Posted on behalf of Emma Marris

The US economy is not the only complex system suffering from lack of liquidity. The Florida Everglades, the watery mosaic of landscapes that varies along with minute changes in elevation—sawgrass marsh, slightly higher hammocks of hardwood trees, and an edging of mangrove swamps, among other miniature worlds—needs cash and water. It’s an ecosystem with romantic resonance, inhabited by alligators, pelicans, roseate spoonbills and a few scrappy panthers, a beloved place that almost disappeared forever when development diverted much of the water flow that keeps it running.

The National Academies has just released a report assessing the progress of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, the eight-year-old state-federal project to keep the Everglades from drying up. The news is depressingly bad. The project is “bogged down in budgeting, planning, and procedural matters while the ecosystem that it was created to save is in peril”. Without a smooth flow of money, the project managers can’t manage the smooth flow of water. None of the plan’s component projects have been completed, and the key water-engineering piece, called the “Modified Water Deliveries to Everglades National Park”, which predates the plan and was first put forth in 1989, is still not done. The report brief says it has been “plagued for nearly 20 years by changes in direction and scope, parochial interests, litigation, cost escalation, engineering constraints, and a lack of coordinated leadership.” The report puts more blame on the feds than the state.

(See the National Academies press release, report brief, and full report.)

Florida newspapers, including the Palm Beach Post and Miami Herald, provide good coverage. The Herald’s Curtis Morgan quotes William Graf, chair of the committee that wrote the report: ”We’ve invested in all this science and this engineering development and we still don’t have one completed project. Well, how can that be? I think the conclusion is we don’t have the political and public will to do it.”

Image: National Park Service