the airport." That Menendez paragraph is among the best I've read of first hand observation of Everglades politics.

Two terms of George Bush did very little for the Everglades. As Menendez observes, a miserable week in Iraq would pay for the federal government's promised share of the restoration. But George left the Everglades to Jeb, and Jeb spent money for sure, but it was a greenwashing job from the start, astroturfing the Everglades by guaranteeing that the cities and agriculture and rock miners would get their infrastructure needs. He wouldn't so much as look in the direction of dissenters.

Where were the Everglades advocates in the Republican Congress? The truth is: they were no where, not when their allegiances were so clearly defined by the interests that promoted and pimped the housing boom now in cinders.

Senator Mel Martinez, former HUD Secretary, was all about suburban sprawl-- just like the US House Representatives Mario Diaz Balart and Illeana Ros Lehtinen.

One of the really bad political events damaging the Everglades was splitting the Congressional district in 2002 that included the Florida Keys and the Greater Everglades. It had been one district, and one ably represented by then Broward Congressman Peter Deutsch, a Democrat. The 2002 Congressional redistricting was lead by Mario Diaz Balart, then a senior member of the Florida House of Representatives.

He and his colleagues and supporters, from the building industry--no surprise there--, carved a new district to include most of the Everglades for him. By splitting the district from the Florida Keys, did Diaz Balart care that Florida Bay--at the southern section of the Everglades ecosystem--had turned into a dirty, befouled sump for Everglades pollution? Of course not.

The mystery is Congresswoman Ileana Ros Lehtinen who has been ineffective in protecting her constituents in the Keys from the disaster of Florida Bay. It is a mystery because her husband, Dexter Lehtinen--the former US Attorney who brought much of the Everglades federal litigation and is now supported by Miccosoukee gambling money--is the impatient, imperious pitbull of the Everglades in federal court.

The litigation goes on and on and on. Big Sugar succeeded in its effort to remove Judge William Hoeveler from the federal court case. Government agencies have consistently lined up in Everglades related litigation on the side of polluters. Politics continue to crush the Everglades: from Big Sugar's political contributions to the development lobby's continued pressure. Once upon a time, the initial federal plan to restore the Everglades included a cost component for "public education". That disappeared in a heart-beat. To the extent that there is Everglades education these days, it is often scrubbed clean of criticism of politics that still are the only forum in which the public treasury can be tapped.

What you have now is spin: reams and reams of it from the US Army Corps of Engineers and the South Florida Water Management District. The public believes that the Everglades are being saved, because it has been said so many times.

Then director of Friends of the Everglades, Joe Podgor, famously uttered: "The Everglades is a test, if we pass we get to keep the planet." We're not passing the first test, by a long shot. When educator James Gustave Speth recently wrote of the threat of global warming, "It is time for civic unreasonableness", he might well have referred to Everglades restoration.

But none of that civic unreasonableness called for by Speth, a former chair of the White House Council of Environmental Quality, was on display during Senator McCain's visit to the Everglades as Florida and the nation head into a long, hot summer.