Everglades National Park

If you took the highest point in Florida, a hill that rises 345-foot above sea level in Walton County, and put it next to the state’s tallest building, the skyscraper would tower another 450 feet above it.

Obviously Florida’s landscape can’t compete in drama with states that have mountains or high deserts. But it does have a feature that has fascinated almost every person who has ever seen it, one that draws 940,000 visitors a year. It is the Everglades, Florida’s great subtropical swamp.

Before entrepreneur Henry Flagler hyped up a land rush into southern Florida in the early 1900s, the Everglades were a vast but remote tract, a seemingly endless sea of grass punctuated by hummocks and occasional groves of trees, sheltering a stunning number and range of birds, mammals and reptiles.

But the true magnificence of the swamp was that it was the southern terminus of one of the widest rivers on earth.* For the Everglades is really a shallow river, only inches deep, but up to 50 miles wide, whose origins lie near present-day Orlando and Kissimmee.

Before its flows were interrupted by dams and agriculture, water from the Kissimmee River would flow south into Lake Okeechobee. When Okeechobee brimmed, its water would spill south onto the vast flatland of southern Florida. The water would slowly spread across the flats, forming a shallow, slow-moving sheet that might advance 2,000 feet a day.

The lazy, nutrient-rich waters made it easy for mangroves, cypresses, pines, grasses, alligators, crocodiles (it’s the only place on earth where crocs and gators co-exist) fish, wading birds, panthers, manatees and small mammals to prosper. The Everglades became a subtropical version of the Serengeti in terms of its richness of life. Where it interfaced with the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, the swamp’s sweet water and the gulf’s seawater produced an ideal estuarine environment for shellfish.

It also became a target for hunters, trappers, farmers and developers. Many people saw the swamp as a dangerous, pestiferous obstacle to settlement. In northern sections, the river of water was sectioned off and the protected lands drained to be turned over to agriculture and towns. Hunters swooped down to harvest alligator skins and egret plumes, and fishermen began exploiting the bounty of the river-sea interface.

In the late 1940s, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began work on the Central and South Florida Project, a massive scheme of ditches, diversions, dams, levees and roads that eventually cost the Everglades more than half its original territory.

"Tropical National Park"

Well before the devastating incursions of the 1940s, conservationists had called for creation of a “Tropical National Park” to preserve a substantial portion of the now quickly dwindling swamp. Although Congress took heed and authorized creation of an Everglades National Park in 1934, it took supporters another 13 years to amass enough funding and acreage to make the park a reality.

At 2,357 square miles, it is by far the largest national park east of the Mississippi – almost three times larger than Great Smokey Mountains in the Appalachians. In the lower 48 states, only Yellowstone exceeds it in size. Even at that size, it constituted only about 20% of the Everglades’ original area. Developers continued to gnaw at the periphery, choking off the essential flow of water into the swamp.

The biggest blow came in the 1960s when plans were introduced to drain Big Cypress Swamp on the northwest of the Everglades. When ecologists and biologists were able to prove that Big Cypress was so crucial a link between Okeechobee and the Everglades that its demise would mean the destruction of the national park, Congress created the Big Cypress National Preserve in 1974 to stand sentinel. At the same time, as development threatened Biscayne Bay at the eastern end of the Everglades, Congress created Biscayne Bay National Monument.

But protecting large areas of land would be pointless if the water they depended on for their abundance was slowly choked off. By 1993, Florida and the Federal Government entered a 20-year pact that called for a comprehensive review of South Florida’s ecosystem. Up to $7.8 billion will be appropriated over that time to allow the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to review, revise and carry out changes in the distribution of Southern Florida’s water that will restore the Everglades to the condition they were in 1900.

This ambitious plan will not re-create the pristine environment of the pre-European era. But given Florida’s huge population (16.7 million people – fourth most populous in the U.S. behind California, Texas and New York) and the large area undergoing rehabilitation, this restoration project is being watched closely the world over. Can great damage to fragile ecosystems be undone by great acts of will (and expenditures of money)?

Until the answers to those questions are in, visitors to Florida are left with the happy task of seeing what all the shouting is about. The Everglades’ recesses are easily accessible by watercraft, especially Florida’s famous air boats, wide flat-bottomed vehicles that skim the shallow swamp waters, pushed along by huge blades (located behind the passengers in steel cages that look like oversized fan housings) that create a propulsive whoosh of air behind them.

What they’ll see are huge concentrations of herons, egrets and storks, and shy, but abundant, crocodiles and alligators. They’ll plumb the mysteries of how mangroves survive with their roots awash in saltwater, ponder the sweet irony that subtropical cypresses and fog-loving redwood trees are genetically very close, and marvel at the slow-moving river of water that gives rise to all their wonder.

*At its mouth, the Amazon River is more than 200 miles wide. It empties such a huge volume of fresh water into the Atlantic that it’s possible to sail more than 100 miles beyond its mouth out to sea without drawing saltwater into buckets or ladles dipped into the ocean.

– Patrick Totty