Maggie Hurchalla

Partial Transcript: I'm Maggie Hurchalla. I live in Stewart, Florida. I was born in Miami 70 years, 77 years, yep 77 years ago. And grew up in Miami, went off to college, and then came back here. I’ve been involved as a Martin Co. Commissioner for 20 years and as an environmental advocate, I guess sort of forever in my adult life.

Partial Transcript: I guess I was probably not much more than 6 or 7 years old. And uh my mother decided that we were going to drive down to what’s now a fairly civilized place in Flamingo in Everglades National Park and see how far we could go in the dirt road. Uh, there was no park facility at Flamingo. When you got to Flamingo all it was, was some staked-out docks with some nets hanging on them. And the road itself was one of those absolutely marvelous horrible terrible roads in a very beautiful place. It was uh Gray Greasy Morrel (?) and if you weren’t very careful you got stuck. And so we got stuck and we pushed out.
We saw all sorts of interesting creatures as it got dark and I think we probably didn’t get home until 10:00 at night. But 4 little children in the back of the Jeep uh going down a dirt road that you didn’t know where it went to and you didn’t know what you were going to find was quite wonderful. The mosquitoes were quite awful.

Partial Transcript: The Everglades IS South Florida. Heart, soul, um, it is the whole water system that makes the coast exist, that makes the Keys exist. It goes from North of Orlando in terms of its connectedness, in terms of the greater Everglades ecosystem, all the way down through Florida Bay and through the bridges and the keys and out to the reef. And it does something in managing the water that we’ve never learned how to do--as people--that worked much better when we started. But we thought there was too much water, and so the first decades of settlement in Florida were all about getting rid of the water. And the magic of the Everglades, the magic of what Marjory call (?) the river grass actually starts well above it in the Kissimmee Valley, where you don’t have the wide sawgrass marsh but you’ve got a winding river that winds 100 miles before they turned it into a ditch that went just 50 miles. It’s that moving slowly evaporating as you move slowly spreading out into a flood plain where when it floods you simply cover a much wider area. When you have too much water, you evaporate more water. And you recirculate it upstream again, into the clouds. When you have too little water, you lose less water ‘cause it goes back into the stream and back into, as you go further south, Shark Valley South.

So the ability to damp the extremes of flood and drought, the ability to clean up water, the ability to provide a productive enough environment that you got some of the most fantastic bird life in the world but to balance your productivity and nutrients so they are where they should be, when they should be, for the critters, the larva, the very base of the food chain that needs them.

Partial Transcript: It was a place to hide. It was a place to hide from the white man. Uh and a very safe place,

David Weintraub, Can you give some context to the answer?

Um, the first people in the Everglades were actually the Tequesta Indians from way back in the 1500s. The last of them left with uh from the Chocloskee, with the last of the Spanish when the British took over Florida and went to Cuba. Uh but for them, it was ah, a fantastic food source, it was something that, if you didn’t mess it up, it gave you everything you needed.
I’ve always loved the line that says well the Indians knew when a hurricane was coming because they’d watch to see if the Sawgrass bloomed. Well the Sawgrass blooms every year. But sometimes hurricanes come every year, so it’s a good idea to move to higher ground when the sawgrass blooms. Uh later, the Miccosukee who came all the way down from North Carolina ah were looking for a place to hide from the American soldiers.

Partial Transcript: The first thing was to drain it. Ah, yep, again, context, context, ok.
For people who thought they were civilized, ha, as they moved into South Florida, the first and most important thing in everybody’s mind, and probably best exemplified by Napoleon Bonaparte Broward an early governor of Florida back in the early 1900s, was drain the swamps. And draining the swamps was about getting rid of malaria, draining swamps was about exposing south of Lake Okeechobee, this fantastic black muck to grow things on. Draining the swamps was to keep you from getting flooded out when we had a hurricane and we had a heavy, rainy year. So they dug canals as fast as they could dig canals and the more civilized we got and the bigger the cranes we got, the more canals we built so our first, right on up probably until before WWII, was drain the swamp.

Partial Transcript: Oh, the consequences of draining the swamp in the Everglades ah, were first noticed in Miami when well fields started going salt. Uh you had a huge head of fresh water back west of Miami and you had well fields that were fairly close to the salt water ocean. When you dried up the swamp in the wet season because you didn’t want all that water, the you got a really dry swamp in the dry season. And that caused the salt water to come into the well fields so that in 1945 they had to start building salt dams in all the canals that had dung, dug in order to drain the swamp. They would put in dams that held water back to a level of at least maybe 2 or 3 feet above sea level and that way reduce the salt intrusion that was happening with the wells.

Partial Transcript: In terms of the biggest destruction we did to it, besides changing the water, which was the biggest destruction, ah, what you saw as you lost the edges of the Everglades. And that was because you could drain the edges and keep them drained. The center part you couldn’t keep drained. But by draining the edges, ah, we found that we had destroyed the, what they call the short hydro period wet ones…(pause)
In terms of what we did to the Everglades physically, it was the edges. And particularly from Miami right on up through Broward and Palm Beach Counties, we drained those edges, we canalized them, we filled areas, and we covered them with so much pavement and subdivisions that they are irreclaimable.
Those edges didn’t seem to be so important, even for those people who love the Everglades. They looked at the heart of Short Belly Sleu (?) and it still looked good and the Sawgrass was still there. It turned out that we saw that it was the small wetlands on the edge of the Everglades that made the tremendous waiting (?) bird population. It was the fact that they could live year-round in Short Belly Sloop but when it came nesting time, they needed a little wetland, that drew down, though they had a veritable supermarket of fish, you might have a little 3-acre wetland that drew down in terms of drying out to a half acre and a wood Ibis could go in there, and Ms. Wood Ibis could eat all she want, get enough protein to start laying eggs at the beginning of the season and then as the nesting season went on, what happened is the little wetlands drew down first in December and January when the dry season started, you needed the littlest wetlands of all to get the nest, to lay the eggs in the first place. And then as the chicks needed feeding and whatnot, the bigger wetlands would dry down and there would be plenty of food there. And then in May and June, they would take off from the nest, and go live across the whole Everglades.
And we lost the edges of the Everglades in terms of the conference of Everglades restoration plan, one of the over-arching goals is to expand those short hydro-period wetlands.

Partial Transcript: When you talk about the, ah, destruction of the short hydro-period wetlands, and the ever-growing suburbs of Miami and Ft. Lauderdale, that actually came at a later time then what was the most immediate and destructive attack on the waiting birds of the Everglades and that was the plume hunters. All across the world, ladies were wearing roseate spoonbill plumes in their hats and egret feathers in their hats. It was very easy in nesting season to take a gun and destroy as much as the colony as you needed to sell those feathers which were worth a whole lot more than fishing for a living or farming for a living.

Partial Transcript: I don’t know, there are other, ya know I’ve read those figures and it was really striking uh, the sheer amount of feathers that went out of Florida during that period. But following up, the plume hunters following up drying up the little wetlands, on the edge, the next thing that happened to civilization where we noticed that we hadn’t really meant to do that to ourselves was when the fires started. And I can remember in the uh 50s and 60s when whole swaths of the Everglades west of Miami were on fire. And we had dried it out so much, that in a dry year, the peat started burning and it just kept burning. And you could-there was no way you could put it out. And if the west wind blew into Miami, everybody was coughing, kids were in the hospital emergency room with asthma, ah, it was, we knew that was not a good idea. I think that was…(noise)
So when we got to the point where we were burning the Everglades, we knew we’d made a mistake. We didn’t quite know what to do with it but we knew we’d made a mistake. And one of the problems people have in Florida, and I guess that applies to most places in the world, is you have a cycle of rainfall. We know that it rains in the summer in Florida, and it’s supposed to stop raining in October, and then it rains again in May. It doesn’t always do that. If you design your systems in FL, your flood control systems, your drainage systems in FL for averages, you will be wrong more than you are right. Because we do extremes. Uh, you have 50-55 inches of rain/year but we had over 100” of rain in 1947 and we have as little as 30-35” of rain. I’ll come back on him (?)
So when you put the drainage system that we had built without much thought together what with ah, what was happening ah, you found that it didn’t happen every year. And at first when it happened you said well this is really strange--it’s never been this dry before. Well, if you’d been around long enough you would know, that you have a very unpredictable cycle of drought and wet. And we had been very wet in the 1940s. We had hurricane after hurricane. If you’re 7 years old, hurricanes are wonderful fun. If you live out on a 20 acre cow pasture you can build boats and see all sorts of interesting things swimming by but all that water, after the well field problems of 1945 left everyone feeling again that they had too much water.
So we did the central and south FL flood control plan to dyke off the Everglades, keep them from flooding into Western Dade County and do even more drainage than we had done previously. Get rid of more little wetlands on the edge. And then we had a drought cycle. And in that drought cycle Everglades National Park caught fire, Big Cypress caught fire, and it burned and burned and burned. And that was the beginning of a very long journey to try to figure out how to get the water right.

Partial Transcript: Ah, south of the lake did not start with Sawgrass Everglades. Because Sawgrass is very nutrient limited. It just doesn’t want any phosphorous or nitrogen at all. Whatcha had south of the lake was the great pond apple swamp. And it was supposed to be so old and so thick that you couldn’t see the sun at noon when you were trying to scrabble around in it which wasn’t easy to do. That was the sump for the lake. That was the area that’s now the sugar cane field. South of the lake, the lake would overflow to the south, all of the nutrients that had come down in a natural way down the Kissimmee Valley from the flooding, going into the Kissimmee, coming into the lake, settled out into the great pond apple swamp. And they built 8, 10’ of the most beautiful black muck you can imagine.

It is not actually, if you talk US Dept of Ag soil type, it’s not great soil. It’s not like the great farming soils of Iowa where you can raise corn, where you’ve got the right amount of loam and real earth and stuff like that. It’s muck. And it’s good for some things but it’s not the perfect soil they thought. And it has another problem. If you dry it out enough, to grow something on it, ah, then it evaporates. It literally burns off, even without a match, even without a spark. Ah, when you expose that black muck to continual dryness over several months, it literally oxidizes and so you have places out there in the glades that you can still see that look like they were built on stilts 8’ off the ground--well the ground was 8’ up way back in the 1920s.

Partial Transcript: Whatcha had in the water system was the wide Kissimmee Valley, where the winding river could spread out, or it could go back in the river. It could collect nutrients or get rid of nutrients as it spread out into the flood plain. And that winding river came down into Okeechobee. Okeechobee didn’t have any walls, it barely had any banks. If you go out there now and take pictures, you can see the old bank, it’s got oak trees on it, big old cypress trees on it. But it all exists higher than the swamp on either side of it. So the edges were really barely edges and when you had a really rainy year, the water spread out beyond those edges for miles and miles and miles.

Lake Okeechobee was one of those perfect natural designs that took care of the extremes. In a very different way than the winding Kissimmee and the Kissimmee floodplain, what you had was this big lake that could become a littler lake or it could become a huge area that spread out over everywhere. And it could also damp the extremes, not just because it had room to spread out, because if you spread out over hundreds of acres, over thousands of acres, of shallow grasses, you’re now going to start throwing water away to the sky. You are going to dramatically increase what they call your evapo-transpiration. So in wet years, the lake would expand, it would have room to expand and it would literally push that water up into the sky and it would spread out enough so that instead of cutting a river down to the south that was a recognizable river instead of a river of grass...wave at me when
South of the lake, instead of cutting a river, you had this great area that was absorbing the flood. And you had the pond apple swamp underneath that was taking the nutrients out of the flood. And after that what you had was a slow flow that could move down slowly over this wide flat area that became the Sawgrass Everglades. A place that doesn’t have a lot of nutrients but has a huge amount of productivity. A place where you ah have ah an evapotranspiration again, the fancy word for saying that it’s not just the evaporation from the surface of the water, it’s the Sawgrass itself evaporating. And that is recycling the water that’s coming down the state back up the state with prevailing winds. So you have a rain machine that is part of your ground system. We always think of it simply in terms of canals, dams, pumps. We don’t think of the relationship to the rainfall patterns, but this, the rainfall patterns were part of the design. Part of what made it work and as it spread out down through the Everglades, it made this vast, huge, wonderful place that you wouldn’t think we could have hurt.
If you fly over it now, and you look down at it, you wouldn’t think that puny little mankind could have hurt it. But when we started changing the water, when we messed up the water flow, we changed all of it.

Partial Transcript: I think in terms of the effects all the way around, we don’t even begin to know because we didn’t do enough monitoring we didn’t do know what was happening and we can’t give you a before and after. But we can definitely tell you that it would have changed the cloud patterns, changed the rainfall patterns, changed the way you had water available when you need it and you took care of too much water when you needed to take too much water. So we ended up in a really wet state with a chronic problem of flood and drought. After we had spent decades draining it, we ended up with drought. And we couldn’t put it back and we couldn’t recreate the rain machine and the natural ways that had made it all balanced. And so we went from fires and drought and we still had floods.

Partial Transcript: We didn’t solve anything, we just kept making things worse, and one of the indications of our limitations back then was I think probably by the 1950s and the 1960s the biologists and national parks people and ecologists had a really good idea of how badly we had messed things up. The politicians had not the vaguest idea. And the engineers had not the vaguest idea of how we had messed things up. So that the immediate response to the fires was to promise to pump a certain amount of water south from Lake Okeechobee every year. And they chose an average amount of water. And the Everglades does not live (?), it lives on the extremes that have always been the park. Those extremes affect the entire web of ecosystem and all of the life. There are times when it’s drier than is good for them there are times that are wetter that is good for them. But we went from extreme wet to extreme dry and without the balance and connection to the web of life you had in the Everglades so sending an average amount of water down to Everglades National Park every year from Lake Okeechobee was not what the Everglades were all about in terms of biology in a natural area.

Partial Transcript: We are the land of boom and bust, haha. You know we still are the land of boom and bust. We were the foreclosure capital of America in 2008. Because it’s so warm and it’s so beautiful on a winter day. There are lots of people who come to Florida who could care less about any natural part of Florida. But they do get awfully tired of sheet ice and shoveling snow off roofs and all of the problems that go with a messy winter and they will come to Florida.
And so we go through our cycles of boom and bust from national economic cycles, from international economic cycles, and from things like hurricanes. Have enough hurricanes and you do tend to scare people away. In the 1940s we had a hurricane in 1945, we had 2 hurricanes and a tropical storm in ‘47, we had another one in ‘46, we had another one in 1950. That did not bring a whole lot of people down, ha. But from 1950-1960 we didn’t have any hurricanes and people forget very quickly and so all of the things that are Florida fit the boom and bust, along with the sense that it is an adventure. It is a form of the American Pioneer spirit to say I’m going to Miami, I’m going to Key West, I’m going to the southern end of America.

Partial Transcript: Maggie Hurchalla - And you’ll have to remind me of the name, give me the name and I know the stories.
David Weintraub - OK, I’m going to have to look that up...OK the first name I had was Mary Barr Munroe who worked with the state Audubon and created these other organizations.
Maggie Hurchalla
And I can probably do that more honestly and accurately for you because I don’t at this point. I think if you go back to the history, when did people start to care, you can give a lot of credit to the women’s clubs of Florida who lobbied for Everglades National Park and to the various players who made it their lifetime mission to see that we not only had an Everglades National Park down at Royal Palm Hammock but we had an Everglades National Park that encompassed enough of the Everglades that it could be a surviving interrelated system.

You had the Audubon wardens who fought the plume hunters, you had people who organized the early Audubon groups and got interested in it. And building up through that time, you got more and more people who were using and loving the Everglades as a place to hunt and fish. When I was a kid you drove out to Tamiami Trail (?) and it was lined with cane pole fishermen. Which we were, you know, just about to go catch some Brim and hope that the big ol’ garfish didn’t steal our bait.
There was a sense that I think by the time you had passed WWI/WWII there was kind of a dual sense. One that this was a fascinating place for those who lived in Miami and knew it and went out there. And the other when the ‘47 hurricanes hit and we had over 100” of rain, but we needed to do something about it because it was flooding all the way into the Coral Gables golf course, north of the Venetian pool had 4’ of water in it and we were swimming in it near my grandmother’s house. Our place out on 20 acres on North Kendall Drive had so much water after the ‘47 hurricane it lasted for months afterwards. My father was a police reporter and he generally had to be out in a hurricane so we would go up to my grandmother’s house to help her board up and make her feel safer and we’d leave the little house out in the country. Well a cow has to be milked and we had a cow. So Daddy would have to go home after a night out in the hurricane and milk the cow and he got out to the 20 acres and there was not a place on 20 acres that the bucket didn’t float away so he finally milked the cow into the water.
Well that was too much water as far as Florida was concerned and it wasn’t just in Broward and Miami that it was a problem. North of the lake where there were cattle ranches with what had been normal expansion area of the lake, you hadn’t had that much rain in a long time, everybody thought those cattle pastures were dry pastures and the cows got foot rot. You had problems for farmers, you had problems for ranchers, you had problems for urban subdivisions.

And politicians especially, and it seems ironic, are very fond of blaming the core of engineers. The core of engineers does what they’re told. It was the state of Florida that demanded that congress join in a federal state project called the Central and South Florida Flood Control Project to make this stop happening. And if you go back to what we had done to things, if you go back to…still on, that’s on (pause)

Hurricanes are so much part of Florida, and you can go 10 or 15 years without one, nobody realizes how much a part of Florida they’ve been. The ‘26 hurricane in Miami broke the boom and ended the boom long before people were jumping out the window in Wall Street. The ‘28 hurricane changed the way we treat Lake Okeechobee. The storm came in over North Palm Beach Co, southern Martin Co, it blew the lenses out of the Jupiter lighthouse many feet above the ground and it came in...not your fault, they’re my boats...the 1928 hurricane was a big, fierce hurricane that came directly off the ocean, hit the Florida coast near the Palm Beach Co/Martin Co line, took the lenses out of the lighthouse at Jupiter and hit Lake Okeechobee. When it hit the lake, it made this great slosh. And then when the winds changed…
We’d had some little hurricanes before the ‘28 hurricanes and there was a little levy 6’ down near the vegetable fields that were growing in the now-drained muck soils down there. But when the ‘28 hurricane hit it sloshed the lake up to one side, the winds changed and it sloshed the lake back to the other side so literally you had a tremendous difference in lake levels. Broke whatever little 6’ levies were anywhere and killed thousands of people with no where to go in what had been a swamp and was now a swamp again with a raging hurricane on top of it. I met a guy out in the western part of the county who said “I don’t remember because I was only 2 years old but my family told me.” He said, “we had a house down near canal point” he said “was a 2 story house and just me and my parents,” he said, “when storm hit, my daddy got out napsack and he got a hatchet. And he put me in the knapsack and we went up to the second floor and knocked a hole in the attic and then went up in the attic and then he chopped a hole in the roof and we went up on the roof when the water came up.” And he said “you know, he’s got me in the napsack, and he and my mother and the knapsack and me they both jumped on a big tree that came by.” He said, “we were the only ones in our neighborhood who lived.” It was a total, horrible disaster. And particularly because there were so many migrant workers out there, they were dragging bodies out behind row boats by the dozens. My father was one of the first reporters in there and he said it was a sight you did not want to see.

So we started building as a result of the 1928 hurricane the Hoover Dike. And the Hoover Dike originally just covered the lower parts and the sides of the lake. It didn’t cover all the way around the circle. In 1947 they completely caged the lake. So it would no longer flood up into those farms and cattle ranches up in the Northwest and Northern parts of the lake there. And now you had the lake in a straight jacket. And that caused a lot of the problems that are still being caused now. And it caused environmental problems because if you tried to make the lake be this wide, then the water went like this with Florida’s extremes of rainfall instead of spreading out and not getting that much deeper. And the other thing they had done back in the ‘20s was build a connection from Lake Okeechobee to the St. Lucy estuary here near Stuart and to connect up the Caloosahatchee. On the Western side, where it goes into Ft. Myers and the Caloosahatchee, that was a much bigger river and the river actually went almost to Lake Okeechobee and you had some Lake Okeechobee overflow in really wet years.
On the Martin County side the St. Lucy Estuary had no connection whatsoever to Lake Okeechobee, even in the highest water. We were a coastal estuary with a south fork that went south and a north fork that went north instead of a river that went west. And so that canal on this side and on the other side became the dumping ground for the lake when the lake got too full. You couldn’t let the lake get too full or it would break the dike and when you dumped it, you destroyed the estuaries on either side. We found a resolution in 1932 I believe it was from the Martin Co Commission asking Congress to please stop dumping Lake Okeechobee on them. And we are still saying that today, hopefully in an even louder and more united fashion and hopefully we’ll finally get something done about it.

But the damage on that on both of the coastal estuaries was cumulative, it was striking the year it happened, and then the estuary recovered. And you forgot about it until it happened again. And what we’ve seen over the last decade is, it’s like the punch drunk prize fighter--he can take just so many concussions and then he doesn’t get up again. And that’s been happening to the coastal estuaries which have also at the same time with that straightjacket you put around the lake enlarged, continuously enlarged the farming area that they call the EAA or the Everglades Agricultural Area. So that there is no longer a connection between Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades. There’s no longer a connection with the north, the part of the Everglades north of the Tamiami trail that they call the conservation areas, they diked those off and built those into shallow reservoirs of sawgrass. And then you’ve got the Tamiami Trail, which again was an early 1920s blockade to the natural flow of water to the south. So now we have messed it up immeasurably. We have put a road across it, we put a bunch of diked reservoirs where you were supposed to have a flowing river of grass, we put a huge farming area between where you used to have a sump for the water to settle out and there’s no longer any flow across it. We’ve got a lake in a straightjacket that goes very high, very quickly. The lake can raise 3’ in 2 months. So the problem is, if you knew what was going to happen, this would all be wonderfully manageable. If you knew exactly what the rainfall was going to be every year, then you could adjust how much water you let out this month and how much water you let out this month. We never know. You will get long range forecasts that say we think there’s going to be an el Niño and then the el Niño will recede and won’t come. If you dump all the water too early, you won’t have enough water. But if you don’t dump it early enough, you’re gonna break the dike.
0:41:32 Ah so we added to that the fact that we chanelized the Kissimmee River, which was our last awful deed if you will. Since then we’ve been trying to fix it. But I was actually at a hearing with Marjory Stoneman Douglas; I think probably one of the first corp of engineer hearings I ever went to in which Marjory was explaining to them why they shouldn’t do this. And they did it just before we learned not to do it. So now we’ve got water coming down really fast and really dirty from the Kissimmee and the ditch instead of a winding river and a flood plain, we’ve got a lake in a straight jacket that rises up too fast, and also gets too late, we’ve got a farming area that blocks off the flow to the south and that affects everything down to Florida Bay and the reefs that are south of the FL keys.

Partial Transcript: I can just give you vignettes of that, I’m not a perfect Marjorie historian but I love Marjory’s stories that Marjory has told me. Somewhere in the early 1900s her father was the editor of the Miami Tribune and Marjory came down here and went to work as his reporter.
And Marjory tells the story on herself that she would come back with a story and he would say, “Marjory, I sent you out for a news story and you came back with 2 sunsets and 1 sunrise” haha.
Marjory was let’s say a spare but lyrical writer, not overdone but beautifully lyric. And where that lyricism in writing. And where Marjory’s beautiful writing flows into what she writes about you have something that you don’t always find in somebody who just writes about beauty. And that was, she was a scholar, Marjory was very smart, she was very curious, and she wanted to know all about it. And she got this offer, I think sometime right after WWII to write something for the American Rivers series. Got interested in the details of the Everglades, and I was always amazed in the years that I knew Marjory how much she knew. Marjory knew as much as most of the scientists who worked sort of on the periphery of the Everglades, instead of full time on the Everglades. And she knew far more than any of the politicians did about it. And what she knew was accurate. What she knew came from finding out which scientist she could trust from asking, not from accepting what they said but saying, well if you said that then why this? She could analyze, she could find out, she could learn--and she did.

And the other side of Marjory was that, she was a quite happy teacher and preacher. Marjory loved to talk, ha, Marjory loved to take an audience and the corp of engineers and make them laugh as well as pay attention to the problem. And she would come up with lovely, but not unkind things to say such as, “you mustn’t blame the corp of engineers, their mothers didn’t let them play with mud puddles enough when they were little” and they would always think that the best thing to do was to draw the shortest line and dig a canal.

Partial Transcript: What the interesting story of the Everglades is, is about a sense of place. If you don’t have somebody who cares about the sense of place, then you don’t appoint or hire scientists to find out what makes it work. And the early people who helped start Everglades National Park, uh i think it’s probably symbolic that Royal Palm Hammock down there was the you know, original center there, you know because those were trees. People can identify with trees. The Everglades isn’t about trees, it’s about grass but they did have a sense, not just of the Royal Palms at Royal Palm Hammock but I’ve never seen any place in the world that has as much sky as the Everglades. And if you are a native of South Florida, you love sky.
And so those people loved the place, and they wanted as much of that place as they could get preserved because they knew the more you had of it, the better it would be preserved and the wilder it would be for that sense of place that they had. Marjory took an amazing sense of place, an amazing ability to describe that sense of place for people. But she added to it, as I say, and absolutely scholarly analysis sense of people and whom she listened to and who she talked to and way beyond simply listening and repeating what other people say. Asking enough questions that I would say that Marjory helped scientists move further into a sense of the whole connection by asking those in-between questions that a scientist who is studying just one part of it doesn’t see.

Partial Transcript: Uh, I think that you could say now that our knowledge, or at least the knowledge of some of us, because a large part of the political institutions of FL don’t necessarily agree with it. Our knowledge that we are going to destroy South Florida if we don’t recreate as best we can the natural system that gives us clean water, that gives us the right patterns of rainfall, that damps our floods and reduces them and reduces the extremities of our drought. If we don’t do that, it’s not just about the critters; it’s not just about the place. It’s about Miami’s water supply, it’s about whether Biscayne Bay is going to be a toxic algae bloom, it’s about the effects on the reef, it’s about the 2 coastal estuaries and whether you’re going to destroy them, it’s about whether Lake Okeechobee is going to become a cesspool that’s covered with a 90% cover of toxic algae. Those things are so totally damaging that if we allow them to get worse, and we don’t do some fairly dramatic things to make them better, which is what Everglades restoration is about, then ah it is going to not just be uncomfortable like the fires of the 1960s, it’s going to be untenable.

Partial Transcript: Uh, the “River of Grass” was the sense of place that got people interested but it made them understand the hydrology. It made them understand the tremendous importance of getting the water right. And we’ve got more of that now as we see climate change and sea level rise because it is that river of grass to the west of Miami that keeps the salt from being pumped into the wellfields that are now giving fresh drinking water to, what? 400 million people? And ah,yes, there’s such a thing as desalinization--do you know how much that costs? You know what that does to the economy? So the whole economy of coastal South Florida, plus what we’re doing to the coastal estuary on the west side is dependent on that river of grass. And it’s dependent on connecting the whole Everglades--the greater Everglades system, the Kissimmee being rewound, the lake being managed so that it is not too far on the extremes of wet and dry, the water being able to go south and the whole idea of taking advantage of a natural system that we happen to love and think is beautiful and have a wonderful sense of place about and has really beautiful birds in it--taking advantage of that to make us be able to be co-inhabitants in south Florida.

Partial Transcript: Marjory was not just about the Everglades, um I asked her once, I said, “Marjory, you were brought up a Quaker, is there anything you’ve ever done to excess?” And she said, “yes, my dear: read.” Ha. She loved to read and she loved to write and so I think when she died she was still working on a biography of Henry Hudson the English writer. She was writing about a lot of things that were not Everglades but she started writing more about the Everglades. She started getting more active. She started being the highlight of anybody watching a hearing before the corp of engineers or anybody else because Marjory’s speeches were intelligent, on point, and vastly entertaining. But I guess I most remember getting involved when Marjory started Friends of the Everglades. And somebody will be able to tell you what year that was. It was sometime after 1968 because we lived here.

So Marjory asked, ah, she started Friends of the Everglades with the idea that membership would be a dollar a piece which could just cover enough mailings to keep in touch. This was not a way to raise money and become, you know, a swollen bureaucracy or anything else. And Marjory and her friend Kitty and Mike Chenoweth, got in a motorhome camper and went around Lake Okeechobee with Marjory making speeches to anyone who would listen to her, all the way around the lake, through Okeechobee City. Mike was a very young man with a very large red beard at that time. Ah, since it seemed complicated to explain why this young man was so interested in environment or something, Marjory simply introduced him as “my illegitimate grandson.” Ha, I can remember Mike said, ah you know, he went out for a beer in Okeechobee and somebody said “We don’t wear hippie beards like that here” and he decided to be careful which bars he went in.
Anyway, they all arrived here, delightful group of people to have staying with us. Marjory was making a speech here to the Martin County Audubon Society and we had a wonderful time swapping stories and listening to her. And then for the next 20 years, if Marjory was making a speech in this area, Marjory stayed here. And I loved listening to her, haha, in terms of her contacts--very much like Nat Reed. Marjory’s contacts with people who knew things were so huge and all those people were willing to take the time to talk to Marjory and I was just a kid, ha, you know, maybe 35 years old at that point. And I could find for Marjory things that I could then start looking up and finding out more about and study

Partial Transcript: There are so many of those that I think you would do better to ask the Miami folks and the Friends of the Everglades because it becomes a long list from jet ports to ah building a city on the islands in Biscayne Bay to ah the Aerojet canal. A lot of really stupid ideas left over from the period of ignorant indifference to the environment that were still going strong. And if Marjory and a whole bunch of people down in Miami ah hadn’t done what, at that point amounted to some magical things about turning around things that had a big financial interest behind them and normally would have just snowballed over little old ladies in tennis shoes.

Partial Transcript: Marjory I think chose to be a certain kind of proper-looking, little old lady stereotype except for the hat, ha. And then ah, there sprang from what looked like a caricature of a little old lady in tennis shoes these marvelous speeches that were always leaded with something funny, something that got your attention, something that made it beautifully clear what the scientists themselves hadn’t been able to translate.
But I think there is something else about Marjory’s character that I happened to love. My mother used to say, “all my life I wanted to be a hero and all God ever asked of me was patience.” Ha, Marjory loved being a hero. She was not vain, she was not doing any of this because of personal egotism but she loved showing off. She loved being a hero. She loved going out and fighting effectively and joyously for what was right. And my favorite story on that is I was down in Miami at some environmental event. I’d come down from up here in Stewart. And I was sitting next to Marjory on the couch. I’d been staying at my family’s house down in Miami. And I’d read the morning paper where somebody had driven off the bridge at Oak Plum (?) plaza, right near where sunset drive comes in there. And the car was sinking when a young woman drove up, parked her car, jumped out, dove in, and saved him. And I was telling Marjory about it and Marjory said, “Wasn’t SHE lucky?”

And there are people when you tell that story, that looked at you, that don’t understand. Hahaha. But Marjory felt that she was extremely lucky to be a hero and she enjoyed it immensely.

Partial Transcript: It was very difficult for the other side to be mean to a little old lady, particularly when she got to be a 90-year-old little old lady, ha. Ah, you know, from the very beginning, I guess from the first time I met Marjory she was a white-haired old lady, the kind of nice lady that a gentleman should not be rude to. And so they didn’t fight back rudely, they didn’t pick on, they didn’t try to destroy her reputation--they just wished she would go away. haha, and I think that made a tremendous difference because good gosh, you see so often now that destroying the other side is the game. Ah, and you hire PR people to put something on Facebook that says what they’re really want, etc etc. You find something wrong with the person who disagrees with you.

Marjory was very much like Lacey Davenport in Doonesbury. And they both had that ability, hat and ladylikeness and all, to turn back any sort of gross rudeness in opposition, but more than that, they could have made fun of her if she was wrong, they could have made fun of her if she had her facts wrong, but she had her facts downright better than they were and backed up by a large cadre of scientists with professional credentials who would stand behind her.

Partial Transcript: I think Marjory’s legacy is that we still have a chance. I think we would have gone too far to come back if it had not been all of those things together in one pretending-to-be little old lady that had so much an effect on so many people, so many policies, so many things that happened. Ah, I hear people these days telling us how awful things are and I’m...Nat Reed used to say when they were, had decided to do something awful that would have clear consequences 10 years from now, he’d say thank God I’ll be dead by then. Ah but the ah, fact is that we could have gone so far if we hadn’t had somebody who really understood, really managed to get politicians like Bob Graham knowledgeable about water management district boards with people on it who understood, who weren’t just sitting there in a fight between lobbyists and environmentalists, but actually to get a whole bunch of people at various times in Florida government who understood what they were talking about. And that was mightily important in terms of truly getting somewhere with it all. And actually I began babbling then because I forgot what I was talking about. Ha ha

Ah, the legacy of the fact that you will hear, oh my gosh, look what’s happening, oh my gosh, look what’s happening. We’re not digging coastal canals anymore, we’re rewinding the Kissimmee River, we understand that we can’t just build a bigger dike around Lake Okeechobee and turn it into a 20 foot pool of water with no marshes that has toxic algae blooms in it all the time. We know that the river of grass is vital to the survival of Miami and Everglades National Park and Biscayne Bay. Not just a pretty place that we love. That’s because of Marjory. That might not have happened. Or it would have happened so much later that particularly dealing with climate change and the new challenges that that will bring with it, we would have been too late.

Partial Transcript: Ah, well first I would tell them not to be cynical, and if they said, “Well, it’s all a mess anyway, and it’s all everybody’s fault” I would tell them therefore it is THEIR fault, and I would give them Winston Churchill “never, never, never give up.” But I’d also pass on something that an old friend of mine told me once when I started environmental fighting. He said, “Don’t forget to go out and enjoy it.” That Marjory didn’t...Marjory could get angry, but she didn’t go at it to hurt or attack somebody. She went at it to teach people how to solve it. To teach people they could solve it, to teach people that they could not keep doing sound bytes of stupidity but they actually had to address the question because the consequences were something we couldn’t stand. And I think that for young people, they can either say, “I’m sorry, I’m mad at the other side, I hate all my politicians, I’m not gonna vote, it’s not worth getting involved.” They can be very sure that things will get much worse much faster if they take that attitude.
I think likewise they can be very sure that if they get involved, and they keep enjoying it, and they remember to go see the sunsets, and ah they do it with a joyful, realistic optimism that they’ll make a difference.

Partial Transcript: Whoa, ah, I think it was 2002 we passed, Congress, I think on an almost unanimous vote adopted comprehensive Everglades restoration. We were hopeful since we had a governor who was the brother of the president that hey, we were going to do it and we were all going to be done in 20 years...well, we’ve barely started. Ha, but we have started. We’ve run into some log jams, we’ve done wonderful things in terms of rewinding the Kissimmee, ah, we’ve got people understanding more that you don’t just pile up water in the lake because if you kill the natural marshes all you grow is algae. We still have people who don’t believe that, who just want to make the dike higher. But the key to the whole thing is now in Congress, it’s happening now.

Florida’s environmentalist politicians and special interest are now involved in a huge fight over what we do with Everglades’s restoration. And there are those who say well, you know, go up north and fix the problem up there and then there won’t be too much water. Well, that’s not true, there’s a reason why Everglades are there, even with a natural system there’s too much water some of the time and it needs to go somewhere. And there’s some people who say, well just build the dikes higher and we can store all the water there. Well, that won’t work. And there are people on either side of the estuary who say, well just stop the discharges and we can’t because the dike might break and we are not interested in seeing the 1925/1928 disaster happen again.

The key, oddly enough, ironically enough, the whole piece of the puzzle that makes Everglades’s restoration work is connecting the river of grass from Lake Okeechobee to the south. And it has become the war cry, the motto for Lee Co in Ft. Myers, for people around the estuary in Stuart, for people around Florida Bay and in the Florida Keys, for those who care about Everglades National Park, and for those who care about Miami’s water supply.
We’ve made a really good start in Stuart with a plan. What we were able to do with that plan you couldn’t do before because you had computer models where you could do what we could guess but we couldn’t know. If I poke it here, what happens over here. The history of Florida’s water management is we poked it here, we thought we knew what we were doing and then something awful happened over there. So the Everglades restoration plan was built on iterations of let’s see what sounds plausible, ooh you know what happens if you do that, that’s not good, what are we going to do about that? So they went through 6 different plans that they ran a full model on, 2x2, 2 mile by 2 mile squares of the entire South Florida water system to see what happened if you did different things in different places. And maximized it to the point where you could increase the short hydroperiod wetlands, you could get the flows at the right time of year, in the right amount to Everglades National Park and to Florida Bay, that you could find a way to send water south, clean it and send it south instead of dumping it on the coastal estuaries, that you could slow down and clean up the flow coming back.
And part of that is a pure plumbing solution. They’re building a reservoir on the C44 canal, on our St. Lucy canal. They’re building a reservoir on the Caloosahatchee canal; they’ll be building reservoirs on Okeechobee Co. north of the lake.
Those are pieces of the puzzle of taking care of the watershed around the lake in places where it’s already been farmed or developed for urban area where you, you can’t do it by just putting the natural area back because the natural area has pavement on top of it. And those are important parts of the puzzle, but the part of the puzzle that is what it’s all about, is sending clean water south. Everglades’s restoration is being funded 50/50 by the Federal Government, by Congress because it’s America’s Everglades. I personally like to think of it as Florida’s Everglades, ha but they like to think of it as America’s Everglades and that’s good.
1:13:32 Because that same Florida boom and bust means that everybody’s been to Florida once, or they’ve had a grandmother or a relative who came to Florida once, or lived in Florida in the wintertime, and so on. So we had an amazing connection we found in 2002 when we were getting surpassed with a Congressman from New Hampshire who was really interested because he had spent winters down here for a long time.

We have run into a roadblock in the last few years, ah there was a period when we had a plan to buy a large amount of acreage in the sugar area. It was not a plan to destroy sugar farming, it was a peaceful coexistence, it was an idea to find a system of plumbing that would allow us to flow the water down, clean the water up, and send the water south when it needed to go south in the amounts it needed to go south. And at the same time, still take care of sugar’s drainage, still clean up sugar’s run off, still…
Sending clean water south, which is the war cry of the, I think now, the united environmental groups across South Florida is not about destroying sugar, it’s not about making sugar...

Sending clean water south is not about destroying the sugar industry or making people stop farming south of the lake or taking away the jobs of people who are working in the sugar fields. Sending the water south is peaceful coexistence. It is a plan to connect what we’re doing in the Kissimmee, what we’re doing around the lake, what we’re doing on the 2 coastal canals, to connect that to a flow down to the south that makes Everglades National Park sustainable.

The Governor’s Commission for a Sustainable South Florida, a terrible long name, was a group of about 50 people, largely business people, not ah you know, with environmentals, academics, and so on that worked with the corp of Engineers to develop comprehensive Everglades restoration. And the final report of that group was South Florida is not sustainable on it’s present course.
And in order to make South Florida sustainable, and Everglades National Park sustainable, you’ve got to send the water south. There is no other way. Congress is matching us 50/50 because we’re saving Everglades NATIONAL park. Not because we’re building some reservoirs up around Lake Okeechobee and we ran into a road block.
The period when the state had an option to buy sugar land was the period when the sugar industry was afraid that NAFTA was going to destroy it with competition from Mexican sugar. They’re making lots of money raising sugar now and they are not interested in giving up any land. Ah, I don’t understand. The people I know and do talk to there are adamant that if the government starts buying any land it’ll just keep doing it and it’ll put them out of business. And I don’t see it that way. As I say, we will be spending a lot of money on surp (?) and helping them continue and taking care of the problem they caused. Ah but at any rate, they dug their heels in and said no. You will not be allowed to buy any land to send the water south. And we’ve been arguing and arguing about that and we are arguing about that still. And we’ve got ah a beginning of the idea of a smaller reservoir that’s in congress now and hopefully will get in the Water Resources Development Act this year. If we get a water bill this year.
But the single most important thing we can do right now, in terms of the system dysfunction that is being harmful, is to regulate Lake Okeechobee’s water levels based on health and human safety. Human health and human safety. The corp of engineers, when they were ordered to build this system in 1947, were ordered to make flood control and water supply the priority. There’s nothing in that legislation that tells the corp that they can worry about toxic algae. There’s nothing in that legislation that tells them they can worry about the lake marshes. So the corp can actually design a lake reduction to keep the dike from breaking but that’s not about human safety, that’s about flood control so it meets the priority. Whereas if the corp wanted to and had a way to stop tomorrow but it might have some effect on some other part of the system like not getting enough irrigation water or minor flooding area, and they’ve got a problem with toxic algae that’s one of the scariest things we’ve come/faced in the environment in a long time, they don’t have a choice. They cannot look at you and help. And ah I understand that our congressman is going to be introducing legislation that amends the 1947 legislation to say that human health and human safety are the top priorities. I know we have political problems in the world, I know we have political problems in the country. I would challenge anybody in the US House or in the US Senate to tell me they don’t believe that human health and safety could be the top problem.

If we do that, then we’re able to manage lake levels in a way where we don’t store as much water to meet every possible irrigation need. So we don’t have to dump as much water if they don’t need that irrigation need. If we do that, we can work more toward the goal that we’ve got to find the adequate land, the adequate plumbing system to send the clean water south. And the key is going to be the politicians of the United States saying human health and safety is what we care about, or telling us they don’t believe that. If they don’t believe that, we lose. The key to it is finding a way to send adequate clean water south and having whatever land we need to do that. And if we don’t do that, we lose.

Ah there had been under a previous governor, there had been an option to buy land in the sugar area. There would have been some 60,000 acres was what we thought was needed. They might have bought as much as 100,000 acres but you would have still had hundreds of thousands of acres in sugar and that sugar would still have us taking care of their drainage, cleaning up their run off and supplying them with irrigation water.

Partial Transcript: Ah let’s see, I’ve just been found guilty by a lower court judge and jury, tortious interference. I didn’t know what tortious interference was and now I am one, ha. I have been ah, levied, ah damage award to ah billionaire rockpit owner of 4.3 million dollars. Several weeks ago they came and garnished my kayaks. They met me at a deposition in town and threatened to tow my car if I didn’t give them the keys. Ah, I seem to be involved in what is called a slap suit. A slap suit is a strategic lawsuit against public participation. Ah, it is a new strategy; you’ll see it across the country right now, the same law firm that has been partially involved in my case is the law firm that is suing Green Peace and the Standing Sioux for 900 million dollars for tortious interference with the Dakota Pipeline. The aim of the new strategy is to put private property rights in terms of contract trumping the First Amendment. As our judge observed, your First Amendment rights stop when a contract has been signed. I don’t happen to believe that is true. Whereas it is somewhat daunting to be assessed 4.3 million dollars, ah, you know if they take my kayaks and they take my car, the First Amendment is worth it.

And I am accused of sending emails to county commissioners that said that George Lindemann Jr., a spoiled young millionaire, had a problem with his rock pit. And evidently George is not used to anybody getting in his way. And the purpose of a slap suit, if you look it up in Wikipedia, is not to win. It’s to punish. And it’s to use somebody as an ugly example so nobody else will get in the way again.

And I am going to stay in the way, I have the most wonderful team of lawyers you could imagine. I’ve got my local lawyers, Ginny and Howard. I have Sandy Dalenberg and his wife Patsy. Sandy’s the former head of the American Bar Association. Rick Ovelmen with Carlton Fields is representing me. Carlton Fields is, I think, the largest law firm in the state of Florida and Rick has a long history as a Miami Herald lawyer and a first amendment defender. WilmerHale, one of Washington’s most prestigious law firms is joining as counsel. We had 2 requests to be in amicus that I was rather disappointed that the court of appeals refused to let them file amicus brief. One was my friend Nathaniel Reed, who just died last month and they refused to let Mr. Reed file an amicus on behalf of the environment and free speech. Ah the other was the Guardians of Martin Co. Just this last week the First Amendment Foundation filed an amicus brief and another brief was filed for a group of environmental organizations including Florida Wildlife Federation, Friends of the Everglades, Bull (?) Sugar, Martin Co. Conservation Alliance, the Pegasus, I love the word “amicus”. I feel like I have a whole bunch of amici.
And so my friends worry about me, they worry about them snatching my kayak and my car. I now have a motion from ha, the lawyer who we unfondly refer to as “Snidely Whiplash” who seems to appear to think that if I burst into, you know, if they’re mean enough to me, I’ll burst into tears and back down. Ah, I’ve got a fantastic group of people who are supporting me. I have a fantastic thing to stand for and that’s the Constitution of the United States, and I’m not going away.

Partial Transcript: Paddling out into the back creeks there, ah watching sunrises and sunsets, climbing mountains, whitewater kayaking, ah. I get high on wild, beautiful places, all kinds of wild, beautiful places. The week after I was convicted, Jim took all our frequent flyer miles and we went down to Patagonia. I’ve seen penguins and ostriches and guanacos, ha, and the most beautiful mountains off of the Andes. Ah, the pieces of the natural world that I’ve fallen in love with are diverse and worldwide and never cease to just, you know, give you the joy that you get when you see a white-tailed deer leaping. So I feel like I owe it to it.

Partial Transcript: We learn from our failures, we learn from our successes. If you don’t look at the people who were there, the people who did the right thing, the people who sometimes through ignorance did the wrong thing, if you don’t look at the people and how it happened, just looking at what happened is not going to keep you from doing it again.