Last Gasp for the Everglades

By James Carney

Once it was a forbidding wilderness of marshland and saw grass that had to be drained and tamed before southern Florida could realize its rich potential. Today the Everglades -- what is left of it -- is surrounded by an urban sprawl of 4.5 million people. Thriving sugarcane farms carved out of its northern reaches drain pollutants into its water; Air Force jets boom over its skies. The 1.4 million-acre Everglades National Park, created in 1947, has become an endangered relic in the nation's fourth most populous state. "Make no mistake," says outgoing park superintendent Michael Finley, "the Everglades is dying."

But not without a fight. Last fall, while candidate George Bush was proclaiming himself an environmentalist, the Republican U.S. Attorney in Miami sued the state of Florida for breaking its own laws by pumping pollutants onto federal lands. State officials, including Republican Governor Bob Martinez, were stunned. Florida's farmers, who harvest nearly half the cane sugar produced in the U.S. and contribute $2 billion a year to the state economy, cried foul. In the past month the battle intensified when the South Florida Water Management District, the main defendant in the suit, proposed a new pollution-control plan aimed at persuading U.S. Attorney Dexter Lehtinen to back off. Lehtinen's reply: "We are going forward with the litigation aggressively." The battle may drag on for years and end up as the most expensive environmental lawsuit ever.

If successful, the suit could be a landmark for national parks trying to reach outside their boundaries to protect their ecosystems. The "river of grass," as the Everglades was named by naturalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas, is one of the largest wetlands systems in the world, and the most imperiled. Despite the protection of the national park, the population of wading birds has dropped from more than 2.5 million in the 1930s to 250,000. Thirteen Everglades animals are now endangered species. Only about 30 Florida panthers remain, and in recent years several have been killed on roads cutting through the area. Half the original Everglades has been lost to development. Now the biggest threat comes not from bulldozers but in nutrient-laden runoff from sugarcane and vegetable farms that lie to the north, between the Everglades and its chief source of water, Lake Okeechobee.

The Federal Government contends that Florida, despite overwhelming demands on its limited natural resources, can re-create the ecological balance necessary to keep the Everglades alive. The water that replenishes the marshland once spilled out of Lake Okeechobee in a shallow sheet 50 miles wide, moving slowly south for 180 miles before emptying into Florida Bay. But since the mid-1960s, the lake overflow has been channeled through a massive flood-control project -- 1,400 miles of canals and hydraulic pumps that can drain a field or rush water to urban centers on command. Using computers, engineers now try to mimic the natural flow into the park. If water levels fluctuate even by a matter of inches, the ecology of the Everglades can change radically. The same holds true if the water is polluted.

"There's nothing simple about trying to replicate nature," says Jim Webb, regional director of the Wilderness Society, "but it has to be done." Florida's research shows that high levels of phosphates and nitrates from farm runoff have transformed more than 20,000 acres of Everglades saw grass into cattails. These intruders, which thrive in high-nutrient water, suck the oxygen from the marsh and suffocate aquatic life at the bottom of the Everglades food chain. On shallow ponds and canals, nutrient-fed algae grow so thick that they block the sun from underwater plants. So far, most of the damage is confined to Loxahatchee National Wildlife Preserve -- an Everglades habitat abutting the farms -- and state conservation areas just north of the national park. "It's like a cancer," says park superintendent Finley, "and the cancer is moving south."

U.S. Attorney Lehtinen, 43, grew up in Homestead, next to the park, and was appointed federal prosecutor for South Florida in June 1988, just when George Bush was campaigning for the White House by promising "no net loss of wetlands." An Army paratrooper who was badly wounded in the face in Viet Nam, Lehtinen was a Democratic state legislator when he married a Republican colleague, Ileana Ros; a year later, he switched to the G.O.P. Last month Ileana Ros-Lehtinen won election to Congress to fill Claude Pepper's seat. As a legislator, Lehtinen earned a reputation as a hot-tempered, brainy conservative who preferred taking on the Establishment to joining it.

Critics of the Everglades suit charged -- correctly -- that Lehtinen went to court without consulting either the Justice or the Interior Department. Governor Martinez asked Attorney General Dick Thornburgh to settle the suit or drop it. Last December Lehtinen was summoned to Washington for a review of his actions. It seemed the suit would be scrapped, but Lehtinen, by agreeing to drop the most sweeping charges, returned with both Justice and Interior on his side.

"I didn't invent the environmental laws," says Lehtinen, who denies that he is using the Everglades to promote his political fortunes. "All we are asking is that the state of Florida abide by what is already on the books." To comply, however, the state will have to take on the powerful sugar lobby. While not a defendant, sugar is clearly the suit's target. For Florida to meet Lehtinen's water-purity standards, farmers would have to convert at least 40,000 acres into marshes to filter their pollution. Instead, the sugar industry has questioned the U.S. Attorney's motives and disputed his scientists' data. "The first question is, Which sugar mill will you put out of business? Who will you put out of work?" asks Andy Rackley, general manager of the Florida Sugar Cane League. If growers are forced to give up land, he claims, the entire industry could collapse.

The water-management district is also angry. John Wodraska, the district director, claims that the lawsuit is a nuisance that only delays his staff from working on a plan to save the Everglades. Moreover, the suit is costing a fortune in both state and federal funds. Beyond the Justice Department's considerable expenses, the water district's board has spent $980,000 on legal fees and expects to dole out at least $175,000 more a month. Yet a majority of board members seem as recalcitrant as the farmers. "If ((Lehtinen)) wants to fight, let's go ahead," said board member Doran Jason at one meeting. "There has to be a change," counters Nathaniel P. Reed, a former top Interior official who once served on the water district's board. "If sugar doesn't agree to the plan, the environmental community will go to war."

More is at stake than the future of a habitat for alligators, wading birds and other swamp life. "This is not just an argument between greedy farmers and anxious environmentalists," says the Wilderness Society's Webb. "It's a planning issue of fundamental proportions. It's the future of South Florida." If the river of grass turns into a sea of cattails, the water supply for coastal cities from West Palm Beach to Miami could dry up, and a sunny subtropical paradise could become a barren wasteland. Floridians are coming to realize how much they too depend on the vast marshland that once seemed so useless.