As they wait and work for Everglades restoration, the swamp keeps dying
Restoring the Everglades was originally expected to cost just under $8 billion and take about 20 years. The price has now soared to $23 billion and fallen decades behind schedule.
Deep in the Everglades, in remote sawgrass marshes few people ever see, Michael Frank points to a faded white, red black and gold Miccosukee flag that flies above the dock at his family tree island.
“We were told to never, ever leave the Everglades. You leave the Everglades, you lose your culture, you lose your language, you lose your identity,” Frank said. “You become just like the outside people.”
Today, unnaturally high water flows under the boardwalks that connect the island’s thatchroofed chickees. Native plants fight for space with weedy elephant grass, Brazilian pepper and other invasive species.
The flag stays up,
Frank said, because it represents the Miccosukee Tribe’s willingness to talk with those outside people to help save the marshes that hold his ancestral tree islands.
The WLRN podcast Bright Lit Place examines what happened to Florida’s promise to undo the damage killing the islands and restore the Everglades with a massive plan approved in 2000. Work was originally expected to cost just under $8 billion and take about 20 years. The price has now soared to $23 billion and fallen decades behind schedule. Meanwhile, the swamp keeps dying.
Half the Everglades’ tree islands in Frank’s homeland are now gone, washed away by high water stored in the marshes after the Everglades was dredged and drained to make way for development. Pig Jaw, Smallpox Tommy, Stinking Hammock and other islands where Frank lived and played as a child remain, but they’re chronically threatened by water.
Without freshwater from the Everglades, mangrove forests that protect the shoreline struggle to keep up with sea rise. Spongy peat soils and sawgrass marshes that help collect South Florida’s drinking water continue to collapse. And a menagerie of wildlife, from scarlet-colored roseate spoonbills to marsh rabbits, disappear.
These are some of the people appearing in Bright Lit Place, who’ve spent decades waiting for progress. Those hit hardest measure losses in their checkbooks and family businesses, or even their homelands. Others are scientists who’ve spent those same decades fighting to revive the struggling system, undaunted by some of the harshest working conditions on the planet.
MICCOSUKEE ELDER MICHAEL FRANK
Growing up, Frank, 66, lived on tree islands, moving within the swampy patches of high ground shared by the tribe. Even before he was born, the islands were starting to disappear, as the Central and South Florida flood system took shape in the 1940s. The tribe often gathered for celebrations and meetings on a large island called New Town.
When the Army Corps dredged a canal to drain farm fields to the north, it split the island in two.
As flood control pushed more water into the vast conservation area west of Miami, Frank was forced to move more frequently. His family finally fled the islands, he said, when the Army Corps dredged a levee near the Tamiami Trail.
“Back in 1949 or ‘48, when my grandpa and grandma moved in, that’s when they started working on the levees,” he said. “And when they were working on that, they told my grandfather and grandmother, if that day ever comes when your island goes underwater, we’ll come and build up your camp, which they never did. It went three, four feet under water, but they never came and built the camps up.”
Today, Frank and his uncle still camp on Rice Island, about seven miles north of the Tamiami
Trail. He gets around the boardwalks with a walking stick now. Age has left his hands crimped and knotted.
He’s had to rebuild his dock as water rises. But he keeps his flags flying.
FISHING GUIDE TIM KLEIN
On a postcard perfect day in Florida Bay, fishing guide Tim Klein and his son James steer their boats around a small, horseshoe-shaped key crowded with squawking sea birds.
The water ripples with nervous mullet as a small pod of bottlenose dolphins swim nearby. Suddenly, a dolphin breaks the surface, belly up, with a mullet in its mouth.
“That was epic! Did you see that?” an astonished Klein shouted. “See, I give good eco tour.”
Klein, 62, is a champion flats guide with a long list of tournament victories. Years of poling clients to victory in his skiff kept his schedule booked nearly every day with anglers wanting to catch one of the Keys’ cherished sportfish — bonefish, permit or tarpon. Fewer days get booked now. When they are, Klein usually suggests a day looking for sawfish or sightseeing
around the emerald mangrove islands.
“I got all new clientele,” he said. “I’ve been doing this for 38 years now, and the people I’ve fished in the past are just not here anymore.”
That’s because it’s getting harder to find those champion sportfish in Florida Bay, where flood control has cut off freshwater and left water chronically salty. High salinity can damage seagrass meadows that harbor shrimp, crab and other prey for the fish.
The bay now gets about half of the freshwater it received a century ago.
“It’s never going to be like it used to be back in the days when my dad was guiding, especially with all the big bonefish and scores of red fish,” said James Klein, 23, the third generation of Kleins to captain a boat. He does most of his guiding offshore, not the flats that brought his dad so much success. “We used to drive around on my little Hell’s Bay (skiff) and just find schools of hundreds of them.”