Introduction | Nathaniel Reed's Presentation

Speech given by

Nathaniel P. Reed

for the

University of Florida

2007 Distinguished Leader in Fish and Wildlife Conservation Award Recipient

November 28, 2007


Good afternoon Ladies and Gentlemen:

I am honored to be the first recipient of the Distinguished Leader Award from Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences’ (IFAS) Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, and Department of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences.

Having been, much earlier in my career, an occasionally vociferous critic of some IFAS efforts, I’m here today recognizing that both of us have become considerably enlightened with the passage of time.  I’m come to accept that IFAS has certain obligations incumbent on a land-grant university to serve its agricultural clientele.

But, I also have great respect for the dramatically expanded capabilities of IFAS, and the entire University community, to produce critically needed environmental information for all the citizens of Florida. 

As but one example, without the Lake Okeechobee phosphorus studies conducted by IFAS for the South Florida Water Management District, we would not have obtained critical information needed to move the entire Lake Okeechobee restoration effort forward.

My earliest address at the University of Florida was almost forty years ago at the inaugural Earth Day program.  At that time the entire wildlife program was housed in a dilapidated Quonset hut – a war-era relic mercifully buried long ago beneath the current Journalism Building.

The buildings distance from Rolfs Hall reflected the discordant gulf between forestry - and other commodity interests of IFAS – and wildlife – at that time.  My remarks on Earth Day were somewhat predictable; an exhortation for students to become both better educated and more involved in Florida - and the nations - environmental issues.

I vaguely recall that I also (mildly, I’m sure) chastised some senior University staff for the failure of the University to be more proactive in their wildlife and environmental programs.

The following year, at the behest of my dear friend Dr. Charles Loveless, the University would hire a young man named Larry Harris, to join Wayne Marion and David Harris in the tin shack.

Somewhat earlier, the indefatigable Margory Carr had organized David Anthony, and a handful of other campus “Davids” such as Jack Kaufman and Don Forrester - under the banner of the Florida Defenders of the Environment - to slay a Goliath called the Cross-Florida Barge Canal.  It was a major milestone when those University professors stepped forth beyond the ivy and volunteered their expertise to the effort to expose the pseudo-science and pseudo-economics behind the Barge Canal Boondoggle.  The barge canal battle was the very first major defeat of a Corps of Engineers project and the beginning of a painstakingly slow evolution of the Corps thought process to one we would today consider – at least generally – more environmentally enlightened.  

To me at the time, those Florida Defenders professors were role-models for what concerned engaged scientists could achieve.  Several years later Floridians, building on the FDE concept, would undertake a major legislative effort known as Conservation-70’s when a broad consortium of environmentalists, university scientists, and legislators from across Florida banded together to develop, lobby, and pass more than 50 pieces of environmental legislation.

If I fast-forward in my memory to the 1980’s, I found myself serving as a Governing Board member of the South Florida Water Management District.  It was a noteworthy period when the District Governing Board - facing ever-greater challenges in virtually every component of the South Florida ecosystem; Biscayne Bay, the Everglades, Lake Okeechobee, the Kissimmee River, the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee Rivers, etc. - decided to move from their historic reliance upon their in-house science staff to ever-greater contractual arrangements  - “outsourcing” to address key environmental questions.

I vividly recall sitting on the dais as staff brought forth proposed contracts – virtually all with institutions outside of Florida.  And I asked where were the proposals from the Florida universities?

I must tell you that I’m truly impressed by the University’s position today.  I never imagined more than 180 staff members are linked to focus on environmental issues!  Not just in IFAS alone, but across the entire University through Environmental Engineering, Zoology, the Museum, and the Co-Op Unit - it’s an impressive assembly!

I readily confess to a Luditte mentality where the Internet is concerned, but before becoming hopelessly lost, I reviewed a spectrum of research projects and educational programs so vast I can’t even begin to do it justice here. 

Geographically, topically, you have a staggering array of endeavors in Florida.  Just in the Lake Okeechobee region alone, IFAS has had more than six million dollars in research projects in recent years.

For much of the last twenty years, the mantra of management entities, especially the Florida DEP and the Water Management Districts, has been that “Yes, we know what the problem is, but we don’t have the science required to develop a solution”.

I well remember my absolute incredulity the first time the District staff laid out timelines for basic Everglade’s research - research deemed essential to answer a series of management questions we posed to them.  Their timelines were ten years – or more!  And with that initial bad news came the caveat that sufficient expertise to undertake the necessary research might not even be available.  To an impatient activist, convinced that time is not our ally in solving Florida’s problems, it was not a very welcome message!

I recognize that its every bit as frustrating to you, as I’m sure not a single person here has been able to obtain both all the funding, and all the time, they’ve wanted for their work!

Despite the many serious environmental problems facing Florida, and my impatience with the progress of some efforts, I must tell you that I am truly impressed with the progress you and the University have made in becoming an active partner in seeking solutions to our state’s very complex problems.

You’ve come a very long way baby from that old Quonset hut.  I applaud your achievements.

As I contemplated how to address you today, I momentarily considered presenting a series of current environmental challenges stretching from the Apalachicola to Florida Bay.

My first outline suggested we’d be here until very late tonight, and much of my information was actually coming ­from people in this room. 

Instead, I would like to focus upon the plight of Lake Okeechobee, the liquid heart of south Florida, the second largest fresh water lake in the continental United States - as perhaps Florida’s most prominent example of poor decision making and extreme technical challenges in managing aquatic resources.

I think every example I cite you can translate to other, perhaps less prominent localities in Florida where you individually, and we collectively, face similar challenges today.

We all recognize the importance of adequate rainfall for every area within our state.   Knowledgeable people understand that there are no average rainfall years in Florida.  Most often our state receives rainfall as a ‘unique’ event.

Our weather is dependent on many factors, some even as distant as Saharan Desert temperatures or Eastern Pacific Ocean temperatures.  Events, both in frequency and magnitude, often defy our best predictions.  Often our rainfall is ‘feast or famine’ and it is often wrongly blamed for our water management problems. 

Our largest problem actually is not the variability of rain, it is massive human alterations to a landscape that formerly had vast areas of storage potential to handle water in a smooth, predicable way, but now rushes it here and there through ditches, pumps, canals and locks, creating chronic surpluses and deficits.

It’s a problem further exacerbated by engineering designs that accommodate the ‘average’ conditions rather than the extremes we routinely experience.  That’s an economically-driven decision.  The worst case scenario is always the most expensive to accommodate, at least in the short-term.

To understand the problems of the Okeechobee watershed, Lake Okeechobee and the importance of attempting to restore a partial everglades ecosystem, we must understand how the system used to work, before the ‘improvements’ of modern man. 

Most of you have read Majorie Stoneman Douglas’s eloquent description of the Everglades as the “River of Grass”, and Michael Grunwald’s recent “The Swamp” tracing the history of Everglade’s mis-management.  They describe how during the wet Florida summer, the River would fill with ample rains, spreading widely and deeply over south Florida.  In the following, long dry season, the river would slowly shrink, from evaporation, seepage, and also from furnishing a continuous and smooth flow into Florida Bay.  The water that accumulated in the summer kept the river flowing until the following summer, rarely ever drying completely out.  Biological communities knew what to expect and bird and fish life thrived in numbers unimaginable today. 

What some haven’t heard is that Okeechobee’s upper watershed--the Kissimmee Valley, the Indian Prairie, and Fisheating Creek-- also were rivers of grass.  This vast flat region also filled from ample summer rains.  By the end of the wet season, virtually anywhere you traveled in the Okeechobee watershed, you walked in water. 

Over the dry season, this water slowly meandered to nearby sloughs, and on to larger rivers, and finally to replenish Lake Okeechobee, and in turn, the Everglades. 

Depending on where a raindrop fell, it could take eight months or more to reach the lake.  In 1948, the USACE decided that productive drained land trumped the natural system and South Florida was ditched, diked and drained.

In today’s ‘improved’ system, water is quickly drained from ranches, farms, groves, and urban lands by ubiquitous drainage ditches, into the grand Central and South Florida Project the Corps built to drain the state. 

Within a day of falling on the land, the drop of water is in a ditch.  In another day, into a major canal.  Within a week, it can reach Lake Okeechobee. 

Today, within a month of the end of the wet season, virtually all the watershed water has been efficiently shunted to Okeechobee.  We now pile ‘eight months of water’ into the lake within a month of the end of the wet season. 

The result of this rapid drainage is that the lake rises very quickly during rainy periods.  The lake then suffers serious and lingering degradation from the deep levels, the Hoover Dike is imperiled, and we dump the water to the estuaries in massive, smothering volumes.  

Drainage not only makes the lake rise unnaturally quickly during wet periods, it makes the lake drop more quickly during dry periods.  Instead of a constant replenishment from its watershed during the dry season, there is little or no replenishment and it starts dropping rapidly. 

Humans also pump water out to irrigate crops, supply their homes, or lawns, or golf courses, making the lake drop even more quickly.  The result: we run out of water!  As I speak the lake has been at record low levels for some 200 days, and promises to set even more records in the coming months.

During 2004 and 2005 the COE and SFWMD dumped enough polluted water to the estuaries to meet the water supply demand of all the farms and cities around Lake Okeechobee for an entire decade.  Yet, in the two years following, COE and SFWMD have experienced severe water shortages and rationing. 

It’s not that we didn’t get enough water, it’s that we wasted it when it was plentiful, leaving us short as soon as the rains stopped. 

Think of this, we have a system, a supposedly managed system, which harms our natural resources during wet periods, and fails our farms, cities, and natural resources during dry periods. 

It’s not that drainage is wholly bad, some drainage has made Florida great for millions of residents.  But we over-achieved, we binged on drainage, to the point of damaging our current interests, and endangering our water future—even for people.

Now we will have to spend billions to restore and build additional storage in the system, to regain what we once had for free.  Imagine this: the most current estimate for building reservoirs on the C-43 and C-44 canals, intended to reduce Lake Okeechobee discharges to tide is $500 million – Each!

In the process of trying to restore Lake Okeechobee, we’ve learned that we can’t succeed unless we also restore the biological functions of the Kissimmee River draining into the lake, and we can’t successfully restore the downstream Everglade’s system without first achieving success in Lake Okeechobee! 

It’s all one vast interconnected system - from Orlando to Florida Bay!

The partial backfilling of the Kissimmee Ditch - and resultant partial restoration of the adjacent river and marshes have already cost another $500 million – including buying over 100,000 acres of land.  And I haven’t even mentioned the hundreds of millions being spent to clean Lake Okeechobee and Everglades Agricultural Area runoff sufficiently to allow it continue on its historic course through the Everglades!

Land costs alone for these projects amount to hundreds of millions of dollars – which highlights the critical need to develop effective programs to obtain easements, rather than fee simple title for large tracts of land where temporary uses don’t seriously impair agricultural activities, or as a tool to protect large ecologically valuable ranches.

For years, the District and COE kept Okeechobee harmfully deep, trying to compensate for the over drainage and insure agriculture virtually unrestricted water supplies.  That action accelerated the erosion of the Hoover Dike to the point that allowing deep water now is unsafe. 
One recent Corps estimate places the price tag for rehabbing the leaky dike at $800 million dollars and 20 years time!  The Corps is enacting a new lower lake schedule, a must if the Hoover Dike is not to be breached and nearby lakeshore communities potentially obliterated as occurred in 1926. 

This forces decision makers to acquire additional storage elsewhere and requires a reallocation of the water within the lake—to the chagrin of existing water users.  Obviously, agriculture in the Everglades Agricultural Area immediately south of the lake is dependent on Lake Okeechobee’s water.  It has been their private reservoir for many, many years.  The advent of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan combined with the deepening drought has caused a level of panic among the legitimate water users. 

Rightly, agriculture looks at the coastal utilities to the south - all of whom want to add more straws to suck everglades water for human consumption - as a serious threat.  Urban people vote and can easily outvote the agricultural interests. 

Drought makes and breaks patterns of cooperation and understanding.  The historic pattern of supplying agriculture and urban needs by simply further raiding the environment is no longer a viable option.

The balancing game will be played out this winter and spring.  The Congress will watch with interest to see if Florida will indeed preserve everglades restoration water even during drought.  These are indeed interesting times!

Storage of excess water to combat drainage effects, excess water that has often been polluted by agriculture and urban development must be a major state initiative. 

The forces that demanded a high lake schedule were rudely shocked when hurricanes Charley, Jeanne, Frances, and Ivan (as a depression) capitalized on the efficient drainage system to dump 7 feet of water into the lake in only two months, raising it from 12.5 feet to a levee-emergency level of 18 feet (the lake only climbed 5.5 feet because the Corps frantically dumped 1.5 feet to the estuaries during the rise).

Lake Okeechobee’s once vast marsh system was the prime habitat for the lake’s extraordinary fishery, habitat for wading birds, for nesting sites for wading birds, snail kites and even storks. 
100 million migratory birds use its shoreline to gain strength for their continued flights.  The marsh was a great filter for the most pressing of the lakes’ environmental threats— phosphorus pollution, but the lake was turned into open, dirty, virtually lifeless water.

Due to the Corps artificially higher lake levels, we’ve now lost 75 square miles of critical vegetation.

By any measure, the distribution and abundance of plant species, fisheries populations, macro invertebrate populations, water quality parameters, virtually ever assessment conducted in the lake reveals a dramatically affected, seriously impaired, ecosystem.  Excessive nutrient loading, and excessive lake levels, has been identified as the chief causes.

In the 1970’s, the first major assessment of Lake Okeechobee and the impacts of the Corps drainage project was completed.  It was entitled “The Special Project to Prevent the Eutrophication of Lake Okeechobee”.  It had as one of its senior authors Curry Hutchinson, one of the very first students, under Dr. George Cornwell, in the Wildlife Program.

At the time it described the serious plight of the lake, Okeechobee’s phosphorus levels were near 40ppb.  The leaders of DEP and the SFWMD have watched the levels of phosphorus grow.  They have watched – and watched, and waited – and waited, as the deposition of what is now estimated to be, 50,000-tons of phosphorus-laden sediment has occurred.  It clings to the bottom in a mud layer that gets mixed into a phosphorus cocktail during every blow, major or minor, ruining water quality, and producing conditions that threaten the lake’s very ecological life.

Commissions, select committees and peer groups have been engaged over 30 years in an effort to diminish the amount of phosphorus flowing from the watershed into the lake.  Some of the commissions were predetermined to advise ‘restraint’, a watch and wait strategy. 

Others urged actions insufficient to meet the challenges.  Agricultural pollution is vexing - worldwide.  It is not part of the federal Clean Water Act, but it is covered by state’s standards.

After a staggering thirty-five years’ efforts, Okeechobee’s phosphorus level is worse than ever.  It is no longer 40ppb, it is above 100, sometimes as high as 600, and still climbing.  Annual loads to the lake are in the 500-600 ton range, instead of the goal of 105 tons of inflow. 

Amidst these chronic problems, we continue adding an additional 5,000 tons to the watershed lands every year.

You’ve all heard, repetitively, that we need good science to make good decisions.  Certainly true…but if you look around Florida today you can find a lot of good science – and bad decisions.  Which leads me to one of Reed’s Laws of environmental management: 
Good Science can always be trumped by Bad Politics.

In the Lake Okeechobee watershed, politics trumped science when the state decided that, rather than hold dairies to strict standards for phosphorus discharge - as they would impose on other land uses, the dairies would only be required to implement ‘Best Management Practices’, a non-quantitative sort of ‘best effort’.

A true cynic might have called them ‘Mismanagement Minimization Plans’.  I would characterize them as ‘Good Management Practices’, as the phosphorus management strategies developed were certainly better than the essential dearth of phosphorus management practices that preceded them.

To their credit, some dairy farmers undertook difficult, and expensive, implementation efforts. To everyone’s dismay, too much phosphorus is still leaving the basins and entering the lake, and the legacy of the ‘BMP’s’ is still with us.

To me, it is not the ‘Best’ Management Practice unless it achieves the intended result!  Today, only 20 of perhaps 40 dairies existing 25 years ago remain; depositing 30 tons/year of phosphorus on their property.

We’ve already spent $8.5 million to buy out 16 dairies deemed unable to even undertake meaningful BMP’s, and spent another $33 million retrofitting about 25 operations.

A further $10 million has been spent buying and attempting to cleanse former dairies. Staff from DACS recently developed Comprehensive Nutrient Management Plans.   

The proposed DACS plans, which included almost complete containment of water, chemical treatment of outgoing water, and achieving a P balance, were projected to cost $100 million more.  They were axed as too expensive.  The present containment plans are cheaper, but are problematic in the long-term and put the diaries in a fair perspective; their estimated contribution is only 10% of the current excess.

The balance of the problem is once again more about politics than science; the original recovery plan focused upon only four so-called ‘priority basins’ (the most problematic, which covered only 10% of the entire watershed and discharged only about 25% of the total P to the Lake).

Basins deemed to be below the level of problematic discharge were essentially ignored – we turned our back on 75% of the watershed while we focused intently on but 25%.

I don’t think there is an undergraduate student in this room who would consider that smart watershed management – and yet I was one of the Governing Board members who voted for it, thinking that, after years of contention and delay, the plan represented progress.

We also naively believed that after the priority basins were fixed, we would quickly move on to the other areas.  Addressing the remaining, seemingly non-problematic basins didn’t seem a formidable challenge when the Lake Okeechobee loading target was 361 tons P/year.

Now better science has reduced that target to 140* tons (*minus 35 tons from rainfall) and angst has arrived!  The original strategy of the priority basins was developed more than 15 years ago – the lake has still never once met the target!

In the last legislative session, thanks to Senators Pruitt and Saunders a new attempt to address Lake Okeechobee failures was passed – the Northern Everglades Protection Program. 

In addition to significant funding for implementation efforts (more than $100 million), it moves toward what we would all agree is a fundamental concept – treat a problem at the source. 

Instead of spending hundreds of millions building Stormwater Treatment Areas (Pollutant Polishing Ponds) to remove nutrients after they’re in the lake water, stop them before they enter.

Think about this: 5000 tons of phosphorus enters the Lake Okeechobee watershed each year.  Of that 5,000, 3,000 tons comes in as sewage sludge trucked from coastal treatment plants to be dispersed in the basins.

Why on earth would you import 3,000 tons more when you are trying to reduce the basin loads? It is absolutely ludicrous!   Under the new law you can’t.  At last!  Now the landowner has to prove no harm, not the state.

You can’t get a permit unless you can ‘affirmatively demonstrate that the phosphorus in the residuals will not add to phosphorus loadings in the Lake or its tributaries’.

What a concept!  The permit will not be granted unless you can demonstrate no harm!  And it’s only been 35 years since that first report on Lake Okeechobee’s problems!

The law also addresses manure management and stormwater runoff from new development.  It once again relies on the concept of BMP’s as a solution, so we’ll have to see if these are at least ‘Better’ if not truly the ‘Best’.

As the first Chairman of Florida’s fledgling Department of Air and Water Pollution Control Commission, that later evolved into the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, I am dismayed that today we look to voluntary cooperation and economic coercion rather than stringent enforcement of the laws intended to protect our citizens and resources.  Having served 12 years on the SFWMD Governing Board, I’m chagrined that, under my watch, we compartmentalized water supply and water quality issues without integrating them into a truly comprehensive plan for South Florida.

A truly damning memorandum was recently penned by Major General Don Riley, Director of Civil Works for the US Army Corps of Engineers.  He flatly rejected state overtures for federal cost-share of proposed Lake Okeechobee water treatment projects, noting that both state and federal law stipulate that the state must be in compliance with WQ standards for the current use of the water, and that the work proposed must be essential to the Everglades restoration effort.
He noted that the state had still not set over-due mandated total maximum daily loads so that water quality standards could be implemented.

He also noted that cleaning water deemed essential to the Everglades restoration, then allowing it into Lake Okeechobee, and to then proposing that it be cleaned yet again to remove Lake Okeechobee pollution before sending it to the Everglades called into question the economic wisdom of such a strategy.

He noted that the state is disqualified for national assistance due to its continuing violation of minimum national water quality standards, and is unlikely to come into compliance for several decades.

But these issues I’ve outlined regarding Lake Okeechobee:

 

None of these are truly unique to Lake Okeechobee.  Every person in this room can name water bodies across Florida to which these could apply.  We can only hope that the painful, costly, mistakes of Lake Okeechobee may help us to avoid similar mistakes elsewhere in the future.

Despite a seemingly bleak picture, I am actually curiously optimistic regarding the future of Lake Okeechobee, and by extension, other aquatic ecosystems in Florida.

First, we have today, thanks in no small way to this University, the most impressive cadre of environmental scientists ever assembled in Florida.  The depth, breath, and commitments I’ve seen during my campus visit are truly impressive.

Second, we have assembled, and continue to gather really sound technical data crucial to both formulating, and adapting our management options,

Third, we have a population becoming increasingly energized - both by promises of severe water restrictions in the near future - and a concurrent frustration with getting the bills for fixing all the previous mistakes. 

Fourth, numerous NGO’s have entered the fray, bringing technical expertise, legal expertise, and focus to the issues.  Slowly, but surely, the citizens of Florida are demanding that government agencies perform, rather than blink, blunder, and obfuscate.

Fifth, local governments are becoming increasingly involved as they recognize both the potential impacts upon their economic futures if the current trends are not reversed, and the failure of state agencies to look out for their interests.

I look out with genuine pleasure knowing that many faces I recognize here today have made significant contributions to Florida’s future, and will continue to make even more contributions.

To Dr. John Haynes, Chair of the Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, and Dr. Karl Havens, Chair of the Department of Fisheries and Aquatic Science, and indeed to all of you here today, my thanks, not only for the honor of being the University of Florida’s first annual Distinguished Leader in Fish and Wildlife Conservation but also for the efforts you’ve made to actively advance the University’s involvement in our quest for a better Florida.

I look forward, eagerly, to returning for the dedication of your proposed new building that will permit your growing programs, and faculty, to meld even more effectively.

Thank you