The New York Times reported on June 17: "Everglades Offers Model for Massive Gulf Restoration, Says Senior Obama Administration Official". Really?
"A task force may be the solution, similar to the one that oversees the Everglades restoration effort, a project whose costs are split 50-50 between the state and federal government and that is managed by the Army Corps of Engineers and the South Florida Water Management District, an existing state agency. "In order to take those moneys and spend them in a more holistic way, it may take some legislation and certainly the formation of an interagency, Everglades-restoration-like coordinated team," said Lynn Scarlett, a former deputy secretary of the Interior."
But it may also take litigation. Why? Because successive administrations have gutted federal agencies charged with enforcing rules and regulations to protect the environment. Who is going to protect Gulf wetlands? The US EPA, that could have objected to wetland fill permits in counties surrounding the Everglades issued by the US Army Corps of Engineers in Florida, but over a course of many years did not reject a single one. The US Fish and Wildlife Service could have issued jeopardy opinions to protect critical species whose presence or absence in the Everglades is an indicator of health. The record shows that USFWS biologists who tried to protect the Florida panther were reprimanded or worse. The nation's science mapping agency, the USGS, is chronically underfunded and endemically subject to political pressure.
This result is exactly the preference of risk takers who have controlled Congress and the White House: limit federal authority in order to empower state and local levels of government. That is the story of Everglades restoration. But on those counts, both Florida and local regulatory authorities have been failures, run out of the back pockets of lobbyists and public officials who mastered the sound bite on the Everglades. The key metric of proof: the 2003 change to the phosphorous standard in the Jeb Bush Everglades "Whenever" Act, recently judged illegal in federal court. The bottom line: there is no political will to restore the Everglades in any timeframe that is meaningful to the living. Future generations, given the lapses of human character, could be expected to follow the same, well-beaten course.
Let the Obama administration do more than say the effort to restore the Gulf Coast will be a bigger, shinier version of Everglades restoration. Let the administration explain how it will not allow this mess to be decided twenty years from now by a future federal judge; a boy or girl who is likely now in grade school, learning the principles of democracy for the first time.
3 comments:
I'm sorry to keep repeating the same mantra from that pain-in-the-ass Constitution, but with respect to federal oversight of Everglades cleanup:
Amendment 10 - Powers of the States and People. Ratified 12/15/1791. Note
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
I've read the Constitution carefully, and it doesn't say shit about the Everglades or federal jurisdiction over environmentally sensitive areas.
If the state can't handle the job, it's up to us as voters, if it is our collective will, to elect politicians who can get the job done. If we cannot, it's our fault, no one else's.
This constant bleating for more federal oversight is staggeringly misinformed. Can anyone cite one federal program that hasn't become a fucked up morass of shit by the time they got done with it?
Check out "Gasland" on HBO. Dumbo.
What Everglades Restoration? That has to be the biggest scam that taxpayers have ever funded. There is no "restoration" going on anywhere, just lots of civil works projects for water supply for the lower east coast of FL.
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