The Killing of the Everglades

The old man saw the lizard slip out from under a bush in front of the drugstore where he had gone to test his blood pressure and saw its sprawl on the flagstone path beside the sidewalk and hunched toward it, propping himself with his cane. He raised the cane over his head, baring his teeth, and jammed it down and pinned the lizard to the flagstone, tearing its belly out, and it twisted over, its four infant hands clutching the air and its mouth opening and closing, and the old man jerked the cane up and jammed it down and jammed it up and down until he had mashed the lizard into the stone. The black tip of his cane smeared now, the old man looked uneasily around and, breathing hard, set the cane to the walk, staining the white stone red, and lurched away, teeming Florida jerking across his narrowed eyes.

He didn't understand.

That the lizard was harmless?

Yes.

But he did understand. It wasn't harmless.

A lizard?

It was a fuse running back into the swamp. He put it out.

One of many fuses, then.

We put them out whenever we can. They mean us no good.

They mean us no harm.

They mean us no harm. They mean us nothing at all.

• • •

The Everglades, the wilderness Everglades that was once the wonder of the world, is not dying. It is already dead. The shell is left, the shell of a wilderness, and should be saved. We save shells. They are symmetrical and can be understood. The silent things that live inside them are not symmetrical and cannot be understood. They must be taken for what they are or destroyed. They do not care if they are taken or not. They live and die in silence. The old man raged. The lizard never said a word.

I am not cynical. I am not wedded to death, though at one time I thought I might be. I do not know Florida as well as the men and women who live there who would save it from itself, but I know land and know when it is failing. South Florida will be a garden or it will be a desert. It will never again be a wilderness.

Amerigo Vespucci named this Western continent with a name better than his own. In a letter to Lorenzo de' Medici he called it a New World. It tore men's eyes open. They could not believe what they saw. On their maps they shrank it into comprehension. Leonardo da Vinci, the most visionary of Renaissance men, drew the New World as a string of islands. Jacques le Moyne, the first artist to visit North America, drew Florida smaller than Cuba and located the Great Lakes in Tennessee.

Men came to the New World to plunder. Later they came to live. They could choose to move through the wilderness and make it their own or they could choose to push it back before them, destroying it as they went. Having money and courage but lacking the genius that might transform them into a new kind of people, they chose to push the wilderness back. They chose to remain European, with European notions of land ownership and European beliefs in man's authority over the natural world. That is why, though we think of ourselves today as American, we do not think of ourselves as an American race. We are separate from one another. We are Italian or Polish or black or WASP. The only people in America who feel they belong to the land, and so to one another, are the ones we call Indian. They are the people who made the wilderness their own.

You can easily locate the places that pass for wilderness in the United States. The U. S. Geological Survey has not yet found time to record them on its most detailed topographic maps, the seven-and-a-half-minute series, scaled one inch to 2000 feet. Barrens of western Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah and Nevada have not yet been mapped for the seven-and-a-half-minute series. The Everglades from Lake Okeechobee to Cape Sable has not yet been mapped for the series, though a jetport almost rose on the edge of the Big Cypress swamp, though most of the Everglades has been leveed and ditched for water storage, though canals have been cut for new towns near the Big Cypress' Fakahatchee Strand and though acres of Nike missiles point toward Cuba from the center of the national park. The Everglades is still officially a wilderness. But it has already been pushed back. It once teemed with life. It teems no more.

"How shall I express myself," traveler William Bartram wrote from upper Florida in the 18th Century, "to ... avoid raising suspicions of my veracity? Should I say that the river (in this place) from shore to shore, and perhaps near half a mile above and below me, appeared to be one solid bank of fish, of various kinds, pushing through this narrow pass of St. Juans into the little lake, on their return down the river, and that the alligators were in such incredible numbers, and so close together from shore to shore, that it would have been easy to have walked across on their heads, had the animals been harmless?" Bartram saw alligators 20 feet long, with bodies, he said, as big as horses'. The longest recorded in the 20th Century was 13 feet.

Birds, countless millions of birds, came to Florida once from all reaches of the world, so thick in the sky that they darkened the sun, so thick in the shallow rookeries that their droppings turned the brown water white for miles. At the height of Florida's trade in egret plumes, 80 years ago, one Jacksonville merchant in one year shipped 130,000 egretskins to New York. The birds come now in shrunken numbers, fewer than 50,000 of them a year, and many do not stay. Some species will never be seen again.

The first pictures of wilderness America to reach Europe were Jacques le Moyne's drawings of savage Florida. For a time, Florida was the New World to European eyes. Bartram's Travels fired the imagination of the English romantic poets, of William and Dorothy Wordsworth and of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge read Bartram and dreamed of building a utopia in Florida. Young men in groups of 12 would sail there and work only half a day and discuss philosophy in the long afternoons. Coleridge never saw it, but Bartram's Florida worked its way into his opium dream and came out Kubla Khan:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea.

Alph was a Florida spring. But the caverns proved treacherous. They were caverns of time and we moved through them as if the only lives that concerned us were our own.

• • •

We took the land and made it ours. "After we had strooken sayle and cast anker athwart the River," wrote an early French explorer of Florida, "I determined to goe on shore to discover the same." Religion strengthened him. He was only a little lower than the angels. He was lord of the earth. The men who planned the Everglades jetport felt the same. "We will do our best," one of them wrote, "to meet our responsibilities and the responsibilities of all men to exercise dominion over the land, sea and air above us as the higher order of man intends." You can hear the Great Chain of Being rattling in there, the old medieval hierarchy of stone and plant and animal and man and angel and God. The preservationists who fought the jetport down heard only greed, but they ought to have heard an echo of the old belief in the sovereignty of man that impelled men to discover America and justified the white man's existence here for 300 years. The planners who hold that belief today cannot understand why others do not. They smell subversion.

"How," asks a broadside circulating these days in south Florida, "can anyone legally stop a useless land from becoming a community of churches, schools, hospitals, universities, playground parks, golf courses and beautiful homes where thousands of precious children will be born and raised to be useful citizens?" That the swamps and flood plains are not useless, that they collect and store and purify all the water south Florida will ever have, that the worst thing that could happen to the region would be the addition of more thousands of precious children to its present load are not assertions easy to prove.

"Before this century is done," Peter Matthiessen writes in the Sierra Club book The Everglades, "there will be an evolution in our values and the values of human society, not because man has become more civilized but because, on a blighted earth, he will have no choice. This evolution--actually a revolution whose violence will depend on the violence with which it is met--must aim at an order of things that treats man and his habitat with respect." Nowhere in America is the conflict more directly engaged than in south Florida. If it primeval wilderness is gone, its eco-system is not yet irrevocably damaged Birds still sing and trees still grow There is something left to save, a water supply and a way of life. New and terrifying problems have not yet displaced the old. Miami is not yet New York, nor Okeechobee Lake Erie. But how much time remains for south Florida is a question on which few people agree.

• • •

The Everglades was once a vast and grassy river. It began in the flood and hurricane spill of Lake Okeechobee and flowed south and southwest 100 miles to merge with the ocean above Cape Sable on the southwestern tip of Florida. Saw grass and water and peat muck, a river 50, 70 miles wide, bound on the east by a limestone ridge and on the west by a broad and shadowed cypress swamp, it looked like a marsh, but the water flowed sluggishly down. One foot of fall-off in ten months--an inch and a little more a month. From new moon to new moon in the summer, the land might receive 40 inches of rain and fill up like a tipped bowl. Alligators spread out then to feed, and deer and the panthers that harvested them found refuge on hammocks, tree islands shaped like longboats that interrupted the monotony of saw grass. In the summer and autumn, hurricanes thrashed the saw grass and tore the tops off the royal palms. The hurricanes dropped the last of the rains the land would see until summer came again. The water crept down the land or evaporated in the sun or transpired through the pores of green plants and trees. Disappearing, it concentrated the life that swarmed within it, mosquito fish and killifish and crawfish and the larger predators that lived on them, and the birds came to feed in the broth and reproduce. The water level dropped lower and lower and alligators dug out holes, tearing the grass and the peat away with their tails, making room not only for themselves but also for a seed crop of fish and turtles and frogs that would grow to populate the land when the next rains came. The first thunderstorms of late winter brought fire that burned away the old cover of saw grass. On the higher land the fire destroyed brush and the shoots of hardwoods but left behind the corky, fire-resistant pines.

When the water that flooded Okeechobee readied the mangrove estuaries that lined the coast, it mixed with sea water stirred by the tides. The brackish solution that resulted from the mixing was a thousand times more fertile than the sea itself, haven for adolescent pink shrimps whose shells gave the roseate spoonbill its color, haven for young fish that men would later hook for sport and net for food. Crowds of crocodiles swarmed in the deltas of mangrove rivers, the only place in North America they were ever found. The mangrove forest itself was one of the largest in the world, trees that reclaimed the land from the sea, trees denser on their islands and peninsulas than any rain jungle.

Aboriginal Indians lived on the mangrove coast and hunted the Everglades, men who came down from the continental wilderness and exchanged their buckskins for breechclouts of woven palm engorged in back with the tails of raccoons, women who bared their brown breasts and hung their bellies and flanks with Spanish moss like tropical growths of pubic hair. They piled up mounds of feasted shells that later whole farms would occupy, roared out to slaughter the fat manatee, dug coontie root and learned to wash it free of its alkaloid and pound it into white flour, harvested the land and the ocean and threw the waste over their shoulders and moved on. In other mounds they piled up their dead without ceremony, until a dream of death came down the peninsula from the interior of America, and then they saw through to the other side and began to leave tokens in the graves of those of their blood who would pass over. The idea of death brought an idea of life and they flowered out in decoration, scratched patterns on their pots, carved wooden deer heads with knives made from the teeth of sharks, pushed smoothed knucklebones through their ear lobes, took scalps and arms and legs from their enemies. And these, the Calusa and Tequesta, greeted the Spanish when they arrived. Greeted the Spanish with poisoned arrows and night hatchetings, but within 100 years most of them were gone, killed by new diseases or shipped off to slavery in Cuban sugar fields.

The Everglades was not fit to live on, not fit to farm. White men left it alone while they tackled the Northern wilderness. They pushed all the way to Oregon before they began to look seriously at the young peninsula that reached farther south than any other land in the United States. In the late 19th Century, sporadic efforts at drainage began. A muck dike went up along the lower rim of Lake Okeechobee to stop the spill of water and farmers moved in with cattle and sugar cane. Where the Everglades peat was exposed to the sun it began to oxidize, crumbling from fertile muck into gray silica-brightened ash that fed nothing. It is still oxidizing today and will be gone, the work of 5000 years, in a few decades. America's winter vegetable garden, Florida people call it.

The Okeechobee dike held the lake water back, but it was no match for hurricanes. One hit the lake in 1926 and drove the shallow water through the dike and killed 500 people determined (continued on page 154)Everglades(continued from page 116) enough to try to make their living on a flood plain. A worse hurricane hit in 1928 and this time rescue workers stacked the bodies up like cordwood and burned them because there was no place to bury them in the flooded ground. Two thousand people died. Herbert Hoover went to Florida to survey the destruction. The new levee he caused to be built on the south shore of the lake stands today. It began the Federal-state program to control the lake and the Everglades below, although most of the canal-work wasn't started until the late Forties, about the time President Truman announced the creation of a new national park at the lower end of the state.

Before the park, before even the more forgiving of the hurricanes, men planned a road from Miami to the Gulf and then north to Tampa. It would cross the Everglades east to west. To build it, a causeway had to be dredged beside a borrow canal above standing water. After dissension--some thought the name a joke--they agreed to call it the Tamiami Trail. Men waded the Everglades and Florida's western swamp and blasted their obstructions away with dynamite. Fought mosquitoes and saw grass and limestone to shovel a road west from Miami. They drilled spillways under the road to drain the sheet water south.

Today only that part of the Everglades that lies within the national park--less than seven percent of its original area--escapes direct control; and even that depends during the dry season on water draining into it from the spillways on the Tamiami Trail and from a new canal on the eastern edge of the park.

The Everglades south of Okeechobee for a distance of 25 miles is farmland. Three water-conservation areas now lie where most of the Everglades ran before. They are surrounded by canals and levees. The Central and Southern Florida Flood Control District, using stations constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers, pumps water into these areas for storage in dry times and pumps water out of them to the ocean in times of potential flood. They are maintained as wilderness areas, and as many people visit them for hunting and fishing and air-boating annually as visit the national park. But they are only historically Everglades, because the water flows through them now only at the behest of man. Nor are they particularly effective for storage. One scientist estimates that most of the rain water they catch is evaporated or transpired before it can be used. They are essentially shallow lagoons. It was in these areas that the worst of last winter's fires burned. It was in one of them, in 1966, when flood followed five years of drought, that the stress of high water killed thousands of deer. People blamed the Corps of Engineers. The Corps announced that the water-conservation area where the deer were killed had been designed not for wildlife preservation but for water control.

The park suffered during the same drought. Lacking the rainfall that supplies it with 80 percent of its water, it needed the flow south from Okeechobee, but the spillways on the Tamiami Trail were closed. The Corps explained that it had not planned the water-conservation system to feed the park.

Hurricanes in the Twenties, fires in 1945, flood in 1947, severe drought in the early Sixties, flood in 1966, more fires in 1970 and 1971--south Florida and the Everglades have had their woes. But cycles of flood and drought have always worked their changes on the south Florida landscape. The difference today is that men are there, men who are working their changes, too.

• • •

The jetport controversy has been resolved. Forty thousand flights a month still use the single training strip north of the Tamiami Trail above Everglades National Park, but the training strip will be moved and the jetport built elsewhere in Florida, on a site where the natural order has already given way completely to the man-made. It is worth remembering that the preservationists' victory was only a relative one. The jetport has not been canceled. It will only be moved, to a place where it will cause less damage because the damage has already been done. That is what rankles the landowners of southwest Florida. They have held their land for years, paid taxes on cypress swamp and wet prairie and everglades, waited their turn while the Gold Coast yielded up its wealth. The jetport would have sustained a major city. A Government far away, an Interior Secretary from Alaska, a President from California, denied them their dream. Gave it away to other landowners. Encouraged by wilderness activists and hordes of newsmen, just such people as Spiro Agnew warned against.

The dream of city building, the dream of land bought at $100 an acre and sold for $20,000, has not faded. The jetport released energies in south Florida that will not easily be discharged. Twenty-five years ago, the same landowners watched a new national park devour huge areas of Dade and Monroe counties. They say bitterly today what they must have thought bitterly then, that the park is already larger than the state of Delaware. They mean, how much land does a park need? And not a notably scenic park, at that, a water park, a biological park, a park for alligators and birds and gumbo-limbo trees. Then the jetport, a second chance. Lost because it would damage the park. Then, in 1970, the possibility that a leg of Interstate 75 might be cut from Naples to Miami to replace the Tamiami Trail. A panel of scientists and engineers recommended that no road at all be built. Florida's secretary of transportation compromised on Alligator Alley, which runs from Naples straight to Fort Lauderdale and avoids most of the Big Cypress. But even the new highway won't do landowners much good, because it will probably have few access roads.

Having successfully expelled the Everglades jetport, preservationists are now fighting to save the Big Cypress Swamp from development. Only from the Big Cypress does water still drift freely into the park. The preservationists would like the Federal Government to buy 500,000 acres north of the park to protect its western water supply, a supply that amounts to more than half of its dry-season flow. Burdened with deficits, the Nixon Administration would prefer to try to preserve the land without buying it by converting the Tamiami Trail into a scenic parkway and Federally zoning the swamp around it for recreation only.

The landowners, the big ones, are fighting back, and fighting the harder because they know this may be their last chance. Much of the Big Cypress was originally intended to be included in the park. It is still raw today, but development is beginning. New towns are going up on its western edge. A Miami real-estate firm is selling land within the park itself for "waterfront estates," land still privately owned because Congress has not yet provided funds to buy it. Oil companies would like to drill in the Big Cypress, laying down access roads that would further alter its sheet-water flow and encourage development. Speculators are dredging out canals. If the Everglades jetport was yesterday's south Florida controversy, the Big Cypress is today's.

• • •

You can walk in the Big Cypress, if you don't mind getting wet. Roberts Lake Strand is surrounded by Loop Road 94 in the heart of the land the preservationists hope Congress will buy. It is one of the smaller strands in the Big Cypress and one still unmarred except for the scars of old logging and the deprivations of boy scouts in search of cypress knees. The strand begins at roadside, a screen of brush and cypress trees. If you do not know the swamp, you do not enter it easily, no more easily than you would parachute for the first time from a plane. Panthers. Water moccasins. Alligators. The water creeps over your shoes. Firm bottom, sometimes bare limestone pitted with holes dissolved (continued on page 278)Everglades(continued from page 154) out over the centuries by plant acids, more often a tangle of leaves. Cool water, brown but entirely clear. Small plants like green stars grow on the bottom. You can drink the water. It tastes of plant decay, but no more so than most Florida water. The cypress trees close overhead and sunlight breaks fitfully through. Lichens grow on the tree trunks, gray-green, bright-green, even pink, and Loss soft as velvet, wet home for things too small to see. On the cypress branches sit air plants like isolated pineapples, their pointed leaves cupped to catch rain. Some of the air plants catch enough water to support life, natural aquariums with a crawfish and a tadpole or two up there in the trees. The nooks and crannies of life, a tadpole in an air plant on a cypress in the swamp. You realize you will not be attacked by predators and you relax, enjoying the cool water in the summer heat. You slog back into the swamp and farther back, heading toward a pond, passing a few cut stumps, then big trees never cut, trees that have grown in silence since before Columbus' first voyage, trees towering up to the sun like the columns of cathedrals. And rooted in the water, in the slow southward flow.

The pond is a clearing, one of the water holes around which the cypress grow. It is still choked with grass from last winter's drought. The grass will die, flooded out by summer rain and thrashed down by alligators. You wade to your waist in the water now, taking caution in the dense grass. Ahead of you, out of sight, frogs bleat and jump. The distance is exact, an exact territorial boundary. Cross the boundary and you throw a switch and the frogs bleat and jump. The grass is indifferent. It has grown and seeded. It has done its job. It hangs in bunches on your legs. From time to time you reach under the water and push the grass behind you. You are making an alligator trail. You are an alligator pushing through lime grass in the Florida sun. You reach the edge of the pond and climb over a floating log and re-enter the cypress shade. You could walk into eternity in a cypress swamp. It has no corners. It is not abstract and knows no titles nor plats. It flows and changes in patterns we are only dimly beginning to understand. The south Florida ecosystem has been seriously studied for less than 30 years.

If you find bogeymen in a cypress swamp, then you put them here. It is only itself, green in tooth and claw. It is what we left behind, territorial frogs and silent trees. You could live here if you took the trouble to learn how. An alligator might get you. There are worse deaths. Death means nothing and less than nothing here. Death leads back to life as surely as a circle turns in upon itself. If you died, the moss would still hang from the trees and the air plants still sit like comic birds, nursing along a tadpole or two. The resurrection ferns, come summer and summer rain, would still resurrect. The gods who designed the swamp had a sense of humor. They put air plants on the trees and green-gray pads of periphyton in the water and they canceled death. The periphyton is spongy and slippery. You can mold it like clay. It feeds small things that feed larger things that eventually feed alligators, and the alligators belch and bed down in cypress ponds. Gar hover like broken branches. Leaves float by. A spider shakes its web strung on struts that reach high up into the trees. Cypress knees bend above the water. They might be shaggy ladies offering an accommodation. "How could anyone want to tear this beautiful place down?" asks my guide, a friend of the earth. How could they not, with its old mysteries scratching at their souls? It denies them their sovereignties. It reminds them that life, all life, their own life, too, is a swarm of molecules thrown up momentarily in fantastic shapes and washed down and thrown up again, like waves breaking forever against a shore. Cowering behind antique metaphysics, believing life a constitutional right and death an obscenity, most of us find such reminders hard to cherish.

• • •

As love does when it decays, the debate over the future of the Big Cypress Swamp is rapidly resolving into a power struggle. Those who believe some wild land should be preserved in America, for itself and as a hedge against the unknown effects of massive ecological change, are fighting to preserve the Big Cypress. Those who believe the land is infinitely bountiful and was put here for human use are fighting to develop the Big Cypress. Wedged between the two positions is the tender science of ecology, and it is no more capable of taking a clear stand than a child is capable of deciding between parents in a divorce.

Joe Browder, Washington director of the Friends of the Earth and the man more responsible than any other for bringing the Everglades jetport to national attention and national censure, thinks that Big Cypress development would be a catastrophe. "Failure to protect that portion of the Big Cypress that supplies water to Everglades National Park," he has written, "would, in addition to destroying the existing natural values in much of the Everglades, decrease water supply and increase water demand in southwest Florida to such a degree that additional pressures would be placed on the other major Everglades watershed, the saw-grass glades managed by the [Flood Control District]. The extra water demands would diminish the supply available for urban, industrial and agricultural users in southeast Florida, and would further stimulate the conflict between all other users and Everglades National Park."

Landowners in Collier County, the county in southwest Florida that includes most of the Big Cypress, disagree. They believe the water is plentiful, the swamp useless and dangerous, development desirable and water into the park merely a matter of aiming a few canals its way. Their plans, they have said publicly, "could make this park into a living garden for wildlife and plant life the year round." It is that already, but never mind.

The facts, as far as they are known, fall somewhere between.

The Big Cypress is presently an unusual and largely undamaged south Florida swamp, most of it privately owned. All of its water comes from rain. The rain that falls on the Big Cypress recharges the fresh-water aquifer that supplies water for human use on the southwest coast of the state. It is the only natural water supply available to the coast. When the aquifer is full, water left standing on the ground drifts slowly down into the coastal portion of Everglades National Park, maintaining the life there under natural conditions.

If the Big Cypress were drained, its ecology would be altered from that of a swamp to that of dry land. Most of the life that thrives there would die off. So would the coastal estuary. The park would take its water from canals and the canals would certainly change and might permanently disrupt the ecology of the land within the park itself. The park's chief biologist, William Robertson, thinks the effects of development "highly unpredictable" but probably damaging.

The Water Resources Division of the United States Geological Survey, in a report prepared for Interior Secretary Walter Hickel before he left Washington, implied that controlled development of the Big Cypress would cause some damage to the park but would not seriously impair the Gulf Coast's water supply. "No estimate is available," the report said, "of the total water-supply potential of [the western Big Cypress]. The present total water use in those areas is insignificant compared with the quantity evaporated, transpired and discharged through the canal systems."

Draining the Big Cypress, then, would deliver up an enormous tract of land for human use. It would destroy the Big Cypress itself. It would turn the park into a giant zoo, an ecosystem that would look natural to casual visitors but would, in fact, be artificially maintained through canals. Pesticides used for mosquito control in the new towns north of the park would take their toll on the park, but the effects would be long-term. Any adverse effects on the Gulf Coast water supply would also be long-term.

The question of the Big Cypress becomes a long-term question, though it must be answered now, before development proceeds any further: What kind of future do the people of south Florida envision for themselves? And that question is part of a larger dilemma: What kind of future do all of us in America envision for ourselves? Assuming that we have a choice, do we want to live entirely in cities under artificial conditions or do we want a little of the natural world around us?

• • •

The larger dilemma begins to answer itself not in the speeches of our leaders but in the actions of individual citizens moving forward along parallel lines. We laid out the land long ago, in square sections that looked logical on a map but had nothing to do with the natural divisions of the land itself and little to do with the interests of the people who lived on it. Nowhere did the fine enlightened minds that devised our Constitution fail us more completely. Over the grid of sections they fitted a Balkanized grid of political institutions, of townships and counties and states. Each had its particular sovereignties. Each developed its particular structures of power, some informal, some legally constituted. The old boundaries worked when the nation was poor in people and overrich in resources. They worked when those who differed from the established authorities had at least the possibility of moving on.

The boundaries are strained almost to breaking today, and the points of stress locate problems the entire nation is scrambling to solve. Our cities need money because their legal boundaries no longer define the metropolitan areas in which we live, areas that may well cut across village, town, city, county and even state lines, areas chopped up into small authorities that drain away tax money to duplicate services the city has traditionally supplied. Citizens in nearly every state struggle with state legislatures still gerrymandered to give dominance to rural interests. Pollution control continues by law to be the responsibility of state and local governments, while pollution blows across boundary lines. The shape of our political institutions no longer matches the shape of our purposes and our need.

Consider Florida. The Everglades, which is all one watershed from Okeechobee to Cape Sable, is divided into three counties, a state-Federal water-conservation district and a national park, each with its own priorities of water and development.

The Big Cypress Swamp is being developed by men who have no legal nor political responsibility to consider the ultimate effects of that development. The area of the Big Cypress that preservationists would like the Federal Government to buy is located in Monroe and Collier counties. Many of the large developers live in Miami. The Monroe County seat is located in Key West, 100 miles away across Florida Bay.

Lake Okeechobee supplies water for Miami and most of Florida's Gold Coast. The water that feeds Okeechobee and is beginning to pollute it with pesticides and fertilizers rushes down the channelized Kissimmee River from farms and towns to the north, farms and towns that draw their own water supply from sources other than the big lake.

The list could be longer and it could be duplicated anywhere in America. It demonstrates a failure of responsibility on the part of institutions that no longer fit our needs but are unwilling to rearrange the authority they have held for so many years. But we have never been a people to let institutions stand in our way. When they have not worked, we have either abolished them or left them to die of neglect while we moved on to others that could do the job we wanted done. That is why a few activist men and women could work through the courts, the press, the television networks and the lobbies of Congress to convince a President that he should personally cancel one county-sponsored jetport. That is why Congress, not the state of Florida nor the governments of Collier and Monroe counties, will probably find some way to buy or otherwise control the Big Cypress Swamp. But that is also why the battle to save the wild lands, in south Florida and elsewhere, has been so difficult for those who believe land deserves its day in court as surely as people do: because the idea is new and the institutions that will make it work are still being shaped.

The battle may be won, if there is time. No one knows how much time is left. However abstractly we divided the land, and however much we may want today to redivide it into shapes more consistent with its natural patterns, it has never been attendant to our laws. It changes with the certainty of old laws of chemistry and physics. We can misuse it, if that is what we are doing, for an unknown length of time before it fails to serve our needs; but when that time is up, it fails suddenly and totally and without much hope of recovery. Poisonous organisms have already appeared at the northern end of Lake Okeechobee. Miami imposed water rationing last winter. "The Everglades," says Arthur Marshall, an ecologist at the University of Miami who has studied south Florida for 22 years, "has all the symptoms of environmental stress and approaching catastrophic decline."

Perhaps it has. The men who believe the Lord gave us land to build on aren't worried. "Look at the Dutch," one of them, Ben Shepard, a commissioner of the Dade County Port Authority, said recently. "They completely destroyed the ecology of their land and yet it's supporting human life satisfactorily. The Dutch are some of the best-adjusted, most prosperous, happiest people today." Shepard's is the old voice, the voice of a practical farmer and businessman. It probably does him no justice to recite John Maynard Keynes's jape at such men. "Practical men," he said, "who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." Because Florida, having everything else, also has its own little Netherlands: Key West.

• • •

Key West. A waterless island of fossilized coral surrounded by the sea. If the continent were water and the water land, Key West is where all the sweetness and bitterness, all the honey and sour acids of our complicated American lives would drain. The southernmost point in the United States. Land's end. Old glory and present decay. Haven for disgruntled Cubans paddling the 90 miles from Havana on rafts of canvas and old inner tubes. Tourist trap meringued with key lime pie. Swabbies' town clipped to a drab naval base where black submarines cruise the harbor like sharks. Where developers reclaim land from the sea, the dying mangroves stinking of sulphur. Where an aquarium displays ocean fish in narrow tanks, white fungus blinding their eyes. Hemingway's home and Audubon's shrine.

Some of Key West's water comes from the Everglades. When the Navy decided to settle permanently on the island, it ran a pipeline down the Overseas Highway to supply it with water. Before the pipeline came in, the natives collected rain water in cisterns behind their houses or bought it from commercial cisterns that dotted the island like small-town Mexican jails. With its population growing today in response to the tourist trade, Key West has gone to desalinization. Westinghouse built it a $4,000,000 plant, the largest of its kind in the United States. If we run out of water, we can always distill the sea. With water, the motels in Key West may fill their swimming pools for tourists who come to see the turtle stockyards or to bend an elbow in Hemingway's favorite bar, hung with parachute canopies and open to the street. And no one can complain of ecological damage, because there isn't much you can do to a dry Florida key once you've kicked out the dwarf key deer. There ought to be no wilderness here at all, except the wilderness of the sea, but even here, the wilderness intrudes like a hypodermic straining blood into a dying man.

Hemingway's house hangs back on a side street, a wide, gracious house surrounded on four sides' with gardens and tropical trees--a huge banyan, shading palms, a royal poinciana with all its fired flowers burning. Cats prowl the corridors and sleep under the trees. Here the man lived for years, tightening down the screws on his inner life even as his public life thickened with poisonous fame, writing less and less well. Describing love with the naïveté of a schoolgirl. Hunting Nazi submarines in the Caribbean. Converting heroism into mere bravado by dividing it from its vital source, the idea of death, his best and only theme, the theme he avoided more and more. Avoided until it killed him.

He was a hunter and a fisherman. He tried to come to grips with the land and the sea and at his occasional best he succeeded as well as anyone ever has; but to hunt and to fish is only to use the natural world, and to recover that world in all its intimacy, you must be used by it, must give yourself up to it as nakedly as any Indian. He could not. He walked the narrow catwalk to his study over the garage and sharpened his pencils and fought to find feelings he progressively lost because he could not bear the crowd of fantasies that came with them. "There is no timber," an Irish playwright once wrote, "that has not strong roots among the clay and worms." You must be buried alive like a seed or a larva to grow up into the sun, and to write about that growth you must willingly bury yourself alive over and over again. Paralyzed by private grief, Hemingway wielded his shovel clumsily over his own grave. Below his study, so they say in Key West, in a rusted steel safe, Hemingway's last wife found the manuscripts he had locked away there from prying eyes. She would publish them after his death to add a few thousand years more to his trial in purgatory. He bent to the wilderness and it devoured him.

Audubon owned no house in Key West, but he stayed in one that is more than a match for Hemingway's. It is a shrine today, decked out with expensive antiques that command more attention than they deserve. The house belonged to a Key West salvager named Geiger, a plump, bespectacled old scholar and hypocrite who made his living hauling in the lucrative stores of ships wrecked on the coral reef east of the island. Key West was a wealthy town when Miami was still an Indian village, and the islanders weren't above rearranging reef markers to keep it that way. Captain Geiger salvaged with the best of them and got rich on the proceeds.

Down came Audubon one day to work up the Florida birds. The captain housed him, a rare bird himself. Once, in New Orleans, broke, months from home and marriage bed, Audubon accepted a beautiful woman's commission to paint her portrait. He hauled his palette to her back-street house and found her naked before him on a couch. She lay naked for ten long afternoons while he stared and cartooned and oiled. It was the most difficult commission he ever accepted, he told a friend later.

He brought the same compaction of frustrated lust to his birds. They perch life-size in the pages of the enormous elephant folios displayed today in Captain Geiger's house. Audubon's eye raped them alive, tore them free from the clay and the worms. They rend their prey or fix the water at their feet with high metabolic intensity or poise to leap from the paper and claw out your heart. He saw the wilderness through them, made them transparent as any lantern slide. Their hollow whistling bones and their racing wings beat from the interstices of the creamy paper against which they were thrown. Making them, building them up with remembered motions of the eye and the hand that first described them alive in the Everglades, he lived with the fear that trickled sweat down his back and pushed through to the swarming mystery beyond. The Aztec priests who never cut their hair and never knew a woman molded seeds and fresh human blood and black dirt into idols in black rooms off the main halls of their temples, and Audubon, sweating in an upstairs parlor at raffish Captain Geiger's house in Key West, molded seeds and blood and black dirt into birds and discovered the essential Florida, the Florida that not even the most ardent preservationist dares speak of, the Florida that sent William Bartram into paroxysms of bliss and Samuel Coleridge into opium dreams. Why, the wilderness is insane. It destroys us with pluralities. It skins off our flesh and shows us branching vessels and twitching meat and bubbling fluids and bones round and sturdy as tree trunks. The alligator in its drying pond chews up its young, the wild boar breeds moaning with its mother, the panther licks its wet member, the mantis eats the male it has coupled with, the strangler fig chokes to death its parent tree, the shrimp feasts on rot and the buzzard on decay and the proud eagle on carrion, and we see into ourselves and are horrified to live in such a world, a world that so mirrors our own depths, that delights in acts we have thought depraved, have worked from the beginning of our consciousness to fence in and legislate away. We wear pants and write laws and turn over the earth and only at the climax of our feverish couplings do we dimly sense how far we have removed ourselves from the moment-by-moment ecstasies of any animal's ordinary day. And that is one reason to keep what is left of wilderness in this civilized land, not to fish and hunt but to see the complexities that lie dormant within us, the possibilities we have not yet understood, because Shakespeare and the old Indian tales and the myths of Greece and Rome together do not begin to reveal as many metamorphoses as one walk through a cypress swamp or one descent into a coral reef. Audubon knew and pushed through his fear to the other side and came back bird-maddened and showed us what he saw, the Florida that pulses inside. And for his trouble he is enshrined today on a barren Florida key fed by foul water recovered from the ocean. That is Key West, a little Netherlands. We can convert the whole continent over if we choose. Look at the Dutch.

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When we came to Florida, my wife and two children and I, we took a house on the white beach at Naples, and we returned to it now by air from Key West like birds returning to an old and favored nest. At Naples the land meets the sea casually. Nothing here of rugged coast nor coral reef. You must swim out seven miles to find a depth of 30 feet. No undertow will claim you, nor any shark. Deceptive shallows, as Florida with its imperceptible seaward tilt is deceptive, a beach itself dropping slowly into the water, a ramp on which the smallest creature may generation by generation crawl out onto the land. We came from the sea, by degrees teaching our flesh to wrap the sea inside it. It courses through us every day of our lives, reddened now with hungry iron. We never returned. The fish left the sea and returned, most of them. Their blood, like ours, is less salty than sea water, because while they lived in the estuaries or in fresh water, the sea increased its load of salt leached from the land. The shark with his bitter blood never left the sea. He is old and well adapted. Older still are the airless bacteria that lie at the bottom of the lakes we have poisoned and the most terrible of disease organisms we suffer, botulism and tetanus and gas gangrene. The airless bacteria evolved before the fresh wind blew across the face of the world, evolved in vapors of methane and a saltless world of water. And learned to encyst themselves against the deadly oxygen that gives us life. Learned to wait their turn in a world gone wild with life. They wait now and will always be waiting, until sun and fresh air sting them no more.

Florida summer oppresses. Sweat collects. Clothes do not dry. You move in an invisible cloud of steam, smelling sea metals and the dust of palm trees. Sun on the white beach reverses colors in your eyes. At low tide, in the early evening, beachcombers pull piles of Naples starfish from the wet sand and lay them out on towels to dry, to die. My son flushes an ivory crab from its hole. It stands high on jointed legs, its eyes like black pearls glued to its carapace, and it turns in little jumps to face the boy as he moves. It is a head without a trunk, jumping on jointed legs. It skitters sideways and collects itself and runs away to dig another hole and wait in the shadow inside, and the boy is awed to silence.

Near sunset, the pier down the beach that reaches out 1000 feet into the Gulf fills up with fishermen. Young people with long hair, elderly couples in pale-blue shorts and yachting caps. A hunch back whose shrunken legs dangle over the rim of his wheelchair. A fat woman with curlers in her cropped gray hair, smoking a pipe, her enormous breasts hanging loose beneath a dirty T-shirt. Fish flop on the pier and lie still, one silver eye fixed on the moon. Schools, universities of bream flash among the pilings, bream enough to repopulate the ocean if it were ever in need, bream that sound the water like an orchestra of harps as they jump and dodge the predators that chase them. A black ray, one of its wings chopped off for bait, stains the pier. The tension of the fishermen smells like boiling lead. They have come out to catch fish in the low tide. Men cast their lines and reel them up. Boys drop lines between the floor boards and lie on their bellies peering into the darkness below. A woman baits the four prongs of a hook as big as a man's fist. Back on the land a mosquito-control truck pumps mists of Dibrom through the streets and Naples disappears like Brigadoon. Brown pelicans, birds as comic and serene as Polynesian girls, birds that look like benevolent pterodactyls, circle the water beside the pier and casually fold their wings and dive and bring up fish no fisherman can touch. And fly a little way off and settle on the water and flip the fish in the air and swallow them.

The sun thickens to a giant red ball. It touches the water and flattens out at its base. The lead tension holds, vibrating like a dulled gong. At the moment of the sun's setting, everyone on the pier stops fishing and looks up to watch, pulled alert by an old compulsion. The water and the sky turn pink. The red ball grows, careless of the energy that gives everything in the world its single life. It drops into the ocean, feeding the water. Something breaks inside. The sea has eaten the sun. A few at a time, the fishermen reel up and walk away. The Dibrom settles on trees and houses and Naples returns to life minus mosquitoes. Out of sight in the swamp, in the saw grass, living mosquitoes sniff the air, the males searching nectar, the females seeking blood.

Florida night. The thunderstorms of late afternoon have blown away. The sun has set and the fishermen are gone. The moon is down. On the porch of our house, I am drinking bourbon and talking to a friend of the earth. It is our last night in Florida and we are ready to return home, because Florida has come to seem some enormous conspiracy of contentious men and pregnant silence and I need distance to sort it out. The friend of the earth believes the wild lands will be saved because they must be if he is to find any peace in the world. Bitter at the confusion of my own life, I believe they will be turned and plowed and paved, so that homes can be built where children will grow up guarded from the stews of birth and the stink of death, out of sight of the real life of the world. He is optimistic and his optimism makes no sense. We have everywhere destroyed the wilderness, raging and whimpering as we went. Yet he believes we will put aside our old autocracies and become natural democrats.

My wife remembers then a time, as a child, when she found a shell on the Naples beach and took it to her Victorian grandmother, who told her to throw it into a pot of boiling water to clean it out. A child, she did, and something alive shot out of the shell and flailed its legs in agony up to the roiling surface of the water and died, died as terribly as anything can ever die. She understood later what it was, a hermit crab. She would never again clean out a shell. The friend of the earth remembers a time when he was lost in the mountains of New Mexico and feared that he would die. He walked out in three days without food, marveling that he had felt, after the first day, no hunger, only the compulsion to put one font in front of the other lest he lie down and give up. He is camping in the same mountains as I write.

We are a wild species, Darwin said. We were never scientifically bred. We are a various and colorful pack of mongrels, and the wilderness made us what we are: It is the place from which we came and the place, clay and worms, where we shall go. For most of the life of man, we could not live with that knowledge. Rather than live with it, we pushed the wilderness away from us, as a child pushes away the mother who would smother him with complexity. We go into the wilderness today, what is left of it, to find out who we are; but that is not the reason we should preserve it. We should preserve it because we need to know now, and our children and our children's children will need even more to know later, that we are not finally compelled by our raging and whimpering always and forever to destroy, that we are not entirely wedded to death. We need to leave a little food on our plates to prove that we are not impoverished. We need magnanimity, more today than we have ever needed it before.

At midnight we wade into the Gulf, my wife and the friend of the earth and I, into one small shore of the sea. The sky is clear and filled with stars, constellations we can see, formations we have never named, galaxies and suns too far from us for any except spiritual vision. They glow over the swamp, over the Everglades, over the great ramp of land that rises out of the water to cause men contention they have not yet decided how to still. Shall there be homes on the land? Oil pumped out of it? Water drawn up to wash away sweat and the spendings of the night? Shall old lizards crawl through muck there, green moss riding on their backs? And birds nest and the used shells of their eggs drop through the branches to float on the brown water? The things that live there, in the grass and in the swamp, will not know nor care what we do. They will go on as they have or they will not go on at all. They do not choose. They only live. And the sharks circle forever, waiting for their prey.

The sea water glows around our bodies as we move: night plankton; they come alive with light in the moving water we make, dots, sparkles, flashes, flares. We stare under water at a flood of stars glowing around the tips of our fingers, lighting our kicking feet and our stroking arms. They were here all along in the bright day and we did not know. We swirl them into light and they decorate us, imitating the stars above, microscopic things glowing in the water like the giant stars reduced by incomprehensible distances to points of white in the black sky. The stars in the sky and night plank ton making stars in the water wherever we go: layers, and layers under layers down into the very center of things, and layers there too small to see, and layers below those layers until the head swims and still more layers then. We are no more divided from the world than the water itself is divided. When we damage the world, we damage ourselves. If we destroy it, we destroy ourselves. A piece at a time, we think, a part at a time, but the world has no pieces and does not come apart. Wherever we put our hands, points of energy trail off from us like the tails of comets. The tree that falls without sound falls within our hearing.