Everglades Turn 50, but will they live to See 100?
12/6/97
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Headline: Everglades Turn 50, but will they live to See 100?
Source: CNN
Date: 12/6/97
Copyright 1997: Cable News Network, Inc
The Everglades National Park
celebrated its 50th anniversary on Saturday, but
environmentalists say the fight to save the
wetlands may never end.
"The fight is still there to make sure that we do
have an Everglades and to make sure there is an
Everglades when the 100th anniversary comes
around," Thomas Sadler of the National Audubon
Society told CNN.
Park officials planned a weekend of festivities,
including a rededication ceremony Saturday that
Vice President Al Gore was expected to attend. The
events were to highlight the ongoing battle to
save a region that has shrunk from more than 4
million acres to 1.5 million acres.
The latest battlefront is located 10 miles east of
the park's eastern edge, in Homestead, Florida.
City officials are pushing hard to develop a
commercial airport to help revive the local
economy and relieve Miami International Airport,
which is expected to reach capacity within 20
years.
The airport factor
Homestead, 25 miles south of Miami, was hit hard
by Hurricane Andrew in 1992. The storm drove away
about one-third of its residents, and so badly
damaged Homestead Air Force Base that federal
officials decided not to reopen it. The base
provided 7,000 jobs and $420 million for the local
economy.
To lure businesses, Homestead built a motorsports
complex and baseball stadium -- specifically for
the Cleveland Indians. But the Indians didn't
come.
Advocates for the airport say it could bring the
city thousands of jobs, and billions of dollars,
without hurting the Everglades. They oppose a
proposed environmental impact study, fearing it
could kill the airport project.
Attorneys for airport developers have hinted that
if Gore opposes the construction, it could hurt
him politically. Gore has championed Everglades
restoration.
Vanishing wildlife
Development, pollution and fierce hurricanes have
battered the Everglades for nearly a century. But
it is progress that has hurt the region the most.
Roughly 30,000 residents lived in the area around
1990, and the Everglades stretched from the coast
of the Gulf of Mexico to the coast of the Atlantic
Ocean, covering most of South Florida.
People were lured by developers who transformed
wetlands into dry lands. And, the animals began to
disappear.
Manatees, Florida panthers, American crocodiles,
peregrine falcons and Wood storks are among the
more than one dozen once-prolific species that now
roam the park.
"Only 5 to 10 percent of the wading birds are
left," said park superintendent Richard Ring.
The monotonous sawgrass prairie with its shallow
sheet of water is filled with animals most of us
would rather not face: spiders, poisonous snakes,
mosquitoes and alligators.
More than 5.5 million people now live along the
park's fringes.
A wasted effort?
It was President Harry Truman who executed the pen
stroke that was intended to save the Everglades.
"We have permanently safeguarded an irreplaceable
primitive area," Truman said when he dedicated the
1.5 million-acre sanctuary on December 6, 1947.
After that, the federal government, bowing to
public demand, built an intricate series of canals
to protect area farmers from floods. The system
drained some areas of the park, and flooded
others, destroying habitats of animals and birds.
But last year, the government launched a 20-year,
$3 billion effort to restore the Everglades'
"plumbing system" and to correct problems caused
by agricultural pollution. Environmentalists call
it the largest ecological rescue in history.
Some of them say that despite the park's
ever-present threats, there is reason to celebrate
its golden anniversary.
"We now have everybody in government and the
public and private sectors on board to restore
this ecosystem," said Stuart Strahl of the
National Audubon Society. "That's a tremendous
thing to celebrate."
Correspondent Robert Vito, The Associated Press
and Reuters contributed to this report.