A Stillness in the Glades

At the western end of the drought-parched Tamiami Trail, grass fires burned from horizon to horizon, and the sun was nearly blotted out by the bitter brown haze. Smog shrouded Miami, and acrid smoke choked much of the rest of southern Florida. The magnificent Everglades National Park--the timeless, endless "river of grass"--was drying up like a farmer's mudhole in August, and the smallest spark quickly turned into a blaze.

Giant alligators fought for space in the shrinking ponds, or else sought moisture by burrowing into the mud. Schools of bream and bass flopped listlessly in ever shallower hideaways, attracting great white herons from their natural seashore habitat. Vultures and buzzards, turning endlessly in the sky, were glutted by the carnage, leaving to park rangers the unsavory task of carting away thousands of putrid fish.

Upset Equation. Disaster--through drought, hurricane, fire or flood--is nothing new to the Everglades, and may even be part of nature's balancing equation. In recent years, however, man has upset that equation, raising the question whether drought may not be the permanent future of the Everglades. Vast reclamation projects have turned swamps into bean, corn and sugar-cane fields, which not only partly block the natural flow of the Everglades "river" from its headwaters in Lake Okeechobee, but also have first claim on the area's water resources. When water is short, little if any is now left over for the wilderness. Immune for centuries to permanent damage from natural disaster, the great park, a constant wonder to nearly 1,000,000 visitors a year, may be destroyed by man.

The eventual solution might be to build more storage areas to hold the precious water and to give the park better access to Okeechobee's supply. In partial answer, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has belatedly awarded a contract for a canal that would move water directly from Okeechobee toward the glades.

Meanwhile, the only hope is rain: south Florida had not had any significant rainfall in more than seven weeks.

No one knows for sure how much of the park's wildlife--unlike that found in any other spot in North America--has already been lost. Park Superintendent Roger Allin estimates that the wading-bird population, which includes herons, egrets, storks, ibis and spoonbills, has dropped from 1,500,000 in the '30s to perhaps 35,000 now. Alligators and other reptiles have probably suffered a similar decline. "It's a long-term thing," says a ranger. "Over the past years, it's just gotten awful still out there."

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