Living next door to a national park might sound idyllic, but for the folks in Everglades City the park‘s size and proximity have been a mixed blessing. Situadted just beyond the park‘s northwest border, Everglades City was once a busy commercial fishing village where the locals ran their boats out to the Ten Thousand Islands to catch mullet and pompano, stone crabs and oysters. Thirty years ago it was a dream, people can fished how they wanted, where they wanted and cought what they wanted. Not any more. In 1985 the park banned commercial fishing in its waters, calling it an incompatible use of a protected resource. In the late 1970s and early‘ 80s, drugs came into Everglades City by the boatland, and so did the money. Suddenly some folks were driving Lincoln Continentals, wearing gold necklaces, and paying for their coffee with $100 bills. All that ended with Operation Everglades, which law enforcement agents launched in 1981. When the dust finally settled after several big busts, more than 100 people in this town of 500 had gone to jail...

„It‘s possible to put this ecosystem back together again,“ says Bill Robertson, the park‘s senior biologist. All its natural components are still intact, he says, albeit on a much smaller scale. And Robertson shoudl know: He‘s been working here since 1956, so he‘s heard and seen it all – the hurricanes, the fires, the natural and man-made droughts, and all the breathless pronouncements about the park‘s imminent demise. „This ecosystem has some resilience to it, more than it‘s given credit for,“ he says. But why should the public heed the cries for help this time around? „Because everyone have to admit the possibility that when you get knocked down often enough, after the next blow you won‘t get up.“.