Short Wave - Lessons on the limits of ecosystem restoration from the Everglades

Episode Date: January 27, 2024

When the U.S. government and state of Florida unveiled a new plan to save the Everglades in 2000, the sprawling blueprint to restore the wetlands became the largest hydrological restoration effort in the nation's history. Two decades later, only one project is complete, the effort is $15 billion over budget and the Everglades is still dying. The new podcast Bright Lit Place from WLRN and NPR heads into the swamp to meet its first inhabitants, the scientists who study it and the warring sides struggling to find a way out of the muck. Today, we hear an excerpt as environment reporter Jenny Staletovich tags along with wetlands ecologist Evelyn Gaiser to the remotest part of the swamp.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Hey short waivers, Regina Barber here. Today we're heading south, into the swamps of South Florida. Think mosquitoes the size of a quarter, alligators, and sawgrass lined with tiny razor-sharp teeth. But also think of seagrass meadows, cathedrals of mangrove forests and clean water. That's because the thing that made South Florida's Everglades so inhospitable before it was drained also made it stunningly beautiful and livable. Only half the Everglades remain. And that could be a problem for drinking water supplies for,

about 9 million people as sea levels rise. Florida is now trying to save what's left of the swamp with one of the largest ecosystem restoration projects in the nation's history. That work could have given Florida a head start fighting climate change, but it's not going so well. It's way behind schedule and over budget by about $15 billion. In the new podcast, Bright Lit Place from WLRN and NPR, Environment Reporter Jenny Stilettovich explains why. We hear an excerpt as she tags along with wetlands ecologist Evelyn Geyser to the most remote part of the swamp. My trip with Geyser started early in the morning at Everglades National Park, pushing off from a boat ramp near the southernmost tip of mainland Florida.

To get to Shark River, we head down a canal and cross two bays. Whitewater Bay today is flat calm. It's like a mirror reflecting the sky. It's hard to tell where the water ends and the sky begins. I mean, it's just gorgeous right now. Yeah, it's just so ridiculously shallow here, like five feet at the deepest. You can see pictures and maps showing what I'm talking about at our website, brightlitplace.org. We head down Shark River and make our way to that monitoring station where we started the episode,

tucked into the mangroves, Geyser, and her lab manager, Rafa Trasier. Ravieso have been monitoring Shark River for more than 20 years. It depends on the wind. The station sits on a platform that's not much bigger than a shower stall, so docking can be tricky. Right now, the leaves are like... Yeah, it must be next low tide. The platform connects to single boards elevated above the mangrove prop routes, and it's pretty exposed to the elements. One time, Travieso found two pythons wrapped around it.

One of which came home in the cooler. Well, I give it to the person doing Python research in the park. I've been out here before, and I'm always amazed at what the equipment is capable of doing. That is called the auto-sampler. So it is a machine that collects, it has a peristalti pump inside that collects water every 18 hours. The computer tells the machine when to collect the water. It's one of the very remotest places in the state. Homestead is nearly 40 miles to the east, separated by a sea of sawgrass.

Everglades City is 40 miles to the north behind dense swamps. Nearly all around us, mangroves line the coast in a protective embrace. It's just exactly how you would expect a blight to look that can deal with storms and winds and, and floodwaters and it's a fence. Yeah, it makes a fence. That's right. That's right. Mangroves are hugely important out here.

They store enormous amounts of carbon. This fringe of forest wrapping around the coast is Florida's version of the Amazon. But even more importantly, the mangrove forest stabilize muddy banks to keep parts of South Florida from washing away. Mangroves are able to build soil rapidly they build elevation, which combats the rising seas, and can buffer these coastal zones from storms.

They are built to do that. They have evolved in storm-prone areas, so they have these massive prop roots that stabilize them, and the soils underneath them, and the whole forest behind them. Building land is like their superpower. If the salt is intruding slowly like it has over the forest. the last several millennia, main groves like that, and they can deal with it and they can creep inland. They can have their little propagueless set root in these areas and grow very happily. But now they're having trouble keeping up.

Over the last 150 years, about three feet of soggy peat soil has shriveled up like a sponge and collapsed because of unnatural drought conditions. When that happens, deeper ponds open up in place of the soft. sawgrass marshes. When the water is so deep in these collapsed areas, the mangroves cannot do that. Sea rise is also taking advantage of that lost elevation. Saltwater moves inland, killing off the freshwater sawgrass, and that can make peak collapse worse.

We were trying to set a level of phosphorus that would protect the interior of the Everglades ecosystem. Everybody knew that that was going to be very costly. That's after the break. Explain to me how we're going to, so I'm prepared to know, like, am I going to, how much am I going to sink? Because I'm just taking my phone and my recorder. No, you should be fine.

I mean, we're, this is from a field trip I took a few years ago when I was trying to better understand pea collapse in the same Marsh's Geyser is studying. There might be a couple spots where it might get kind of up here. But I'll go, like, I'll be walking first, and then, like, you'll be able to know. So I asked Florida International University student Luke Lamb if I could tag along during his field work. To get to the sawgrass prairie where the peat is, we need to push our way through a thick stand of trees and brush. So, hey, see that tree right there, that's poison one. That you don't want to touch.

We get past the trees and wade into the sawgrass and find planks hidden underwater that make it easier to walk across the muddy bottom. Without them, the muck can trap your feet. So then this ends, and then there's another bore rock, but then there's another one here. So if you just kind of take small steps, you feel it start to end,

and then it would be kind of a step down. All right. And then take kind of a larger step. You got it? I don't think I'm on a... You're on it? I don't think I'm on. Okay.

No, you are. You are. Okay. Just keep going. Yeah. How do you stay working? I mean, we've been out here to keep walking. It'll be there.

Lamb is working on his doctorate in a different lab in Geyser's department. He works with a team tracking peak collapse. Because the Everglades is so big, there are places that can only be reached by helicopter. There's plenty of spots scientists have never visited. In just a few yards, we reach an elevated boardwalk. Around it, three-foot sample plots of sawgrass are enclosed in plastic sheeting so lamb can track growth rates

and take water samples. Check out our website, brightlit place.org, for photographs and maps of the sawgrass marshes. To take soil borings, we need to lead the relative safety of the boardwalk. That first step into the sawgrass, we sink up to our thighs and muck and water. As we walk, the walk

hits my hips. The sharp sawgrass quickly starts to take my radio gear apart. Crap, I lost my, uh, the foamy thing on top of my, oh. Anybody see it? It should float. Right here. Thank you. It's a little wet, but... Okay, I'll squeeze that out. Lam starts pointing out the obvious peak collapse. And you can see I mean, this is the roots, there's the collapse, so it's just kind of, it's everywhere.

But then over here, you know, these aren't... Sometimes I kind of call this place, it's kind of a windling at times. So if you get a little deep here, there's not really any way to avoid this spot. This is where I get stuck after I step in a hole. The suction from the mud traps me. Oh, my gosh. So one of Lange's colleagues has to pull me out. Yeah.

Thank you. Oh, my God. That's pretty much the way. We finally get to the spot Lamb is looking for. It's on the other side of a low, shrubby mangrove island, rising out of the sawgrass. The marsh mosquitoes here are joined by horseflies. Lamb plunges a metal soil borer down into the peat.

It's called the Russian, after the Russian scientists who designed it in the 60s. One 91. There's also a Swedish probe that I'm guessing is called the swede. Peets and bogs and tundras built up by dying plants over thousands of years are all over the world, from the Arctic to the Congo. Altogether, they store quarter of the planet's carbon. Lamb is reading off-depth measurements from the Russian. And 96.

He could not be happier here. I should mention that he can also do a 30-mile trail hike in a day. I do one more. When he first came down to interview for the program, he instantly fell in love with the mangrove forest, the cypress domes farther up the coast, and places like this head high in sawgrass.

Once, he had to wait out of the swamp barefoot after the mud sucked off both his shoes. He didn't care. It looks worse than it. Did your feet get cut up? Oh, yeah. It looks like just like 12 times. It's like 12 tiny cats just stomped all over my foot with a clogged up.

Takes about an hour to collect as Pete samples and record their depths. All together, it took us about four hours. To me, it felt like 10. Not to lamb. I like to say that I was born and work in wetlands because I don't... My skin, like, doesn't bump up to mosquitoes. It doesn't, like, itch afterwards, so I can just get bit, like, 100 times. Then, like, I don't know.

But poison wood. Poison would. allergic to. It's the peat under the sawgrass that's a big part of what restoration is trying to save. Without it, the Everglades sawgrass prairies turn into open water and vanish. It's our version of the subsidence wiping out the Louisiana coast. These are the marshes that the wide, shallow shark river slew is supposed to revive with all the water we're trying to send south. And we are sending water south, just not nearly enough.

We need way more bridging. We need way more areas of the conservationary is ripped apart. There's a whole lot more that has to get done in order to get water where it's supposed to be. And in the meantime... More on that after the break. You've given all the information to all the right people to act on them and to see declines happening

in places where we know exactly how to reverse it. We've all agreed that we need to act on those reverses. and we have it. Part of the problem goes back to getting water clean. I keep bringing this up because it's a fundamental point. Fixing the last fifth of the wild everglades will not work without clean water. That's what the treatment marshes we visited in episode three are supposed to be doing. Restoration was supposed to send just over a million acre feet of new water south every year instead of flushing it down rivers and canals and into the ocean. But so far, there's not enough treatment marshes to be able to clean and move that much.

They're not needing pollution limits for water off sugar farms now, let alone cleaning the polluted water in Lake Okeechobee. As it stands, only a tiny amount of that treated water makes it into the Everglades. We talked a lot about a reservoir being built that's supposed to provide some of that, quote, new water. But even that won't solve the problem. You've got really polluted water that's going to be in that reservoir, and reservoirs do not take nutrient out of water. It takes plants to do that. Reservoirs are not home for that kind of process, and so we need much more acreage to clean the water that comes out of that reservoir than what was authorized. Research by Geiser and her colleagues at FIU shows the state needs to add at least another 30,000 acres

of pollution cleaning marshes on top of the 50,000 acres we now have. So when we talk about progress, what we really need to do is look at the science, because while politicians were wringing their hands over whether to spend money on a pump or a culvert, scientists were building their case for why the Everglades and its mangroves and peat marshes, Matter not just to Florida, but to the world.

That was an excerpt from WLRN's Bright Lit Place podcast, hosted by Jenny Stolettovich. It was produced with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. I'm Regina Barber. Catch you Monday for more regularly scheduled shortwave.