OCR Text |
Show EEE aa _ ae How the ‘New Vigilantes’ Save Aroused Florida citizens have shown the nation hof | January 15, Walter falenl Gnnwntn>-- ~f tL. Te a Hickel, ouerctvaly Ui Ulie Lii~ terior, John A. Volpe, Sec- retary of Transportation, and Governor Claude R. Kirk, of Florida, made a memorable announcement to newsmen gathered in the White House. An agreement had been reached, they said, with state and local authorities in Florida forbidding the completion of an international jetport —already under construction—eight miles north of Everglades National Park. The Federal Government, Volpe added, would foot the bill for “hury- ing” the one ranway already completed. President Mixon hailed this decision as “an outstanding victory for conservation.” ‘The dramatic disclosure concluded a nine-monthbattle between the Dade County Port Authority and thousands of Americans who had banded together to save the Everglades and preserve the southern half of the state. Their victory, headlined in newspapers across theland, is a most significant instance of an aroused citizenry defeating a coalition of business and political interests bent on commerciai gains regardless of what damage might be done to a unique environment. The great Glades arc a shimmering, sun-dominated Eden of water and life that stretches from Lake Okeechobee south to Florida Bay. The Park harbors the richest collection of wildlife and plants on this continent. Trees are festooned with more than 50 varieties of wild orchids. Among the 2,000 varieties of plants which botanists from all over the world come to see live 350 different kinds of birds. More than 300 species of butterflies float over the sawgrass and sip nectar from the galaxy of wildflowers. Bobcats, raccoons, armadillos, and black bears prowl through the mangroves and cypresses, and the only swimming cottontail in the world, the marsh rabbit, leaps into sloughs and paddles among the water lilies, reeds, and frogs—16 abundant species. "Phe big tourist attraction, the alligator, is but one of 48 incredible rep- tiles that Launt the Glades—with the mammoth loggerhead turtle, beautiful glass lizards, and the sly pygmy rattlesnake. Babyfaced manatees— sea cows—have their homes there and Family Weekly, July 5,1970 an Visitors to Florida’s Everglades stop along Anhinga Trail tc photograph birds and tropical growth. amuse visitors who paddle canoes through the estuaries. Florida Bay, whichis also part of the Park, is considered by many to be the best fishing grounds on the Eastern Seaboard. It is this zoological garden—America’s lushest subtropical environment —that Floridians won back from developers, defeating a multibillion-dollar project even after concrete had been poured. I recently went down there to learn how they didit. F. decades the people of Florida have watched while their paradise was being dynamited, bulldozed, drained, and polluted—and perforce, they be- camestudents of ecology, the science of relationships between man,plants, and animels. Southern Florida’s plants, animals, and men are particularly interrelated because the region has a delicately balanced ecosystem of wet and dry seasons, with everything held together by interacting layers of fresh water above and below ground. Moreover, these conservation-minded Floridians today think of their Park as a biological unit that cannot be ravaged without dire consequence. Biologically and economically, the whole southern 150-mile tip of Florida is like a row of dominoes—and the first domino might well have been knocked over by the construction of a jetport. The battle to save the Glades was joined a year ago last May 2 when Port Authority Director Alan Stewart suddenly announced at a public hearing that a gigantic jetport was gcing to be built just north of the Everglades. It would be the biggest airport ever planned anywhere in the gical balance—literally the survival. of southern Florida as it is knov today depends on the purity an quantity of the water flowing dow from the north. The jetport, Stewai announced, was to be set in the mai stream (known misleadingly as B: Cypress Swamp) ofthis uniquerive! eight miles above the Park’s no boundary. world—covering 39 square miles, an Why was the Big Cypress site s lected? Seventeen sites had been com sidered. All but Big Cypress we deemed too close to urban populatio’ Their selection would bring protes' from land owners. So the uninhabite area was chosen, and the Port Aw thority left the problem of air angi” water pollution in the neighbori Park area to the Park Service. Oh jections from this body were many but ineffectual, and permission to gy ~ | ahead wage quietly obtained from loc4 : representatives of the Department og — the Interior in May 1967. Floridians were in a quanda they knew that a jetport was bad! needed—but what would it do to t area larger than haif of Washington, D.C.! By 1985 it would be able to handle 65 million passengers a year, three times the capacity of Kennedy International. Eventually millions of Floridians probably would make their homes in the vicinity of the Port, and as Miami and the West Coast cities expanded to enclose it, a new industrial center could be created around the jetport. T. grasp the implication of Stewart’s announcement, it is necessary to understand the most important fact about the Everglades: namely, that it is not a great swamp,as it appears, but actually a free-flowing river moving from south-ceatral Florida down through the sawgrass country into the Gulf of Mexico. The whole ecolo- Glades? This question had been rai: before. Some months before Stewart public statement, Robert Padrick, an-auto dealer in Fort Pierce, an |