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St. Thomas Law Review

First Page

667

Document Type

Article

Abstract

"The Everglades were dying. The endless acres of saw grass, brown as an enormous shadow where rain and lake water had once flowed, rustled dry." As late as the 1800's, the Everglades consisted of a 60-mile wide shallow river, seldom more than 2 feet deep, flowing from Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay. That was before the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers erected 1,400 miles of dikes, dams, levees and water control structures in the name of water supply and flood control Now in the year 2000, more than fifty years after Marjory Stoneman Douglas wrote about the demise of the Everglades, only 2.4 million acres of Everglades remain - about one half of the original Everglades ecosystem. Lake Okeechobee is likewise experiencing adverse ecological impacts. Florida is now at a turning point, ready to begin reversing the effects of massive wetlands drainage, damage to our estuaries and loss of valuable water storage areas." Getting to this point, however, has not been easy. In fact, the history of South Florida's transformation of its natural environment can be traced back over more than a century. Recent Florida history reveals an evolutionary process in environmental water policy-making, evincing repeating cycles of litigation, negotiation, and legislation that eventually led to development of the world's largest environmental restoration project - the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP). This article explores the history and future of South Florida's ecosystem restoration efforts. Part II provides a general introduction to South Florida's history of attempting to transform nature through engineering and manipulation of the natural environment. Part III explores the consequences of those engineering efforts for the Everglades ecosystem, and its recent history of litigation, negotiation and legislation that culminated with the passage and ongoing implementation of the Everglades Forever Act and Congressional adoption of historic legislation implementing the CERP. Part IV describes the future of environmental restoration throughout the greater Everglades ecosystem, including the restoration of Lake Okeechobee and the implementation and funding of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan. Finally, Part V provides the authors' conclusions.

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