Big Water Blues

The old river system had been the lake's kidneys--or one of them--cleansing roughly half the inflow as the Everglades used to cleanse the outflow. Now, along with the other gutterized tributaries, it express-delivers nutrients and solids straight into the lake, where they settle, choking benthic life and plants and toppling the ecosystems built upon them.

When the devastation gets bad enough, even the bureaucrats take note. It was, in fact, the extirpation of nesting snail kites in 1999 that helped set real restoration in motion. In 1977 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared Lake Okeechobee critical snail-kite habitat, which meant that by flooding the marshes the Corps was violating the Endangered Species Act. If Audubon, the lead group in the fight for Okeechobee, had sued--and it would have--the lake's water management would probably have been taken over by a federal judge. But on April 25, 2000, the Corps let the district declare an environmental emergency, authorizing water releases calculated to bring the lake down to 13 feet above sea level by June.

Then came an additional reprieve for the flora and fauna of Lake Okeechobee--a drought, which by May 14, 2001, had dropped the surface to 9.24 feet above sea level, the lowest ever recorded. Now a new water-level management plan has been implemented that is better than the last, though still inadequate. It will allow levels as low as 13.5 feet, at which point 19 percent of the marshes will be exposed. "A quarter of the lake is marshes," said Gray. "So we can restore 25 percent of Okeechobee with just a good water regimen, which means occasionally allowing the level to go down to 12 feet [at which point 75 percent of the marshes would be exposed]."

Even with the great promise of restoration that I saw on the lake and on the upper Kissimmee River, public resistance is daunting. James Bass--who runs 500 head of cattle a mile from C-38 and whose father rode on the old cattle drives to the east coast before there were real roads--speaks for many of his neighbors when he calls freeing the river from the big ditch a faddish "reversal" instigated by "newcomers." "You can't go backwards," he told me. "Everyone wants to preserve. How would you like to own land here and be preserved?"

One of Okeechobee's biggest problems is the inflow of phosphorus and pesticides from the sugar industry's flood and irrigation water. The growers, accustomed to getting their way, appear intransigent. While the water-management district has always allowed them to get rid of flood and irrigation water by backpumping, it has recently given them permission to backpump merely to keep the lake full for future irrigation. "It's difficult to talk to environmentalists sometimes because they don't want to look at the facts," declared George Wedgworth, president of the Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida.

But here's a fact that environmentalists have looked at: Soon there will be no excuse for backpumping, because treatment areas on the south shore will serve as receptacles for excess water from the sugarcane fields, and because water needed for future irrigation will be available from all treatment areas. About half the wetlands in Florida have been drained, so now there is water to spare. In an average year the lake gets about 7.7 surface feet, 5 of which evaporate. About a foot goes to irrigation, about six inches to the big cities on the lower east coast, and about a foot needs to be vented. It is this excess foot that has been killing the salt-dependent St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee estuaries by being dumped on them and killing the freshwater-dependent Everglades and Florida Bay by not being dumped on them.

"The water going into the Everglades [from the sugarcane fields] is cleaner than the water we're receiving from Lake Okeechobee," proclaimed Wedgworth. "Water backpumped from sugarcane is the cleanest entering the lake--somewhere in the high 90s [parts per billion of phosphorus]," chimed in his vice-president for communications, Barbara Miedema, who later denied she said it, correctly pointing out that the real figure is more like 250 ppb. And Wedgworth blames environmentalists for demanding the emergency release and thereby making backpumping "necessary." "Lowering the lake has caused the worst drought that South Florida has seen in over 20 years," he continued. (According to the South Florida Water Management District, 450,000 acre-feet of water were released during last year's emergency, the same amount taken by the agricultural industry; from October 2, 2000, to May 14, 2001, the industry took an additional 400,000 acre-feet.) But then, speaking of the storm that had drenched Don Fox, Paul Gray, and me, Wedgworth said something eminently true, and with which all interests agree: "We had about two inches of rain last Monday, and they dumped [much of] it into the sea. I don't think that's very prudent for the natural system, for wildlife, for agriculture, or for people who drink scotch and water on Miami Beach." It is this agreement that has allowed Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades to suddenly acquire a future.

If resistance to restoration seems unstoppable, so does support. The increased backpumping has outraged and mobilized the two-year-old, 150-member Friends of Lake Okeechobee. "At the same time the district authorized more backpumping it decided not to restrict water usage," says Larry Harris, the editor of the group's newsletter. "The district made a conscious decision to pollute the lake on the south end, which is extremely sensitive and which was showing the best recovery. Now they're dumping all this stuff in there. I hate to call it water--you have to look at it to understand."

"The lake's health is more important than having just-in-case water for the sugar industry," adds the group's president, Carroll Head. Along with Audubon and the Florida Wildlife Federation, the Friends of Lake Okeechobee petitioned the district to reverse its decision, but they were ignored.

When I tried to contact the loud, angry property-rights group Realists Opposing Alleged Restoration (ROAR), I learned that it was no longer active. Apparently, its voice has been drowned out. Louder and angrier than ROAR ever thought of being is Fishermen Against Destruction of the Environment. "It's a new day dawning, and I'm glad to see it," comments the group's take-no-prisoners director, Wayne Nelson. "For 15 years I've been trying to tell the bureaucrats that if you don't clean up Okeechobee, you can forget about the Everglades. Finally, they're listening. Now what this lake needs is a governor who will be its champion. Jeb Bush told me he's fished it. But when I asked him to come see it with me, he hemmed and hawed." The governor has yet to take him up on his offer, but his aides say he strongly supports restoration.