Florida’s Big Dig

https ://vimeo.com/130709822  Tap the line to the left to start the short video. Read the text first.

In this woefully short video, we take a fast trip through one ecosystem.  Starting at the Kissimmee River basin and its estuaries, we visually fly over, under and through a flow of several waters, Lake Okeechobee, south through the slow-moving Everglades, until we reach the tip of the Florida peninsula at Florida Bay.

Unlike anything in the world, this connected and continuous FLow of waters supports a plethora of bird life, of wading birds, of hawks of all kinds, of fish, of the greatest number of wide-mouthed bass in the country, of submerged and floating plants, of plants microscopically small yet vital to the larger animal life that feed upon them, of alligators resident in only a handful of states like Florida, of snails and of the smallest plants that support fish, turtles, and other small animal life.

At one time, this 350-mile stretch of water was meant to flow continuously, without interruption and without the intervention of animals like the tropical boa constrictor, which was never intended to inhabit these waters nor the Eucalyptus tree that continues to harm our natural waters and their natural inhabitants. How did this self-supporting ecology of plants, animals and water run so horribly askew?  In my 65 years in Florida I had never fully grasped the importance of the interconnectedness of this flow of waters.   I never fully comprehended the interdependency of so many elements that must be kept in balance if we are to depend upon clean water for our survival in the future.

Today, we know the science and how to fix it, yet we may still lack the urgency to take action before it is too late.  I hope I’m wrong.  The Earth is a trust given to humanity. It is time to lay aside excuses, recriminations, and pleas for more time.  The time is now.

The start of the rescue of the three-part system began with the restoration of the old sinuous Kissimmee River (above) and its network of a similarly sinuous web of estuaries sprouting in every direction, naturally supplying clean water for the surrounding  prairies, ultimately providing  water south  to Lake Okeechobee (“O”).

The first wrong man-made step had been the channelization of the Kissimmee River (above, left) to straighten it, to remove the curves, to restore the old flows (above, right) despite the absence of scientific evidence to substantiate it and without evaluating its effects on the ecology of the Everglades.  The first step in restoration would be to restore the sinuosity of the old River system to bring back the animals lost in the degradation of the prairies.