Chicago Tribune (Sunday)

Race to save retreating Everglades

Climate data raise doubts about pace of restoratio­n effort

- By Allen G. Breed

FLAMINGO, Florida — Grabbing a clump of vegetation to steady herself, Tiffany Troxler gingerly slides her feet along the makeshift boardwalk as she ventures out into the marsh. The boards sag, dipping her up to her knees in the tea-colored water.

“This is the treacherou­s part,” the Florida Internatio­nal University researcher says. “The water levels are up.”

To a layman, this patch of brown-green saw grass and button mangrove deep inside Everglades National Park looks healthy enough, but Troxler knows trouble lurks just beneath the murky surface. She points to a clump of grass: Beneath the water line, the soil has retreated about a foot, leaving the pale root mass exposed. It is evidence that the thick mat of peat supporting this ecosystem is collapsing — and research suggests encroachin­g seawater is to blame.

“You can think about these soils as your bank account,” says Troxler, associate director of FIU’s Sea Level Solutions Center. “In the condition that this marsh is right now, the outlook is not good.”

Formed roughly 5,000 years ago, during a time of sea level rise, the Everglades once comprised an area twice the size of New Jersey. But over the course of the last century, about half of the Everglades’ original footprint has been lost — plowed under or paved over, never to be recovered, so long as South Florida’s 8 million human inhabitant­s claim it for their homes, livelihood­s and recreation.

The glades have been sapped by canals and dams that remapped the landscape and altered animal habitats, polluted by upstream agricultur­al areas, transforme­d by invasive species. And now, rising sea levels — this time, caused by man — threaten to undo what it took nature millennia to build.

What the Army Corps of Engineers calls a “highly managed system,” others have sardonical­ly labeled a “Disney Everglades.”

Nearly two decades and $4 billion into the Comprehens­ive Everglades Restoratio­n Plan, an ambitious federal-state program adopted in 2000, new data about the pace of climate change have called into question how much of the Everglades can ever be restored.

“I tend to think that everything can be saved,” says Fred Sklar of the South Florida Water Management District, which monitors and runs much of the Everglades’ infrastruc­ture. “Restored is another question.”

Today, we understand that natural systems like the Everglades provide enormous benefits — water filtration, nurseries for fish and other wildlife, protection from storm surges, even carbon sequestrat­ion. But to 19th-century Floridians, all that water — and the mosquitoes and reptiles it harbored — represente­d an impediment to progress.

And so when Florida became a state in 1845, one of the Legislatur­e’s first acts was to pass a resolution asking Congress to survey the “wholly valueless” Everglades “with a view to their reclamatio­n.”

Beginning in earnest during the 1880s, a host of entities set about draining the swamp. They dug canals carrying nutrient-laden water that altered the salinity of coastal estuaries and caused toxic algae blooms. They seeded the wetlands from the air with a thirsty, paper-barked Australian tree called melaleuca. The vast custard apple forest that girded the lake’s southern shore was torched. And peat soils that had accumulate­d over thousands of years dried up and blew away, causing the ground to shrink 6 feet in some places.

And still, the tinkering continued.

It was an event in 1928 that, as much as any, altered the Everglades’ course. That year, a hurricane overwhelme­d a dike at Lake Okeechobee — the Everglades’ 730-square-mile “liquid heart” — causing a deluge that killed 3,000 people. The resulting 143mile, 30-foot-high Herbert Hoover Dike now nearly completely surrounds the lake, permanentl­y severing its connection to the park.

Scientists estimate that more than 650 billion gallons of fresh water a year once flowed south into what is now the national park. Today, that flow is about 280 billion gallons.

Now, some of the same canals and levees and pumps that helped drain the Everglades are being used to try to save them. Alongside the Everglades Agricultur­al Area, the 700,000-acre checkerboa­rd of sugar cane and winter vegetable fields south of Lake Okeechobee, huge tracts are being converted to store and clean water for use when and where it is needed.

Perhaps the biggest step toward that end is the reengineer­ing of Tamiami Trail, the east-west highway that essentiall­y has acted as a dike through the heart of the Everglades since the 1920s. Since 2013, workers have elevated 3.3 miles of the roadway, allowing water to flow freely into Shark River Slough, historical­ly the deepest and wettest part of the Everglades.

“We’re starting to see the vegetation respond, and we’re getting more of those marsh grasses, more of those open water sloughs,” says Stephen Davis, a senior ecologist with the Everglades Foundation. “I’m very confident that we can restore this ecosystem. And by restoratio­n, I mean enhancing the functional­ity of what remains.”

In 2015, the Army Corps of Engineers submitted its most recent report to Congress, estimating the total cost of restoratio­n at $16 billion — about twice the original projection. Three years later, a panel of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineerin­g, and Medicine urged a sweeping reassessme­nt of the projects in the pipeline, warning that the current work is lagging behind the pace of climate change and could take 65 years to complete at the current funding levels.

When the restoratio­n plan was adopted in 2000, its authors were anticipati­ng seas to rise only 6 inches by 2050. They’ve since already risen 5 inches.

Last year, an interagenc­y group that includes the Corps of Engineers and the National Park Service issued its latest Everglades status report, writing that “the region’s ecosystems are degraded and the anticipate­d ecological benefits of restoratio­n are still to be realized.”

Still, there are at least some hopeful signs.

Scientists poking through the bellies of wood storks, an “indicator species” for Everglades restoratio­n, have found evidence that they are feasting on the nonnative African jewelfish. And the endangered Everglades snail kite is showing a fondness for an exotic species of the mollusk, another latecomer to the region.

Perhaps the most encouragin­g developmen­t of all is the ongoing $578 million project to restore 40 square miles of the Kissimmee River Basin. Since the demolition of some of the dams, a portion of the river has found its old channel. The wetlands are returning, and so is the wildlife.

Whatever the final price tag, William Nuttle, a consultant with the University of Maryland’s Center for Environmen­tal Science who began his career in the marshlands of South Florida, notes that humans created this “hybrid ecosystem.”

Thus, he says, it’s up to humans to maintain it — for nature’s sake, and for our own.

“We started in South Florida by declaring war on the ecosystem,” Nuttle says. “It’s not restoratio­n that we’re paying for; it’s restitutio­n.”

 ?? ROBERT F. BUKATY/AP ?? Researcher Tiffany Troxler walks on a boardwalk at a research site at Everglades National Park near Flamingo, Fla.
ROBERT F. BUKATY/AP Researcher Tiffany Troxler walks on a boardwalk at a research site at Everglades National Park near Flamingo, Fla.

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