Sugar barons' campaign: Not sweet but low

November 10, 1996

Big Sugar did a masterful job of crushing the penny-a-pound tax amendment. All it took were $24 million and a stupendous pack of lies.

With ammo like that, it would be possible to convince a majority of voters that dogs have wings.

Political campaigns are often orgies of deception, but the battle over Amendment 4 set a grimy new benchmark. Twisting the truth is commonplace in election years; abandoning it completely is unusual.

That's what happened when the sugar barons decided their only hope of victory was to scare and confuse the public. The best way to do that was to make stuff up, and they did a brilliant, if despicable, job.

As a result, there are people walking around Florida today who actually believe they would have paid the penny-per-pound sugar tax instead of the growers.

Because that's what Big Sugar told them over and over on TV It was the largest of many lies aimed at a stratum of voters who might be charitably described as impressionable.

The manner in which the sugar industry defeated the penny-tax proposal is relevant only for what it means to the Everglades, which would have been the beneficiary of Amendment 4.

Since the referendum, which cost a stupefying $36 million, both sides have been talking vaguely about mending fences and getting down to the urgent task of cleaning up South Florida's water.

U.S. Sugar, in particular, has indicated a willingness to move ahead in harmony with conservationists. It would be great news, if it were true. The question is, how can you believe a word these guys say?

Look at the execrable campaign they just ran. Look at the avalanche of lawsuits they've unleashed to block or delay key facets of Everglades restoration.

On the other hand, you've got to wonder if the sugar barons are tired of being portrayed as the Antichrists of the environment. These aren't stupid people. Cynical and ruthless, to be sure—but not stupid.

They know most Floridians want their wetlands pure and protected. The lopsided vote in favor of Amendment 5, which requires polluters to pay for Everglades cleanup, was a sharp reminder of the public's passion on that subject.

As a matter of fact, environmentalists hope to use Amendment 5 to pry more money out of the sugar industry. At the same time, EPA Chief Carol Browner says the feds want Big Sugar to fork over a bigger share.

Last week's impressive victory at the polls didn't get the sugar barons out of the political woods, nor did it improve their image. If they hope to hang onto their lucrative price supports, they need to appear more concerned about their waste water. They need to appear more reasonable and responsible.

And they need to make more friends. Cooperating actively with the Everglades cleanup would win them many.

Conservation groups should be similarly motivated to sit down at the bargaining table. The first incentive is economic—lawsuits and political campaigns are a drain of precious resources.

The second incentive is time, which is running out for our watershed. The sooner the replumbing begins, the better the chance of a successful restoration.

Many environmentalists acknowledge that nobody wins if Big Sugar bails out of Florida. Properly filtered, agricultural runoff is less damaging to the Everglades than the fallout from urban encroachment.

There's no reason why the farms can't stay and the great river can't be repaired and replenished. Let's hope the next $36 million is spent on the water, not on television commercials.

Everglades National Park 50th Anniversary Homage to a magical place

October 19, 1997

The cabin hung on wooden stilts in a marsh pond, the stilts rising up through lily pads as big as hubcaps.

Getting there was tricky but my friends Andy and Matt knew the way—gunning a johnboat down subtle and sinuous trails, the sawgrass whisking against the hull. If you were foolish enough to stick out your hand, it came back bleeding.

The stalks were so high and thick that they parted like a curtain when we plowed through. The boat's bow acted as a scoop, picking up gem-green chameleons and ribbon snakes and leopard frogs. By the time we reached the cabin, we'd usually have spider webs on our heads, and sometimes the spiders themselves.

We were kids, and it was fantastic. It was the Everglades.

One night we stood on the canted porch and watched tiny starbursts of color in the distant sky. At first we couldn't figure out what they were, and then we remembered: It was the Fourth of July. Those were fireworks over the city of Fort Lauderdale.

But we were so far away that all we could hear was the peeping of frogs and the hum of mosquitoes and the occasional trill of an owl. We didn't need to be told it was a magical place. We didn't need to be reminded how lucky we were.

I don't know if the old shack is still standing in Conservation Area 1B, but the eastward view certainly isn't the same. Instead of starlight you now get the glow from the Sawgrass Mills mall, a humongous Ford dealership and, absurdly, the crown of a new pro hockey arena.

We wouldn't have thought it possible, three teenagers gazing across wild country that swept to all horizons. Ice hockey on the doorstep of the Everglades! We couldn't have imagined such soulless incongruity and blithering greed.

Fortunately, somebody was smarter than we were. Somebody 30 years earlier had realized that the most imposing of natural wonders, even a river of grass, could be destroyed if enough well-financed intruders set their minds to it.

And somebody also understood that Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties would inevitably grow westward as haphazardly as fungus, and with even less regard for their mother host.

So that, politically, the only part of the Everglades that could be set aside for true preservation was its remote southernmost spur, and not without a battle. As impenetrable as the area appeared, speculators nonetheless mulled ways to log it, plow it, mine it or subdivide it.

That the U.S. Congress and state Legislature ever went along with the idea of an Everglades National Park remains astounding, 50 years after its dedication.

Nature helped its own cause. Hurricanes hammered South Florida in the 1930s and 1940s, so most land grabbers weren't in the market for more submerged acreage. It was hard enough hawking the soggy, stamp-sized lots they already had.

Seasonal flooding and fires had become such a threat to coastal development that extravagant technology was being directed toward a radical solution: containing and controlling all water near the farms and newly sprouted towns.

Thus preoccupied, most entrepreneurs remained wary of the buggy, moccasin-infested wetlands below the Tamiami Trail. That particular wilderness was, if not unconquerable, presumed not worth the high cost of conquering.

So in 1947 there came to be a spectacular national park, 1.3 million acres and destined to grow.

Ironically, it wasn't long afterwards that the rest of the Everglades, an area five times the size of the park, came under attack from the dredge and the bulldozer—a methodical and arrogant replumbing. Hundreds of miles of canals and dikes were gouged through the sawgrass meadows, pond apple sloughs and cypress heads.

Once the big "water management" project got under way, not enough people considered what might happen to the park itself, to the south. Too few understood its vascular, life-or-death connection to the sugarcane fields of Clewiston, the limerock mines of Medley or the tomato farms of Homestead.

As a consequence, hundreds of millions of dollars are today being requisitioned to undo the damage and "restore" both the flow and purity of the Everglades. Nowhere in the world has such a massive, complex hydrological repair been attempted. If by some miracle it succeeds, your children and their children probably will never run out of clean water.