What you now see out your car window is unlike anything that's happened before. From an airplane, the sight is even more dramatic and dismaying.
In past years the blooms were smaller, localized. They came and went in a couple months. This one was born in October, and continues to spread like an 50-square-mile amoeba.
Chilly weather hasn't killed it, only moved it from the remote middle part of the bay—Everglades National Park—toward the populated islands. Each night at the fishing docks, backcountry guides grimly exchange information on the movement of the algae; on some days it's a challenge to find clear water.
The cloudy bloom not only looks like sewage, it blocks out vital sunlight, causing marine life to flee or perish. Sponges are dying by thousands—clots of them can be found bobbing in the algae. That's bad news for future lobster harvests; the juvenile crustaceans require healthy sponges for food and protection.
Even more alarming is that strong winter winds have pushed broad streaks of the algae out of the bay through the Keys bridges, into the Atlantic. The offshore reefs, already imperiled, could suffocate if the microbic crud thickens.
Imagine what would happen to the boating, diving and fishing—in other words, the entire Keys economy. Disaster is the only word for it, like an oil spill that won't go away.
This weekend the nation's top environmental groups are gathered in Tallahassee for the annual Everglades Coalition. The task is to devise a way to remap South Florida's plumbing to repair the Everglades.
Incredibly, it's the first time that the agenda includes a serious scientific discussion of the fate of Florida Bay. Pray that it's not too late.
Douglas would trade medal for preserved Glades
December 2, 1993
A bone-numbing north wind blew across the breadth of Everglades early this week. At the farthest tip, near Cape Sable, the sky flashed with wild birds: herons, curlews, ibises, blue egrets, white pelicans, sandpipers and a few roseate spoonbills.
They swarmed to the mud banks and oyster beds as the tide ran out, diving, wading, and wheeling overhead in such numbers that one could hardly imagine the place is dying. It is.
A long way off, an amazing woman named Marjory Stoneman Douglas was sleeping at the White House as an honored guest of the first family. On Tuesday she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for a life's work trying to preserve the Everglades.
Medallions are nice, but Mrs. Douglas probably would trade hers in an instant for one solid promise from Mr. Clinton. Water is what the Everglades needs—a restored flow, streaming pure from Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay.The way it was 103 years ago, when Marjory Stoneman Douglas was born.
That any of her Everglades remains untouched is the miracle. What Mrs. Douglas and her colleagues accomplished will never be done again. Not a chance.
Look at a map. The entire southwest thumb of Florida is a park—2,300 square miles that can't be malled, dredged, subdivided or plowed into golf courses. President Harry Truman made it official in 1947, the same year that Mrs. Douglas came out with her masterpiece, River of Gross.
Originally the park was 460,000 acres, a small piece of the total Everglades.The remainder was to be channelized by the Army Corps with the unabashed mission of conquest. In 1950 the park doubled its size, and has since grown to 1.5 million acres.
Saving so much raw real estate from the clutches of banks, developers, and speculators would be impossible today. Even if such a vast spread existed, the forces of greed would never surrender it for preservation.
The creation of Everglades National Park culminated a crusade that began in 1927, when Mrs. Douglas was just one voice on a local committee pushing for it. She admits that she knew "next to nothing" about the Everglades. When she started researching her book, she'd visited the place only a few times.
Today she is its patron saint. Ironically, her highest honor comes when her beloved Everglades is most imperiled. Although it can't be paved, it is being starved. Man-made canals with man-made faucets govern the ebb of its lifeblood; decisions rest with bureaucrats sympathetic to special interests.
The headwaters of Mrs. Douglas' river are spoiled by the sewage of millionaire sugar barons. What moves south is siphoned to suburbs, cities and a handful of vegetable farmers. The water that reaches Florida Bay is an anemic trickle—a 10th of what it once was. The bay, muddy and algae-clogged, languishes.
Those grand birds that rise from the mangroves on a wintry breeze are but a fleeting fraction of what once thrived here. Yet it would be untrue to say that the sight isn't a cause for hope. Given half a chance, nature rebounds swiftly.
Soon the Clinton administration will reveal more details of its controversial Everglades restoration plan, which includes a cleanup settlement with Big Sugar. At stake is more than bird life. It's our water, our economy, our whole future.
For political impact, the Everglades deal will be promoted as tough, bold and urgent. It had better be exactly that, or Mr. Clinton will have to contend again with Mrs. Douglas.
She might not be the type to return a presidential medallion, but she could definitely hang him with it.
Sugar bosses fight to keep real sweet deal
April 30, 1995
Powerful politicians want to spoil Big Sugar's sweetheart deal by eliminating the program that artificially props up the price.
Sugar barons hate the word "welfare," but that's what it is: guaranteed income, at the expense of foreign growers and American consumers.
Last week a congressional subcommittee meeting in Belle Glade heard from scores of regular folks who said that wiping out federal price guarantees would wipe out their way of life.
The sugar companies say so, too: They just can't hack it in a free-market economy.
Judging from all that whining, you'd think they were barely scraping by—U.S. Sugar, Flo-Sun and the other growers. You'd think their saga was one of a small farmer, struggling to eke a living from the fickle soil.
That's the image being peddled these days, as Big Sugar lobbies to keep its place on the federal gravy train.
And it's impossible not to feel sympathy for the working people of Clewiston, Pahokee and Belle Glade, who rely on the industry's prosperity. Those folks are truly scared, and they made an impression on the visiting congressmen.
Big Sugar's other face was not so visible. Take the Fanjul family, for instance, which owns 170,000 acres of Okeechobee cane. Its tale is not such a humble tearjerker.
As heads of Flo-Sun, brothers Alfie and Pepe Fanjul have gotten grossly wealthy because the U.S. government lets them charge eight cents per pound above the world price for sugar, and imposes strict import quotas on foreign competitors.
Forbes magazine estimates the program enriches the Fanjuls by $65 million a year. Their combined fortune is said to exceed $500 million. They live luxuriantly in Palm Beach, and contribute heavily (and, up to now, productively) to both Democrats and Republicans.
Interestingly, the Cuban-born brothers have never applied for American citizenship. They keep Spanish passports, which means their foreign assets aren't subject to U.S. estate taxes.
Oh, it gets better.
Recently the Fanjuls discovered the benefits of minority set-aside programs. They own most of a financial company, FAIC Securities, that's getting a cut of the juicy municipal bond business from Dade and Broward.
Set-asides were conceived to help local minority-owned firms compete with underwriting giants such as Merrill Lynch. Broward finance director Phillip Allen told Forbes it was "irrelevant" that the Fanjuls were non-citizen multimillionaires.