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Bait and Switch
Developers continue to call the shots in the western Everglades, where the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act are routinely flouted. Meanwhile, wetlands that protect against floods, provide the public with drinking water, and sustain all kinds of wildlife are being destroyed by federal sleight of hand.
Audubon Mar./Apr. 2008
The Cocohatchee Slough, rising in Audubon’s 13,000-acre Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary in southwest Florida, is a system of wet forests, wet prairies, and streams that delivers life-sustaining water to the western Everglades, of which it is part. Along the way it filters out pollutants, feeds and shelters fish and wildlife, including endangered wood storks and endangered Florida panthers, recharges aquifers, and protects humans from floods. I have known and loved these wetlands for most of my adult life. Each time I return there are fewer.
The destruction is illegal, a fact that might seem curious to someone unfamiliar with American wetlands politics. Throughout the United States, but especially in Florida, little stands between rich, politically well-connected developers and the wetlands on which they have designs, least of all federal law. Brilliant, creative, and brazen are the most apt modifiers for state and federal circumvention and contravention of the Clean Water Act (which proscribes wetlands destruction without mitigation) and the Endangered Species Act (which proscribes development that jeopardizes the existence of a listed species).
And then, of course, there is the official White House wetlands policy of “no net loss,” set forth in 1989 by President George H.W. Bush, which would, in his words, “stand the history of wetlands destruction on its head.” Bill Clinton and George W. Bush promptly committed their administrations to the same pledge and policy.
Yet an investigation conducted by the St. Petersburg Times revealed that between 1990 and 2005, Florida lost at least 84,000 acres of wetlands. How could this happen?
I collected bits and pieces of the answer this past December, first from a Cessna 172. At the controls was Beaver Aviation Service’s Shawn Homoky, who punched a GPS every time we saw a wood stork. In the backseat, shooting photos, was the Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary’s assistant director, Jason Lauritsen. As we banked over wetlands in various stages of destruction, the view from the starboard window was alternately beautiful and repugnant. One instant there was the unbroken, tundralike green of the Corkscrew Regional Ecosystem Watershed (CREW), the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge, and the Big Cypress National Preserve; then, metastasizing into it, equally vast rectangles of bulldozed dirt, felled trees, new roads, cement, asphalt, and the red-clay roof tiles of slapdash, ticky-tacky, golf-condo sprawl.
Where the South Florida Water Management District was maintaining CREW’s fire-dependent ecosystems with prescribed burns, plumes of white smoke rose, the fragrance filling the cabin when I opened the window for Lauritsen’s camera. A black thunderhead of tree swallows, ravenous for the nutritious berries, swirled around a wax myrtle. Wood storks, white ibises, herons, and great egrets foraged along ditches. Black vultures dipped and wobbled like umbrellas lost to an updraft.
Five miles southwest of Corkscrew Swamp, Lauritsen called my attention to three adjacent developments, called Parklands, Saturnia Falls, and Mirasol. Together they’ll destroy 1,147 acres of wetlands in prime panther and wood stork habitat. Florida panthers—thought to number between 80 and 100—are arguably the most endangered mammals in North America and have been on the federal list since it began in 1967. And while the American population of wood storks, listed in 1984, is now thought to include about 5,000 breeding pairs, that’s down from 20,000 in the 1930s. Moreover, wetlands loss in south Florida has pushed the species’ main breeding concentration out of its traditional (and best) habitat in Corkscrew Swamp north as far as South Carolina.
Developers seeking to destroy wetlands in the western Everglades must obtain permits from the South Florida Water Management District and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The Cocohatchee Slough Coalition (consisting of Audubon of Florida, the Collier County Audubon Society, the National Wildlife Federation, the Florida Wildlife Federation, and The Conservancy of Southwest Florida) has challenged all three projects, charging multiple violations in state and federal permitting.
In violation of the state permit for its 1,600-housing-unit, 27-hole golf-community Parklands development, The Ronto Group cleared about 18 acres of wetlands and hacked out a road (for which it paid a fine of only $51,800). And it illegally excavated between 300,000 and 400,000 cubic yards of earth (worth $10 million as fill, according to some estimates) from protected CREW land. For this infraction it must attempt partial restoration. Ronto ceased work when the South Florida Water Management District notified it that it had violated its state permit. The Cocohatchee Slough Coalition then got the federal permit thrown out. In the likely event that a new one is issued, the coalition vows to go back to court.
Work was further along at Saturnia Falls, another massive Cocohatchee Slough development (in which G.L. Homes of Sunrise, Florida, has received permits to build 800 housing units, though apparently there won’t be golf). Today, from 2,000 feet in the air, it’s a scene from a kid’s sandbox: Matchbox trucks and backhoes crawling between stacks of Tinkertoy logs and fire-ant mounds of bulldozed dirt.
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