Kabuki Theater: Former Senator Bob Graham, on Everglades Restoration ... by gimleteye

"Everglades Restoration: Can this marriage be saved?" is the question asked by former US senator Bob Graham (Democrat), the living political icon most closely associated with government efforts to save the River of Grass.

In a Miami Herald editorial, Graham blames the Florida legislature for extremism in the 2011 session that eviscerated environmental protections and budgets. He might have added that the main funders of political campaigns: Associated Industries, the Florida Chamber of Commerce, the builders, realtors, and speculators were rubbing their hands with glee at the time. ("If we knew it would be this easy to decapitate environmental regulations, we would have crashed the economy a long time ago.") Graham cites draconian cuts to science and administrative protections endorsed by Gov. Rick Scott (Republican). He sidesteps the fact that Scott funded his way to the governor's mansion without a jot of knowledge about Florida's environment or the deformed politics targeting protections put in place through broad bipartisan support in earlier generations of the legislature.

Indeed Graham's editorial is better viewed as Kabuki drama, although one has to be well versed in the form that has unfolded over decades to recognize the points. That is the key point about Kabuki, a thousand year old tradition of Japanese drama where every plot point and character is well known to the audiences. (continued...)

Graham emphasizes the economic benefits of Everglades restoration, a refrain as well worn and threadbare as any in the past twenty years. Whenever there has been doubt about the economic benefits of protecting Florida's Everglades, it has been because too much money was being made by polluters and speculators at the edges of the River of Grass. Now that land speculation crashed and burned along with bankers and production home builders, the same mask is pulled out, and its use will follow the same script as it has in the past.

Graham emphasizes positive steps that have been made to advance Everglades restoration while lightly dancing around "occasional vacillations in the specific steps necessary to accomplish this objective." In recent months, the Scott administration has taken steps to sidestep the devastation wrought by Scott's indifference, including the evisceration of the Florida Department of Community Affairs-- a point Graham's editorial omits.  In fairness, there is concern that negative reports on the Everglades will hurt funding.

On the other hand, sugar coating comes naturally to Florida politics. It was Graham's own role fronting for Big Sugar and the Fanjul billionaires in 1992 that lead to decades of distorting science to serve a highly engineered fraud at the center of Everglades restoration-- 333 aquifer storage and recovery wells-- a colossal embarrassment that should never have been adopted but was, because delay serves the profit motive of Big Sugar.

A Kabuki history of the Everglades would detail this dismal charade, involving the US Army Corps of Engineers, South Florida Water Management District, and Florida Department of Environmental Protect as well as the biggest advocate for highly mechanized water supply in Florida, former Governor Jeb Bush.

So far as the "marriage" between federal and state partners is concerned-- a marriage that Jeb Bush and Bill Clinton presided over in January 2001 on the same day the US Supreme Court decided Bush v. Gore--the only way to judge the results is to answer the question: is water reaching the Everglades from outfalls of sugar farms and cities any closer to meeting the 10 parts per billion phosphorous standard established as the drop-dead maximum limit than it was in 1990, when the late Gov. Lawton Chiles said, enough is enough? Not so far.

The greatest hope for progress for the Everglades was during the Charlie Crist administration, when Gov. Crist announced the acquisition of US Sugar lands. Yes, the Crist deal was expensive, but the true cost of failure in the Everglades is incalculable. As it was, the backlash by the sugar industry helped elected Marco Rubio to the US Senate and thus propelled him to consideration as a potential VP choice for the 2012 Republican presidential ticket. The worst moment for Florida environmentalists was Gov. Rick Scott dismantling the deal.

Today another deal is brewing between the state and the federal government. That is the backdrop of the Graham editorial in the Herald. The legislature has a role to play. So far it has been only the role of villain. The Florida legislature has never lifted a finger to enact the constitutional referendum supported by a majority of Florida voters in 1996 calling for the polluters of the Everglades to shoulder 100 percent of the costs of cleaning up their pollution. Meanwhile, the county commission in Miami-Dade county pushes for the expansion of SR 836 at the edge of the Everglades to bail out the campaign financiers/ bankers. Pay attention: the Everglades shows us, first; in this web of life everything is connected and second,  only a little poison rips it all to bits and pieces.

(In the interest of disclosure, I am president of Friends of the Everglades, an organization that is co-plaintiff in litigation against the US EPA in the courtroom of Judge Alan S. Gold.)