Everglades
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">inhofe only no vote?</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">see wetlands as mod/ buffer</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></div><div><a href="https://theconversation.com/climate-change-alters-whats-possible-in-restoring-floridas-everglades-115618">https://theconversation.com/climate-change-alters-whats-possible-in-restoring-floridas-everglades-115618</a></div><div>
</div><div><div>many lnx</div><div>
</div><div>Climate change alters what’s possible in restoring Florida’s Everglades</div><div>June 7, 2019 11.36am EDT</div><div>Sawgrass prairie in Everglades National Park. NPS/G. Gardner</div><div>Author</div><div> William Nuttle</div><div>Science Integrator, Integration and Application Network, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science</div><div>
</div><div>Disclosure statement</div><div>William Nuttle receives funding from the US Army Corps of Engineers, one of the partners in the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Program.</div><div>
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</div><div>The Everglades are a vast network of subtropical freshwater wetland and estuarine ecosystems that once spanned the length and breadth of south Florida. Fifty years of dredging and diking, starting in 1948, greatly reduced their extent, altering water flow patterns and causing widespread ecological damage.</div><div>
</div><div>For the past 20 years, scientists and engineers have been working on a multi-billion-dollar restoration effort designed to reclaim the Everglades’ past glory. I am a hydrologist and have worked for 25 years in south Florida. Currently I co-lead a team at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Sciences that worked with federal and state agencies to compile a report card on the ecological health of the Everglades.</div><div>
</div><div>The report card revealed that not enough has been done yet to reverse the ecological damage from years of misdirected water management. Although some progress has been made toward restoration’s original goals, growing evidence of unanticipated effects from climate change and sea level rise is forcing experts to reassess what is possible.</div><div>
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</div><div>Both scientific and political hurdles make ‘rehydrating’ the Everglades one of the most complex ecological restoration projects ever attempted.</div><div>Rescuing the ‘river of grass’</div><div>Advocates have been working to protect the Everglades nearly as long as developers have been dismantling it. In 1947, author and activist Marjory Stoneman Douglas published her classic book “The Everglades: River of Grass,” which warned that “The Everglades were dying,” and their loss would doom the entire region. Presciently, Douglas observed that the Everglades recharge the aquifer that supplies water to Miami and other coastal communities, making south Florida’s booming economy possible.</div><div>
</div><div>Douglas’ assessment spurred action to preserve this unique ecological resource, although it took decades to organize and fund a restoration effort on the scale that was needed. In the year 2000 federal and state agencies launched the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, which is designed to restore the characteristics of the water cycle in south Florida that were critical to sustaining the historical Everglades. At the same time, water managers also must maintain water supplies and flood protection for farms and communities that have been built in and around the Everglades, with more people arriving every year.</div><div>
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</div><div>bizjournals.com</div><div>See SFBJ Newsroom's other Tweets</div><div>Stressed ecosystems</div><div>After nearly two decades of work, the health of the Everglades is only fair, and progress still lies in the future. That’s the conclusion of the Everglades Report Card, which was released in April 2019 after assessing a huge quantity of data collected from 2012 through 2017. Overall, it finds that “the ecosystems of the Everglades are struggling</div><div>to support the plants and animals that live there and the natural services they provide to people.”</div><div>
</div><div>Sea level rise is increasingly a factor. About 10 years ago, scientists began seeing unsettling changes in the freshwater wetlands of Everglades National Park at Florida’s southwest tip. Holes were appearing in expansive sawgrass prairies near the coast, filled with dead vegetation and standing water. Experiments confirm that the cause is saltwater infiltrating the freshwater wetlands.</div><div>
</div><div>Sawgrass grows on top of a thick deposit of peat. Too much saltwater can kill the plants and eat away at the peat, causing the soil surface to collapse. As seawater infiltrates vast areas of sawgrass, formerly healthy sawgrass prairie is beginning to unravel like a moth-eaten wool sweater.</div><div>
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</div><div>Open-water ‘pothole’ ponds in a sawgrass marsh, Everglades National Park, are thought to have been formed through collapsing peat driven by saltwater intrusion. Everglades Foundation/Stephen Davis, CC BY-ND</div><div>Outpaced by rising seas</div><div>The Everglades have natural defenses against sea level rise. Dense mangrove forests along Florida’s southwest coast form a protective barrier that absorbs storm surge from hurricanes. Mangroves filter out and consolidate mud and sand churned up by hurricanes from the sea bottom, building up the coast’s elevation in pace with sea level rise.</div><div>
</div><div>Freshwater draining from the interior piles up behind the mangroves, creating a hydraulic barrier that prevents seawater from infiltrating inland. And freshwater wetlands keep up with sea level rise through the accumulation of undecomposed plant material and marl, a mineral-rich mud produced by algae.</div><div>
</div><div>But geological records show that there are limits to how much sea level rise the Everglades can accommodate. The Everglades have existed only for about the last 4,000 years. Over this time seas were near their present level and rising at a relatively leisurely pace of 0.04 inches (1 millimeter) per year or less.</div><div>
</div><div>Much earlier, around 10,000 years ago, sea level was about 150 feet lower and rising more quickly as ice sheets covering much of the Northern Hemisphere melted. The sedimentary record shows that extensive areas of coastal wetlands and mangrove forests did not form until around 7,000 years ago, when sea level rise slowed below a threshold of about 0.4 inches (10 millimeters) per year.</div><div>
</div><div>Since the year 2000, sea levels around south Florida have been rising by about 0.33 inches (7.6 millimeters) yearly – close to the threshold beyond which coastal wetlands are not found in sedimentary records. And this rate is expected to increase as the climate continues to warm. This is why geologists were among the first to raise the alarm about potential impacts of sea level rise, and tend to be pessimistic about the future of the Everglades and south Florida.</div><div>
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</div><div>Sunny day tidal flooding (shown: downtown Miami, 2016) is one sign of sea level rise in south Florida. B137/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA</div><div>Feasible restoration goals</div><div>In an October 2018 report, a special committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine urged agencies directing the Everglades restoration to reevaluate whether the project’s original goals were still achievable, given trends in climate change and sea level rise.</div><div>
</div><div>Ecologists studying direct impacts of sea level rise on the Everglades are more optimistic. One restoration objective is increasing the amount of freshwater discharge into the southern estuaries by installing bridges along the Tamiami Highway, which has blocked water flow to the Everglades for decades. Restoring flow and raising water levels in freshwater wetlands near the coast will improve ecological conditions in the estuaries and reduce seawater infiltration, making freshwater wetlands less vulnerable to peat collapse.</div><div>
</div><div>No one believes it will be possible to completely counter the effects of sea level rise. But Everglades restoration projects like this can moderate them, and perhaps allow the ecosystem to transition more gradually.</div><div>
</div><div>However, the plans that guide restoration efforts have not changed since they were first made 20 years ago, and do not take into account changes in temperature, rainfall and evaporation that are occurring with climate change.</div><div>
</div><div>Originally, it was anticipated that sea level would rise by up to 6 inches (152 millimeters) by 2050, which is equivalent to 0.12 inches per year (3 mm/yr). Now, however, seas are rising at three times this rate, and are expected to accelerate further due to melting of glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica. New guidelines recently adopted by the Army Corps of Engineers would require planning for up to 26 inches (660 millimeters) of sea level rise in the Everglades by 2050.</div><div>
</div><div>In my view, it is time to set aside the goal of restoring the historical Everglades wilderness that Marjory Stoneman Douglas described. The Everglades today are a hybrid ecosystem that encompasses both natural and constructed landscapes. Areas of wilderness will remain, but climate change and sea level rise make it impossible for the Everglades and the rest of south Florida to return to the past.</div></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">extensive sea level rise</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="http://gizmodo.com/this-is-how-south-florida-ends-1783803198">http://gizmodo.com/this-is-how-south-florida-ends-1783803198</a></font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">8/16</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="line-height: 21px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> National Park Service is celebrating its centennial this month — 100 years of protecting America's great public lands.</span><br style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; line-height: 21px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /><br style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; line-height: 21px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /><span id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1472063129820_14498" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; font-weight: 700; line-height: 21px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Yet the Park Service just approved disastrous plans to explore for oil and gas in Florida's Big Cypress National Preserve</span><span style="line-height: 21px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> — right next to the iconic Everglades National Park and home to the critically endangered Florida panther.</span><br style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; line-height: 21px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /><br style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; line-height: 21px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /><span style="line-height: 21px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">And what's more, the agency gave this plan the green light without completing the Environmental Impact Statement they're required to do by law.</span><br style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; line-height: 21px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /><br style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; line-height: 21px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /><span id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1472063129820_14497" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; font-weight: 700; line-height: 21px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">NRDC rushed to court as soon as we could to protect this spectacular wild place.</span><span style="line-height: 21px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> Now we need your help to ratchet up massive public pressure that will compel the Obama Administration to protect Big Cypress and its iconic wildlife before it's destroyed forever</span>
</font><div><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">astroturf:</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The Palm Beach Post‘s Christine Stapleton </span><a href="http://www.mypalmbeachpost.com/news/news/state-regional-govt-politics/actors-hired-to-protest-at-water-district-know-lit/nkkkb/" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">reports</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> that the “Tea Party” protesters outside of the South Florida Water Management District on Thursday were, by and large, </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">actors hired by the <a href="http://www.teaparty-miami.org/about-1.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none;">Tea Party of Miami</a> and U.S. Sugar.</span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The district is currently considering buying land owned by U.S. Sugar, which it would use for the treatment and storage of lake flood water. Environmentalist <a href="http://florida.newszap.com/clewiston/138821-113/can-purchasing-us-sugars-land-fix-south-floridas-water-problems" target="_blank" style="text-decoration: none;">believe</a> that using the land in this way will allow them to divert more water into the Everglades without harming coastal estuaries. The water would not only help replenish the Everglades, it would also provide an emergency reserve drinking supply for South Florida.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But U.S. Sugar wants to keep the land, arguing that as one of the area’s largest employers, it is in the district’s best interests not to exercise the $350 million buy-out option in its contract. Tea Party Miami:</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="http://www.alternet.org/environment/tea-party-protesters-opposed-florida-land-deal-were-mostly-actors-hired-big-sugar"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">...</font></a></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="line-height: 32px;"><a href="http://www.alternet.org/environment/tea-party-protesters-opposed-florida-land-deal-were-mostly-actors-hired-big-sugar">http://www.alternet.org/environment/tea-party-protesters-opposed-florida-land-deal-were-mostly-actors-hired-big-sugar</a></span></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></p><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Time magazine has called them the "First Family of Corporate Welfare"</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">John Ellis Bush (JEB), Rick Scott, and other GOP politicians kowtow to this family like no other. They were a top donor for W. And they are almost singlehandedly destroying our Everglades.</font></b></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Welcome to Keeping up with the Fanjul family of Palm Beach. The Fanjul family is synonymous with the term "Big Sugar" here in Florida. They control 1/3 of our nation's raw sugar. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This family collects over 60 million a year in Federal subsidies. As a result, you pay an artificially high price for raw sugar, but of course that's not all. You not only support their hedonistic lifestyle (such as Casa De Campo, their 7000 acre multimillion resort), horrible labor practices, and right-wing politics: you support the killing of our Everglades National Park. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I am not being hyperbolic. The Park is actually going to die, along with Miami's fresh water supply. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One of their subsidiaries is Florida Crystals (among other sugar affiliates). You can see how much of the Everglades that is by itself on the map below. (See the orange and yellow)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That huge lake is Lake Okeechobee, one of the biggest freshwater lakes in the Continental United States. You can pick it out on any map because it is so large. The Fanjul's use this lake to irrigate their crops. The discharge is toxic.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The irrigated water should be recycled in a reservoir, but it isn't. The family dumps it in the coastal estuaries. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Before Tallahassee was taken over by teabags, our state was making an effort to clean up the Everglades. The one crucial piece was a binding contract that the sugar industry signed that would sell land to the state to create a reservoir. Not only that, Florida passed Amendment 1 last year. The whole purpose of that amendment was to guarantee a source of funding for land acquisition to protect Florida's Everglades and our very fragile estuaries.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Despite the GOP's election wave last year, <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Amendment 1 received 78% of the vote.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Our state has an opportunity to buy the land we need from Big Sugar (the land is shown in the article here), at fair market value. The University of Florida issued a report yesterday to say it's desperately needed. The contract ends on October 15, 2015.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Unfortunately, it isn't going to happen.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Our GOP legislature and, as always, Gov. Sick Scott, are steadfastly refusing to purchase the land we were promised.</b> You see, one big reason the rightwing interests didn't pour money into fighting Amendment 1 is they knew they could just ignore it. Just look at Amendments 5 and 6 back in 2010: they were supposed to end gerrymandering. Didn't happen. They completely ignored those as well, which is why every black neighborhood from Jacksonville to Orlando is crammed into District 5. Because f* you.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In fact, the only amendment that Pam Bondi and Rick Scott ever fought for was the only one declared illegal by the courts: banning gay marriage. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rick Scott cares nothing about the Everglades. Heck, he made money allowing fracking in the Everglades before he was caught (and still won re-election). Of course he's not going to care about toxic water.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By the way, if all of this is new to you, I don't blame you. As always, our local media is silent. Also, our state party hasn't said anything. Even though this critical issue is next to our DNC chair's home, Debbie-Wasserman, she hasn't said one word. She is too wrapped up in a failed Senate run.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Please go to SavingFLwater.com and add your name. At the very least, we can let our politicians know that we were watching.</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.alternet.org/environment/everglades-be-killed-october-floridas-own-koch-brothers</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div></div></div></div>