Everglades

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This week I listened to a podcast about draining the Everglades and read chapter 16, which is titled The First Developers. Out of all the things I could talk about this week I wanted to talk about something that is important. I truly believe the Everglades are important. At the end of the Ice Age, the Everglades became what we know it now. The Everglades came to be about 5,000 years ago. The Everglades exist because Florida gets a lot of rain, there is a lake that overflows into the Everglades known as Lake Okeechobee, and there is not that much elevation throughout the southern part of Florida. Before the Everglade was damaged by humans, the size of the Everglades was huge. The Everglades is larger than the state of Connecticut and the entire size of the watershed system, aka the waterways, is twice the size of New Jersey. When agriculture came into the land, the fertilizers and other chemicals ran into the Everglades causing havoc on the ecosystem. Buckingham Smith was the first person to survey the Everglades after Florida became a state. He spent 5 weeks exploring the Everglades but he only explored a portion of the massive Everglades. The purpose behind surveying the Everglades was to sell the land for farmland and to people for homes. "Disston established real estate companies in the North and in Europe to sell land to immigrants, making him one of the largest promotors of Florida. His dredges began digging south from the town of Kissimmee to straighten the Kissimmee River so that it would carry water rapidly into Lake Okeechobee. At the same time, another crew excavated a canal from the mouth of the Caloosahatchee into Lake Okeechobee at Moore Haven so that water from the lake would flow into the Gulf of Mexico."(1). There were people who were fighting at the time to save some of the lands for parks in other states. "President Roosevelt established Pelican Island Wildlife Refuge on Indian River in 1903, and the state set aside Royal Palm Park in the Everglades in 1916 as Florida's first state park."(2). The Governor of Florida that promised to drain the Everglades was Napoleon Broward. "Once in office, Broward found little support for his proposal to drain the Everglades because the legislature was reluctant to appropriate funds. Instead, it voted for a constitutional amendment to create a drainage tax district to fund the plan. Without waiting for the public's action on the amendment, Broward. on July 4, 1906, sent a dredge off from the north branch of New River in Ft. Lauderdale to excavate west and north toward Lake Okeechobee."(3). "It also became clear that the two dredges Broward had in operation were not making substantial progress in lowering water levels, so Broward constructed two more dredges to join the work."(4). Northern Floridians did not want to continue to pay for the drainage in the south. Also, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers did not place a priority on drainage projects, causing a standstill in draining the Everglades. "By this time, it had become clear to everyone that lowering water levels in the Everglades was a much more complex problem than it had first appeared."(5). There were two gigantic hurricanes that hit Florida. The first one was in 1926, killing hundreds of people. The second one was in 1928, which killed thousands of people. It made landfall around Palm Neach and barreled towards Lake Okeechobee. After the hurricanes, the president came down and funded flooding control. To help with flooding control they built a huge dam. Parts of the Everglades became a dust bowl. Natural brushfires turn into giant blazers that seem to burn forever. Douglas decided to turn parts of South Florida into a national park, aka the Everglades National Park. For many years CPR said they would try and fix the damage to the Everglades and have failed to do so. The Everglades will forever be messed up due to the government failing the environment. The Everglades will never be as big as it once was because people now live on the land that was once wetlands. 


Resources:
(1) Graham, T. (2018). The History of Florida (M. Gannon, Ed.) (ch. 16, p. 278). The University Press of Florida.

(2) Graham, T. (2018). The History of Florida (M. Gannon, Ed.) (ch. 16, p. 287). The University Press of Florida.

(3 + 4) Graham, T. (2018). The History of Florida (M. Gannon, Ed.) (ch. 16, p. 289). The University Press of Florida.

(5) Graham, T. (2018). The History of Florida (M. Gannon, Ed.) (ch. 16, p. 290). The University Press of Florida.

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