‘River of Grass’: Inside the quest to restore the Everglades

Eight hundred feet up, the helicopter banks hard to the left. The horizon disappears. Mark Cook, an avian biologist, peers out his side window at a small irregular patch of water below. It’s hardly distinguishable from innumerable other patches that lie in every direction, dark and shining amid a ragged expanse of brown marsh grass and green tree islands.

There’s one small difference: This patch is flecked with tiny specks of white, scattered like scraps of paper around a puddle.

“This year is pretty quiet,” Dr. Cook has been saying. “It’s not very good for wading birds.”

Now he looks more closely. The specks resolve into a variety of different birds, not all of them white: great egrets, snowy egrets, wood storks, white ibises, and pale pink roseate spoonbills, all standing in and around the shallow water. “We’ve got all sorts of birds,” he says. He opens his window and sticks his camera out, his spirits lifted, at least for now.  

For the birds of the Everglades, it’s not really been good for almost a century. First came the plume hunters of the 1800s and early 1900s, who shot birds by the thousands so that their feathers could adorn women’s hats in New York and London. Then came the speculators, developers, and visionaries who did more lasting damage, draining the marshes, logging the cypress swamps, digging canals, and building levees. They turned the Everglades into fields and housing tracts until half of it was gone. What’s more, says Paul Gray, a biologist with Audubon Florida, “The half of what’s there is all screwed up.” 

Today the state of Florida, the federal government, and many private organizations and individuals are working to bring the Everglades back – at least the half that’s still left. Everglades restoration became national policy in 2000 when Congress adopted the $7.8 billion Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan.

Since then, lawsuits, political fighting, and dwindled funding have at times