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The Everglades
Florida's slow-moving river of grass, from Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay
The Everglades is a river that hardly looks like one — a sheet of fresh water about 60 miles (97 km) wide that creeps south through sawgrass at roughly half a mile a day. Before drainage, this marsh covered about 4,000 square miles (10,000 km²) of South Florida, fed by the Kissimmee River and the overflow of Lake Okeechobee and emptying into Florida Bay more than 100 miles away. Seminole and Miccosukee people, whose ancestors retreated here during the Seminole Wars, know it as Pa-hay-okee, or grassy water. Journalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas gave it the English name that stuck in her 1947 book, The Everglades: River of Grass.
Draining the swamp was official policy for more than half a century. Hamilton Disston began digging canals in the 1880s, Governor Napoleon Bonaparte Broward campaigned in 1904 to build an 'Empire of the Everglades,' and later federal levees and pumps turned the northern marsh into sugarcane fields and the eastern edge into the suburbs of Miami and Fort Lauderdale. About half of the original Everglades has been lost to farms and cities. What remains is split by canals and roads, and the water that does arrive often comes at the wrong time, in the wrong amount, carrying phosphorus from agricultural runoff.
Everglades National Park, dedicated in 1947 just weeks after Douglas published her book, protects the southern end, while Big Cypress National Preserve and state water conservation areas guard much of the rest. In 2000 Congress approved the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, a decades-long federal and state effort to store, clean and redirect water so it flows south again. Its reservoirs and bridges are being built piece by piece, and the system remains the test case for whether a drained wetland can be stitched back together.