we recognize today. Over time, this mantle would support colonization by a bevy of plants largely from the south, animals largely from the north and, eventually, people from everywhere. The Everglades, in its present form, is a precocious infant—a youthful ecosystem only several millennia old, yet maturing quickly into an energetic, productive environment capable of surviving the harshest adversity while simultaneously providing generously for its innumerable dependents. To meet these demands, however, the Everglades itself depends upon the most basic of all necessities—a predictably cyclic supply of fresh water.
Fortunately, the extreme southern reaches of peninsular Florida stretch close enough to the Tropic of Cancer to be amenable to this request. While winter months bring mild temperatures and a relative paucity of rainfall, the hot, humid days of summer are routinely punctuated with powerful afternoon thunderstorms that infuse the marsh with water. Every year, the clouds overhead are wrung dry—delivering over five feet of water to the thirsty landscape below. Much of it falls on the open face of massive Lake Okeechobee—a seemingly boundless natural reservoir whose true capacity is limited sharply by its surprising lack of depth. As the wet season continues to unfurl, unrelenting storms fill both the lake and the Everglades to capacity, spilling waters on a path of least resistance that courses nearly one hundred miles to the south on an overland march to the sea. This lengthy journey is somewhat aided by a steady, though nominal, loss of elevation totaling only around nineteen feet. The waters of the Everglades, though slow and almost imperceptible, are always on the move.
Whereas swamps are usually characterized by the occurrence of stagnant water, the Everglades is truly a river in its hydrology. Unlike the raging rivers that find their origins in the confluence of mountain streams, the waters that wind their way through south Florida’s marshes and forests do so at an almost imperceptible rate. In the absence of obstruction and constraint, the sluggish waters do not keep to a single riverbed, but rather, reach out broadly on the landscape to inundate millions of acres along the way. All told, 4,000 square miles are said to have been touched by the waters of the historic Everglades. And though slight, the presence of a detectable current in those waters provided the necessary grounds for author and activist Marjory Stoneman Douglas to christen the system with its other familiar moniker—the River of Grass.
Though the peculiarities of the Everglades may not always bend to our liking, they have—over thousands of years—proven hospitable to an astoundingly diverse collection of life. Early naturalists gave the area high marks for the breadth of rare Caribbean plants found growing along the subtropical coast. The waters of south Florida teem with an assortment of fresh- and saltwater life that has proven central to the people of historic and present-day cultures. Yearly congregations of migratory birds provide spectacular testimony to the nearly 400 species that have been recorded in the Everglades. And joining these is a motley crew of threatened and endangered creatures that have, over time, served to both define the area and infuse the River of Grass with character.
The chance of sighting a manatee, Florida panther, or the rarest of butterflies entices some to spend their lives exploring the wilds of south Florida. Yet, ironically, the promise of near-certain encounters with wildlife also prompts others to shun the Glades entirely. The Everglades have received legitimate fame for hosting dense congregations of critters of ill repute. They are home to innumerable snakes, including four venomous species. They are the only location in the world where both alligators and crocodiles thrive side by side. And insects can be so copious in the summer, some have said you need to throw a rock through the bugs just to get a decent view.
For some, it is probably fortunate there is no other Everglades in the world. Yet as unremarkable as it might seem, it is perhaps the relative scarcity of places like it that lend it truly remarkable value. Perched delicately between earth’s temperate and tropical biomes, the Everglades have amassed an unparalleled wealth of resources worthy of preservation. Recognizing an important opportunity, the United States Congress authorized creation of Everglades National Park in 1935 with the stipulation that the park “be permanently reserved as a wilderness, and no development of the project or plan for the entertainment of visitors shall be undertaken which will interfere with the preservation of the unique flora and fauna and the essential primitive conditions now prevailing in the area.”
Since that time, the park has been recognized for the wealth of resources it protects. Within its borders can be found the largest sawgrass prairie in North America, an estuary of national significance, and the largest protected mangrove forest in the Northern Hemisphere. Dozens of rare species are found within the park, and no doubt many more yet await discovery. Quietly and without fanfare, the orchestrated interplay of the living and non-living drives the uninterrupted continuance of vital ecological processes—gas exchange, nutrient cycling, water filtration, erosion control, carbon sequestration, and the like. And though underappreciated as a repository of human culture, the park preserves the ancestral homeland of remarkably advanced civilizations that have long since gone extinct.
Everglades National Park has received global recognition for its inherent values and enjoys protection under three distinct, international accords as a World Heritage Site, Wetland of International Importance, and a Man in the Biosphere Reserve. True to the intent of the park’s enabling legislation, the National Park Service has worked diligently to spare the landscape from further physical modification. And in 1978, roughly 1.3 million acres of the park were designated the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Wilderness Area—affording them the highest level of federal protection currently possible.
Given these efforts, the natural world should find refuge in the confines of Everglades National Park. Here the biological and chemical processes that forge life should continue to run wild and unimpaired. In the absence of synthetic materials, internal combustion engines, impermeable surfaces, chemical pollutants, and artificial lights, native populations of plants and animals should continue to thrive and interact as they have for thousands of years.
Yet despite decades of struggle to protect the Everglades against development, the south Florida wilderness has been dammed, diked, and drained nearly to death. For well over a century, well-intentioned water management schemes have successfully yoked the formerly intractable waters of the Everglades watershed. Today, an intricate system of canals, spillways, pump stations, levees, and wells provides a deceptively dependable supply of fresh water that has fueled the explosive growth of industry and population centers in the southern peninsula. Today, nearly half the original extent of the Everglades has been supplanted by agricultural fields and urban subdivisions, which are afforded flood protection through the deliberate and wasteful redirection of “excess” water to the sea in staggering quantities.
Billions of gallons of fresh water are shunted to the coast annually, plaguing the ecological health and vitality of the estuaries that receive them. And while oysters, shrimp, and shorebirds are forced to contend with unnatural gluts of fresh water, other organisms are condemned to suffer lengthy droughts further downstream. For decades growers, politics, and the occasional tropical storm have governed how and when south Florida’s accumulated rains were distributed. At virtually any time of the year, without regard to Mother Nature’s historical preferences, the flip of a switch could send a deluge north, south, east, or west. Rarely were south Florida’s natural areas the beneficiaries of such technological prowess. Rather, some years, Everglades National Park was denied any inflow of life-giving water whatsoever.
Circumventing the very cycles with which the furred, feathered and photosynthetic denizens had become attuned proved disastrous. Wading birds, no longer privy to the gradual draw-down of water that pooled the prey necessary to nourish their young, saw precipitous drops in their populations. Snail kites and Cape Sable seaside sparrows were driven to near extinction, subjected to artificial flooding that drowned their respective prey and young during consecutive dry seasons. Wildfires, historically hampered in marshlands by long periods of inundation, ran rampant in areas that lay parched for months. And further downstream the estuaries of Florida Bay and the coastal fringe, denied periodic infusions of fresh water from the north, saw pronounced changes in salinity, seagrass, and species composition.
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