Park at Home 2024 | #2: Everglades National Park
Last night — Thursday, March 14 at 7:00 p.m. — was the second installment of the 2024 season of Parked at Home, a webinar series hosted by the National Park Service. In this talk, park ranger Mark Mello of Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park was joined by park ranger Rebecca Schroeder of the Ten Thousand Islands District of Everglades National Park to talk about the history of these sites as related to water.
Mello began by explaining the rarity of drinkable fresh water on Earth. He then spoke about the rights to own and use water, especially in the Blackstone Valley. These rights have been contested for centuries in Pawtucket, RI. The village was established by blacksmith Joseph Jenks to power his iron forge. By the 1790s, the Upper Dam or Slater Dam was constructed to control the flow of the mill, but locals tore down the dam in 1792. Oziel Wilkinson, the father-in-law to Samuel Slater, put a lock on the gate to his floom, but locals cut the lock off the gate. In 1827, the case Tyler v Wilkinson made its way to the Supreme Court to determine who held water rights. Justice Joseph Story declared that every landowner next to water had a right to use the water unless it infringed on another landowner’s use of the water. This seemed like a simple solution, but determining what constituted infringement became a complex equation on its own, especially as more mills were built on the river.
Schroeder described the location of the Everglades in the southern part of Florida. While this is the third largest park in the National Park Service, dedicated by Harry S. Truman in 1947, the designated boundaries only cover part of the entire ecosystem. The Everglades start as far north as Orlando, and water flows down the Kissimmee River to Lake Okeechobee through the River of Grass. Over 2,000 species of plants and animals live in the ecosystem. Unlike New England with its many seasons, the Everglades has two. The West Season lasts from May through November with high humidity, a heat index over 100°F, and daily afternoon thunderstorms accounting for 75% of the year’s rainfall. The Dry Season lasts from November to April with an average temperature of 77°F, lower humidity, and only 25% of the year’s rainfall. The Everglades have only tiny variations in elevation, with the highest point standing eight feet above sea level. The entire area floods during wet season, while the water slowly drains into the Gulf of Mexico during dry season. Similar to Big Thicket National Preserve, where I was formerly a park ranger, the Everglades has many habitats, including Pinelands, Cypress, Freshwater Marl Prairie, Freshwater Slough, Coastal Lowland, Mangrove, and Marine & Estuarine habitats. Tropical and temperate species live together along with migrating animals.
During the 1800s, Floridians launched a movement to turn the Everglades into “profitable land” by dredging, canal building, and draining wetlands. Much of the land was dried out and used for agricultural, residential, and commercial purposes. The plots of land were advertised as some of the most fertile in the world. Over half of the Everglades were destroyed in that time, with politicians like the 1905 to 1909 governor of Florida Napoleon Bonaparte Broward running on the platform to “Drain that abominable pestilence-ridden swamp”. More recently, massive roads like Highway 41 and Interstate 75 acted as dams and prevented water from draining properly. Instead of lingering through the Everglades, water diverted to the coast. Salty ocean water entered aquifers in southern Florida and ruined wells. Salt-tolerant mangroves acted as nurseries for fish, could no longer live in the area, in turn hurting the commercial fishing industry.
Environmentally conscious Floridians declared that “Something needs to change!” Congress authorized the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan in 2000, providing more than $10.5 billion over thirty-five years to the largest hydraulic restoration project in the United States, which seeks to find a balance for water usage between plants, animals, and people. Activist Marjorie Stillman Douglas, who helped to create Everglades National Park, described the importance of preserving the history and environment by saying, “There are no other Everglades in the world… one of the unique regions of the earth… It is a river of grass.”
During the Q&A, Schroeder described some of the invasive species in southern Florida. She remarked that because the land has nice weather all year, “any plant or animal can live here, whether it’s supposed to or not”. One of the worst invasives is the burmese python. Great at camouflage and difficult to find, the animals have eaten up to 95% of the small mammal population, including squirrels, rabbits, and raccoons. Other invasive species include iguanas and tegus, a species of lizard. Climate change also has an adverse effect on the Everglades and the Blackstone Valley. For a happier story, the number of Florida panthers in the Everglades has increased greatly thanks to conservation efforts. This golden-brown big cats are a subspecies of mountain lion hunted nearly to extinction in Florida, with only twenty animals remaining at one time. Fortunately, cats from a genetically similar Texas population were brought to Florida, and the population has grown to around two hundred.
The webinar closed with quick tips about visiting the Everglades and a summary about the value of water. Schroeder believes the best time to visit the Everglades is during the late dry season during February, March, and April. All the fish have clustered into smaller areas because of the shrinking water levels, and the predators come to hunt the fish, allowing visitors to see many wild animals in one area. Migratory birds pass through the Everglades as they head north after winter. The weather is cooler than the rest of the year and not as humid along with fewer thunderstorms. Mello described projects and laws that have positive affected the Blackstone Valley, including the first ZAP the Blackstone cleanup in 1972, the Clean Water Act in 1972, and the Endangered Species Act in 1973.
Read the summaries from Parked at Home 2024:
Read the summaries from Parked at Home 2023: