http://www.counterpunch.org/farago12212009.htmlTurning Wetlands Into Rock Mines
In early December, on an unseasonably hot and humid Florida day, I sat under a large tent in a crowd of hundreds at the edge of a man-made canal draining the Everglades. On stage, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, deputy assistant secretary of the Army ‘Rock’ Salt who oversees the Corps of Engineers, Gary Guzy, deputy director of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, and assorted dignitaries to celebrate the decision by the Obama White House and Congress to invest in the elevation of the roadway—one mile of Tamiami Trail—allowing fresh water to flow and hopefully nourish parts of the Everglades that remain as a pale reminder of spectacular biodiversity. Make no mistake: among serial claims of historic accomplishments for restoring the Everglades, this was a big deal. The first hard dollars for a project to restore water flow into the Everglades.
A few hundred feet away, cars and trucks sped across the highway seemingly oblivious to the proceedings. They might have slowed if it were a car crash, an instant fatality, of passengers and drivers thrown from the cars. But the Everglades is another kind of wreck; happening in slow motion over such a long period of time that the easiest course is to forget. It is easy enough to do, in Florida.
From the highway, one cannot even see the Everglades to the north. It is blocked by limestone spoil dredged from the canal and set back from its edges to nearly twenty feet. Even from the tent and rows of folding plastic chairs—brought in by a caterer for the occasion—to see the Everglades you would have to scramble up the spoil bank. The bank itself is only authorized to public access pending approval of half a dozen law enforcement agencies. For me, standing on that spoil was itself an historic occasion. From that vantage, you could simultaneously grasp the speeches, the travelers beyond encased in cars of steel, aluminum and molded plastic, and the Everglades, dammed, diked, and deformed.
Just like the drive-by motorists who have no inkling of the tent and its meaning, and the fishermen ignoring toxic mercury contamination of the fish caught in the canal, many of the attendees at the event were themselves oblivious —or simply could not hold contradictory images at once—that just a few miles away, the Corps of Engineers is about to permit more destruction of Everglades wetlands for industrial rock mining. These permits for wetlands destruction, to be issued soon at the end of nearly a decade of litigation, will likely rob some of the water meant to flow beneath the raised Tamiami Trail costing more than $100 million.
If they wanted, senior officials of the EPA and White House Council on Environmental Quality could elevate the Lake Belt permits sought by industry from the Corps to a higher review. The way things stand, is that DC defers to the local office of the Corps, that defers to the state, the state defers to local jurisdictions that defer to big contributors to political campaigns from the Growth Machine and the engineering cartel. A 2005 St. Petersburg Times special report detailed how in fifteen year period during which “no net loss of wetlands” was federal policy, 84,000 acres of Florida wetlands simply disappeared. (“Paving Paradise: Florida’s vanishing wetlands” by authors Craig Pittman and Matthew Waite was expanded into one of the most important books of 2009.)
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The ironies pile up so fast you need a IPhone App to keep track. While District Engineer in South Florida in the 1990’s and director of the Governor’s Commission for A Sustainable South Florida, the Corps’ top political official, Rock Salt, was involved in the rock miners’ permits judged to be illegal. Judge William Hoeveler, in his July 2007 ruling, wrote, “In three decades of federal judicial service, this Court has never seen a federal agency respond so indifferently to clear evidence of significant environmental risks related to the agency's proposed action”. While it has taken nearly a decade for federal litigation to wind its way toward a victory for environmentalists, the current permits under which miners operate are expiring. The rock miners, one of Florida’s wealthiest and most secretive constituencies, are confidently lining up more permits. Win, but lose.
Back under the tent, the Republican congressman whose district encompasses the Everglades, Mario Diaz Balart, talked enthusiastically about the bipartisan love in the Florida delegation for the Everglades. The theme: “Yes it is hard and we have differences, but we are working together” could have been pulled from any speech for the Everglades by a public official; five, ten, fifteen, or twenty years ago. The same utterances were available from the speakers podium in Palm Beach County in October 2004 when Governor Jeb Bush announced a multi-billion dollar commitment by the state to accelerate restoration of the Everglades. But the Jeb Bush money was for water supply projects benefiting cities and agriculture first, not the Everglades or only at the back end of the investment, and when a longtime Republican congressman, Clay Shaw, had the temerity to say so he was not only banished from the platform wrapped in red, white and blue bunting, in his next campaign he was targeted by the radical, conservative wing of the G.O.P. that had engorged itself on the fictions of the housing market bubble, of wetlands “mitigation” schemes, and the cartel created from serving highly engineered water supply to new suburbs; a game of leap-frogging infrastructure and other cartwheels of public policies that flourished by ignoring its porous financial underpinnings and fraudulent environmental benefits.
(may Mario Diaz Balart fall down and never get up again)
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In the Lake Belt in West Miami-Dade County in 2002, the US Army Corps of Engineers issued ten-year permits to Florida rock miners for 5600 acres of Everglades wetlands destruction. Those permits have been judged to be illegal in federal court. There is time for the Obama administration to fairly balance the costs to the Everglades and the public. The price the rock mining industry pays per ton for its privilege to destroy Everglades wetlands in the Lake Belt Area is 25 cents.
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watching the neo cons crumble and destroy Florida
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