Michael A. Soukup - American Covenant

1

Good Fortune

There is a vast, strange, and beautiful place at the southern tip of Florida that every American should see. The Everglades, with its expanse of water fifty miles wide in places, has for thousands of years flowed slowly over porous limestone, sand, and peat from Lake Okeechobee to the Gulf of Mexico. In the poetic phrase of Marjory Stoneman Douglas, this river of grass is quietly majestic, fecund, and richly alive. It is a subtropical paradise or a foreboding wilderness, depending on how you approach it. Experiences in the Everglades are often unforgettable.

The Everglades system receives water from as far north as Orlando via overflows from Lake Okeechobee. Its flat terrain and shallow waters dominate South Florida. Along the way, the glades are made up of sawgrass prairies, tree islands, hardwood hammocks (where slight elevations allow their growth), marl prairies, cypress stands, freshwater sloughs, pinelands, coastal prairies, mangrove swamps, and the marine and brackish areas along Florida Bay. Guidebooks list its marvelous wildlife in our national vernacular: American alligators and American crocodiles; Florida redbelly, soft-shell, and loggerhead turtles; green tree and leopard frogs; apple snails; Florida panthers and bobcats; zebra butterflies; swallowtail kites, Everglades snail kites, limpkins, roseate spoonbills, brown pelicans, and anhingas; great blue, white, and green herons; wood storks, snowy egrets, white ibises, purple gallinules, white-crowned pigeons, barred owls, black vultures, flamingos, and Some twenty-three species of native snakes, including six poisonous ones, add to the Everglades image as a stark, somewhat foreboding, but compelling place. Here wildlife stalks, slithers, and swims among millions of acres of sawgrass, swamp lilies, bull thistles, strap ferns, air plants, gumbo limbo trees, slash pines, royal palms, saw-palmettos, strangler figs, and dwarf cypress. The Everglades authenticity as a desolate and starkly beautiful destination attracts adventurers from all over the world.

The Everglades has been in many ways Americas last eastern frontier. It has held a unique place in Americas human history, replete with pirates, politicians, plume hunters, alligator poachers, and assorted outlaws. Long before that it was home to Native Americans such as the Calusa and the Miami, and it remains to this day the home of the Cow Creek Seminole and the Miccosukee peoples. More recently the Everglades has also stood in the way of South Floridas rapacious appetite for development.

While stubbornly resisting huge public and private projects to drain it entirely, by the early twentieth century the Everglades was being diminished to the extent that there was mounting concern that this one-of-a-kind place needed protection or it would be forever lost. A large portion of the glades just below Lake Okeechobee had already become the Everglades Agricultural Area700,000 acres of sugar cane fields and vegetable farmsas huge public works projects were beginning to control floods and provide for agricultural and municipal water supplies. Massive public works projects enabled constant human encroachment along its periphery, with cities, suburbs, universities, and farms occupying areas that were once Everglades wetlands.

Everglades National Park was something new, a national park established to protect the southern Everglades, its strange wildness, and its curious intersection of temperate and tropical plants and animals. It was to be a national park without majestic mountains; indeed, the park has a maximum elevation of 10 feet over its 1.5 million acres.