Good riddance to Norton; take a different approach
Editorial /Palm Beach Post /Mar 15
Gale Norton was a terrible interior secretary because she did what President Bush wanted her to do.Rather than protect public lands, she tried to open them to the oil, gas and mining industries. A protégé of the equally awful James Watt, who served under Ronald Reagan, Ms. Norton learned from her mentor. She spent five years turning the department's mission on its head by exploiting public lands for private profit. There isn't much good news coming out of the Bush administration these days, but Ms. Norton's resignation, which she announced Friday, will do for now.When it comes to environmental desecration, Ms. Norton was a career, habitual offender. The following examples are just part of her rap sheet. Among her many offenses, Ms. Norton:Worked to open the eastern Gulf of Mexico to oil drilling, threatening Florida's beaches and tourist industry and giving oil-friendly states control of ...

Land-buy proposal comes with a catch
C Pittman & M Waite /St Pete Times /Mar 14
Last fall, when state officials voted to spend $350-million to buy a Charlotte County ranch that's home to panthers and bears, environmental advocates worried that the Florida Forever land-buying program would run short of cash.So state Rep. Trudi Williams, R-Fort Myers, has filed a bill to double the amount the state spends buying environmentally sensitive land.But there's a catch: The bill also calls for the state to take over the federal job of issuing permits to destroy wetlands of 10 acres or smaller.Developers say the change will speed up government permission to wipe out wetlands."This will trim the bureaucratic nightmare," said Pensacola developer Dan Gilmore, leading the Florida Home Builders Association's push for the bill.The prospect outrages environmental advocates."I don't think the state is institutionally capable of turning down a permit," said Lesley Blackner, a West Pal ...

FAU researchers urge area to work with South Fla. on growth issues
Jim Turner /TCPalm /Mar 16
STUART — Treasure Coast governments need to work with their South Florida counterparts, rather than continue looking at their self-interests regarding traffic, housing, commerce and education, if they want to ensure a positive economic and environmental future for the entire region, Florida Atlantic University researchers said Thursday. Faced with additional demands on a limited water supply, development encroaching upon the Everglades, increased transit problems, and the prospects of a racially diverse mix of 2.5 million new residents over the next 25 years crowding into the seven-county region from Indian River south to Monroe counties, the Center for Urban and Environmental Solutions at Florida Atlantic University released a report Thursday that outlined four generalized scenarios that confront South Florida. However, only through one scenario could things work out well both economica ...

Tests indicate risk to Dade's drinking water
Curtis Morgan /Miami Herald /Mar 17
Faucets flowed with shocking pink within hours after the test dye was injected into the Biscayne Aquifer.County administrators have long worried that the limerock industry's plans to carve up 21,000 acres of Northwest Miami-Dade posed a threat to the source of drinking water for more than one million people.The contamination risk now appears even higher than they suspected.New findings from federal scientists and consultants suggest a half-mile no-mining protection zone around 15 key wells in the heart of the mining district is too small. According to the draft of one county study, the zone is perhaps several miles too small.The studies, notably a dye test that left faucets flowing shocking pink, tracked water moving far faster underground than expected -- possibly too fast for the porous limestone buffer to filter out a nasty parasite called cryptosporidium. ...

Congress threatens to cut funding for Everglades cleanup
William Gibson /Sun Sentinel /Mar 17
WASHINGTON -- Growing concern in Congress that Florida is failing to sufficiently clean up water pollution has jeopardized federal funding for a massive Everglades restoration project.This concern, along with a tight federal budget and competing requests for other projects around the country, come as Congress prepares to divvy up appropriations for next fiscal year.Those who hold the purse strings on Capitol Hill strongly back restoration of the Everglades and praise Florida's recent bold moves to acquire land and contribute state funds for the re-plumbing project. But some key members warn that apparent state attempts to end or reduce a court-ordered cleanup of phosphorus, much of it from farmland near the Everglades, could discourage Congress from providing full funding for next fiscal year.``We're looking for things to cut,'' ...

Quagmire: How America Learned to Love the Everglades
Elizabeth Hoover /American Heritage /Mar 06
Everyone knows that Everglades National Park is a national treasure. It’s a unique ecosystem, a river of grass 50 miles wide and often less than a foot deep, home to storks and ibises, alligators and crocodiles, mangroves andmahogany trees. But as Michael Grunwald explains in his highly entertaining new book, The Swamp: The Everglades,Florida, and the Politics of Paradise, for a long time it was regarded as a dismal bog that needed to be drained,incinerated, and exploited.Grunwald, a journalist for the Washington Post, Slate, and The New Republic, begins his lively history 200 millionyears ago, when South Florida emerged from the ocean during the last ice age. He describes the Everglades as “avast sheet of water spread across a seemingly infinite prairie of serrated sawgrass, a liquid expanse of mutedgreens and browns extending to the horizon. It has the panoramic sweep of a desert, exce ...

Algae bloom choking the life out of Indian River Lagoon
Suzanne Wentley /Sun Sentinel /Mar 16
State scientists began an investigation Wednesday into the cause of a thick blanket of reddish-brown algae piled along the banks of the Indian River Lagoon, after being alerted to the problem by Indian River Drive residents.Dead stingrays, catfish and horseshoe crabs were found trapped in large clumps of seaweed, which had begun to decay and stink like sewage. Underneath, shaded sea grass beds were starting to die, residents said.The algae bloom, which can occur annually, has happened this year in much colder water and at a much greater magnitude, residents said. Such an early bloom could warn of even worse problems throughout the lagoon this summer.There is also concern the bloom could be related to a different kind of algae -- which forms gray foam on the water -- in Brevard County and another seaweed bloom on Florida's west coast."This is going on all around Florida," said Kevin Stinn ...

'La Nina' winds blowing state a parched spring
Craig Pittman /St Pete Times /Mar 20
How dry is it? Firefighters judge the level of a drought on an index that goes from 0 to 800, with higher numbers being the driest. As of Sunday, some sections of Palm Beach and Hendry counties south of Lake Okeechobee were in the 600s. A stretch from Naples to Stuart topped 500, as did several hot spots in the Panhandle.This is just the beginning. The weather is likely to stay this dry all spring, forecasters say.Blame La Nina. The opposite of the rainy El Nino weather pattern, a La Nina occurs when unusually cold water in the Pacific Ocean impedes the formation of clouds above the surface, so that winds blowing across the sea carry less moisture to the southern United States.Thanks to the hurricanes of the past two years, Madden said, the woods are full of fallen timber and dried-out vegetation ready to turn a spark into a conflagration."There's a lot of fuel on the ground and it's had ...

Culpepper Ranch in Martin County may be bought for $37.8 million
staff /TCPalm /Mar 22
The 1,280-acre Culpepper Ranch in southernmost Martin County could soon be in public ownership as part of the effort to restore the Everglades. The South Florida Water Management District is poised to buy the ranch from owner James Moran for $37.8 million over three years at no interest, said Ruth Clements, the district's land acquisition director. ...

Mining permits hit legal snag
Curtis Morgan /Miami Herald /Mar 23
A Miami federal judge on Wednesday ordered two agencies to take a new, harder look at the threats that rock mining poses to the public water supply, to wildlife and to the Everglades, saying that permits they issued four years ago are riddled with ``a multitude of defects.''Senior U.S. District Judge William Hoeveler found that the federal agencies -- the Army Corps of Engineers and the Fish and Wildlife Service -- rushed to what seemed a predetermined approval of the limerock industry's controversial plan to carve up 77.5 square miles of northwest Miami-Dade County.In the process, he wrote in a scathing and exhaustive 186-page opinion, the agencies rebuffed concerns from Miami-Dade County managers about contamination threats to the county's largest wellfield and ''apparently were overly influenced'' by pressure from Florida lawmakers and ''menacing threats'' of lawsuit from miners.The r ...

Speciality license tags fund research of green sea turtles in Lake Worth Lagoon
Peter Franceschina /Sun Sentinel /Mar 23
Researchers spent three days this week out on the Lake Worth Lagoon in pursuit of the secret, mysterious lives of green sea turtles.The young turtles proved a little more elusive than in times past, with only five of the creatures caught during the outings. Not a whole lot is known about the life cycle of the green sea turtle, but the lagoon is one popular stop for the turtles on their long journey to maturity."We want to know more about the part of the life history we don't know about," said Dean Bagley, a biologist and research associate at the University of Central Florida. "We are trying to understand what turtles do. We have this endangered animal we try to protect. We try to understand where they go."The study, now entering its second year, is being carried out by InWater Research Group, a nonprofit group of biologists and researchers specializing in turtle conservation. The work i ...

Judge denies bid for mining permits
Robert Nolin /Sun Sentinel /Mar 23
A federal judge Wednesday blocked permits for 10 companies that wanted to mine limestone in 5,000 acres of west Miami-Dade County.The ruling encouraged environmentalists, who said the project would threaten the Everglades and raise bacteria levels in drinking water. It could also affect residents in southwest Miramar who say previous blasting from the mines damaged their homes.U.S. District Judge William Hoeveler said permits for the companies, including Tarmac America Inc. and Rinker Materials Corp., were improperly granted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Those agencies, Hoeveler said, did not adequately evaluate the project's effect on the environment."This is a good day for the Everglades," said John Adornato of the National Parks Conservation Association. "The judge has made a very strong opinion in favor of the environment."The Army Corps an ...

Katrina: The Big One Or Just a Warning Shot?
Michael Grunwald /Washington Post /Mar 26
Hurricane Katrina was America's deadliest natural disaster since the Florida hurricane of 1928, which killed 2,500 people in the Everglades. And the parallels were uncanny: The ignored warnings. The Category 4 winds. The levee failures. The giant lake unleashed upon the people of the lowlands. Most of them poor. Most of them black.The storm of 1928 led to a radical overhaul of Florida's flood-control system. For better and for worse, the policies adopted after the disaster helped transform the state's southern thumb from sparsely inhabited swampland into a sprawling suburban megalopolis. They also helped cripple the Everglades, which is now the subject of the largest-ever environmental restoration project.When Katrina drowned New Orleans, I had just finished a book about Florida and the Everglades, so I had flashbacks to 1928. I wondered whether history would repeat itself, or whether Ne ...

Indiantown canal reservoir construction starts
staff /TCPalm /Mar 25
State water managers on Friday celebrated work under way to construct the first project of the local $1.2 billion Everglades restoration effort. Preliminary work on a 3,400-acre reservoir and 6,200-acre stormwater cleansing facility along the St. Lucie Canal began Feb. 18, but officials heralded the water quality work on site Friday. Construction of "test cells," which will help model and design final plans for the full $330 million project, also marked the beginning of the third such reservoir project recently implemented by the state. The reservoir project, designed to cleanse and store up to 65 percent of the water flowing from nearby farms and homes, is expected to be completed by Dec. 31, 2009. ...

Not all lobbyists are the same
Amie Parnes /Naples Daily News /Mar 25
WASHINGTON — If you happened upon April Gromnicki's business card, you'd notice she holds the title of "assistant director of government relations" at the environmental group Audubon. That's the formal way of saying she's a (gasp) lobbyist. In the wake of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, the job title has become synonymous with money-hungry, glad-handing weasels — and that's on a good day. But Gromnicki insists she's one of the good guys, and some may argue that she is. After all, she's not exactly lobbying on behalf of the tobacco industry. Instead, she spends her days trying to land funding and then more funding for the ecosystem. One of her main responsibilities is to lobby for funding for the Everglades. I cornered Gromnicki one recent afternoon and made her give me the skinny on what her job is really like, especially with the dark clouds over the lobbying industry. Here's what s ...

Scientists say reef may be dying
Suzanne Wentley /Sun Sentinel /Mar 25
ST. LUCIE INLET STATE PRESERVE · Covered in murky, brown water for months, this isolated park's coral reef is beginning to die.Local scientists who dove the reef on the north end of Jupiter Island recently discovered the first major outbreak of coral bleaching -- a sign of stress that can lead to death -- with around 15 percent of the coral reef already dead."It's the worst we've ever seen it,"said Jeff Beal, marine habitat coordinator with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. "It probably took many months of water quality problems for those corals to finally start bleaching and dying."The 6-square-mile reef, the northernmost tropical coral reef in America, is just south of the inlet -- where polluted water discharges from Lake Okeechobee and nearby homes and farms have created a dark water plume for miles into the Atlantic Ocean.Scientists said the murky waters, along ...

Climate Shift Research Predicts Smaller Florida
Neil Johnson /Tampa Bay Tribune /Mar 24
Rising sea temperatures and melting ice caps will raise the sea level 3 feet by the next century, according to newresearch into the effects of global warming.The research, by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., and at theUniversity of Arizona, predicts a slow rise that will accelerate as the century draws to a close, affectingcoastlines around the world. "Although the focus of our work is polar, the implications are global," said BetteOtto-Bliesner, a paleoclimate specialist at the research center in Boulder.With its low terrain, the changes would be profound in Florida.If the sea level rose 3 feet, the Everglades could become a shallow sea, Tampa Bay could double in size, the Keyscould vanish and rivers would become estuaries, said Albert C. Hine, a marine science professor at the Universityof South Florida. Although the rise would be slow at fi ...