Slightly lower are the hardwood hammocks, just a few feet elevation above the river of grass but still in it. “The grass stays. This significant law would not have been achieved without the broad … One, visible as a hump of trees from the main park road, is so cinematic on the inside that it is named “The Movie Dome.” It is a set-designer’s idea of a storybook tropical paradise: sunlight shafting in, white branches festooned with proliferations of flowering epiphytes or air flowers, including rare orchids like the ghost orchid, plumed birds beating their wings so close you can feel the air move, all of it mirrored and doubled in crystal water around our knees. That’s the headline of a report released Wednesday by a Congressionally-appointed committee of scientists. Restoration projects in the Florida Everglades will be on the upswing in coming years with growing political interest in the effort and recent boosts … Republican Congressman Brian Mast of Stuart says H.R. An American alligator on the shore of the Turner River in Big Cypress National Preserve. Alligators were nearly hunted to extinction in the 1960s but surged back after restrictions. He picks up clients barefoot — in a 12-person Ford van in the parking lot of a fruit stand outside Homestead city limits. Today it remains one of the biggest  environmental restoration efforts in the world, but even with a price tag that will be around $17 Billion when it’s all finished, the project remains underfunded and behind schedule. They are, they have always been, one of the unique regions of the earth; remote, never wholly known,” Marjory Stoneman Douglas wrote in her 1947 book, “The Everglades: River of Grass.” “The spears prick upward, tender green, glass green, bright green, darker green, to spread the blossoms and the fine seeds like brown lace,” she wrote. Funding has been secured to raise the Tamiami Trail, reroute water into Shark River Slough and mitigate damage near the Taylor Slough. The two processes are tending to eliminate all the native life from the state. I also thought about the animal life that we weren’t going to see because of the invasive species problem, and that humans are the worst invasive species of all. "The president has already in the past couple of years supported Everglades restoration and putting it in his budget, so there is the expectation that that would continue," Perry said. In 2000, the state and federal government agreed to a $4 billion Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan. Researchers chip male pythons and track them to the nests of huge mother snakes, removing hundreds of eggs. Worse, as sea levels rise around Florida, increased salinity on the edges of the Everglades is killing the saw grass, setting off a cycle of damage to the sediment, allowing even more salty water farther inland. Without Everglades restoration, Florida’s tourism-based economy is at risk.”. CBS News The Everglades is the largest wetland of its kind in North America, but it's been under assault for generations by residential development, water … The fresh river flows.”. SOUTH FLORIDA — Founding leaders of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan initiated a monumental project 20 years ago by gaining national recognition of the need for more freshwater to reach the southern portion of the Everglades and Florida Bay. At night, only their eyes glitter in the beam of a flashlight. For 175 years, the drive to control the flow of water was planned, plotted and executed with devastating results for the native inhabitants — flora, fauna and human. Everglades' Restoration. They look to be on high ground but signal areas of deep water formed by dips in the limestone bedrock. Saw grass at sunset in the Everglades National Park.Credit...Erik Freeland for The New York Times. Viewed from above, they are teardrop shaped, narrow at the top and bulging at the bottom, marking the shape of the water flowing in and around the holes. 1520 includes a record-setting $250 million in funding to restore the Everglades. There are success stories. FIU experts are available to discuss the … These islands are historical hide-outs for pirates, hermits and criminals. Read: Massive Everglades restoration project in Picayune Strand more than two thirds complete Both projects, which are still in the planning stages, should be … The Everglades were designated a national park in 1947, the same year that its most ardent fan, the environmentalist Douglas, published her book. Florida’s freshwater wonder is threatened like never before with a rising sea level as restoration efforts lag. Learn more about the Everglades’ restoration. The man to see for that is the Everglades guide Garl Harrold. Good news on the Everglades restoration front. WMFE environmental reporter Amy Green has spent some 10 years looking into the progress- and this year she produced a podcast to explore some of the details behind this mind bogglingly complex plan to restore the River of Grass. Tomorrow, December 11, the Everglades Foundation is virtually hosting the 4th annual John Marshall Everglades Symposium–featuring our own Tom Rosenbauer as one of the moderators. sometimes pulling ourselves through dense mangrove tunnels with our hands. The Victorian taste for big hats with plumage led to near extinction of the Everglades’ snowy egrets and other wading birds, with more than five million birds killed annually by 1900. Published December 11, 2020 at 12:10 PM EST, One Of A Kind Shelter Helps Traumatized Dogs Learn To Trust Humans Again, Detroit Pistons Owner Urged To Sell Team Over His Investment In Prison Telecom Firm, Trump's Threat To Veto Latest Pandemic Relief Bill Leaves Congress In Chaos, U.K. And EU Agree To A New Free Trade Deal, As U.K. Finalizes Brexit, A Soggy, Stormy, Flooded South Florida And Increasing COVID-19 Infections, U.S. Army Corps Warns Lake Okeechobee Could Rise By 10 Inches As Eta Crosses South Florida, Everglades Marshes Contain Mercury That Can Poison Birds. Twenty years on, a few of the … Paddling in Florida Bay one night at twilight, Garl trailed his hand in the warm salty water and pulled up some gray muck, let it drip back into the murk. Kayaking at sunset in the Florida Bay, the Everglades National Park. To see more, visit WMFE. News Everglades Restoration Takes Three Big Steps Forward. In a series of trips to South Florida in the last year, I explored the interior of the River of Grass, the only subtropical wilderness in North America, plunging into microclimates and diminishing habitats, traversing slices of the Everglades National Park and its adjacent neighbor, Big Cypress National Preserve, by car, kayak, foot and even looking down from a small plane. On Dec. 11, 2020 it’ll be 20 years since Congress passed the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan to restore, protect and preserve South Florida’s ecosystem while providing for water-related needs of the region. In the imperiled Everglades, cormorants nest for the evening in Ten Thousand Islands, a maze of mangrove and shallow salt water off the coast of Everglades City. The highest elevations in the Everglades are called pine rockland, and they are considered endangered habitat. Martha Calloway of San Antonio was touring the Everglades for a day while her husband fished in Key Largo. (The winner of the 2020 “Python Bowl” gets a truck.). The mysterious cypress domes also tower above the grass, but they thrive just a few feet closer to sea level, or even in holes in the limestone below sea level. “The Everglades is such a finely tuned machine, I guess you would say, that inches of water make profound differences in the landscape and the vegetation and the wildlife,” says Green. Where it’s not diverted or blocked by human engineering, the water still trickles south at the rate of a quarter mile a day, as it has for millenniums. As salt water breaches the limestone bedrock around the Florida peninsula and enters the aquifer, this natural freshwater wonder is threatened like never before. But, I told them — and I really mean it — that experience will really stick with me.”. The Republican governor was there to watch Clinton, a Democrat, sign into law a bipartisan bill, the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Program, aka “CERP,” hailed as the largest environmental restoration project in the planet’s history. Florida Bay has not recovered from a great sea grass die-off in 2015 because of unusual salinity caused by the man-made diversion of fresh water away from the bay. Nothing else. Here … So have the birds. During the dry season, from December through April (when most tourists visit the glades because it is virtually bug-free), these stands of swamp cypress rise, leafless and bone white above the grass, visible for miles. The long-awaited stimulus package approved by Congress Monday night includes $250 million for Everglades restoration. The Palm Beach Post. Twenty years ago this month President Bill Clinton signed into law a plan to save the Florida Everglades. Dredging, levee building, pumping water in and out, more than 2,100 miles of canals, 2,000 miles of levees and hundreds of floodgates, pump stations and other water-control structures, usually initiated with a blind zeal for progress and indifference to — or ignorance about — the fact that engineers were playing a game of Jenga on an interconnected fragile system. "Funding for Everglades restoration, South Florida ecosystem restoration, our waterways funding as a whole." “Sneaky, she’s around here somewhere.” “I saw Croc-zilla out here last week.” He is encyclopedic on the flora, pointing out plants like the lemon bacopa that the Calusa and Tequesta tribes used as mosquito repellent, and the saltwort, a pale green crunchy plant great as a snack or in a salad. Getting into and out of these domes can be a nerve-pricking enterprise, not for the faint of heart. Distant rain over the saw grass in the Everglades National Park. Like everything in Everglades restoration, which aims to re-establish the natural flow of water through the unique ecosystem after decades of draining and canal-cutting, BBSEER has lofty goals. If doubt remains that Eden and the Fall coexist here, consider that the name of the author who extolled the wonders of this paradise is affixed to a school — the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland — forever associated with the 2018 school massacre that left 17 people dead. “When I first came down, this water was clear, and I used to dip my hand in here and pull up a handful of sand and sea grass and find dozens of baby clams and tiny living shells,” he said. What’s gone is gone, and what’s still there is threatened by invasives like the cattails and the ornamental plant Brazilian pepper that leapt from people’s manicured gardens and into the Everglades. Sky and grass. 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