Everglades

If you look at any list of great modern writers such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald, you'll notice two things about them:1. They all had editors.2. They are all dead.Thus we can draw the scientific conclusion that editors are fatal. I was made intensely aware of this recently when, as the direct result of an idea conceived by my editor, I wound up flailing around up to my armpits in the Swamp of Doom.That is not its technical name. Its technical name is the Big Cypress National Preserve, which is part of the Everglades ecosystem, an enormous, wet, nature-intensive area that at one time was considered useless, but which is now recognized as a vital ecological resource, providing Florida with an estimated 93 percent of its bloodsucking insects.

LOXAHATCHEE, Fla. - It was a strategy so bold no environmentalist or state bureaucrat dared dream it could happen: Buy out Big Sugar's polluted fields, railroad and refinery within the Everglades so the wounded "river of grass" could heal after more than a century of man's industrial intrusions. But bureaucrats and activists alike watched in giddy wonder yesterday as Gov. Charlie Crist and the head of U.S. Sugar Corp. announced a historic deal by which the state would pay $1.75 billion for 187,000 acres obstructing the natural path of the treasured Everglades.

The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida and the Politics of Paradise Michael Grunwald Simon & Schuster / 450 pages / $27 For at least a century and a half, the Everglades wrestled with an image problem. Today, looking at its endless acres of swaying sawgrass, Americans see precious wetlands, home to the egret and the orchid. But for earlier generations, the Everglades was simply a swamp, a mosquito-infested wasteland. "The first and most abiding impression is the utter worthlessness to civilized man, in its present condition, of the entire region," wrote Buckingham Smith, a Harvard-educated lawyer and historian sent by the government to study the Everglades in the 1840s.

FLORIDA CITY, Fla. -- The Everglades can be a surprisingly noisy place. There were the strange, catlike sounds from the small heron sitting in a tree. Earthshaking burps could be heard from unseen Southern bullfrogs or pig frogs. There was an occasional roar that we knew came from, yes, the dark-colored alligators along the Anhinga Trail. Some were sunning themselves, and some were swimming in the freshwater pools. Everglades National Park is a big, flat, swampy and often buggy place.

For most of the year, David and Kitty Snell are busy raising beautiful plants in their commercial greenhouses.But when winter closes down production, the Mount Airy couple heads for their secluded winter hideaway on Florida's southwest coast for some fishing and relaxation.It was David's love of fishing and the outdoors that originally led the Snells to Chokoloskee Island, some 35 miles south of Naples. Kitty at first resisted the idea of vacationing in such a remote locale, but quickly fell in love with both the people and the primitive beauty of the area.

PALM BEACH, Fla. - It's almost shocking to hear good news about the Everglades, but here goes: For many of the marsh's wading birds, last year was the best nesting year in six decades. Not since the 1940s have the Everglades' imperiled white ibises enjoyed such a great year to raise families. For the endangered wood stork, it was the best nesting season since 1967. And the snowy egret didn't do too badly, either. The phenomenal year appeared to come from a combination of wet and dry years that proved nearly ideal for many species.

FLORIDA'S incomparable Everglades is dying, victim of a century of draining, diking and pumping its freshwater out to sea to make way for farms and urban development. Piecemeal remedies have failed to revive the giant wetlands, so a massive $8 billion federal-state plan aims to restore its natural water flow. But the project needs congressional approval as this session draws to a close; it can't be left to the uncertainties of a new administration and Congress. Absent action, the unique ecosystem will be lost.

FLORIDA CITY, Fla. -- The Everglades can be a surprisingly noisy place. There were the strange, catlike sounds from the small heron sitting in a tree. Earthshaking burps could be heard from unseen Southern bullfrogs or pig frogs. There was an occasional roar that we knew came from, yes, the dark-colored alligators along the Anhinga Trail. Some were sunning themselves, and some were swimming in the freshwater pools. Everglades National Park is a big, flat, swampy and often buggy place.

EVERGLADES NATIONAL PARK, Fla. - In a continuing campaign to show that he is devoted to the environment, President Bush stood at the edge of an alligator-filled river in Florida's Everglades yesterday and declared that his administration supports efforts to restore the sensitive wetlands. Against a backdrop indicative of the riches of nature and with a group of park rangers standing beside him, Bush blended in, wearing an open-collared tan shirt and seeming delighted with the setting. As if on cue, gators occasionally bobbed their heads out of the water as the president spoke of the Everglades as "a beautiful slice of heaven."

Everglades National Park, Fla. -- The beauty lies beyond the saw grass.At first view the land stretches flat, monotonously so, toward the horizon where the sky seems as white and brilliant as the day's light. And the spectrum of colors in this vast wetland mimics the blandness of a Western prairie.This national treasure doesn't soar into a cobalt blue sky like the burnished, sandstone minarets of Bryce Canyon in Utah. Nor does it hiss steam, spit fire and heave lava into the swirling blue Pacific on the command of a Hawaiian goddess in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.

MIAMI -- A year after two bodies were discovered locked in gruesome embrace deep in the marsh, a television documentary attempts to solve a mystery since burned into Everglades lore. Did a giant python really explode after swallowing an alligator? And what ate the snake's head? The National Geographic Explorer show examines what happened last September when a 13-foot Burmese python ate a 6-foot gator in Everglades National Park. The extraordinary encounter was captured in a memorable macabre photo that captivated the public and experts alike, and - for a week, at least - made "alligator-python" among the most Googled phrases on the planet.

The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida and the Politics of Paradise Michael Grunwald Simon & Schuster / 450 pages / $27 For at least a century and a half, the Everglades wrestled with an image problem. Today, looking at its endless acres of swaying sawgrass, Americans see precious wetlands, home to the egret and the orchid. But for earlier generations, the Everglades was simply a swamp, a mosquito-infested wasteland. "The first and most abiding impression is the utter worthlessness to civilized man, in its present condition, of the entire region," wrote Buckingham Smith, a Harvard-educated lawyer and historian sent by the government to study the Everglades in the 1840s.

I HAVE DESIRED striped bass ever since I learned to fish for them 50 years ago, but last week was the first time we'd made love. The tryst began innocently enough. We awakened beside lower Dorchester county's Transquaking River to the gobble of wild turkeys and great horned owls' resonant hoots. For 10 years, friends and I have made an early-spring, kayaking-camping pilgrimage across the trackless expanse of Maryland's Everglades (40 percent of the state's tidal wetlands are in this one county)

WASHINGTON - State and federal officials and environmentalists pressed Congress yesterday to grant approval of the first major projects in a $8.4 billion re-plumbing of the Florida Everglades, saying the land needed to be acquired before prices skyrocket under pressures of development. Congress authorized a blueprint for the entire restoration plan four years ago, but approval is still needed for specific projects contained in the plan. A coalition of leaders from the state, the National Audubon Society and the Army Corps of Engineers made their case to the House Subcommittee on Water Resources and Development in the waning days of the session.

Stolen Water: Saving the Everglades From Its Friends, Foes, and Florida, by W. Hodding Carter. Atria. 288 pages. $24. In 1928, a hurricane raged across the Everglades, sending Lake Okeechobee flooding into West Palm Beach County and killing 2,400 people. In an attempt to tame what many regarded as a savage waterway, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers imported thousands of hardy melaleuca trees from Australia, hoping their roots would stabilize the lake's shores and help to dry out the swamp.

Skinny Dip, by Carl Hiaasen. Knopf. 354 pages. $24.95 It serves up tidbits like these: A hairy goon takes a beating from an elderly cancer patient, a biologist hates the outdoors, and a woman's parents die when a bear takes control of their airplane and crashes it. Carl Hiaasen's latest novel is worth picking up if only to delight in these situations. Like many of Hiaasen's 10 previous novels, Skinny Dip falls into the unlikely genre of lighthearted humor thriller. Hiaasen - a former reporter and current columnist for the Miami Herald - often mines his detailed knowledge of Florida for settings, and, he claims, for his bizarre and quirky characters.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is putting the finishing touches on the most expensive environmental restoration ever undertaken: a $7.5 billion effort to undo the damage the corps did decades ago when it drained Florida's Everglades.The wilderness that once was the liquid heart of Florida has been dying of thirst since the late 1960s, when the corps completed a 1,600-mile long network of canals that created cities and farms out of saw-grass marshes, but deprived the Everglades of its life-giving water.

An ambitious $8 billion plan to restore the Florida Everglades to ecological health over the next several decades is coming under fire from experts who say the proposed measures will actually do little in the way of restoration.The main reason, these critics say, is that the federal-state plan does not go far enough in re-establishing the natural flow of shallow water that once moved in an unbroken sheet down the South Florida peninsula, creating a habitat for one of the world's largest assemblages of marsh wildlife.

The most ambitious environmental experiment in history has begun on a South Florida tract where two Baltimore brothers once planned a sun-drenched retirement town. In October, bulldozers moved the first dirt for a 30-year, $8.4 billion effort to revive Florida's dying Everglades. The site: a ghost subdivision called Southern Golden Gate Estate that was once the centerpiece of a development empire run by Leonard and Julius "Jack" Rosen. The Rosens bought nearly 100 square miles of saw grass and cypress trees in 1958.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - Moving quickly to control political fallout, Gov. Jeb Bush signed an Everglades restoration bill yesterday that is tepidly backed by the sugar industry and angrily opposed by environmentalists because it delays plans to restore the River of Grass. The new law eases a timetable for cleaning up the Everglades and has unleashed complaints from a federal judge, Congress and others who warn that it could put at risk the federal government's commitment to pay half the $8 billion cost of Everglades restoration work.