Field Trip · The Washington Post

Everglades National Park

July 5, 2023·1 hr 4 min·5 clips

Audubon researcher Jerry Lorenz describes arriving in Florida in 1989 to find Florida Bay 'a magic green carpet' of seagrass, then returning six months later to a bay that smelled like sulfur and turned into pea soup within a year.

1. Field Trip, a Washington Post podcast hosted by Lillian Cunningham, examines Everglades National Park through the people who have watched it collapse and are now fighting to restore it. 2. Jerry Lorenz, who has studied Everglades wildlife for 34 years as the Audubon Society's Florida research director, and Houston Cypress, a Miccosukee tribe member and environmental advocate, serve as primary guides; Army Corps restoration director Ava Velas explains the engineering history. 3. The episode centers on Marjory Stoneman Douglas's 1947 declaration that 'The Everglades is a test. If we pass it, we may get to keep the planet,' framing the Everglades as a measure of America's capacity to repair its relationship with nature. 4. The Everglades is technically not a swamp but a wetland ecosystem with nearly 2,000 plant and animal species, including 39 threatened or endangered; it functions as a sponge filtering freshwater from Lake Okeechobee south to Florida Bay and the drinking water aquifer for the lower east coast of Florida. 5. Native people including the Miccosukee and Seminole tribes have lived in the Everglades for thousands of years, building earthwork mounds and digging canals; the Seminole Wars from the early to mid-1800s killed as many as 2,000 American soldiers, with the surviving approximately 300 Seminoles retreating into the Everglades and never signing a peace treaty. 6. Durante Blaze Billy of the Seminole Tribe explains that the Everglades provided hiding and survival during military campaigns against the tribe, and that Seminole culture understands humans as part of nature rather than separate from it. 7. Buckingham Smith's 1847 federal report called the Everglades 'utterly worthless to civilized man in its present condition' but said it would yield 'large tracts of fertile and valuable lands' if drained — a template for the development that followed. 8. Conservationist Marjory Stoneman Douglas arrived in Florida in 1915 to get a divorce and began writing about Everglades ecology for what became the Miami Herald, campaigning for a national park starting in the 1920s. 9. President Franklin Roosevelt signed legislation creating Everglades National Park in 1934; President Harry Truman dedicated it in 1947, the same year Marjory Stoneman Douglas published The Everglades River of Grass — the first national park designated specifically for biodiversity rather than scenic beauty, and the first one that already needed restoration at the moment of designation. 10. Following severe flooding in 1947, Congress authorized the Army Corps of Engineers to re-plumb South Florida; from 1948 to 1971, the Corps built thousands of miles of canals, pumping stations, levees, and dikes, and straightened the 103-mile meandering Kissimmee River into a stick-straight 56-mile canal in a project the Corps compared in scale to the Panama Canal. 11. By 1971, about half the Everglades' wetlands had been destroyed according to the Army Corps' own report; a 1950s government film called Waters of Destiny described the Everglades water as 'the vicious scourge of mankind.' 12. Jerry Lorenz arrived in September 1989 to find Florida Bay covered in a magic green carpet of seagrass so thick the clear water appeared just six inches deep; in early 1990, he returned to find dead seagrass smelling of sulfur, triggering a chain reaction — algae bloom, oxygen depletion, mass fish kill — that turned the bay from emerald to pea soup within six months. 13. Lorenz documented wading bird populations declining by more than 90 percent; fish species including redfish, bonefish, and osprey nests declined in numbers he tracked systematically for decades. 14. By 2000, with nearly 16 million Florida residents and the ecosystem in documented collapse, Congress passed the Water Resources Development Act with bipartisan support from Democratic Senator Bob Graham and Republican Governor Jeb Bush, committing nearly $8 billion to restore the Everglades. 15. In 2016, a second major crisis hit when cyanobacteria algae blooms turned waters to what news reports called guacamole, killing seagrass and oysters and forcing fishing guides off the water; fishing guide Daniel Andrews said old-timers told him the ecosystem was gone. 16. Andrews and fellow guide Chris Whitman created Captains for Clean Water, which lobbies the Florida legislature for faster restoration funding and clean-water legislation; seven years later the organization remains active. 17. Ava Velas, who directs Army Corps ecosystem restoration in South Florida, explains the original error was treating the Everglades as a system of efficient compartments rather than an interconnected whole, and describes the new principle of engineering with nature — redesigning infrastructure to mimic natural flow patterns. 18. Ongoing projects include turning the Kissimmee River back into a meandering channel — described as the first restoration of a major river ecosystem ever attempted — and building a 16-square-mile reservoir that will be the Army Corps' largest freestanding reservoir in the country. 19. Even after restoration is complete, the Everglades' footprint will be only about half its historic size; 9 million South Florida residents depend on the existing flood control and water supply infrastructure, making a full reversal impossible. 20. Listeners interested in environmental journalism, water policy, Indigenous land rights, or the politics of government engineering failures and their correction will find this episode dense and emotionally grounded; those seeking lighter nature content or park travel advice should look elsewhere.

As heard by us

A grounded look at how the Everglades works, and why that still matters.

This piece treats Everglades National Park as a living system under pressure, not a scenic backdrop. It starts with a speedboat ride across Florida Bay, then moves into a muddy field trip inside the park, where the basic geology and hydrology are laid out plainly: water begins…

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Follow a muddy field trip through Everglades National Park, where Florida's water story turns political.

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