When Napoleon Bonaparte Broward ran for the governorship of Florida in 1905, he campaigned on a promise to take care of the Everglades -- take care of them, that is, in turn-of-the-century terms. The future of the Everglades became the deciding issue of the 1905 election, and Broward won because he promised to "drain that abominable, pestilence-ridden swamp."

South Florida was then and remains now a maddeningly flat landscape, covered with endless sawgrass marshes, studded with small hammocks (or tree islands), and laced with blackwater sloughs fringed with thick mangroves. Teddy Roosevelt was in the White House when Broward ran for governor, and the conservation ideal was starting to take hold; but most Americans who looked at that landscape in 1905 saw only mosquitoes, the threat of floods, and a wasteland that could be turned into productive farmland if only it were a little less sodden.

Maybe it was prophetic that the first entrepreneur to drain land in the area killed himself after losing everything in the panic of 1893. In any case, the rerouting of water flows in the Everglades has not gone according to plan. Billions of dollars have been made in agriculture and real estate development, and millions of Americans have been able to eat domestic tomatoes on their hamburgers in winter, but now that south Florida has the largest hydrological control system in the world, some of its citizens are running out of drinking water. Jim Webb, regional director of The Wilderness Society, expostulates: "Imagine, in this waterlogged part of the state we sometimes have water shortages!" Extraordinary rescue efforts are now under way -- but they must reconfigure a century of misguided plumbing.

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What people did not know about the Everglades in 1905 has since filled several books. When the hydrology of south Florida was still intact, Lake Okeechobee overflowed its southern lip every year during the wet season from June through September. The water slid south toward Florida Bay in a shallow, imperceptibly slow glide fifty miles wide and more than a hundred miles long. "It would take a year for the rainfall around Lake Okeechobee to reach the Tamiami Trail," says Bob Johnson, a senior hydrologist in Everglades National Park.

The local Native Americans called this quasi-river the "grassy water." It replenished groundwater reserves, maintained the balance between salt water and fresh water in Florida Bay, and supported a luxuriant profusion of plant and animal species that live in, on, or near water. There were hundreds of unique flora and fauna in this ecosystem, and life in near-unimaginable abundance; in the mid-1900s, individual colonies of egrets and herons harbored more than a hundred thousand nesting birds.

Into this harmoniously functioning system of water and wildlife came the well-meaning engineers of a state intent on development. Broward summed up his policy as "cut'n'try." He persuaded the legislature to create the Everglades Drainage District, encompassing the entire Everglades system from Lake Okeechobee south to Florida Bay. Between 1900 and 1930, seeking to control floods and supply water for agriculture, state-funded construction companies gouged out the four main canals that drain water from Lake Okeechobee toward the Atlantic coast. The Tamiami Trail, which was the first road to cut east to west all the way across the Everglades and which may have affected the annual southward flow, was also built in this period.

The year 1930 marked another milestone, or perhaps tombstone, for the south Florida ecosystem: the arrival of the Army Corps of Engineers. The Corps, with its substantial resources and expertise on redirecting nature, has been often and roundly criticized for its impact on the Everglades. Still, as one Florida environmentalist points out, "The Corps is like Dracula. He can't come in unless you invite him in."

Florida's reason for inviting the Corps in was flood control, which it desperately desired in the wake of lethal hurricanes in 1926 and 1928. The Corps obliged by ringing the southern rim of Lake Okeechobee with a substantial new system of levees and hurricane gates. But, also in keeping with the Dracula metaphor -- the more the Corps drained south Florida, the more dependent south Florida became on the Corps. When the flood control system was improved, entrepreneurs took courage and moved in with new sugar farms and new developments; when the floods came back, the enlarged population of outraged citizens set up a cry for more engineering.

This process culminated with the hurricanes of 1947-1948, in which 2,000 people and 25,000 cows were drowned. Florida responded to the hurricanes by publishing a description of the disasters that became known as the "weeping cow" book, because of the pitiable heifer, belly-deep in floodwaters, on its cover. Congress responded to the weeping cow by approving the Corps' comprehensive plan to integrate state and federal water management in central and south Florida. And after that, says Bernard Yokel, president of the Florida Audubon Society, "the 'four Ds' philosophy prevailed in relation to south Florida's water. Dike it, dam it, divert it, and drain it!"

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The building binge lasted a half century. Between 1948 -- a year after Everglades National Park was dedicated by President Truman -- and 1980, the state and the Corps criss-crossed south Florida with 1,400 miles of canals, levees, dikes, and impoundments designed to regulate water flow for flood control, drainage, and water supply. They designated the entire Kissimmee River/Everglades watershed system as the South Florida Water Management District. They built a series of levees to the east that dried out Florida's southeast coast and turned it into a real estate mecca. They drained the enormous Everglades Agricultural Area to serve as a dedicated farming zone. To store water for irrigation and urban use, they walled in the Water Conservation Areas. And to move water around the whole vast system, they added a plethora of spillways, culverts, pump stations, and smaller canals.

The upshot of all this work was that massive amounts of water -- two-thirds of the total in the Okeechobee/Everglades system -- were siphoned off to appease increasingly powerful agricultural interests. Additional water was diverted to Miami and other booming communities to the east. Vast areas of wetlands were drained for new housing, businesses, sugarcane fields, vegetable and dairy farms, ranches, and citrus groves. In wet periods, excess water was pumped into canals and out to sea, rather than allowed to sink into the soils to renew the groundwater; in the 1980's, write Stephen Light and J. Walter Dineen in Everglades: The Ecosystem and Its Restoration, 3.3 million acre-feet were sent out to the Atlantic every year.

By 1990, so much water in the upper watershed had fallen victim to the "four Ds" that very little was trickling down into the Everglades and Florida Bay. The water control and diversion projects effectively cut the Everglades off from most of its water supply, "constricting the top three-quarters of the region like a concrete and steel corset," wrote Alan Mairson in National Geographic last year.

What was an unqualified success, in terms of protecting south Florida residents from floods, was an unmitigated disaster for south Florida's ecosystems. The unique wetland habitats of south Florida began collapsing, one after the other, like a row of dominoes. Agricultural runoff encouraged the growth of cattails and other nutrient-loving plants, which shouldered away the native sawgrass. Wading bird populations crashed, declining by more than 90 percent over the last fifty years. The great colonies of a hundred thousand birds are no more: "Today, an egret colony with two thousand birds in it is considered a big colony," says John Ogden, one of the Park's veteran biologists. Fourteen of the Park's species are listed as endangered, including the southern bald eagle, American crocodile, Florida panther, snail kite, and wood stork.

And then there are the human impacts. The natural hydrological cycle for south Florida is now so fouled up that if the wet season is particularly wet, water managers with excess water on their hands must play God by deciding where to put the floods. After a wet fall in 1994, for instance, they elected to spare most farms and cities, and site the disaster in wildlife conservation areas and the Miccosukee Indian Reservation.

If, on the other hand, the dry season is particularly dry, parts of the Everglades dry up. So too does the water supply for some south Florida communities. And with so much water being drained and pumped out of south Florida, salt water has intruded into some groundwater aquifers, making them unfit for drinking or agriculture. "Water in this part of Florida has been so badly mismanaged that we have communities planning to build reverse-osmosis desalinization plants, using brackish groundwater, so that they will have a constant supply of drinking water," complains Jim Webb of The Wilderness Society.

The final, ironic verdict on Napoleon Bonaparte Broward's "cut'n'try" policy was handed down recently when Broward County, located in the heart of what was once the "grassy water," received the official state designation of Critical Water Supply Problem Area.

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The water flow problems have changed the flow of politics in this state. "The main issue in south Florida has always been water -- who gets it, how much, and when," says Maggy Hurchalla flatly. "For the past hundred years or so every-one wanted to destroy the Everglades, and convert it into something useful.... Conservation was a dirty word, particularly if you were running for political office." But Hurchalla, a long-time Florida resident and environmental activist (and Janet Reno's sister) has more recently observed a remarkable shift in the battle lines of Florida's water wars: "In less than a decade we went from trying to get rid of the Everglades, to doing everything we can to save what is left of it."

Hurchalla now sits on the Governor's Commission for a Sustainable South Florida -- an entity that, not too long ago, would have sounded like a contradiction in terms. Governor Graham launched a "Save Our Everglades" program in 1983, but as late as 1988, the state was still so resistant to serious environmental reform that the federal government sued it for allowing agricultural runoff to flow into Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge and Everglades National Park.

The political shift has come about in part because of the drying up of drinking water and irrigation supplies, in part because politicians have woken up to the fact that income from tourism in south Florida rivals -- and may exceed -- the income from agriculture. A major turning point came in 1991, when newly elected governor Lawton Chiles officially called off the state's fight against the 1988 lawsuit. "I want to surrender," he said, walking into the courtroom. "I've brought my sword; who do I give it to?"

Once the ice was broken, Everglades activists saw their decades of spadework rewarded with a sudden flowering of political bodies. Chiles agreed to launch a comprehensive ecosystem restoration and protection plan for south Florida. The state legislature passed the Everglades Forever Act, authorizing an Everglades Construction Project to "clean and restore the Everglades Protection Area," which includes the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge, the Water Conservation Areas, and the National Park itself. A blue-ribbon federal task force has been set up under the auspices of the Secretary of the Interior, with support from Chiles and President Clinton. And Congress has authorized the Army Corps of Engineers to undertake a detailed assessment of just how far to go in undoing what it has been doing in south Florida since 1930.

If all goes well, this bureaucratic flowering should bear some impressive hydrological fruit. At the state level, some fifty-five different projects will be carried out in the next decade by the South Florida Water Management District and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, working closely with the Army Corps.

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At the core of this state effort is the Everglades Construction Project, with eleven major undertakings planned. The liquid heart of these projects will be the conversion of more than 40,000 acres of degraded wetlands, such as abandoned sugar cane fields, into specially designed artificial wetlands to serve as stormwater treatment areas. All told, six of these wetlands will be built, ranging in size from 800 acres to over 16,000 acres. Preliminary plans call for already-existing canals to channel polluted irrigation water and runoff from agricultural fields into the artificial wetlands, which are essentially huge ponds with earthen walls. A carefully chosen mix of nutrient-loving plants will then soak up the fertilizers and other pollutants in the water, making it clean enough to be discharged out the other end into an outflow canal -- which will send the water back into the Everglades system, instead of pumping it into agricultural land or out to sea. As Duke University professor Curtis Richardson points out, however, it remains to be seen whether 40,000 acres can do the job.

Another of the big state projects is designed to send more water south. Current plans call for increasing sheet flow (water with no definite channel) into the Water Conservation Areas by opening twenty miles of levees. "Right now, there are only four outlets for this water," explains Gary Goforth, of the South Florida Water Management District. "By widening the flow of water across twenty miles of remnant Everglades marshes, we will be able to greatly increase the amount of sheetflow southward into the wetland system."

Two of the state projects are intended to improve water quality in Lake Okeechobee. At present, about 42,000 acre-feet of polluted stormwater runoff is discharged directly into the lake every year without any treatment whatsoever. The new plans would redirect some 60 to 80 percent of that water southward into a stormwater treatment area. The other modification would redirect about 51,000 acre-feet yearly of clean water, which is now being discharged into the sea, back into the lake itself.

As for the Army Corps, its future in south Florida hinges on a political process that is likely to make the water disputes of the past fifty years look tame. Congress has asked the Corps first to reassess south Florida's water needs, and then to make recommendations for restoring and preserving the remaining wetlands in Loxahatchee and the Park -- while at the same time making more water available to expanding urban areas and the Everglades Agricultural Area.

Are these two priorities compatible? Perhaps not, judging from the Corps' response. It has come up with not one, but six different proposals for six different levels of wetlands restoration. The six plans, which are only frameworks at this point, range from the simple band-aid variety -- operational changes, such as opening a few more locks and filling in a few canals -- to the truly sublime: a restoration effort to remake south Florida's truncated wetlands into an interconnected ecosystem once again.

Plan Six is "the cadillac version," as Lewis Hornung of the Corps says. It would reconnect Lake Okeechobee to the Everglades by restoring seasonal water flow from the lake southward through the canal system. It would use impoundments to store water that is now simply dumped in the lake, for release during the dry season or in periods of drought. It would restore sheet flow from the Water Conservation Areas into Everglades National Park. And it would improve the quality of the water flowing into and through the Everglades by utilizing the six stormwater treatment areas being designed and built by the state (though more may be needed), and by building a flow-way along the eastern fringe of the Everglades to increase freshwater flow into Florida Bay.

Naturally, virtually the entire environmental community supports Plan Six. And naturally, the entire agricultural lobby opposes it, or any other version that includes reclaiming agricultural land for wetlands. The Corps has now hunkered down to do feasibility studies of the six options, assessing the resource and financial implications of each. "The Corps doesn't favor any of these plans, so far," explains Hornung. "We are just trying to figure out what it will take to implement each of the possible options." (At least one Corps member thinks differently. "It's a lot of fun to get to be the good guy, after we've spent all these years wrecking things," said an engineer who preferred not to be quoted by name.) In the next several months, when the Corps presents its results, the political fur will start to fly.

Even if Plan Six is chosen, there are no guarantees. "It will take years of thoughtful experiment with upstream water diversions to Taylor Slough, Florida Bay, and even Biscayne Bay before we know whether indeed we can recreate what once was -- or come darn close to it," says Nathaniel Reed, former U.S. assistant secretary for parks and wildlife and long-serving member of the Water Management District.

Reed is reasonably optimistic as long as sufficient state and federal funding continues, especially funds for land acquisition. But in south Florida, the best-laid plans of mice and men depend on how much water is available. And with the population expected to reach 15 to 30 million in the next fifty years -- from only 6 million today -- the demand for water and land will soar. Development is already pressing up against the eastern levee of the Water Conservation Areas. "We're racing against time," says Reed. "You have to see it by helicopter to believe it. A helicopter flight over Broward County gives you the chills."

With the development steamroller bearing down on the region, and with a great deal of political opposition being mustered against environmental change, "we still have a hard road ahead," cautions Maggy Hurchalla. But she, too, remains optimistic. "It won't be easy, but hopefully we'll be able to put the 'ever' back in Everglades."

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Sidebar: Water follies*

1845
Florida becomes a state

1881
Philadelphia entrepreneur Hamilton Disston buys 4 million acres near Lake Okeechobee, starts draining and dredging

1896
Miami founded

1905
Napoleon Bonaparte Broward elected governor on platform to drain Everglades; land speculator imports water-hungry Melaleuca trees from Australia to help with drainage; Audubon warden Guy Bradley murdered near Flamingo by egret-plume hunters

1909
Everglades Drainage District dynamites rapids on Miami River

1916
Construction begins on Tamiami Trail highway

1920s
Boom years bring thousands of new residents to south Florida

1930
Florida requests help of U.S. Army Corps of Engineers with flood control

1943-44
Back-to-back droughts and decades of draining lead to horrific wildfires

1947
Marjory Stoneman Douglas publishes The Everglades: River of Grass; Truman dedicates opening of Everglades National Park

1948
After massive hurricanes, Congress authorizes comprehensive flood-control project by Army Corps

1950s
Corps builds eastern levees and drains Everglades Agricultural Area

1960-63
Corps constructs Water Conservation Areas

1962
Corps begins channelizing Kissimmee River, shortening it from 103 miles to fifty-six and destroying 48,000 acres of marsh

1970
State studies show Lake Okeechobee is polluted from nutrients off dairy farms and cattle ranches

1971
Congress orders Corps to deliver more water to National Park

1983
Governor Bob Graham announces "Save Our Everglades" program

1985
Corps says federal guidelines do not allow restoration of Kissimmee for environmental purposes

1988
U.S. government files suit against state agencies for letting polluted water flow into Loxahatchee Wildlife Refuge and Everglades Park

1989
Biologists claim 200 exotic plant species have invaded Everglades, including 100,000 acres of Brazilian peppers and 40,000 acres of Melaleuca

1990
Congress orders Corps to do another study on whether restoring Kissimmee River is possible; Corps now says it is possible

1991
Governor Lawton Chiles settles lawsuit with U.S. government, agrees to build 35,000 acres of water treatment marshes; farmers say pollution is not their fault and file first of more than a dozen lawsuits to block the plan; U.S. Sugar Corp. pleads guilty to dumping toxics in Everglades

1992
Congress authorizes restoration of Kissimmee River, including restoring 30,000 acres of marsh by 2011

1994 Florida legislature passes Everglades Forever Act Compiled from sources provided by the South Florida Water Management District.

*Compiled from sources provided by the South Floria Water Management District.

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Don Hinrichsen, co-author of the Atlas of the Environment (Prentice Hall Press), is a contributing editor of Amicus. This piece first appeared in the Summer 1995 issue of The Amicus Journal.

© 1996 by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Individual authors and artists hold copyright to their own work. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.