When Wayne Nelson, 88, died this week, the liquid heart of Florida -- Lake Okeechobeee- lost a fierce and knowledgeable advocate. Wayne was of a generation of modern-day Everglades activists; including, recently, the late Johnie Jones and his wife, Mariana, who were young in the 1940's and 1950's and experienced the Everglades firing on all cylinders.
Wayne was Korea War veteran and a retired air conditioning contractor whose advocacy for Lake Okeechobee
led all the way to the US Supreme Court. He began fishing in West Palm Beach and Lake Okeechobee in the 1960's. He organized one of the first bass fishing clubs in Florida and the small group, Fishermen Against the Destruction of the Environment. FADE was a co-plaintiff with Friends in federal Clean Water Act litigation challenging the South Florida Water Management District and Big Sugar. Wayne participated in the first meeting of the Everglades Coalition at Port of the Islands in 1984 and was once a member of the board of
Friends of the Everglades (of which I am now president).
Friends of the Everglades, Nelson's FADE, and other conservation groups brought citizen suits under the Clean Water Act against the US Environmental Protection Agency to require the South Florida Water Management District to obtain permits in order to discharge polluted canal water into Lake Okeechobee. These lawsuits had important implications for measuring pollution throughout the nation's waterways and not just the Everglades.)
This practice Wayne railed against is known as "back-pumping". Its purpose is to make sure that the 700,000 acres of the Everglades Agricultural Area -- dominated by Big Sugar-- are never too wet in rainy season. Back-pumping controls water levels on sugar land and through the extensive canal system, forcing water uphill as it were, against gravity, into Lake Okeechobee. The water management practices that deliver immense benefits and profits to sugar barons like the billionaire Fanjuls also deprive the natural system of the rainfall cycle that nourished the Everglades and Florida Bay with clean, fresh water at the right time of year.
The sugar billionaires howl when they are portrayed as environmental destroyers, but this year one company alone-- US Sugar-- harvested 7 million tons of sugarcane (750,000 tons more than they estimated) during a period of severe chronic drought in South Florida. This was the 2nd highest crop in the company's history. The Fanjul's Florida Crystals produced 671,977 tons in 2011-2012 compared to 545,596 the previous year.
The inequities scarcely stop there: according to the University of Florida, Florida sugar cane production, primarily in Palm Beach County, generates more that $800 million a year. ("Local sugarcane crop rebounds from weather troubles", April 16, 2012, Palm Beach Post) A recent analysis of increased valued a restored Everglades ecosystem at $46 billion. (
Mather Economics, "Measuring the Economic Benefits of America's Everglades Restoration", 2011) A recent study also funded by the Everglades Foundation concludes that agriculture only funds 24 percent of the costs while it is responsible for 76 percent of phosphorous pollution.
Wayne Nelson would launch his boat in Belle Glade and would fish through the weekend. "To get to the Lake," Nelson testified in a Friends' affidavit filed with federal court in 2011, "you have to cross the rim canal and enter the Lake through one of the cuts. I would typically see the pumping while I was going out to fish or coming back in from fishing and was traveling in the rim canal to the boat ramp. You can see the turbulence and tinged color of pumped water all the way across the rim canal and into the Lake."
Wayne Nelson was a fierce supporter of grass roots environmentalism. His friend, Jim Harvey, says, "If people were classified like naval ships, Wayne Nelson would be the Warrior Class. He never faltered to say it like he saw it. He believed in watching the ass not the lips to ascertain where things were going. You didn't go fishing with Wayne. He went, listening to him. He loved Lake Okeechobee and held no quarter or gave no quarter when it came to saving the Lake."
Wayne didn't seek out the spotlight. He could be cantankerous and prickly. But anyone who loved the Everglades, fought battles against industry pressure, endured endless delays by government, obfuscation, and false declarations of progress while the liquid heart of Florida turned into a sewer would be spewing comets and fury at the misdirection.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas, who founded Friends of the Everglades, counted Wayne Nelson among her friends. Like Wayne, Marjory was fiercely opposed to the domination of the Everglades by Big Sugar. Joe Podgor, former director of Friends, recounts how Wayne saved Marjory's life when she was nearly 100. "Wayne called me one night, worried about Marjory. He had spoken to her on the phone from West Palm Beach and he insisted that someone run over to her house in Coconut Grove immediately. I called Martha Hubbard who went straight over and discovered she was in the throes of food poisoning. She was treated in time at the hospital, recuperated, and carried on until 108 thanks to Wayne." At 103, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Bill Clinton.
"Water transfers of polluted, nutrient-rich water to Lake Okeechobee results in increased nutrient pollution in the Everglades system," Nelson said in his affidavit. "Nutrient pollution is one of the biggest threats to the Everglades today. Nitrogen and phosphorous from the canal waters feeds algae growth that chokes out sea grasses and other native plants. Algae also depletes oxygen, resulting in "dead zones" below the the surface where few native Everglades species survive. Invasive flora and fauna are increasingly taking over the niches created by the degredation of the water quality in the Everglades."
It has been nearly thirty years since the historic agreement between the federal government and state of Florida to end the pollution of the Everglades, and its results keep a permanent incumbency in place; from local county commissions, to the state legislature -- that still refuses to hold Big Sugar accountable for the costs of its pollution and won't even impose the most rudimentary system to honestly account for polluting farming practices -- to Congress and the White House.
"We don`t need any more studies of Lake Okeechobee or the Everglades," Nelson told the Sun Sentinel in 1988. "We know what the problems are and we know what the solutions are. We need action. The farmers are hiding behind (government agencies they control)." ("Lake Okeechobee Scientific Group Back In Business", Orlando Sentinel, July 14, 1988)
Wayne knew that the environmental warriors were badly outmatched by the Great Destroyers, and he understood the clock was ticking. He didn't stand for niceties; he wanted environmentalists to do more and he had no tolerance for waving banners. He strongly believed that grass roots organizations were the key. Jim Harvey says, "He was pure passion and "old school" on freedom of speech. He hated equivocation and figured political correctness was being accurate. Period. He was in the truest sense, an egalitarian warrior with little regard for large national environmental groups that danced around to keep the Everglades ball in play."
Wayne Nelson just wanted to go fishing, and it made him angry that pollution deprived him, Florida and the nation of that opportunity. Nelson told the Sun Sentinel in 1990: "Reagan missed the boat when he called Russia the Evil Empire". Thrusting a finger toward the sugar cane farms ringing Lake Okeechobee, he said, "I'll tell you where the goddamn Evil Empire is... it's out there!" (A Sweet Deal Has Become The Source Of A Bitter Poison, The Sugar Dynasty, Sept. 16, 1990) And it still is.
