U.S. Effort for Everglades Gives Sugar Growers Bitter Aftertaste : Florida: Runoff from the cane fields is contributing to the destruction of wildlife in one of the most important ecosystems in the country, environmentalists say.

A pale sun glinted off of the knives of Jamaican cutters as they stooped to harvest sugar cane in a field of black, mucky soil. Walter Parker’s pickup bounced across the field as he pulled up to check their progress.

“This is my 27th crop,” he said proudly.

Parker is director of agricultural operations for the U.S. Sugar Co., and he thinks of U.S. Sugar as his extended family. It has provided a comfortable life not only for Parker but for his father, uncle, brother, nephew and many of his friends.

Life has been sweet for Florida’s sugar growers for much of this century. But change is coming.

In May, Florida Gov. Lawton Chiles signed a bill backed by the Clinton Administration that requires sugar growers to spend $322 million over 20 years to clean up the water trickling from their farms into the Everglades.

Environmentalists say runoff from the sugar cane fields is contributing to the destruction of wildlife in one of the most important and endangered ecosystems in the country.

The Florida bill was the first step in a comprehensive plan for restoration of the Everglades, one of the Administration’s top environmental priorities. Ultimately, the plan could put much tougher restrictions on sugar growers.

“This is a clear victory for the Everglades and the people of South Florida,” Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt said when the bill passed.

The sugar cane growers took a dimmer view. “Our perspective on this basically is survival,” said Robert Buker, a senior vice president at U.S. Sugar. “We’re willing to make changes and pay money, but we want it in the context to allow farming to continue in the long term.”

“What’s always been whispered is, they want our land,” Parker said. “They can’t afford to buy it from us, so they want to regulate it from us.”

Florida’s sugar cane industry is crowded into a fertile crescent that hugs the southern shore of Lake Okeechobee. That puts it just upstream from the Everglades and smack in the middle of the debate over what to do about the nation’s most famous swamp.

In 1840, Florida declared the area “wholly valueless” and asked Congress for help draining it. But the Everglades is now recognized as a unique biological resource. Not simply a swamp, it is a slow-moving, 50-mile-wide river, only inches deep in some places.

Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, a centenarian activist who did much to save the Everglades, called it a “river of grass.”

Everglades National Park is the last stop for a vast sheet of water that begins just south of Orlando, bubbles slowly down the Florida peninsula and tumbles off the end into Florida Bay.

But the image of the Everglades as a place of little value persists. National Geographic magazine, which had never met a wilderness it didn’t like, finally found something to complain about when it went to the Everglades.

“Some days I felt as though I were wandering through a museum stripped of its artifacts, which may explain why I was never romanced by this park,” Alan Mairson wrote. After five weeks in Everglades National Park, Mairson said, he recalled “a handful of magic moments . . . but, frankly, there were far too few.”

That image has complicated the job of environmentalists and researchers fighting to save the Everglades. It may partly explain why the Everglades has continued to suffer in recent decades, despite federal protection. Environmentalists say it is the most endangered ecosystem in the United States.

The dismantling of the Everglades began shortly after the turn of the century, when developers moved in with shovels and pickaxes to drain it.

Water was diverted to a growing urban population along the coast. The rich, organic soils south of Lake Okeechobee proved suitable for sugar cane.

Sugar cane growers won favorable water rights from the state and its water agencies, and the sugar industry prospered.

But natural water flows to the Everglades were disrupted, and when the water did arrive it was rich in phosphorous and other nutrients it picked up on the farms.

Native vegetation, accustomed to surviving on the scant resources that occur naturally, was overwhelmed by cattails and other species that thrived on the surge in nutrients. And it is still happening.

“The Everglades is getting much less water, at the wrong place, and it’s the wrong water,” said James Webb of the Wilderness Society.

In 1988, the United States sued Florida and its water agencies to force cleanup of the water reaching the Everglades. Substantial efforts had been made to reach a settlement before the Clinton Administration took up the cause. But pressure from the Interior Department was crucial in bringing about the agreement.

The Florida legislation spells out the terms of settlement of that suit. The question now is whether the agreement spelled out in the Florida bill is a good one.

The bill requires the construction of large artificial marshes that will be used to cleanse farm run-off before it arrives in the Everglades. The marshes, to be completed in 2003, will cost $465 million.

Of that, the sugar cane growers will be required to pay $230 million to $322 million over the next 20 years, depending on how well they do in cleaning up the water before it reaches the water-treatment areas. The rest of the cost will be paid by taxpayers.

Environmentalists said the agreement pushes back deadlines too far, costs taxpayers too much and isn’t tough enough on sugar cane growers.

“I just don’t think it got the job done,” said Webb. “What it clearly does is delimit certain obligations of the industry. It doesn’t do much else with similar clarity.”

“In fairness to sugar, this deal does have some public benefits in it,” said Thomas Martin, director of the Everglades campaign at the National Audubon Society. “They’re going to send more Lake Okeechobee water south to the Everglades.”

Even in 2003, however, the bill allows discharges of water containing up to 50 parts per billion of phosphorous. That’s still enough to do damage, Martin said.

“We should have pushed for more money from the sugar industry so we can provide even less dirty water to the Everglades faster than this,” he said.

Babbitt conceded that the Administration has more to do. “This problem is complex; it’s going to take decades to solve,” he said.

“We can’t save the Everglades unless we are going to find a permanent balance in an ecosystem that is being overburdened by the expansion of Miami, by intensive agriculture, by tremendous pressures on Florida Bay,” he said.

U.S. Sugar’s Buker, meanwhile, is “happy to have it resolved, because this is a horrible issue and it just grinds us down.”

The growers had lobbied for what he called “environmental peace,” so they could carry on without fear of further challenges by environmentalists.

“We have environmental peace, it looks like, for 12 years,” he said.

Babbitt didn’t see it that way. In November, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will present a report with its plan for restoration of the entire Everglades ecosystem, from Lake Okeechobee on down.

Instead of “environmental peace,” Babbitt predicted “relative calm” for the next few months. “But it will only last until the report comes out,” he said. “There is no question that the big issues were . . . touched upon only a little bit in the legislation.”

If the sugar growers do have peace until then, Webb said, “they’re going to be the only creatures in the Everglades, human or otherwise,” that do.