Getting away to the Everglades had a whole different meaning in the mid-1800s.
The Seminole Indians tried to escape here when the U. S. Army came to capture them and force them out West. In the 1840s, Florida‘s first state legislature called the Everglades „wholly valueless“ and appealed to Congress for help in draining the swamp. By the 1920s the public was snapping up land in Florida as fast as it was offerd. Miami was booming. The idea of creating a national park in the Everglades had been circulating even before Governor Napoleon Bonaparte Broward‘s reign, but Ernest Coe, a 59-year-old landscape architekt from New England, took action. He helped established the Everglades National Park Association and became its tireless, stubborn, single-minded director. When President Harry Truman dedicated Everglades National Park in 1947, the corals reefs of Key Largo were exluded, 13 years later Florida made the area a state park. Since the late 1940s, policians have pushed the transformation of the Everglades into high gear. They instructed the Army Corps of Engineers to dredge, dike, and divert to provide flood control, create and irrigate farmland, dry out land for new homes and businesses. Today more than 1,400 miles of canals and levees crisscross the region, constricting the top three-quarters of this water body like a concrete-and-steel corset. More than 50 percent of the Everglades‘ wetlands have dissappeared, destroying wild habitat and disrupting the natural flow of water into the park. Most of the problems affecting Everglades National Park are linked to problems upstream. To study them, the park established a separate scientific division – the South Florida Research Center in 1978. The problem is, the trees adapted to Florida all too well, rapidly muscling out native species. The biggest problems are a species of tree that scientists cal Melaleuca quinquenervia, it can germinate on land or water, it produces massive quantities of seeds, it spreads fast, invading 50 acres a day throughout Florida, and, perhaps most important of all, it has no natural enemies in this park. But government entomologists have imported melaleuca-eating bugs from Australia and are studying them, under strict quarantine, to find the perfect predator – one that will attack the melaleuca but nothing else. The overhaul eill cost billions of dollars, there‘s no consensus about what „Everglades restoration“ specifically means, the symptoms of the Everglades‘ disease are more obvious than the cure, and not all the powerful players in South Florida are pulling in the same direction.