Undoing the Damage

Imagine the outcry if private firms were allowed to tap underground geothermal reservoirs on the borders of Yellowstone National Park to the point that Old Faithful sputtered itself into just another Yellowstone mud pot. Essentially the same thing has happened in southern Florida, and now is the time for the rest of the nation to help correct this environmental misfortune.

Everglades National Park is a classic example of where forces at work outside the preserve can have a devastating effect on the park environment itself. Corrective action must be taken soon, or the park and the adjacent Big Cypress National Preserve may permanently lose the natural qualities that make them a unique and important part of the national park system. As Florida Gov. Bob Graham put it: “In the process of draining the Everglades, the developers reduced a natural work of art to a thing pedestrian and mundane.”

Picture a “river” 50 miles wide and 6 inches deep running from the Kissimmee River Basin in central Florida southward through Lake Okeechobee and into the Everglades. In its natural state, this was a 3-million-acre ecosystem unique in the world, scientists say. But over the past century the area north of the 1.2-million-acre Everglades park has been diked, dredged and filled for farming, industry and other development. The wandering 98-mile-long Kissimmee River was transformed by the Army Corps of Engineers into a 50-mile ditch ignominiously labeled as the C-38 Canal.

All this has shattered the balance of nature in this vast marvelous wetland teeming with fish, bird and animal life, including the alligator and the endangered Florida panther. Portions of the Everglades dried up so much that they caught fire in the 1970s. Remaining waters have become polluted with agricultural runoff, and the drying up of the Everglades has depleted the aquifer essential to domestic and industrial water supplies in southern Florida.

Under retiring Gov. Graham, Florida has launched a program to restore the wetlands by returning some water to the swamps and marshes and buying up land that had been cleared for development. The total project may cost $300 million. An essential part of the effort will be to take the Kissimmee River out of its artificial channel and to restore its natural flow. In doing this, the assistance of the Army Corps of Engineers will be critical. But regional corps officials have recommended against participation on the ground that the project is not economically feasible.

This is typical of the corps’ pinched concrete-channel mindset and insensitivity to the value of America’s wetlands. The corps has stretched credibility to the limit in the past in attempting to justify dubious projects to benefit developers and shippers. Now is the time for Congress to require the corps to see the light and undo the damage that it wrought in channeling the Kissimmee in the first place.