Stuff You Should Know - The Everglades: Wowee

Episode Date: April 4, 2024

One of America’s most important ecosystems takes up more than half the state of Florida. It’s a river of grass, a cactus desert, and a saltwater bay all rolled into one. And there are alligators and crocodiles. And that’s just the beginning.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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we're gonna be in Washington DC and then on May 31st right there in New York City. In August we're gonna hit Chicago, Minneapolis, and Indianapolis on August 7th, 8th, and 9th and then we're gonna wind out the year in Durham and Atlanta on September 5th and 7th. You can get all the info and ticket links that you need by going to linktree.sysklive or going to our website, stuffyoushouldknow.com and clicking on the tour button. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too and this is Stuff You Should Know. That's right. Do people still say that? Sure. I mean, I just did so I guess somebody does. That's right. Do people still say that? Sure. I mean, I just did, so I guess somebody does. I think of that every time I see one of those, you know, pharma commercials are the worst.

Did they say Nizzo on that a lot? Well, Sky Rizzi is... Oh, yeah. I can't even remember what it is. I think it's for rheumatoid arthritis. Like, everything is for rheumatoid arthritis. Like everything is for rheumatoid arthritis. All I know is whenever I see those commercials, I just die laughing and think, what a terrible name.

So I know a lot of those jingles and I think Sky Rizzi's is nothing is everything. And then Snoop Dogg comes in at the end. Yeah. He goes, for schizel. With skyrizzle. Yeah. I've had that same thought too, and it is pretty funny. All right.

So enjoy the free ad. Yeah. Novo Nordisk, whoever you might be. Uh, yeah, we're not talking about pharmaceuticals today, although I'm sure there's plenty of pharmaceuticals floating around where in the area we are talking about today. Okay. What's that? It's probably screwing the frogs up. Something fierce.

Yeah. Because we're talking today about the Everglades. Um, and I know at least one person who has been recently and, um, I'm sure thought it was amazing. Um, but they're in a lot of trouble, it turns out. We've been monkeying with the Everglades for a century or so and it is starting to be like, that is enough, I'm sick of this,

you guys better restore me or else I'm gone. Were you talking about me? Yeah. Oh, okay. I didn't know. I thought you might've known someone else who recently went. You're the only human being I've ever met who's gone to the Everglades. That's not true.

Uh, yeah. Emily's, uh, Emily's parents moved down that way or at least part time. Oh, cool. And, um, we, we took a boat, an airboat tour of part of the Everglades, a very tiny, tiny, tiny part obviously. Yeah, you sent Jerry and I a little video of you on the airboat. Yeah, riding toothless. It's my first airboat experience.

What did you think? Well, they're super loud, so it's not like a relaxing boat ride. Not for you, not for the wildlife, not for anybody. Yeah, I wondered about all that. But getting in the Everglades, and I had done a previous, probably one of the most amazing trips I ever did was a three-nighter in the Okefenokee Swamp. So I've always been sort of entranced by swampland.

And when I was down there, especially now that I'm older, the Okefenokee thing was 20 something years ago. I was like, you know, when you're older, you just appreciate things a little more, I think, like that. Oh, definitely. When you're a kid, you don't know what the heck's going on. Yeah, so I just marveled at the, mainly the bird life, honestly.

Like the alligators were fine, but the birds is what really, or what really knocked me out and, you know, like this is how we learn stuff is we see stuff and we think, oh, well think I got a job where I can actually learn that for, you know, as part of my weekly pay. Right. And so here we are. And so here we are. And it was amazing and I'm super excited about it. Well, what questions did you have that made you want to research the Everglades more?

I mean, just to know more about it, our airboat guy, shout out to Kenny, like true interior Florida man. But he knew a lot, it seemed like, and he was giving us some pretty good information, I feel like. It wasn't just like driving us around. He was into it, working for those tips, you know? Sure. But just, you know, it was just the tip of the mangrove, so to speak. Very nice. Thank you. And by the by, Kenny is such an interior Florida man,

he once robbed a gas station with a snake. Has that happened? It probably has. At least once once for sure. That's pretty smart. Actually, I'd, I'd give up the cash register if someone put a snake in my face. Sure.

For sure. So, um, okay. So for those of you who don't know, and there's probably plenty of you who don't know exactly where the Everglades are, although I would wager that you've heard of them, but they essentially are a, um, I wanted to say a wetlands, but there it's, it's a, a patchwork of diverse ecosystems that are extremely unique, peculiar to

the Southern half of Florida. Essentially, if you want to talk geography and natural history, um, they, they go from just below Orlando all the way down to the Florida Keys. That's technically the, um, the Everglades. And then there's one strip from about Palm beach down to Miami of high ground that holds the Everglades in place. And that represents the one border aside from the top or the Gulf of Mexico or the Florida Keys that is that bounds the Everglades.

Does that make sense? Yeah, totally. And it's a part of what makes the Everglades so unique. And you mentioned different ecosystems. There's a bunch of overlapping ecosystems that don't normally overlap necessarily elsewhere in the world, which is always going to, you know, anytime you have brackish or salty water mixing in in places with fresh water,

it's just gonna create a unique environment. And the Everglades are that. It is seminal for, well, actually the seminal name for Everglades is Paheoki, and it means grassy waters. And they have called them grassy waters, various people or river glades for a long, long time until finally in 1823, the word everglades first appeared on a map. Yeah. And everglades itself is just one of those words you've heard so long, you kind of take for granted it's its own thing.

Totally. But it actually has an English meaning too. A glade is a big grassy opening in a wooded area and ever is kind of like a short for forever. So it's like this endless glade and what they're talking about is that river of grass. There's actually a couple of what are called slu's S-L-U-G-H is how it's pronounced. In America.

Or how it's spelled. In America, you pronounce it slew. And, um, you punctuate it with an eagle's cry. And, um, the slews are kind of what most people probably think about when they're thinking of the Everglades. It's, it's wet, marshy wetland that's pretty much flooded year round with a specific kind of grass

called sawgrass that can grow anywhere. You could take some sawgrass to the moon and it'll be like, great, thanks. I'm going to drive here. It'll grow in the water. It'll grow on dry land. It'll grow in saltwater. It'll grow on in freshwater.

It'll grow under basically any condition. And so it's this flooded grassland that are really just a couple of specific ecosystems that make up the Everglades are what most people think of when they think Everglades, but it's far from the complete picture. Yeah. And when we were driving over those grasses and well, you couldn't tell because they look like little roads through their little wet roads.

I was like, are these here because you drive over them? And he said, yes. And he said, and I think he saw my frowny face, but he said, man, this stuff dries up and grows right back up and you'd never know anyone was here. At least in this part. So, I still say it was fairly disturbing,

at least the noise. Well, it's less impactful in the other mode of transport they use in very swampy areas called swamp buggies, which just have these huge tires that you can't possibly get stuck in. Those definitely are more disruptive to the ecosystem than an airboat is. Yeah, and I was, I mean, every time he stopped

and turned that engine off, I would look down and I was like, Kenny, brother, we're in three inches of water. And he said, it didn't take much, man. He just goose this thing and it'll, it'll get you going. Yeah. And, uh, also every time he stopped it and then would re-crank that, you know, it sounds like an airplane motor. It kind of is, I guess. Uh, I was, I, all an airplane motor, it kind of is, I guess. I was, all I could think of was, please start. Oh yeah, for sure.

Cause it's a little like, there's something about swamps. When I was in the Okee Panokee, it's the same thing. And it's not just alligators, but I think it's just not being able to see into the water, you know, cause that water looks like, you know, brewed iced tea. There's just something scary. Like, when I was a kid, I remember thinking

there was nothing scarier than, because I'd seen a lot of movies, like, set in swamps and stuff. I was like, there's nothing scarier. If you go into a swamp, you're going to die. And that's just not true. That was the clear lesson from swamp thing, and swamp Thing too.

Totally. Livia helped us with this, but it's also important that we point out that there's Everglades National Park, and then the Florida Everglades, and Everglades National Park encompasses a lot of areas that aren't what we think of as Everglades, and the Everglades extend well beyond the boundaries of the park itself as well.

Yeah, it sounds a lot more confusing than it is. We'll line it all up into neat little tidy packages for everybody, how about that? How about this, Everglade very large national park, smaller area within and beyond? You did it. We can end the podcast right here, essentially. Cause you already mentioned alligators, birds

and iced tea, swamp water. So we're good. Well, I think we should talk history because you dug up some, it looks like sort of the quintessential rundown of how we got there, right? My friend, yes, I wrote that. That was good stuff.

Thank you very much. I appreciate that. I was good stuff. Thank you very much I appreciate that I for some reason when I started to research a little more and more of the natural history of the Everglades it just got more and more fascinated so it was easy. Totally take it away. So the Florida Florida is a peninsula for those of you who don't know and it it's on top of some very very solid bedrock part of the continental plate that it's on. But atop that is a layer of limestone bedrock. And it's formed from old like corals and shells because for a very long time, what's now Florida

was under a sea or an ocean, right? Yeah. And potentially might be again one day. Right. So over time, there's like sea level changes and rises, cause you know, the earth likes to go through glacial and interglacial periods. And, um, the, during the last period where the ocean covered Florida, a new layer of like

really porous limestone was laid down a top of that limestone bedrock. And that forms what's called the Biscayne Aquifer. And that aquifer is a holding tank essentially for drinking water for the 9 million people who live along the Atlantic coast of Florida. And it's just super flat. I think there's a difference in elevation, Chuck Chuck from the bottom of Lake Okeechobee, which is essentially the Northern boundary now of the Everglades all the way down to the Florida Keys.

It just drops by like 12 to 15 feet, I think in elevation, all those hundreds of miles. And that is one thing I love about Florida is especially when I was a kid too, is, you know, it's hot and stuff, but walking and jogging and riding bikes and stuff, they don't have any of those hills. So it's just much more palatable for a dude like me. Yeah, it is very flat. The hills are the killers, you know. Exactly.

Yeah, everybody knows that for sure. It doesn't matter whether you're walking, whether you're biking, whether you're rolling uphill. It sucks. Uh, the important part that you mentioned though, is that there's, um, there's not much elevation rise and change, but Florida does slope, um, just ever so slightly. Uh, I guess what? Southeast.

And so all the water in Florida wants to go Southeast. It does, but it runs into that Atlantic coastal ridge, which sounds tall, but at its tallest point, it's like 20 feet above sea level. Yeah, that's a ridge. But Florida is so flat that that actually contains the water in the Everglades from going and spilling off into the Atlantic. So it funnels it down toward that southern southwestern part of Florida.

And over time as sea levels rose and declined, rose and declined, we went through glacial periods. The last time, at the end of the last ice age, which is about 12,000ish years ago, sea levels started to kind of stabilize. Uh, and the, the current climate that Florida has, this subtropical monsoonal climate, um, where there's a dry season and a rainy season and then during the rainy season, it really rains. There's hurricanes, that kind of stuff that started around the end of the last ice age. Right.

And so over that last 12,000 years, that big old lake, Okeechobee, that forms the Northern boundary of the Everglades would periodically flood and it would send a ton of water down toward the bottom of Florida, the Southern, Southwestern tip. Simultaneously, all of that sea level rise and decline, um, deposited things like shells and mud and all sorts of stuff.

And that formed a natural dam, a barrier. That keeps a lot of the water from flowing out of the southwestern part of Florida and it forms the Everglades, which is essentially an extremely slow moving body of water. That is, it moves so slowly that the water has time to percolate downward through the soil, into that aquifer, become purified, and be held. So during times of the wet season, it's a big repository for storm water.

During the dry season, it's a source of drinking water for the people who live in Florida. And some say that a drop of water, some meaning you, and I imagine you got this from somewhere. Right, I didn't make that up. Reputable. That a drop of water takes some meaning you, and I imagine you got this from somewhere. Right. I didn't make that up. Reputable. That a drop of water takes about a year to go from Lake Okeechobee to the Florida Bay, which, you know, all of this talk sounds like Florida is a very scary

place. It sounds like it's held together by, you know, reedy roots and duct tape. It essentially is for sure, but it's so flat that you're really not in any danger. And it's also very shallow. Um, I think that Florida Bay that extends between the Florida Keys and the, the southern most tip of the Florida mainland, that's like five feet, an average of five feet deep.

Oh, did you walk to the Florida Keys? I believe so. Yeah. Because I, from what I saw, the average, the average depth is- Through water? Yes. That it is five feet.

That's pretty cool. We should do that. It is pretty cool. I never thought about that, but yeah, you could, from what I, from what I can tell. If it can be done, it has been done. I'm sure. You'd think so for sure.

I mean, I imagine Jimmy Buffett walked, traversed that many times. Probably. In his life. Yeah. Uh, is that good on natural history? Should we take a break? I think so.

Did we cover everything? I don't remember. I think so. I think that spells it up very nicely. All right. So we're going to take a break and we're going to come back and talk about what Livia calls America's greatest swamp. Chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, bringing you conversations about culture, the latest trends, inspiration, and so much more. I am so excited about this podcast, The Bright Side.

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Let's see if chistas will fly or if these singles will be sent back to the dating apps. Listen today my Abuelita first as part of the My Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so we covered natural history. We should talk about the people of Florida. Southern Florida was really as far as settling the Americas. It was one of the last pieces of the Americas to be settled by human beings. But there's still, like, I think 1200 BCE is where the indigenous population started

out there. So, still nothing to sneeze at. And you know, you still see that indigenous, I guess, representation sort of everywhere. It feels thick just from the names and just kind of everywhere you go. It's apparent almost as if you were, I feel like, out west of the United States.

Like, you get a little bit of that in Georgia and the Carolinas, but it just feels heavier in Florida. For sure. Yeah. There's a lot of native American words that are used as place names still for sure. Is that what you mean? Yeah.

I mean, more than that, but it feels like a clunky way to say what I probably didn't even get across. Well, the thing about the Everglades is it's, it's housed people for, like you said, a very long time, thousands of years. Um, and I think what blew my mind is the Everglades is we know them today, or as I guess we would have

known them if we came upon them in 1850 or something like that. Um, they're only like 3,000, 3,200 years old from what I saw. I saw some places 5,000, but I think the National Park Service said they're only about 3,000, 3,200 years old from what I saw. I saw some places 5,000, but I think the National Park Service said they're only about 3,000 years old. So people in the Everglades kind of came around that area around the same time. And they've been inhabited in some way, shape, or form ever since.

Because as Europeans pushed further and further west and further and further south, the Everglades, you couldn't do anything with them. When Florida first was settled by people of European ancestry, they were like, this is just a completely valueless expanse of swamp, we can't do anything with this. You go live there.

Yeah, for sure. And in a sec, we'll get to kind of what the United States started doing once they acquired Florida from Spain in 1819 with the Adams, what was it, Onus Treaty? That's probably not pronouncing it right. I'm not sure, I didn't see that one. Well, that was the treaty where the United States got Florida.

But as far as original inhabitants, we're talking about the Tequesta, the Yega, and I don't know, I tried to find the pronunciation for the AIS tribe, do you know what that is? Yeah, it was AIS, it was an abbreviation. That's pretty good, you almost got me. The I's, the I's maybe? Maybe, I tried to find, it's hard to dig up pronunciation sometime for some of this stuff, but they lived on the

East Coast and then you had the Calusa in the Southwest. And then, you know, they're all over the Everglades. They're living there in their raised huts. What were those called? Chickie huts? Yeah, and those were Seminole, I believe, a Seminole invention, which is just like a platform like the one you stayed on in the Okefenokee Swamp.

Well, even better. Right, but it has like sides and a roof and stuff like that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so it's a house. It's a platform house that was designed to be lived in in the Everglades. Yeah, in the Everglades, you mentioned Seminole, they were formed from a lot of displaced Creek Indians, some other indigenous groups, and then there were some Africans who were, you know, fleeing the slave trade and a lot of these people ended up just sort of hiding in the Everglades because it is a great place to hide.

Yeah. And so still there's Seminole tribe, The Seminole Tribe has a reservation in Big Cypress, one of their reservations in Florida. And the Miccosukee Tribe apparently is made up of, like, former Creek members that, rather than be moved westward to Oklahoma during Indian removal, they said, no, I'm staying down here.

And they ended up forming, basically, their own tribe over time that's still around today. I kinda like the idea of, we're gonna be in the middle of the Everglades, come and find us. That's exactly what they did. Yeah. Yeah.

They were like, well, we'll go brave this. Yeah, you come after us if you want to, see what happens, malaria boy. And then I'm there going, don't go in there, you die if you go into a swamp. Exactly. You don't know what's under You die if you go into a swamp. You don't know what's under that water. It's the lesson of swamp thing.

And where they're like, uh, you know, what's under this water food. Yeah. Bedrock. So you mentioned, um, the land being valueless. That was literally what the first state legislature said that it is quote, wholly valueless and said, we got to figure out how to get this water out of here and make this into land we can use. Yeah.

There's like, some people are actually adapting to living there. Can you believe that? We want to tame this thing. And so they did very quickly. They started digging canals and ditches to drain water from Lake Okeechobee, which again has traditionally flooded its banks and sent water into the Everglades.

That's where the Everglades gets most of its water, or it has over time, and then it takes so long to slosh out that it stays generally wet throughout the year. If you dig canals to divert water to other places like say an existing river or the Atlantic Ocean, you're not going to have those banks flood anymore. And the people that live along those banks are not going to die being covered in a mudslide or a flood, or your crops aren't going to be ruined. And so that was like the first attempt to really kind of tame the Everglades. It was by cutting off its water supply from the north from Lake Okeechobee.

Yeah. And that happened up through the first couple of decades at least of the 20th century until in the 1920s. Some people, not too many, but some people started standing up and saying, you know what? We're wrecking an ecosystem here. It's kind of heartening, I guess, to think that this is happening all the way back in the 1920s. But in 1928, there was a land developer named Ernest F. Coe, a land developer who actually developed a campaign to protect part of that area as a national park,

which eventually bore fruit in 1947. Can you believe it? He was a unicorn. I know. Another champion of the Everglades who came along about 20 or so years later was a journalist named Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, whose name sadly has become synonymous with a school shooting in Florida as well. And I didn't know anything about her, but she was this amazing champion of civil rights, of

women's rights, of protecting the environment. And we're talking in the forties, you know, and she was a really good writer and she wrote a book called The Everglades River of Grass, which is, it's a great title or whatever, but it was apparently a very popular book that changed people's attitudes toward the Everglades. It wasn't like, this isn't something to be tamed for industry and real estate.

This is something to be preserved and protected. And because she helped kind of point out just how unique the Everglades was as an ecosystem, it became protected not because it's incredibly beautiful, it's actually not in some ways, it's not ugly, but it's featureless in a lot of places. It was protected because of the life that it housed. Yeah, you know, I get that it's not, you know,

the Rocky Mountain National Park and like all the amazing things you get out west, but I was blown away by the way it looked. And I know that Swamp just has a connotation is, you know, like when we first, you know, when the US first got ahold of it, they were like, this is, this place is gross. Let's get all this water out of here. You. But like I was knocked out and I, the same thing happened in the Okefenokee. I just think it's an amazing, like visually amazing place as well. That's awesome.

Well, you would have been a great early proponent of protecting the Everglades. Totally. Just don't, I don't want to walk around in there. Cause you'll die. I wanted to exist over there. And again, I talked about the birding, but apparently there was a conservative governor named Spessart Holland who was like, well, hey, you know, there's tons of birds here. We could probably bring in some money as a tourism hotspot with the Everglades.

Yeah. Those nerds are loaded. They usually don't have kids or anything else to do. Really well paying job. Bring them in. Oh, God bless the birders. So the park started out at 400 something thousand acres and eventually just started ballooning very quickly.

I think it's about one and a half million acres now, about 2300 square miles. It's big. A god gigantic amount of kilometers. Um, and it's, it is, it's giant. And you're like, wow, 2300 square miles is a huge staggering size, but compared to the actual historical natural boundaries. And I'm talking like the, taking anything anyone's ever said,

this is the Everglades into account. Naturally speaking, it's about an eighth of what the actual Everglades are meant to be. They're supposed to be something like 18,000 square miles or about twice the size of New Jersey. So like basically the entire lower half of Florida. Yeah. Up, up well into central Florida.

Yeah. For sure. So it might even be closer to the bottom two thirds. I don't know, but it's, it's a significant, huge amount of land. And the idea that the park is just protecting it, uh, that it's like an eighth of its size. Um, it's misleading in one way, because there's actually a patchwork of, um, native American reservations that are protected and, um, state

parks in areas that also enjoy some wildlife refuges. Yeah. So it's actually bigger than just the national park, but at the same time, it's still a shadow of its former self. And there are two things that cause the Everglades to become a shadow of its former self.

One is real estate development. So Florida is amazingly beautiful and sunny. Um, there's yeah, there's a rainy season, but it's still worth hanging around during to make it through to the dry season. Cause it's so nice. Um, and then number two, agriculture, because the Okachobe traditionally like overflowed its banks to the south, it deposited tons of like nutrient rich

silt. Yeah. So just to the south of Lake Okachobe, some of the most fertile land in the United States. And they're like, this is wasted. We need to damn this thing. We need to build, this is wasted. We need to dam this thing. We need to build levees and dikes and everything to keep this thing from overflowing and plant there.

And that's what they did. So the Everglades were drained for real estate in this patchwork way and then cut off again, like I said, from its source of new water, Lake Okeechobee. Yeah, and one of the main projects that kind of got that going in more recent history was in 1948. The Hurricane George came through in 1947, aka the Fort Lauderdale hurricane, did a lot of damage.

And then Congress said, all right, we got to do something about this for real. So they authorized a central and southern Florida project for flood control and other purposes, do something about this for real. So they authorize a central and southern Florida project for flood control and other purposes, otherwise known as the Sea and Ampersand SF. Sea and SF. And that's what basically got it going in 1948,

like you were talking about when, you know, just more and more canals, more levees, creating more farmland and urban areas, just more and more canals, more levees, creating more farmland and urban areas just swelling outward. Yeah, because if you weren't on board with the idea of real estate development or agriculture and you wanted to protect the Everglades, every once in a while an enormous hurricane would come through and kill a couple thousand people. And you'd be like, we've got to do something about this.

So it would bring everybody else into the fold. And that's how that happened. So over time, this, these projects became so successful that still today, the canals and the ditches and all of that stuff that diverts water away from the Everglades outward so that we can live and farm in Florida, carries about 1.7 billion gallons of water a day to the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico. That's incredible. Still today. So yes, the Everglades is essentially, you would hope it's in this holding pattern. It's not.

It's been cut off from its natural source of fresh water coming from the North and Lake Okeechobee, and it's slowly dying, essentially. It's still huge, but it's still being carved up. Agriculture's still being carried out. It's still being drained, and it's in a little bit of trouble. So we'll talk about that, but I say we take a break and then come back and talk about some of the stars of the Everglades. You know who else agrees with you on these points? Who?

Kenny. Oh, Peh. All right, we'll be right back. Bring a little optimism into your life with The Bright Side, a new kind of daily podcast from Hello Sunshine, hosted by me, Danielle Robay. And me, Simone Boyce. Every weekday, we're bringing you conversations about culture, the latest trends, inspiration, and so much more. I am so excited about this podcast, The Bright Side.

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And we also share other advantages that will help you get ahead of your competition. So all you have to do is listen to Marketing School every weekday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Chuck. So the National Park Service carves the Everglades up into nine habitats. Cause I think we said at the outset, the Everglades is actually this amazing patchwork of different kinds of ecosystems. Yeah. Nine to be exact.

Um, and the reason that there are so many different ecosystems is because again, Florida is so flat, the Everglades are so shallow that just in a rise of a few inches can create a completely different ecosystem than one that's a few inches shorter than it, because it can be dry. And so then there can be hardwood trees and then all sorts of different life comes in flocks to these little islands that form over time as the tree roots

capture dirt and the ground raises slowly, but surely over time. Those are called hardwood hammocks and they're just one of the ecosystems found in the Everglades. Yeah, and people should understand every time we say the word dry, that's heavily quoted. Right. Dry meaning, you know, it can sustain birds walking around on it and like a tree to grow.

Yeah. And they'll get flooded periodically, but it's not constantly wet. And imagine if you jump up and down and stand in place, you'll sink a little bit. You will be very sorry. You've also got the pine rocklands. These are just beautiful areas.

These are areas of forest and it has, and it's very unique. It's only found in South Florida and the Bahamans and mostly in Florida, but it's got this pine canopy. Florida's got these beautiful pine trees. I know people often think of just coastal Florida with palm trees and things like that and sand, but you get into interior Florida a little bit, you got these beautiful pine forests,

and that forest canopy means that stuff grows there that doesn't grow anywhere else on planet Earth. Right. And one of the things that's really important to the Pine Rocklands is they can sustain fire. And so, fire periodically comes along. These days, the National Park Rangers set fire on purpose for prescribed burns to mimic natural fires. And that keeps those hardwoods from coming in and establishing dominance and turning those places

into a hardwood hammock so it stays a pine rockland, which is cool. It's its own thing. And it's probably always gonna be its own thing as long as everything stays exactly the same. Oh. Freshwater sloughs, they are the Shark River slough that goes to the Gulf of Mexico

and the Taylor slough that goes into Florida Bay. They're basically two giant marshy sawgrass rivers. Slow moving. Very slow. Yeah, and that's again, that's what people think of typically when they think of Everglades, right? Yeah, the rafting, not so good. There's, there's Marl prairies

and Marl is like the opposite of peat. It needs aerobic conditions to form. Did you just, Pete, cause it has to do with scotch? No, just cause we talk about peat later and I think peat is just sort of amazing. I do too. Yeah. Plus also, it makes scotch pretty great.

Yeah, sure, and that's part of it. But the Marl is made up of a bunch of different weird stuff like algae and microbes and calcium, carbonate, and it's a very specific kind of mud or dirt basically that feeds a lot of very diverse wildlife. Yeah, absolutely. So those are the moral prairies? Yes.

Yeah. What about the cypress trees? They kind of have their own ecosystem allotted to them, but they seem to grow in various places too. Yeah. I mean, they can grow in water, like the standing water. They do really well in the places too. Yeah, I mean they can grow in water, like the standing water. They do really well in the wet areas. They're beautiful.

They also grow in dry areas that don't have great soil, so they're a pretty hardy species. Okay, and I think I would be the jerk of the year if I took a mangrove forest. Oh, you know I love my mangroves. I asked Kenny, I was like, are those mangrove forests. You know, I love my mangroves. I asked Kenny, I was like, are those mangroves? He said, no, but there are some. So what I was seeing was, I'm not sure what I was seeing or exactly which

area I was in now that I'm looking at them all. I mean, it was, it's, it's north west of Fort Myers is where I was. And we were driving around through the marshy section, but there was a very large lake there that I think he said was the second largest lake. I don't know. I'm not familiar with that area, but it sounds like you're talking about Cape Coral area. Maybe. I tried to find that lake on the map, but I couldn't find anything today.

Does Kenny exist? Is anything real? He does. I took a selfie and he jumped in the back of it and he photo bombed us. Nice. But anyway, mangrove forest, there are mangroves there. They're in the coastal channels

around the southern tip of Florida in that brackish water. So I wouldn't have seen them where we were. And listen to our mangroves episode to learn all the great things they do. Yeah, for sure. And they are really great trees. The Everglades apparently has the largest contiguous mangrove ecosystem in the entire Western Hemisphere.

And I read that some of them are like four stories tall, Chuck. Can you imagine seeing a four- story tall mangrove tree? Man, that's amazing. And you know, I did say, listen to that episode, but we, we should say at the very least that one of the big things, cause this will come up later that mangroves do is protect against high water and storms. Yes, exactly. And so there's areas that get such high waters

and get such high winds during hurricanes that the mangroves are like nuts to this. I'm moving elsewhere. And those areas where they move away from or where they just can't exist are called coastal lowlands. And these are the antithesis of what people think of when they think of the Everglades, because it's essentially a scrub desert.

Yeah. Isn't that nuts? There's scrub desert ecosystems in the Everglades. Yeah. It's, it's incredible. Like all the ecosystems are so varied. It's really amazing. Yeah.

So it's, it's populated by low growing salt tolerant plants that can handle being, uh, blown around in 180, 190 mile an hour winds. Like succulents. And then there's Florida Bay. And this is again, the very, very shallow coastal area that's bounded at the South by the Keys and at the North by the Florida mainland. And there's amazing fishing there. And it's most people would think like, that's not the Everglades, but it's technically included

in Everglades, in particular, Everglades National Park. Absolutely. We got to talk about some animals here. We're not going to go into too much detail, but we got to talk about alligators and crocodiles because as you know, if you've listened to the show, that's the only place on planet Earth that has both, which is pretty remarkable. Yeah, it is. A lot more alligators and crocodiles, of course. I think about 200,000 gators compared to 2,000 crocs.

Yes, but the crocs numbered 200 back in 1975. That's pretty good. They call it a comeback. Yeah, because they were never gone. Same with the Panthers. There's a, it's, it's, they're still in a very precariously low population density of about 200. Yeah. But that's up from 20 to 30 in the 1970s. It's crazy. So this is like, these are the yields or the

dividends that, um, that protection yielded. Like the, the, the Florida Panthers should not exist any longer were it not for people like, um, EF Co and Marjorie Stoneman Douglas. Like they would just be long gone, and now they're starting to slowly come back. And those things are beautiful. Yeah, they are gorgeous big kitty cats. Yeah, six to seven feet long.

Yeah. We saw a wild cow. What? Yeah, Kenny said they're not wild Yeah. You don't. We saw a wild cow. What? Yeah. Kenny said they're, they're, uh, not wild cows, but what do you call them? Like, uh, feral cows? No, maybe did say wild cows, but wild just meaning they're not anyone's cows.

That's pretty cool. There's a word for that. I just can't think of it. Unowned cows? No. Possessionless cows? They were leased cows, I think. So, uh, yeah, that's pretty neat though. Then I don't understand how those things survive

because there's, it's like, alligator could take them down so easy. This cow was 50 feet from an alligator. It's so weird. I don't understand nature sometimes, even though I love it. Uh, you've got your, uh, you got your water mammals. Everyone loves to see a manatee or an otter or a dolphin. The manatee, there was, I feel like a push

to save the manatee started in like the 90s or maybe even earlier. Something like that, because they were in trouble and they've kind of come back too. Yeah, I think they went from endangered to threatened in 2017. But just a few years ago, they had, um, what's called an unusual mortality event, which, um, looks like it is because of a loss of seagrass and water quality.

Yeah, that's a huge one. So Lake Okeechobee is, we'll see, is a toxic dump of farm runoff and nutrients. And because it's diverted, that water's diverted now to the Eastern coast and the Western coast, there are very frequently algae die-offs or algae blooms that lead to fish kills and die-offs, including the seagrass. Um, so it's a huge, huge problem. Not only is it not providing the Everglades with, with water right now, that's actually kind of good because if it were, the Everglades would be even more poison than they are.

So instead the coastal areas are getting poisoned and that's where the manatees live. And when the seagrass goes away, the manatees go away. So now they've taken up programs of like feeding the manatees, um, expired heads of cabbage and lettuce and stuff from grocery stores around the state. And it seems to be sustaining them, but the, the key here is to, um, is to figure out how to treat Lake Okeechobee.

That's the key. You can treat Lake Okeechobee, you can start moving water from Lake Okeechobee down into the Everglades, you're taking an enormous first step toward restoration. Yeah. And you're also saving coastal areas that are now just completely trashed by algae blooms and agricultural runoff. Do it, turn the water on. Well, that's what they're doing. They're, they're, so are we on to conservation and climate change?

Well, I want to shout out our bird friends real quick because, like I, sure. Because like I said early on, the alligators were neat, although we did see baby gators, very, very cute, all piling on one another, trying to, I guess, get out of the water. There was like 10 of them. They were just climbing all over each other. They don't like it either. Like five feet from us. It was very cute. But the birds is what really knocked me out. And Emily and I have gotten much more into, I wouldn't even say birding, but just

birds. Appreciate birds. Enthusiasm, like we got a bunch of feeders now and cameras and we're looking them up more and she puts out her phone and the Cornell app listens and records. So we've gotten more into it. We don't actually go out with the binoculars yet.

I have a magazine, you got me a subscription too, that I hadn't heard of before that I love, that I think you'll like too. It's called Birds and Blooms. Oh yeah. And essentially it's almost ad free. I don't know how they publish, I guess just on subscription.

And it's all about birds and how great birds are. And oh, check out this plant and this plant, beautiful. It's almost like just appreciating this stuff for preaching. It's not shoving conservation down your throat, it's not. There's no agenda. There's no agenda aside from appreciating birds and plants.

It's a really great magazine. Oh my friend, I appreciate that. That is gonna be coming Emily's way and I will tell her that you and Yumi are to thank. Sure, if you want to. But anyway. It'll probably never get back to me if you don't. The birds down there were just amazing.

Cranes and herons and the really, the showstopper was that pink, what's it called, the rosette spoonbill. We came upon a big mess of them. Wow. I was just like, ah, do you got it? Like it was in the swamp road ahead of us.

How tall are they? I knew what he was gonna do. And he cut the engine and we watched them and stuff, but then he drives and they fly away and all I could think of was sorry. Sorry for disturbing you. How tall are they? They were about the same size as like a heron or a crane,

it seemed like, but just the spoonbills are cool looking. And then when they take off and fly, they're just this like flamingo pink. It's amazing. That's really cool, man. Yeah. Lots of butterflies down there too, which I'm a big fan of as well.

Yeah, and hopefully we're gonna be doing a, if you're saying, how can you not talk about orchids? I think we're gonna do maybe a shorty just on orchids. Yes. So, um, as I was saying, there's, there's some steps that need to be taken to restore the Everglades. And there's, there's been a huge push to restoring the Everglades for decades now. Um, UNESCO put it on its world heritage list in 1979.

And, um, even long before that, people have been like, we've got to stop screwing with this stuff. We have messed it up so bad with the system of canals and ditches and dikes and levees and dams. Um, we've, we've got to just undo some of this. And there was a huge push to, to actually do that. And in 2000, back when Congress was capable of

being bipartisan, they passed the comprehensive Everglades restoration plan, SERP. And SERP essentially said, we're going to undo as much of that C and SF project work as possible and just let the Everglades be what the Everglades are. And had anyone been on the ball and funding come through early, it would be done by now. It was projected to cost $8 billion in 20 years.

And that is not at all how it worked out at all. They're actually just now starting a lot of the the projects and by a lot of the projects, I mean, a tiny fraction of what's needed to be done. Yeah. And, you know, Kenny said the same thing that, you know, there's still real estate encroaching and developers encroaching.

So it seems like a one step forward, two steps back situation that they're still draining more wetlands to expand, you know, living space and grocery stores and everything else that people use further and further into it. So it's fairly discouraging. I know there was at one point a deal to buy back a bunch of land from U.S. Sugar, but thanks to the 2008 financial crisis, that went belly upright. Didn't that just anger you? So this would have been a huge, huge step

because this was prime agricultural land that was below Lake Okeechobee, and if they could basically flood that again, it would restore water back to the Everglades. It would have been huge. And U.S. Sugar, who up until you said it, I've been pronouncing in my head, U.S. Sugar, they were on board. would have been huge and us sugar who up until you said it, I've been pronouncing in my head us sugar.

Um, they were on board and a lot of people were critical that Florida was going to spend $1.75 billion to buy like 180,000 acres from us sugar. Cause it was a struggling company to begin with and, um, yada, yada, yada, but it made it through all of those. Political obstacles. It was basically a done deal. And then the financial crisis happened, and all those stupid banks that screwed up

the entire global economy also prevented the Everglades restoration from taking that enormous step forward, because Florida's like, oh, we don't have any money all of a sudden, and we really need every penny we can get. Yeah, that's a real thumb in the eye. Yeah. Well, we promised a little bit more talk of peat,

and I'm glad Livia found this because I'm just, I think both of us were pretty knocked out by peat. Maybe we should do a peat cast one day. Yeah. But there's a lot of that peat rich soil underneath the marshes there. And you talked earlier about, what was it that was the opposite of peat?

Marl. Yeah, marl was the opposite of peat. Peat forms from organic materials that don't have oxygen. They're shielded from oxygen, so they don't break down. And that's why you can find like amazing discoveries in peat bogs. The wetland dries up though, and that stuff can all of a sudden burn. That's going to release a bunch of carbon into the atmosphere, and it's, you know, all of a sudden the peat is threatened as well.

Yeah. So, yeah, there's a lot of problems with climate change that climate change is going to bring to the Everglades. And one of them is that restoration. The restoration plan that was adopted in 2000 did not plan for climate change. So they're having to figure out how to implement these things now, the projects now, without going back to the drawing board and starting over and losing tons of ground and time, but also without spending billions of dollars on things that aren't going to work because

the Everglades are going to change with the climate. So that's currently where they're, what they're trying to figure out. Oh yeah. Yeah. And I recommend two different articles that have two really different views of what's going on for a really, really sunny view that I almost found suspicious as if, as if some AI wrote it, knew what I was researching and wrote it and served it up to me just in time for me to report on it to you guys.

I don't think that's a thing yet, but it made me think like that's coming in the future. Yeah. Um, it's, I think it's called like a bypass surgery for the Everglades. It's on phys org and it's pretty good. It's very interesting. Um, but again, it's got a really sunny outlook for

the opposite outlook. There is a, um, up first public radio interview with Jenny Stilettovich, who's a public radio reporter who reports on the Everglades and has forever and that's called, um, who reports on the Everglades and has forever. And that's called, um, How to Save the Everglades. I'd strongly recommend listening or reading to that, as well as that Fizzorg article.

And it'll give you a pretty clear perspective on what's going on. Fizzorg sounds like Snoop Dogg. Name that. What a perfect way to end. Very nice. Uh, well, Chuck made another Snoopop Dog reference to circle things up again. And of course, that has just triggered Listener Mail, whether we like it or not. We're going to shout out, I don't know, did you see that flood of emails come in from those high school kids?

No. Okay, you will. It was sort of right in the last hour before we recorded. We got like 10 or 12 emails all at the same time from a high school class. So I was like, somebody had an assignment. Nice. And I'm going to read one of them and shout out the rest. This was called Subject Line, my teacher forced me to do this. I'm not going to say which student Ms. Tiak wrote this one, but I bet you could probably figure it out.

Hey guys, really enjoy listening to your podcast. I've been listening for the past month or so. So far I've learned a lot from it. One of my favorite topics was the origin of math symbols since I'm a big math person. I'm an AP English language student at Wasco High School. My teacher is a huge fan of both of you guys and has been making us listen to a podcast episode every week Nice, so we gained general knowledge for our argument essay in the AP exam She is now forcing us to send a listener mail for a grade If you happen to see this, can I get a thank you to Ms? T. Yak. How do you spell it? T-Y-A-C-K.

Great name. Unless the T is silent, then it's just yak. Or unless the Y is silent, then it's tac. Sure. What if the A is silent? Then it'd be tic. What if the C-K is silent? It'd be T-I.

Very nice. Anything else? I think we've covered the big ones. I would actually like to thank you for giving our class more knowledge in order to hopefully use it in the exam. Again, thank you. Keep educating the world in an entertaining way. Actually that was a nice email, so I'm going to go ahead and say that was from Anil.

Thanks Anil. And big shout out to Jessica, Damien, Elijah, Abel, Dalen, Mariana, Yair, and Angel. Great lineup of names. Or, and hell, I'm not sure. And it's a great lineup of people too, I'm sure. And hey, this just in, we don't normally do this, but we got a bunch of more emails from kids from this class and you can't just read a third of the kids' names and be done with it, you know. Chuck, what day is it? What's going on? I mean, this is much later,

but like, you gotta read all these kids' names. So we're gonna do that right now. This must be many classes. There's no way all these kids are in one class. But in addition to the ones we read, can we also shout out from that AP class, Ian and Bree and Megan and Eileen and Jocelyn and Marisol and Amanda and Alexis and Charisma and Celeste and Nicholas and Cecilia and Yareli and Alex and Inez.

You think I'm done? Yeah. Nope. Halfway there, my friend. Wow. Because we also have to thank Paulina and Arturo, and Jacqueline and Antonio and Lauren and Brittany. I see you, Brittany. And Victoria and Isaac.

What a name, Isaac. And then finally, Juliette, Jasmine, Ava, Sebastian, and of course, dearest Kierden. All wrote in, and there was one student that was like, don't read my name. Hooper Humperdink. So we're not going to but just wanted to give everyone in the class a shout out. That's awesome sounds like a great bunch Chuck. Yeah so Miss TX give everyone a great grade and a big shout out to the AP English class at

Wasco High. Yeah huge shout out and if you want to be like Miss TX class and get in touch with us for whatever reason, we want to hear from you. You can send it via email to stuffpodcastatihartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, myHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Bring a little optimism into your life with The Bright Side, a new kind of daily podcast from Hello Sunshine, hosted by me, Danielle Robay. And me, Simone Boyce. Every weekday, we're bringing you conversations about culture, the latest trends, inspiration, and so much more. I am so excited about this podcast, The Bright Side. You guys are giving people a chance to shine a light on their lives,

shine a light on a little advice that they want to share. Listen to The Bright Side on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search the bright side. If you want to level up your marketing and business knowledge, look no further than the Marketing School podcast hosted by Neil Patel and yours truly Eric Su. It is the number one marketing podcast on Apple and number 15 on business in the United States.

Now, if you want to listen to interesting conversations with operators that have been there, done that, also with other interesting guests, then listen to Marketing School every weekday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Angie Martinez. Check out my podcast, Angie Martinez IRL, where I talk to Super Bowl halftime performer and the newly married usher about relationships. Trust is the main, you know, component to happiness and success in a relationship. Being able to actually hear each other and speak up.

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