Voters Should Be Alarmed By Everglades "Wins" Masking "Failures" ... by gimleteye

Everglades landscape, photo by Clyde Butcher

Everglades National Park is austere. It speaks to people who will listen to its silence and in the echo of absence. It speaks volumes of heart-break, and of the wrong course and wrong direction in American politics and culture today.

What a visitor sees in the Everglades; the sawgrass prairies, lush hardwood hammocks, and the incomparable majesty of Florida Bay are not quite "diminished" or "faded" or "on life support". The Everglades are those and much more. Its casual visitor and enthusiast, alike, cannot glean what is happening to Everglades National Park by just looking.

The Everglades is more than a cautionary tale. In its damaged state it reflects our own broken promises. Here rests a diabetic who sneaks candy bars at midnight: we warned you but you go and do it anyway.

Today, wealthy and powerful special interests are re-writing the history of the Everglades. It begins with our national park system. The writer Wallace Stegner said, “National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst."

Broadly speaking, the Trump White House is dismantling federal authority for our national parks and energizing their disintegration by refusing to adequately fund infrastructure to maintain or restore them. Trump's inattention is piling on the results of past administrations and Congressional budgets, steered by GOP priorities, that undermined our national parks. That, it so happens, also fits neatly into the ambitions of the stakeholders who control the Florida legislature and the Governor's Mansion.

They are specifically targeting the Everglades and the history of restoration efforts involving generations of hard-working, dedicated scientists and conservationists and millions of Americans who treasure the Everglades. Some say, not so fast. The state is moving along a path to create a $2 billion, massive reservoir just above Everglades National Park to reduce toxic discharges to estuaries and to provide cleaner water to the Everglades, to the cities, and to Big Sugar. They say, be grateful for what you have.

Yesterday, the Miami Herald underlined what, exactly, we have in Everglades National Park today: a the decrepit state of infrastructure.

“They’re really starved,” New Jersey resident Tim Corlis said Tuesday after a quick stop by Everglades’ battered amphitheater as part of a bucket-list journey to visit all the nation’s parks. “We’re very cognizant that the park service does a tremendous amount, with almost nothing.”

The massive repair backlog is nothing new — the Everglades’ to-do list totaled $58 million under the Obama administration. But the Trump administration’s approach to the nation’s wild lands, from shrinking monuments and clearing the way for drilling and mining, to slashing spending in a proposed budget, is setting off alarms. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke wants to cut the National Parks Service budget by nearly $300 million and eliminate more than 1,200 jobs — meaning 90 percent of the nation’s parks would lose staff.

Rather than ask Congress to address the $11.3 billion national maintenance backlog, the administration is also proposing doubling entrance fees at 17 popular parks during their five busiest months, angering park advocates who say the plan could backfire if higher costs drive away visitors. The administration has also ditched the nation’s efforts to address climate change, an issue especially critical to South Florida’s parks.

Earlier this month, 10 of the 12 members on the Service’s national advisory panel quit in protest, complaining that Zinke repeatedly refused to meet with them.

The crumbled infrastructure in Everglades National Park is the visible manifestation of a much deeper neglect. That neglect is based on the deliberate, willful policies of neglect -- not by the feds -- but by the state of Florida.

Look at the Everglades in granular specificity, and you will see a food chain has been exquisitely examined and studied by science. Downstream communities, in both the Florida Keys and along Florida's damaged estuaries on both coasts, are paying attention and awakening to the fact that public officials they elected to protect what they value are helping to tip the scales so that what they value is slowly, gradually and irrevocably diminished.

What is wrecking the ecology of the Everglades has been known for decades; that the gentle alteration of rainy and dry seasons delivered copious amounts of fresh water through a shallow water marsh ecosystem. It was the shallow nature of the Everglades, including deeper sloughs and troughs and islands accreting silt in the marsh, that provided the exact conditions for the flow of rainwater to nourish spectacular biodiversity higher in the food chain, from mats of periphyton to panthers, from shrimp and crab to roseate spoonbills, from mullet in the estuaries to giant tarpon in Florida Bay.

Science understands how the ecosystem operates, but humans who ordered and funded the science have proven politically unwilling to match its conclusions to what the Everglades needs. Not deep reservoirs. A bigger footprint for highly engineered, water storage and treatment marshes to clean up Big Sugar's pollution.

This partly explains why in the early 2000's, the state of Florida refused a co-equal role to the US Department of Interior in assessing the "progress" of Everglades restoration, an effort then estimated to cost taxpayers $6.7 billion and surely, now, triple that amount. The truest advocates for the Everglades ecosystem were federal scientists who represented the national interest to assess damage done by upstream water management practices directed by the state primarily to the benefit of a single special interest group: Big Sugar.

It is not just the Trump administration that has been at work undercutting the contribution of the national park system. The antagonism to federal environmental agencies was also a feature of George W. Bush's terms in the White House. Although Barack Obama made significant executive decisions to expand the footprint of public lands, the Republican Congress strongly opposed investment in the national parks and favored reducing budgets to a shoe-string.

Florida invested in the Everglades, but in ways that fundamentally asserted the privileges of polluters. Gov. Jeb Bush was ideologically opposed to a strong federal presence in the Everglades. Gov. Charlie Crist was an almost champion; negotiating a deal for the state to acquire 187,000 acres of lands owned by the Big Sugar co-cartel member: US Sugar Corporation owned by the descendants of Charles Stuart Mott. But the plan triggered a political backlash by the other co-cartel member: the Fanjul owned Florida Crystals. The Fanjuls destroyed Crist's chances to be US Senator in 2012 and elevated Rick Scott to the first of his two terms, in 2010. More than any governor in Florida history, Scott has been an enemy of Everglades restoration -- despite championing to the contrary.

One of his first acts as governor was axing the science capacity of the South Florida Water Management District. The same science capacity that the state used as an excuse to elbow out federal scientists from a co-equal role in assessing Everglades restoration in the early 2000's. Many capable, strong scientists have left or been forced out of their regulatory, science-based missions since Scott was elected.

There is benign neglect. There is also malignant, willful neglect. That willful neglect contaminates Scott's declaration of victory with a $2 billion reservoir, the centerpiece of Senate president Joe Negron's 2017 legislative agenda, without committing enough cleansing and water treatment marshes to make sure the reservoir can deliver clean, fresh water to the Everglades and to Florida Bay.

Based on the example of Everglades National Park, giving responsibility to the states for our national parks would be like handing  the treasury passcode to interests who all along profited by despoiling the kingdom.

The Everglades took many thousands of years to evolve. Man has undone God's creation in barely a century. Unless Gov. Rick Scott adds significant acreage to the reservoir plan, just north of a crown jewel of the national park system, the end of Everglades National Park is in sight. Critics of that point of view say, "Trust but verify" will see you through. But there is ample evidence that the diminished role of science and loss of expertise through budget cuts leaving agencies gasping, will strip the ability to verify, leaving elected officials to say anything and everything.

The crumbling infrastructure in Everglades National Park matches up to a much deeper problem: willfully disregarding what we know to be true yet refuse to protect.