Big Water Blues

On the last morning of winter 2001, I stood four miles out in Lake Okeechobee--the shallow, rich, 470,000-acre heart and lungs of the Everglades and the second largest freshwater body wholly in the United States. Behind me, to the north, flushing Florida's prairie country, were the Kissimmee River and other arteries that had been straightened and cut off from their spongy floodplains. In front of me, on the distant southern shore and beyond--all blocked from view by water draped over the curving earth--lay the sparse, working-class communities of Clewiston and Belle Glade, sprawling sugarcane plantations, the Everglades, and Florida Bay. I saw none of the high grass that had ringed the lake before it was replumbed by humans. And I could only imagine the custard applemoonvine jungle that had dominated the lake's southern rim, and the dense forest of cypress, water oak, pop ash, maple, and cabbage palms to the north, where beef cattle now cycle alien Bahia grass, dairy cows convert silage into milk and phosphorus, and chemical-addicted orange trees goose-step along chalk-lined rows. The vegetation around the lake had been so impenetrable, and the land so wet, that the basin wasn't even circumnavigated until 1883. This was America's last frontier--through the 19th century wilder and less known than Alaska. Okeechobee, which means "Big Water" in Seminole, had been semi-mythical to whites until Christmas Day 1837, when Colonel Zachary Taylor proved its existence by chasing the Seminoles into a trap they had set for him on its northern shore.

Flanking me in the lake were two of its most tireless and effective advocates: Don Fox, a fisheries biologist with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, and Paul Gray, manager of Audubon's Lake Okeechobee sanctuaries. Hosed by near-horizontal rain--the first significant precipitation in six months--we slogged toward the surviving portion of Audubon's Indian Prairie Marsh, over acres of white mussel shells, through wet muck, up onto cracked muck, and finally onto the high, brushy berm that now seals the marsh from the life-giving lake.

We had swerved and skidded our way here from a mudflat called Little Grassy, 10 miles to the north and 2 miles offshore. In 1988 the lake wind over Little Grassy had ruffled the tops of bulrushes, sending green waves sweeping across their 250-acre expanse. But at about that time the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers decided to raise the lake roughly one foot--to at least 15.5 feet above sea level--because, well, the water might be needed by thirsty sugarcane, citrus, and Gold Coast lawns. More than a decade of high water had drowned the bulrushes, reducing them lakewide from 10,000 acres to about 700. At Little Grassy, where there had been about 18 million stems, there were just 188 by April 2000. The victims' remains, along with other emergent plants, living and dead, had been ripped up by waves and pushed into the shallows to form the berm. With a shovel, Gray sliced three feet through the berm's black guts until he hit the clean sand of the old lakebed.

The mud the plants had once held in place--and the algae proliferating on the nutrients the plants used to eat--blocked sunlight, so that 50,000 acres of submerged plants died, too. Food for wading birds disappeared or, in the deepening water, became unavailable; nesting pairs declined from about 6,000 to zero. The apple snails, on which endangered snail kites depend, once laid their eggs on the bulrush stems. In 1996 there had been 35 active snail-kite nests on the lake; for the past two years there have been none.

The decision to drown Lake Okeechobee's marshes and kill off their ecosystems did not result from any dearth of scientific data. It was a calculated transaction that expended the public's fish and wildlife so that agribusiness and cities could be spared an increase of 3 percent in water "demands not met," which might have cost them $20 million but which also could easily have been canceled by old-fashioned conservation.

No one had bothered to tally what the lost fish and wildlife would cost South Florida's economy. Recently, though, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has calculated that the value of black crappie, largemouth bass, and various other sunfishes dependent on an acre of bulrushes is $19,500. So the lake's 9,000 acres of lost bulrushes had been worth $175.5 million, not counting other values, such as the dabbling ducks that used to attract hunters from all over the nation. In Fisheating Bay, 20 miles southwest of Little Grassy, the commission had counted an average of 11,886 dabbling ducks during the winters of 1981 and 1982. Between 1991 and 2000 it counted an average of 338 for the entire lake.

The absurdity of this and other transactions became even more apparent to me when I stepped back--or up--and perused the whole watershed from a Cessna 172. The still air was hazy from wildfires whose convection columns bloomed like thunderheads to the northwest and southwest. Directly below us the gutterized corpse of the Kissimmee River marched to the lake, straight as a drill column. Six miles east we cut the course of Taylor Creek, named for Zach, now bilious with algae after collecting seepage from dairy-farm manure lagoons (state-of-the-art waste treatment, even in the 21st century).

Scattered over the prairie were potholes where otters, waterfowl, shorebirds, and wading birds breed and raise their young. The metastasizing citrus groves had cut many off from the prairie and its cycles of flood, drought, and fire. Clogged with brush and polluted with nutrients, the potholes can no longer support many wetland-dependent species. All this happened when the lake was supposedly being restored under the state's Surface Water Improvement Management Plan, implemented in 1989. "After 12 years of 'restoration,' the lake is in the worst shape it's ever been in," Gray remarked.

Another tireless lake advocate--Nat Reed of Hobe Sound, Florida, who served presidents Nixon and Ford as Assistant Secretary of the Interior when the lake's decline started accelerating--said this: "I consider the near-death of Lake Okeechobee the single greatest environmental defeat I have suffered on my watch [1971 to 1977]. The defeat is painful and nags at me. I am determined with 'time left' to turn the situation around. . . . The saga of Lake Okeechobee is one of the great pollution stories in the sense that since 1971 [in my case] the key decision makers knew that the problem existed and was growing more serious. It is a story of studies and more studies, because action seemed impossible, either politically or pragmatically. Having stated the obvious, who will save the lake?"

Maybe it will be Reed, Gray, Fox, and other activists, who have been piling up some impressive victories. In June 2000--six months before President Bill Clinton signed the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan--the Florida legislature enacted the Lake Okeechobee Protection Plan, which allocated $38.5 million for restoration of the northern part of the watershed, including landowner-assistance programs and stormwater-treatment areas. The treatment areas, full of nutrient-loving plants, will function as artificial kidneys, doing some of what the natural river systems used to do for free.