Year of the Everglades-10th Annual Cypress Harvest

Golf with our friends at the Gale Academy of Forest Hills HS

Show your support for National Wildlife Refuges

This from our friends at the National Wildlife Refuge Association...

America’s Great Outdoors initiative in an effort to start a national dialogue about the great places across our nation to get outside and how the federal government and private citizens can help protect these places for future generations. After months of collecting input from Americans, the President will announce how he plans to conserve our great outdoors this Fall.
Refuges need YOUR help to make sure they are key part of any Presidential announcement -- don’t let the National Wildlife Refuge System remain America’s best kept SECRET!

Please go to America’s Great Outdoors website and cast your vote for the National Wildlife Refuge System – we need AT LEAST 4000 votes!

The National Wildlife Refuge System ought to be a cornerstone of this Initiative. As committed refuge supporters you’ve experienced the wonders of refuges and you know how important creating and conserving refuges are to preserving our natural legacy. So please cast your vote now and tell the President how valuable refuges are to the American public.

If you haven’t already registered with the website, click here to register. After you’ve completed the process, follow the instructions below.

If you have already registered with the America’s Great Outdoors website, please click on this link to go to Conserving America’s Wildlife Heritage: Strengthening our National Wildlife Refuge System There’s a box on the left with an orange border that shows the vote total so far. Click on the GREEN “Promote” text to cast your vote and leave a comment about your refuge if you wish.

We need to make sure the Refuge System is no longer America’s best-kept secret. Thank you for speaking up for wildlife and the refuges they call home!

Regards,

Joan Patterson

Director of Grassroots Outreach

National Wildlife Refuge Association

And here is a shot of our favorite Refuge:

Annual Cypress Seed Harvest--October 30th

mark your calendars

Green M&M's Party!

US Sugar Purchase: responding to the critics

Several newspapers and columnists have responded negatively to the land purchase that the Governing Board agreed on last week. So let's take the time to debunk some of their favorite myths:

I’m afraid you don’t understand the hydrology of the Everglades, the soil subsidence in the EEA that will prevent any natural connection between Lake O and the water conservation areas, and the need for more water storage

We understand the hydrology perfectly well. We have looked at contour maps, and the north-south profiles from Lake O to WCA-3. It is clear that even with the current subsidence, the possibility of gravity driven flow begins when the lake reaches ~13+ feet, the higher the Lake, the more gravity driven flow, and energy reduction. Florida Crystals has reached the same conclusion.

Even the SFWMD admits that this is so, in the course of the River of Grass workshop considerations.

That also is why the Corps of Engineers is considering a spill-way, down roughly this north-south path around the Miami and North New River Canal. Given current conditions of the dike, and an extreme wet condition that would take the Lake up to 18+ feet, and a possible breach of the dike, it is fairly obvious which direction the water would flow.

An ill-conceived conclusion that the water would not flow came from a look at an east-west transect, which does show a bowl of sorts. However the major objective remains south flow, not east-west flow. The hype that water won't flow from south to north under the aforementioned conditions is beyond science (BS)

Of course the reservoir isn’t the final solution and nobody says it is.

The National Research Council councils against engineered solutions, as usually they carry a lot of unforeseen consequences. As the EAA reservoir would have been a four-sided dam requiring a lot of pumping, and more unforeseen consequences, same as the dike around Lake O, it needed to be taken off the table as providing too few benefits, relative to cost.

Where do you get your water storage?

Dynamic Storage and Sheet Flow, as described in CERP section 2.3.1

Everglades Scientists, Florida Crystals, and the ArtMarshall.org have all calculated that if there is enough treatment by restoration of vegetation in shallow flow-ways and STA's, there would be enough thru-put via flow to provide "dynamic storage", just as it worked in the historic Everglades.

The ArtMarshall.org is also pushing restoration of the pond apple forest as part of the solution. It appears that the pond apple forest played a major role in reducing nutrients as water flowed south.

I.e., this approach would have moved nearly 2 million acre feet south, the current estimated requirement to restore ENP and FL Bay, which would also provide relief of the estuaries.

Both the placement and acreage of the EAA Resvoir would likely have foreclosed this option.

John

B.S. Geology, UF '63, M.S. System Science, 72

John Arthur Marshall, Chairman of the Board,

Arthur R. Marshall Foundation & Florida Environmental Institute, Inc.

www.ArtMarshall.org Declaring 2010 the Year of the Everglades!

EVERGLADES RESTORATION: Our Passion! Our Mission! Our Legacy!

Letter to the Editor: Orlando Sentinel

The following was sent to the Orlando Sentinel in response to Nancy Smith's article, U.S. Sugar Deal Diverts Money From Concrete Solutions. The quote below is from that article...

I asked Sen. Paula Dockery, R-Lakeland, what she thought of Thursday’s unanimous vote. “I’m disappointed but not surprised,” she said. “I’m a great supporter of Everglades restoration, somebody who sponsored Everglades Forever. But this is the wrong land, wrong time, wrong price.
We should never have switched from building projects, from a reservoir that was nearly built that we had already put $300 million into, to buying land that brings us to a halt.

Most of the nay-sayers of the purchase parrot the EAA reservoir as if it would be the savior of the Everglades. In fact it was the second-worst component of a deficient plan, second on to the proposal for 330 Aquifer Storage and Recovery (ASR) wells in what was the historic Everglades.

ASR has faded into the background; the EAA reservoir is in need of the same course of action, with the realization that low-cost, low-risk, low tech approaches, such as a flow-way provide significantly greater benefit to cost, than high-tech, high-risk, high-cost applications that require pumping and concrete.

Operations and maintenance costs, for either of these components would have broken the bank, and both have significant water-quality problems with more expense to address, rather than the needed water treatment provided by restoring flow, re-vegetating, and restoring peat, fundamental processes's needed to restore the Everglades.

In the case of the EAA reservoir, the construction cost was ballooning from the $400 Million estimate to something approaching a billion dollars. The Title of Smith's article - U.S. Sugar deal diverts money from concrete solutions - does hold some truth. There would have been a lot of concrete plowed into this project, and of course there was no concrete or deep water storage in the historic Everglades.

Not only would the EAA Reservoir provide negative water quality attributes, but would provide little relief to the estuaries, because when bone-dry the EAA reservoir would lower Lake Okeechobee less than a foot. Few reservoir advocates have taken a look at the future scenario, with the reservoir being a source for back-pumping polluted farm water.

In a really wet storm event the reservoir would fill up same as Lake O; this would lead to no other option but to dump dirty water south, same as dumping dirty water east at west to the estuaries.

In fact the EAA reservoir would have displaced spatial extent of natural area needed for treatment and conveyance of clean water, as in a lose-lose-lose BIG-time loser situation.

The reservoir was an alternative solution owing to the lack of a willing seller of the lands needed to convey and treat water when the plan was formulated back in 1999 (The ArtMarshall.org was there protesting for more natural flow then, same as now)

All should be grateful that Governing Board Member Estenoz addressed the reservoir issue in the discussion of what to do, April 12.

Granted we all would like to have seen more land bought in the August 12 deal. However the Art Marshall view is that the SFWMD has reached the right reasons for suspending the reservoir and considering win-win options, with the option to purchase more land in the future, for the natural solution.

Whatever configuration is chosen to restore the missing link to revitalize the river of grass, the ArtMarshall.org has calculated economic benefits of 90 Billion dollars over the 40 year life-cycle of the plan.

The best of six solutions - with the most economic benefit - turned out to be the one with no deep water storage reservoirs. Wonder of all wonders, it was the Florida Crystals Corporation solution.

We would be happy to provide the basis for that calculation as well, for people willing to listen to serious analysis, rather than shoot from the hip.

Art Marshall, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, and Johnny Jones, Everglades restoration luminaries past, had it right all along. For the Art Marshall approach, Semper Fi,

Respectfully submitted,

John
John Arthur Marshall, Chairman of the Board,
Arthur R. Marshall Foundation & Florida Environmental Institute, Inc.