Dear Friends:
I received my issue of the MEC Newsletter. Thank you.
I read Dan Hamburg's endorsement of Ralph Nadar and I saw in it a reference to the subsidy to Florida's sugar growers. Both President Clinton and Vice President Gore have endorsed Florida's proposed 1 cent tax on sugar. The point of the tax is to require the sugar growers to contribute to the restoration of the Everglades. The tax came up for a vote in Florida in November, and the sugar growers, portraying themselves as small family farmers in danger of losing their businesses as a result of a tax proposed by "extremists", have spent millions of dollars opposing that tax.
I urge the MEC to provide some fuller background on the Everglades than Dan's brief comment. Sugar is not the only irrigated agricultural business in the Everglades -- "grassy water" to the aboriginal people -- ranching and winter vegetable businesses also contribute to the problem; and urban sprawl is another contributer to environmental degradation. Dairy farms produce 2,295 tons of waste each day that contributes 1.5 tons of phosphorous. Each new human resident uses 200 gallons of fresh water a day. Contaminated water carries ten to twenty times normal concentrations of phosphorous and nitrogen. Nutrient-loving plants displaced thousands of acres of native saw grass. Invaders shade out oxygen producing plants. Cattails strangle the water conservation areas at an average rate of four acres a day.
The Everglades flows into Florida Bay. One effect of pollution of the bay is destruction of fragile marine life chains as well. The effect is devastating to the Florida Keys. Tourism is a primary business in Florida, and, if things continue the way they have been going, there will be nothing natural worth seeing in South Florida.
The grassy water of the Everglades once flowed from the southern banks of Lake Okeechobee across most of southeast Florida, dominated by cypress and mangrove forests. "Until a hundred years ago south Florida's fresh water circulated in a slow, majestic, rain-driven cycle that nurtured an ecosystem unique on earth. Starting at a chain of lakes south of Orlando, water flowed south into the Kissimmee River....the Kissimmee meandered through palmetto-studded Savannahs to Lake Okeechobee, which has an average depth of only 12 feet but covers 730 square miles." (July, 1990 National Geographic.)
Perhaps because this is not the environment I grew up in -- my father's plane, the U.S. Navy's Hellcat, disappeared into the Atlantic 8 miles east of Vero Beach before I was born, but I never saw Florida before last year -- this place stuns me. I might as well have come to another planet. Perhaps we need to go somewhere completely different from what we are used to if we wish to see clean again.
Alligators sometimes walk on their short prehistoric legs from the Savannah in back of where I live (on the town site of Eden, Florida). Pelicans fly in formation across the Indian River Lagoon. They are incredibly beautiful. I found a mud turtle on my path and he pulled into his shell and looked out at me from his own depths. An egret stands at the edge of the water, and then flies out with its legs out behind it like a diver.
This place is still remarkable. Its loss will be terrible.
Phyl Diri (former Ukiah-an)
Copyright Mendocino Environmental Center 1997
Permission granted to excerpt or use this article if source is cited