Balancing on the deck of a National Park Service skiff over Florida Bay, US Interior Secretary Sally Jewell held a clump of seagrass collected from the underwater meadow below.
The plants pulled from the shallow water were brown and appeared dead — nothing like the lush, green seagrass that has grown in the same area for years.
“This is what we get when we don’t take care of Florida Bay,” Jewell said.
Everglades National Park is home to the bay, which juts out from the southern tip of the Florida peninsula. Over the past year, researchers from the National Park Service, which celebrates its centennial this year, have discovered a 40,000-acre section in rapid decline, putting animal and plant life in jeopardy, and the future of the region’s multi-million-dollar fishing and recreational industry at risk.
The suspected culprits for this massive die-off are many: For the past 100 years, increasing development in Florida has disrupted the balance of the Everglades through the construction of homes, industry and roadways. In 1928, Floridians built a highway called the Tamiami Trail connecting Miami with Tampa and cut directly through the Everglades. The highway was acclaimed as an achievement of human progress, but the construction came with severe consequences for the area’s natural ecosystem.
“We stopped the flow of the river of grass from the Everglades headwaters down to Florida Bay,” Jewell said. “That’s had a lot of consequences that we really are understanding now. It’s kind of embarrassing that we’ve allowed this to happen.”
Meanwhile, rising sea levels — which scientists attribute to climate change — have increased the salinity in the water, further causing disruption. That, mixed with a devastating drought in recent years, has worked to create a perfect storm that’s threatening one of the nation’s most prized natural wonders.
Efforts to restore the balance and flow of freshwater into the Everglades are underway. As part of a years-long project coordinated by federal and state agencies, officials are working to raise sections of the Tamiami Trail to allow water to flow. In 2013, the National Park Service celebrated the completion of a mile-long stretch, and have just begun a new project to raise another 2.5 miles of the highway as part of a project funded in part by the US Department of Transportation Federal Lands Highway Program and Florida’s Department of Transportation. The construction is expected to be completed by 2020.
The Interior Department said the project is “one of the largest conservation projects ever undertaken” by the National Park Service.
“We now understand how important that river of grass was,” Jewell said. “It’s about our natural heritage; it’s about our national heritage.”