The Sunday Story: How to Save the Everglades

The Everglades?

You've probably heard of it.

That massive wilderness of wetlands on the southern tip of Florida.

It's home to the largest mangrove ecosystem in the Western Hemisphere, and it's a sanctuary

for over three dozen endangered and threatened species.

It's also the water supply for about 9 million Floridians.

The Everglades is a crucial ecosystem, and it's in crisis.

Climate change, pollution, agriculture, and rapid development are causing potentially

irreversible damage.

Almost 25 years ago, the state of Florida and the federal government struck an extraordinary

deal to save the Everglades.

But from the moment it passed, the problems began.

The plan's been crippled by years of trade-offs and backroom dealing and rising costs, with

little to show for the billions spent.

Meanwhile, South Florida is thirsty.

The population keeps growing, the climate keeps changing, and the Everglades keep dying.

Today I'm talking with environment reporter Jenny Stiletovich from South Florida's WLRN

radio station.

Jenny has a new podcast series out called Bright Lit Place that tells the dramatic story

of the Everglades, what's been done to the ecosystem, and what needs to happen to save

it.

Stay with us.

We're back with the Sunday Story, here with WLRN environment reporter Jenny Stiletovich

talking about the Everglades.

Jenny, for people who've never been to South Florida, what are we talking about?

What are the Everglades?

Florida.

And within the wetland are these different areas.

There's swamps, you still have mangrove forests, four-story tall mangroves down at the southern

end.

The biggest feature of the Everglades is probably the river of grass, 40 miles wide and 100

miles long.

And if you think of a river, a shallow river, that's literally what it is, but filled with

sawgrass.

It looks like a sea of sawgrass, but if you were to wade out into it, it would be shallow

water moving very, very slowly from north to south and out into Florida Bay.

Can you talk about that?

wildlife.

There are panthers in the Everglades.

There are flamingos in the Everglades and bonneted bats with ears that are literally

like bonnets.

They're the largest bats in North America.

There are lots of snakes.

There's butterflies that you can't find anyplace else on the earth.

They're fluorescent blue.

In the sawgrass, the wading birds that come and roost there are some of the weirdest that

you've ever seen.

There are things called wood storks.

They're often nicknamed the preacher's bird because when they're on the ground, they wrap

themselves in their wings that are black on the outside, but when they take off, they're

white underneath.

There are roseate spoonbills that have these bills that are shaped like spoons so that

they can hunt for fish.

They use the bills to swish back and forth in the water.

Swallowtails that are as big as your hand.

Warblers that are migrating, flock to the mangroves, so you'll be inside the mangroves

and you'll just hear this chorus of warblers singing all around you and so it's just a

menagerie.

Does the Everglades play a role in the larger environment?

up from the bottom of South America to the Arctic.

And in terms of climate change, the marshes and the peat soil below them along with the

mangrove forests are huge carbon sinks.

They are like America's Amazon.

For the Florida ecosystem, it is hugely important in terms of water supply in South Florida.

Like modern South Florida would not exist without the Everglades because those marshes

that I keep talking about essentially filter water in a shallow drinking aquifer that supplies

water to about 9 million Floridians.

So during the wet season, the Everglades basically helps keep the rest of South Florida dry.

It holds a ton of water that might otherwise flood neighborhoods and cities.

And then during the dry season, when you actually needed water supply, those marshes were there

to give us that water supply.

Really it was this perfect balance between the wet and the dry season and the things

that you needed to happen in the wet season, which is sawgrass marshes absorbing water.

That's what they did and all that water would flow down the river of grass and it wouldn't

just like flow straight, but it would also flow out the side and areas where there were

depressions in these coastal ridges.

Is that like the water?

Yeah.

You essentially would get fresh water flowing all offshore around Florida and that's what

helped create, you know, really beautiful beaches and these estuaries.

And within those, you just get this variety of wildlife and fish and miles and miles of

seagrass meadows that are basically the nurseries for a lot of wildlife.

and I would imagine that has to do a lot with human beings.

So the Everglades before modern South Florida arrived covered about 4,000 square miles and

now they're down to about half that size.

Florida became a state in 1847 and just a few years later, you know, the leaders of

this new state said, how are we going to create an economy?

Well, let's drain the Everglades and turn them into farm fields.

Starting in the late 1800s, early settlers came in and started draining parts of the

Everglades and they built these canals to control water during the rainy season that

started drying up the river of grass, which they thought was a good thing at the time.

So all that drainage essentially wiped out half the Everglades, turned it into farm fields.

It was hugely successful because that peat soil was so mucky and rich that you could

grow anything there and it became the winter breadbasket for the U.S.

So all those farm fields that grew up around the Everglades use fertilizer and one of the

common ingredients in fertilizer is phosphorus.

So when you started growing all that sugarcane and all those other crops, it started to pollute

the Everglades with this, with phosphorus.

The Everglades, however, thrives with very little phosphorus.

That's why you get these sparse sawgrass marshes.

That sparse grass allows water to flow.

That kind of grass does not need a lot of phosphorus.

When you get too much of it, it spurs too much plant growth and it allows other plants

that need phosphorus to grow to come in and take over this area.

So you started seeing other plants come in and start choking the river of grass.

One of the most damaging plants is cattails.

They're a native plant, but they grow in parts of the state where phosphorus occurs naturally.

When you get cattails, bulrush, other kinds of marsh grasses moving in, it stops up the

water flow.

this mean for the way that Everglades function naturally?

flood control and drinking water supply.

So South Florida, parts that used to be wet were now dry and dry parts were wet.

You essentially get a breakdown of this natural system that filtered and stored water and

instead everything is being drained to make way for farm fields and cities.

And the consequences of that were these freshwater marshes, the estuaries and bays and the fishing

grounds also got screwed up.

They were too salty.

They weren't getting enough fresh water.

And without that fresh water, you get seagrass meadows dying and the nurseries where bonefish

and tarpon and some of the sport fish that draw people from all over the world were going

away.

and livelihoods that are at stake here.

have seen the Everglades transform dramatically.

There's an island over here with a lot of trees and it's high and when the water's high

it never goes underwater.

Michael Frank is one of the guys I wanted to tell you about.

He's a member of the Miccosukee tribe.

Historically the tribe lived on what are called these tree islands which rise out of the river

of grass.

They were formed by sediment piling up and tree roots over thousands of years.

Michael was born and raised on a tree island called Highland and he told me he remembers

being able to spear fish in the marshes because the water was so clear.

The Miccosukee even have a special name for the Everglades.

Kahelit.

Kahelit means a bright lit place.

It's like shining.

Look at that.

Kahelit.

Look at it.

It's shining.

The water from the sun.

Hayalit.

Say hayalit.

Hayalit means light.

It's lit up.

You can see all the way to the bottom.

And you will see sometimes even torpins, even fish that's in the bay, they would swim all

the way.

Yeah, we used a spear to giggle fish, right?

You see a big old torpin, oh man, I'm going to have a big dinner.

Anything that could migrate their way in the canals, they made it out into the Everglades

because it was crystal clear.

I went out on the water with another person who remembers the good old days of fishing.

He's a second generation fishing captain, Tim Klein.

Like the most famous bonefish spots in our backyard is what we call downtown, Shell Key,

Ligden Viaduct.

So he took me out on some of the flats in Florida Bay.

These were once world-class fishing grounds covered with different kinds of sport fish.

Records were set here, but now those fish are going away.

You know, like 70% of the grass is gone.

And that's where, you know, the bonefish fed and stuff.

So we need to, we just need water.

And I should say, the idea of losing these fishing grounds is a really big deal here

in South Florida.

You know, fishing is hugely important, not just economically, but culturally.

This idea of really controlling and taming nature, I mean, it's something that America

was built on.

But when the U.S. government came in and was doing all this dredging and flooding the tree

islands out, you know, Michael Frank was six years old when Highland went underwater.

What, three, four feet underwater?

And while that work was going on, Michael Frank's family and the rest of the tribe that

lived out there on the tree islands, they were forced to move to higher ground.

They told my grandfather and grandmother, if that day ever come, your island goes underwater,

we'll come and build up your camp.

But they never came and built the camps up.

That was one of many broken promises.

You know, the government didn't do anything to protect the islands.

So what that meant was that Michael Frank's family, along with other members of the Miccosukee

tribe, had to move to the Tamiami Trail.

The trail is the highway that was built in the 20s to connect both Florida's coasts.

But that move really changed the tribe.

They'd lost not just their homeland, but their hunting grounds.

And so a lot of people were living along the highway, basically selling trinkets to tourists

traveling the highway.

They eventually got reservation land to the north, but they're still fighting to recover

these ancestral tree islands that are basically being washed away by floodwater and water

that's kept too high.

The Native Americans have been displaced.

The birds, the mammals, the coastal fisheries are all suffering these huge declines.

The land has been cut up, drained, flooded, just a mess.

But it wasn't supposed to be like this, right?

There was supposed to be a solution.

So in 2000, Congress passed what's known as the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan.

And at the time, it was hailed as this huge win for the environment.

It had strong bipartisan support.

And it was also the largest hydrologic restoration plan ever undertaken in the U.S.

It was supposed to be a model that could have helped us figure out how to deal with some

of the impacts from climate change.

But it was going to be expensive.

It was expected to cost $8 billion and would probably take a couple of decades to finish.

right about now then, right?

But that's not the way it worked out.

Stay with us.

We're back talking to Jenny Steletovich, host of the podcast Bright Lit Place about the Everglades.

So Congress passed this massive plan to restore the Everglades.

I'm sure there were signing ceremonies and all this press conferences and what have you.

So what happened?

The scientists said they knew exactly what needed to happen.

The formula for restoration isn't hard from the ecological perspective.

They just needed to get the water flowing again.

But that turned out to be a complicated thing to do.

You have to maintain all these other things and you can't affect anybody and you can't

have any other consequence.

That's hard.

This is hydrologist Tom Van Lant.

When I spoke to him, he was really frustrated by the people aspect of restoration.

There are so many stakeholders, landowners, companies, government agencies.

There are all these interests in the Everglades and you know, it will be impossible to get

water back into the Everglades without affecting the stakeholders.

So what all this means is right after the Everglades restoration plan came into law,

the problems started.

The first was with Congress itself.

The restoration plan was bipartisan, but then gridlock set into Congress right after it

was passed.

It was also just a rough blueprint for what needed to be done.

So it included dozens of projects.

It was like 50 main projects and 68 components within those 50 projects.

And part of the plan said that as you're going along, if cost escalates too much, you have

to bring it back to us and have it reauthorized.

This was actually a pretty standard way to get things done in the past, but you know,

after it was passed in 2000, the projects didn't get authorized for another seven years.

And that was just a small group of projects.

And then it took another seven years to get another small group of projects passed.

Yes.

made things even more complicated.

I spoke to Julie Hill Gabriel, who's an attorney with Audubon.

She was working in South Florida, you know, in the early 2000s when restoration was still

fairly new.

And at the same time, the land that is currently still available in the Everglades is being

targeted to be drained.

So we're going to initiate the world's largest effort to restore wetlands while at the same

time we're filling in and destroying the wetlands that were made.

She was, as you can hear, understandably really frustrated that the restoration plan didn't

seem to have any teeth.

And that made Audubon's work, which is to advocate to get restoration done, unnecessarily

difficult.

local governments were approving that land to be developed for new communities or businesses.

And so we kept having to change some of the project designs based on what was actually

available.

So Congress had passed its big plans, but local governments are meanwhile approving

land to be developed.

Did the state of Florida not have a plan to set land aside to be restored?

Those original architects of the restoration plan, they worried that if the state was allowed

to seize the land, you know, the plan wouldn't get passed and it wouldn't get the support

it needed.

So they relied on willing sellers, and a lot of the land that they needed for projects

was privately owned farmland and mostly sugarcane fields.

In 2008, U.S. Sugar briefly agreed to sell most of their holdings to the state.

And that could have changed restoration for good and altered the course of history.

But that deal fell apart, and they have mostly opposed selling land going forward.

The U.S. Sugar program, which guarantees the price of domestic sugar, also provides huge

incentives for farmers to stay in business.

Yes.

And today, restoring the Everglades is expected to cost 23 billion dollars.

So that's three times the original price.

And it's just like this vicious cycle, because prices going up causes further delays.

Since, as I mentioned before, it was written into the plan that if costs change, then

projects have to be reauthorized by Congress.

I mean, when you think of these giant public works projects is that they drag on and on.

And then they get more and more expensive.

But then environmentally speaking, certain problems are as daunting as ever.

You know, when we look at water that's supposed to go into the Everglades, the pollution

levels are still too high.

And that's despite valiant restoration efforts to reduce the pollution and get it under

control. So we talked about the phosphorus problem and sugar farming, and the state of

Florida has already spent more than a billion dollars trying to clean that water by

building these massive treatment marshes.

But they're not working.

So I took a trip on an airboat to one of the treatment marshes to see what was going on

with Eric Crawford.

He's a wetlands ecologist and he oversees the vegetation that they grow in the marshes

to try and suck up all the phosphorus pollution.

You want to do a little gentle loop into the marsh, some of the birds and plants, and

sort of beautiful slice of the Everglades.

Yeah, you didn't think you'd enjoy sitting in the middle of an industrial wastewater

treatment facility, but that's where we are.

There's birds all over, there's American lotuses, these big platter sized plants growing

on the water, and there's also a ton of alligators and snakes.

I'm sure it was you made it out all right because I'm talking to you.

snakes and alligators with rifles.

Crawford also showed me signs of how the treatment isn't working as well as it needs

to. We're getting closer to the front end of the system here, and you can see there's a

lot of nutrients.

We have all this algae growing in the marsh.

Here is the problem.

While they're beautiful and they are working hard, they are still not getting water clean

enough. Scientists have said that to put water back in the Everglades, the phosphorus has

to be at these really low levels of 13 parts per billion.

That is like one drop in a 10,000 gallon swimming pool.

And the marshes have succeeded at taking out tons and tons of phosphorus.

But what they're not able to do is get the phosphorus levels down to those tiny, tiny

levels. The other thing is these marshes also have to do double duty and act as storm

water marshes when hurricanes or tropical storms come through.

So then they have to stop treating the water and trying to clean it.

Instead, they have to offer flood control.

And that's a completely different operation that then the structures open up and the

water moves. But then we have to be ready to switch back to the trickle.

Let's let's go for water quality performance.

You don't get two different teams.

You get one. You get one piece of land to do both.

with climate change, all this polluted stormwater runoff gets channeled into them.

So the treatment marshes are not able to do the job that they were originally intended to

do, which is to get the water clean enough to send into the Everglades.

marshes to meet the pollution limit.

But scientists say that it is unlikely that that we're going to meet that deadline.

There's one team of scientists that says another 30,000 acres of treatment marshes are

going to be needed to meet those goals.

on time. The water needs to be cleaned and more marshes need to be created.

That's not happening.

Meanwhile, more and more development is happening on land that should go back to be

restored. And on top of that, the ag industry continues to use fertilizers that are

polluting the water.

So none of it is working the way it should, essentially.

Everglades is kind of an impossible promise.

But, you know, it turns out that the hammer in all this restoration has has been the

courts. I mean, they're the ones that can force both governments, the state and the

federal government, to do things.

And it's thanks to federal laws like the Clean Water Act that we have this 2025

deadline for the pollution limits.

And really, that could help determine how restoration moves forward.

Because so far, nobody is willing to make the really hard choices that are needed to

save the Everglades.

The ag industry, you know, continues to get the water it needs.

Cities have gotten their water plus flood control and they still get to keep growing.

And despite all the promises, restoration never seems to be the priority.

We are now asking the Everglades to do the same job that it did a century ago on half

the footprint. It's not succeeding and it's dying at the same time.

And you can see that in every corner of the Everglades, whether it's the tree islands

where the Miccosukee once lived or algae blooms that are fouling Lake Okeechobee or

the fishing grounds where Tim Kline was once a trophy winning guide.

The Everglades is this national treasure, but we're not treating it that way.

That requires sacrifice.

And so far, no one is willing to make those sacrifices.

Everglades that stays with you, that makes you feel why this place is so important?

It's the sound. South Florida is noisy and busy.

The high rises and the highways and the traffic jams and the Everglades, no matter

what part you're in, it's like walking into sometimes nothingness because it is

wide open, quiet space.

So you really get the sense of the end of the world.

You know, we are a peninsula.

We are literally the the end of North America.

I mean, I kind of close my eyes and I could like visually see these steps down from

the sawgrass marshes down into to the mangrove forests.

It's like you're in this green cathedral and you hear birds and bird song echoing

through these forests. And you just don't have that kind of solace anyplace else, or

at least for me.

important topic.

called Bright Lit Place.

This episode was produced by Justine Yan, our editor is Jenny Schmidt.

The Sunday Story team includes Andrew Mambo and Liana Simstrom.

Irene Noguchi is our executive producer.

The engineer for the episode is Josh Newell.

We always love hearing from you, so feel free to reach out to us at the

SundayStory at NPR.org.

I'm Aisha Roscoe, Up First is back in your feed tomorrow with all the news you need

to start your week. Until then, enjoy the rest of your weekend.