The Everglades Foundation is celebrating its “Dirty 30” this year – with an emphasis on the “dirty.” The nonprofit marked its three decades with the groundbreaking of a more than 10,000-acre reservoir just south of the algae-infested Lake Okeechobee, already considered to be the “crown jewel of Everglades restoration.”
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began construction on the Everglades Agricultural Area Reservoir in February – a roughly $3 billion project that’s been 23 years in the making, according to Everglades Foundation CEO Eric Eikenberg – and it’s a critical turning point for restoring water flow to South Florida.
“We call it the crown jewel of Everglades restoration because that is the significant piece that ultimately connects the flow of water from Lake Okeechobee down to the Florida Keys,” he said.
(The Everglades Foundation)
This chart illustrates the Everglade's historic water flow, the altered flow after human intervention and what the restored water flow will be once projects are complete.
In its current state, Lake Okeechobee is roughly 14 feet high, a foot higher than it was last year. One-third of it is covered in toxic blue-green algae; as the rainy season progresses, the lake will begin to overflow and its toxic water will discharge east and west through a series of canals into our oceans.
If all goes according to plan, however, the reservoir will reestablish the historical flow of water from north to south, or from central Florida down to the Florida Bay. The project is expected to be completed in 2030, reversing a legacy of mistakes that started more than a century ago when people first set up camp on the peninsula.
Fixing Past Failures
(The Everglades Foundation)
Blue-green algae from the Pahokee Marina along Lake Okeechobee.
The Everglades Agricultural Area Reservoir is being built in the middle of approximately 5,000 acres of sugar cane fields, and that’s no accident. The fields are the product of a national effort in the 20th century to make the moist, dense and mosquito-ridden ecosystem that settlers first encountered into a drier, more moderately textured land suitable for agriculture.
“Everybody had a campaign to drain the Everglades,” said Begoñe Cazalis, The Everglades Foundation’s director of communications.
New communities sprouted all over the place, from Broward County – named after former Florida governor and draining enthusiast Napoleon Bonaparte Broward – to the rich, coastal communities of Miami-Dade County, which were marketed early on as a hub for wealthy professionals. It was an exciting, albeit trying, time for farmers and businesspeople alike, and their success is part of the reason why we live here today.
What many didn’t know then – or cared about – is that they were destroying the very environment that had made South Florida so attractive to begin with. Writers and conservationists like Zora Neale Hurston and Marjory Stoneman Douglas tried to warn them all along, and 30 years ago, a pair of outdoor fishing buddies began to take heed of their warnings.
(The Everglades Foundation)
Fish kills in the Gulf of Mexico and Biscayne Bay have long been a sign of compromised water quality flowing south from central Florida.
George Barley and Paul Tudor Jones II, founders of The Everglades Foundation, were compelled to spring into action by the massive algae outbreak of 1993, which increased salinity in the Florida Bay, killed off whole communities of fish and seagrass, and hurt the local economy.
“Our founders brought scientists down to Islamorada,” said Cazalis, “but the scientists were like, ‘Your problem’s not here in the Florida Bay. Your problem is all the way north in Lake Okeechobee.’”
That realization set off a decadeslong effort to restore water quality and flow in South Florida by tackling the root of the issue in central Florida. In 2000 as one of his last acts in office, former President Bill Clinton signed the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP), which now accounts for nearly 70 projects and reflects more than $10 billion in federal funds.
(The Everglades Foundation)
The Everglades ecosystem works to harvest rainfall, allowing it to travel through the Biscayne aquifer and ultimately serve as the primary source of drinking water for South Floridians.
Today, organizers can look back and feel proud of what they’ve accomplished, from the reservoir’s groundbreaking to the completion of much smaller achievements like the Taylor Slough Restoration Project. That project, started in January and completed in May, installed culverts along Old Ingram Highway in Everglades National Park to restore water flow to the eastern part of Florida Bay.
“This is a multidimensional puzzle, and all these puzzle pieces are critically important to ultimately achieving success,” said Eikenberg. “It may not be a large piece of the puzzle, but it’s still a piece, so to be able to check the box of completing the removal of the road, that was a significant accomplishment.”
(The Everglades Foundation)
A sign advertising the “Your Water Comes From the Everglades” campaign seen along Biscayne Boulevard.
Progress has not been consistent, however, since the CERP legislation was first crafted. In 2013, Florida experienced what Eikenberg calls “the lost summer,” when estuaries were in crisis and communities were unable to recreate in their beloved waters.
It’s important, therefore, to keep the foundation’s momentum going at full-speed, and crucial to that is making sure everyone knows what’s at stake.
“Your Water Comes From the Everglades”
The Everglades Foundation is also celebrating the one-year anniversary of an education initiative last year known as the “Your Water Comes From the Everglades” campaign. In June 2022, the foundation conducted a survey that showed that 95% of Miami-Dade and Broward county residents were unaware that the Everglades was their source of drinking water.
“We figured out pretty quickly that if we want to protect what’s left, we have to engage the public in a way that makes it real to them,” said Cazalis. “As people go through the hustle and bustle of daily life, they should understand that when they turn on the tap, they shouldn’t take it for granted.”
(The Everglades Foundation)
Eric Eikenberg, Everglades Foundation CEO
She noted how many people moving to South Florida don’t have the legacy education of what the Everglades means to the people who live here. Many don’t know that Miami-Dade has permanent restrictions that dictate when it’s OK to water your lawn – not to mention how few remember the 2020 water shortages that prohibited people from doing so altogether.
Meenakshi Chabba, ecosystem and resilience scientist for The Everglades Foundation, explained how the entire Everglades ecosystem acts as a rainfall harvesting system. Storing rainwater in the Biscayne aquifer is much more cost-effective than sequestering dirtier surface water directly from rivers or lakes, which other cities are inevitably forced to do.
But it isn’t just drinking water that we have our unique environment to thank for, Chabba says. The Everglades are also the foundation of South Florida’s tourism and recreation, as well as a natural defense system against saltwater intrusion, storms, rising seas and extreme heat.
“To understand the many functions, it’s like peeling layers of how important the Everglades is to us, and you’d have to take a bigger picture,” Chabba said. “We need consensus-building amongst us by building in harmony with the Everglades, where we bring the Everglades into South Florida. We need a different definition of an urban environment, where it’s green infrastructure and not just grey.”
The Everglades provides Floridians with direct benefits as well as a model for how to increase resilience against a changing climate. The ecosystem will never be what it once was now that we’re here, Cazalis notes, but we can do our best to restore its natural flow by storing, cleaning and sending water south.
The Everglades Agricultural Area Reservoir should do just that.
“We’ve got seven years to finish it,” said Eikenberg. “This is the decade of the Everglades.”