Everglades Restoration Plan — Unwise, Unnecessary

Brian Doherty | September 29, 2000

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Col. Terry Rice, a former commander of the Army Corps with a doctorate in hydrology, disagrees. "It's not a question of water," he says. "It's a question of culture in the park. They want buffer zones, no eyesores and they consider people and farm fields eyesores."

These threatened citizens, many of them refugees from Fidel Castro's Cuba, will rightly embroil the plan in legal challenges as the government tries to take their homes.

"Restoring" the Everglades isn't really possible. There is no going back to what existed before the Corps did more destruction to the Florida swamp than private enterprise could ever have afforded to do. Merely restoring what we know of water flows will not necessarily result in the old flora and fauna reasserting themselves.

There never was an ecologically constant Everglades to return to. The Everglades lie in a continually hurricane-battered area a few feet above sea level. Even if such a construct did exist, we don't know enough about its past conditions to "restore" it.

The Corps' project is not a return to nature but another human re- engineering to suit current government interests, which include forcing a slowdown in population and urban growth in southern Florida.

The Everglades' problem--poor water quality and quantity, fewer wetlands and species depletion--are a result of the federal government's previous attempt to manage the Everglades.

Such untried possible solutions as an introduction of free water markets to the currently state-managed water system in Florida could do more to cope with water scarcity problems fairly than a multi-decade, uncertain engineering project.

The Everglades plan was born in ignorance and arrogance to solve a government-created problem. Sadly, it's a typical modern environmental program.

This article was carried by BridgeNews on September 29, 2000. Brian Doherty is an associate editor at Reason magazine.