Letter to the Editor: Blame Loss of the Everglades for South Florida's Drought

Here is my letter to the Palm Beach post--originally printed on June 28:

(followed by some required reading!)

Much has been reported regarding the current water shortage and blaming the "extreme drought" on global climatic conditions, such as La Niña, the Bermuda High, and the North Atlantic Oscillation (Palm Beach Post, June 13).

However, those are not the main causes of water shortages in South Florida. The late Arthur R. Marshall called this scenario a man-made drought, and sought to address it back in 1981. The main water shortage cause is the removal and draining of wetlands for development and agriculture, and the reduction of natural water flow from Lake Okeechobee to the Everglades.

A major volume of water that went south to the Everglades now is flushed to tide. One big result is decreased evapotranspiration (ET for short) over what used to be the river of grass, with surface water and plants sending water vapor into the atmosphere, unabated.

When moisture-heavy sea breezes combined with ET, South Florida was subject to rainfall deluges. Art Marshall dubbed this the "rain machine."

The water supply in all of Florida depends on a rainfall-driven system, and ET drives rainfall.

As Art Marshall declared in June 1981: Water is the major concern of our coalition. If Lake O fails periodically to be adequate for all needs, what is to be done? The question persists today.

Knowing that rainfall and its retention are the only satisfactory sources of water in the Everglades system, we support the reestablishment of sheet flow in the basin to the greatest possible extent.

Conservation measures may help alleviate drought situations . However projected population increases, more rooftops and unmitigated destruction of wetlands will only make for more frequent, extreme/exceptional droughts, and increased water supply costs.

JOHN ARTHUR MARSHALL

you can find a link to the letter: here!

To continue our drought discussion, please click and read this article The Anatomy of a Man-Made Drought originally printed in 1982!

Somebody did something about the weather in Florida; now a looming disaster demands that it be undone

Over the past few weeks, a growing number of Floridians have been jolted by a warning from Arthur Marshall, a 63-year-old ecologist who is widely regarded as having the keenest insights into that state's multiple environmental problems. Marshall's dismaying thesis is this: Drought conditions in Kissimmee Valley, which suffered a "once in every 700 years drought" last year, are going to get worse. Marshall asserts that last year was not in fact a meteorological aberration, but a predictable consequence of the land development and the drainage of wetlands in the Everglades and the Kissimmee River basin that have disrupted the normal rain cycle…

[click for the rest of the article]