Jets v. Everglades

A national park is an outdoor gallery of nature's wonders, complexities and harmonies. But unlike a museum, a park is not independent of its surroundings. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Florida Everglades National Park, an aquatic wilderness of 1.4 million acres and one of America's last refuges of solitude. Precisely because it is linked to intricate webs of life around it, the park may now be doomed by the rising water needs of Florida's farms and cities, plus the construction of a mammoth jetport a few miles away. The result has made the Everglades a battleground between conservationists and developers--and a testing ground for U.S. environmental policies.

America's only subtropical national park is a multitude of habitats--inland pine sloughs, vast saw grass savannahs, hardwood hammocks and coastal mangroves with myriad islands and canals. It is a refuge of 22 endangered species, including the bald eagle, osprey, snowy egret, Florida panther and alligator. Each year, more than a million visitors peer from trails and catwalks at the antics of exotic herons, bitterns and roseate spoonbills. They are mystified by the anhinga, a prehistoric bird that must spread and dry its wings after diving for fish, or drown from lack of natural-body-oil protection. On rare occasions, they glimpse the manatee--a huge sea cow that sailors once imagined to be a mermaid.

The fate of the Everglades is absolutely dependent on water. Each year, 153.5 billion gallons flow through the swamps as a strange kind of river, less than a foot deep and up to 50 miles wide. Changes in the water's quality, quantity and seasonal rhythms endanger the park's incredibly diverse plants and wildlife. And yet, for the past two decades, nearby flood-control projects have steadily dehydrated the glades by diverting water to crop land, commercial and industrial use. The Everglades, explains Park Superintendent Jack Raftery, "is a demonstration that no natural region can be divorced from its surroundings."

Since 1949, the Army Corps of Engineers has created 1,400 miles of canals in the Everglades area. The canals regularly divert billions of gallons of water into the Atlantic after irrigating crops just northeast of the park in Dade and Broward Counties. No reasonable conservationist would sacrifice those crops. But the Interior Department claims that during recent droughts, the water balance was needlessly struck in favor of agriculture, while thousands of fish, birds and animals died in the park. After long bureaucratic squabbling, the Army Corps of Engineers has agreed in principle to supply the Everglades with sufficient water, regardless of other future demands. But the agreement has not yet been carried out.

Crippling Blow. As if dehydration were not enough, the park ecosystem is now threatened by plans for an airport six miles from its northern border. Conservationists fear the effects of jet noise, exhaust fallout, fuel and oil spills. They also shudder at the prospect of helter-skelter development around the airport resulting in pollution from sewage, insecticides and fertilizer runoff.

The plan of the Dade County Port Authority does indeed loom as the crippling blow. Paying private landowners an average price of only $180 an acre, the Port Authority last year quietly began to acquire 39 square miles on the edge of Big Cypress Swamp, which supplies 38% of the park's water. As originally stated, the purpose was to build a "training" jetport for five airlines, whose landing fees will finance a $10 million bond issue for the first runway, which Eastern Air Lines will open next month. Able to handle the new super jets due in 1970, the field will divert up to 200,000 training flights a year from congested Miami International Airport.

Superintendent Raftery thinks that the park can accommodate a training field, but not a commercial airport and a projected community of 1,000,000 people. By now, though, Dade County envisages more runways soon and by 1980, the nation's biggest commercial airport, covering more land than the entire city of Miami. Equally enthusiastic, the U.S. Transportation Department has granted $700,000 to develop the first runway, and to look into high-speed ground transportation, such as a monorail train and air-cushion vehicles running between the jetport and Miami.

The Port Authority has proposed a 750-ft.-wide corridor from Miami to Naples, and highway planners are "dotting in" roads that would further upset the park's water cycle. When completed, the jetport itself would displace some 200 Mikasuki Indians, who were guaranteed a small area in which to continue their tribal ways and colorful rituals. Superintendent Raftery and an Interior lawyer also contend that a clause in the Transportation Act required a study of alternatives as well as proposals to prevent or minimize environmental damages. Raftery argues that Transportation ignored the clause. Instead, he says, the agency encouraged a project that may well cause "unalterable and irreparable damage."

To repair its image, the Dade County Port Authority recently hired former Interior Secretary Stewart L. Udall and his new environmental-consulting firm, Overview Group, to study the impact of an airport and seek alternatives. Udall says that he refused to take the job until the Port Authority promised to freeze jetport construction after the first runway, and showed itself sincerely open-minded on optional sites for a commercial terminal. "We are not going to justify a decision already made," said Udall. "We're hoping to establish planning parameters for the entire southern Florida environment." But Port Director Alan C. Stewart, an affable former flight controller, seems as closed-minded as ever. His job is "fostering aviation, not festering it." Aviation employs 70,000 people around Miami; the new airport would eventually create 60,000 new jobs and three times that in related employment. "I'm more interested in people than alligators," says Stewart. "This is the ideal place as far as aviation is concerned."

Basic Policy. Some officials feel that the jetport may violate the Federal Airport Act, which allows federal grants only to airports used by the public. The training jetport, at least, is no such thing. In addition, the soon-to-be-released results of a joint study by Interior and Transportation officials will show that ecological damage from an airport would be devastating. Senator Henry Jackson, Chairman of the Senate Interior Committee, will also soon release a report on the Everglades. It will recommend that Congress pass new legislation toward a national land-use policy, refusing federal grants to states that do not develop their own zoning and development guidelines to protect the environment. Jackson also feels that buffer zones should be considered to protect national parks.

Alternate airport sites are being studied on state property in Broward County to the north and Homestead Air Force Base to the southeast. But any solution will involve complicated tradeoffs. Furthermore, the division between federal agencies now appears so deep that final action will have to be taken by President Nixon. The Everglades decision may well set his Administration's basic policy toward environmental abuses. As Senator Gaylord Nelson, the Wisconsin Democrat, wrote in a recent letter to the White House: "It is a test of whether or not we are really committed in this country to protecting our environment."

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