The truth of the Everglades is often invisible from the ground. You see bushes, endless sawgrass, cypress trees, an occasional heron or gator. But you can’t discern the larger story of one of the most unique and endangered ecosystems on the planet.
To begin to read that story, you need elevation. Only then can you see nature’s braille, the vast textures and scars that reveal what the Everglades was, what it is, and what it could be.
The South Florida Sun Sentinel recently took a flight with Everglades Foundation chief science officer Stephen Davis and pilot Robert Decker of nonprofit LightHawk Conservation Flying so as to better read the Everglades at a moment when things are about to change.
The timing was ideal. Water flow in South Florida is about to shift forever. Firstly, the Army Corps of Engineers will soon begin a more nature-friendly process of releasing polluted water from Lake Okeechobee.
Secondly, major Everglades Restoration projects have come online recently, and the linchpin of the $10.5 billion restoration, the Everglades Agricultural Area Reservoir, is now under construction. With luck, it’ll be operational by 2030.
When it’s all said and done, both efforts are supposed to prevent polluted Lake Okeechobee water from flowing east and west, where it decimates estuaries — and economies — near Stuart and Fort Myers Beach. And restoration aims to clean Lake Okeechobee water and send it south, where it will replenish the Everglades and Florida Bay, just as it has for 5,000 years.
But questions remain, such as whether there are enough filtration marshes to clean the water before sending it to Everglades National Park.
The brutality of a straight line
From an altitude of 1,000 feet, the story becomes more clear. We pass over a saw-toothed protrusion of suburbia into the Everglades, then fly over what at first appears to be a vast wilderness. But as we pass north of the Tamiami Trail, it’s clear the land, the river of grass, is actually cut into isolated cells.
Each cell has a different texture. Some are lush with sloughs and tree islands sculpted into teardrop patterns through thousands of years of slow sheet flow. Others are dry and monotonous, a single color, a single dominant plant species — one flat pan for miles. Even though they’re “wild,” they’re not.
“Those are the sections that have been cut off from water flow,” yells Davis over the din of the Cessna’s engine.
From up here, once you see the wilderness, straight lines make no sense — a road, a canal, a boundary with suburbia — there’s a brutality to them.
These blocks have been compartmentalized for decades, parching one, flooding another. “One of the goals of restoration is decompartmentalization,” says Davis.
The water, which flows from pastures near Orlando, through Lake Okeechobee and cane fields and stormwater treatment areas, doesn’t just need to flow south to restore the Everglades, it needs to be spread out as it once was, before all the canals.
We spot a hard laceration below — the L-67 canal slices diagonally just south of Weston, straight through the Everglades and Francis S. Taylor Wildlife Management Area (aka Water Conservation Area 3B).
The levee acts as a dam. The ramifications are stark. To the west, a pattern of teardrop-shaped tree islands, the land looking as it would have 5,000 years ago. To the east, a blank flat plain of sawgrass stretching toward Miami Lakes and Miramar.
The monocrop-like areas are not natural, and don’t support as much life, says Davis. A 50/50 ratio of slough to sawgrass would be ideal. But it’s not about looking pretty.
“That patterned landscape is fundamental to driving the ecology of the Everglades. Having a flat marsh landscape is not as good as one that’s corrugated, or patterned,” he says.
The flat areas are either fully wet or fully dry, which is tough on both plants and animals. A patterned landscape gives fish deeper water to make it through the dry season, thus giving wading birds more food, and land animals more raised areas to exploit. There’s just more diversity, and that’s a good thing, says Davis.
He points out one dry area that will eventually receive water from the pending EAA Reservoir. A canal spreader will disperse water widely, and Davis says a diversity of plants, elevations and animals will follow.
Though much of Everglades restoration is about sending more water south to the national park, some areas get too much water these days. “Water today, especially as we get into the wet season, will pile up against the Tamiami Trail and along the L-67 Canal, and that’s what creates problems on the tree islands. It concerns the Miccosukee because it affects their lands,” says Davis.
In the next few years, the L-67 canal will be perforated, spreading water out into dry areas.
Restoration has added three miles of bridges to allow more flow under Tamiami Trail, and by 2026, Davis says there will be another set of five or six smaller bridges added, all of which will spread flow more evenly.
The linchpin
As we fly north, we spot bright green rectangles ahead, the plush corduroy of sugarcane fields. Sugarcane makes up the bulk of the Everglades Agricultural Area, a swath of land south of Lake Okeechobee that’s a bit smaller than the state of Rhode Island. Once part of Everglades flow, it was carved and drained throughout the 20th century. The lake keeps the crops irrigated and the Herbert Hoover Dike keeps towns in the EAA safe from flooding.
Below, a very large chunk of the EAA is being torn up by backhoes and dump trucks. It’s the site of the future EAA Reservoir, what many consider the linchpin of the entire restoration effort. The tractors are stripping out the phosphorus-rich soil so as to amass 37-foot-tall embankments that will form the 23-foot deep, 10,000-acre reservoir.
When the lake is high, the reservoir will store water, and reduce harmful Lake Okeechobee discharges to the coasts.
The water can also be used for crop irrigation. Before it flows south, though, it must be cleaned of phosphorus. Phosphorous fuels algal blooms, and once unleashed into the Everglades, allows plants such as cattails to choke out natural vegetation.
Next to the reservoir is the new 6,500-acre stormwater treatment area (STA), essentially a big marsh, which cleans the water.
But there might not be enough STA treatment to clean the water to high enough standards. “The question is, do we have sufficient treatment?” says Davis. “We won’t know until we get there. But we will not compromise on water quality. The water has to be clean. If we need more treatment, we’ll make it happen. We will ensure that water quality standards are met.”
If the STAs don’t remove enough phosphorus, Davis says the state, who is responsible for water quality, can try to identify phosphorus hot spots within the EAA. The other option would be for the state and federal government to buy more land for more STAs — a contentious proposition, given the years of delay to even get to this point.
The lake
Lake Okeechobee lies ahead. When we fly over, we can make out the wind-blown striations of an algae bloom in the water. We don’t see the gleaming green slime of blooms past. On July 7, 90% of the lake experienced an algae bloom. When the algae flushes down canals to the coasts, they wreak havoc, sometimes growing toxic.
In other flushing events, so much fresh water flowed into estuaries that it killed saltwater seagrass meadows — the foundation of the Indian River Lagoon ecosystem.
As we pass the Tamiami Trail on the way home, areas south of the new bridges are showing signs of diversity, hints of how the areas will shift in coming decades.
Humans are ambitious.
It was ambition that carved up the Everglades 100 years ago — a vision of an agricultural wonderland and suburban wonderland. And it’s ambition now that has us thinking we can fix it.
“To date, our biggest step forward in restoration is that area around the Tamiami Trail and along east Shark River Slough,” says Davis after the flight. “In my mind, that’s the finish line for restoration. If we can just get the water down to the park, across the Tamiami Trail … that’s a huge achievement.”
Bill Kearney covers the environment, the outdoors and tropical weather. He can be reached at bkearney@sunsentinel.com. Follow him on Instagram @billkearney or on X @billkearney6.
