Tomorrowland (11 page)

Celestial dreamers studying Mars have coined a catchall for this sort of mega-engineering:
terraforming
. Down here in South Florida, where all that separates dry land from wet sea is a bit of limestone and landfill, there’s a new word in play:
hydroforming
. But whatever the terminology, the idea of rebuilding ecosystems from scratch has always been the stuff of science fiction — a way
of preparing a distant and environmentally hostile planet for human colonization. Terraforming or, in this case, hydroforming, was never meant to be a game played here on Earth.

Then dire ecological necessity changed the game.

2.

Lou Toth is the chief scientist in charge of river restoration for the South Florida Water Management District and my guide to the hydroforming. The tour starts sixty-five miles east of Tampa, on a boat, on the Kissimmee, the great feeder river of the Everglades. The water is dark, the day hot. Off in the distance, cattle egrets perch in oak trees, and nearer to the shore are great blue herons, their wings spread wide in flight. It’s quite a vista, enough to make one believe this is pristine nature, untouched by man, undisturbed by civilization. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In 1962, working on flood control instructions from Congress, the Army Corps set out to tether the Kissimmee. It yanked out a ruler, drew a straight line down the middle of the state, and got out shovels. By 1971, two-thirds of the floodplain was drained, and one-third of the river was filled in with dirt. The river’s languid S-curves were replaced by one monster ditch: 56 miles long, 300 feet wide, and 30 feet deep.

“Before the Corps came along,” says Toth, “this river was beautiful. It had some of the best fishing in the world, it was a treasure. Afterward, it was a muddy mess.”

Creating that muddy mess was also expensive, costing taxpayers $30 million at the time. But that’s nothing compared to the price of reversing devastation. Simply restoring the Kissimmee — forget about the Everglades proper — will run taxpayers $500 million. It’s the cost of playing at scale. Eighty-five thousand acres will be returned to the river; 22 miles of canal will be backfilled; 2 major dams will be removed; 9 miles of river will be redug; and
the original water flow of Lake Kissimmee will be reestablished. The goal? Restoring 40 square miles of river and floodplain without the loss of flood control.

To maintain control, the Kissimmee will never be entirely free. The river’s upper and lower thirds will remain dammed and channeled, but the middle — those 40 square miles — will flow unhindered. If everything stays on schedule, the Kissimmee Restoration project will finish around the end of the decade.

Until then, there’s merely this pilot project, the 14-mile stretch of river that we are now floating down. Known prosaically as “phase one,” this portion of the reconstruction project started in June 1999 and was completed in February 2001. Phase one was a trial run on a mad scale: 614 miles of canal were backfilled and 13 miles of meanders reconnected. Toth, himself, dynamited Control Structure S-65B — one of six dams built on the Kissimmee. In time-lapse photography of the explosion, you can watch water gushing forth and farmlands disappearing and the works of man undone.

And the undoing is working. Toth points to the broadleaf plants that cover the landscape. “A few years ago,” he says, “you could have counted their numbers individually; not so anymore. Now, it’s whole fields of them, stretching miles from river to tree line.”

A couple hours later, after we’ve floated most of those 14 miles, we leave the river and head over to the Riverwoods Field Laboratory, the research station from which Kissimmee restoration is carefully monitored. The lab is not much in the way of buildings: a rambling shack, a few computers, posters of wading birds on the walls. Out front, the porch gives way to a dirt field, with a butterfly garden tucked in one corner and a few pickups scattered around the yard.

“When we’re done,” says Toth, pointing from the porch, “all this will be gone, turned back into wetlands. Restoration here is pretty low-tech — mostly dynamite and ditch digging — but I’ll
tell you something: If this low-tech approach doesn’t work here, the high-tech stuff they’ve got planned for the rest of the ecosystem doesn’t stand a chance.”

3.

That high-tech stuff made its debut in Octave Béliard’s 1910 novel,
The Journey of a Parisian in the 21st Century
, wherein the author proposes terraforming the moon — giving it an atmosphere and vegetation and turning it into a sanctuary for endangered species and a possible human colonization site. The idea reappeared in a 1927 essay by famed evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane, popped up in a 1930 novel by Olaf Stapledon, then entered the mainstream psyche in 1950, when Robert A. Heinlein published
Farmer in the Sky
. With his mathematical approach to the transformation of the Jovian moon Ganymede, Heinlein added a much more rigorous slant to the mega-engineering of ecosystems, plucking the notion out of the realm of pure fantasy and placing it squarely in the world of future science.

Here on Earth, that high-tech approach debuted in central Florida, at the spot where the Kissimmee river flows into Lake Okeechobee — a body of water so large it produces its own weather systems and so domesticated it hardly deserves to be called a lake. All of Lake Okeechobee’s 730 square miles are penned in by an earthen levee, a massive cage some 143 miles long and 20 feet tall. Built to reduce flooding and provide optimal growing conditions for the sugarcane plantations that hug the lake’s lower banks, the levee dumps water into 5 massive drainage canals — 4 dug east to the Atlantic and one west to the Gulf of Mexico. Altogether, these canals send 1.7 billion gallons of freshwater out to tide each day.

Those 1.7 billion gallons are the key to the entire restoration project. While the penning in of Lake Okeechobee has provided flood protection, not enough water is reaching the Everglades.
The entire ecosystem is dying of thirst. Thus, saving the Everglades requires saving those 1.7 billion gallons. “The idea is to bring this water back to the ecosystem,” says Rick Nevulis, senior water-storage hydrologist for the project. “We have to store it in the wet season for when we need it during the dry. Everything else comes second. To make that happen, we need water impoundments, and we need wells.”

Water impoundments are man-made lakes. CERP calls for a total of 180,000 combined lake acres — split between 10 to 20 sites — designed to capture nearly 500 billion gallons of water. But that’s only 60 percent of the water storage that the hydrologists need. It’s a conundrum, alright. They can’t build more reservoirs without displacing people or farmland and thus risking the ire of Florida’s politically powerful real estate and sugarcane lobbies. They can’t dig the reservoirs deeper than 8 feet because the state sits on the country’s most porous limestone — hit that and the water would simply drain away. The only real solution is to store excess water deep underground, in wells.

I see my first well at the eastern edge of the Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge, 20 miles west of Boca Raton, in a small clearing the size of a suburban backyard. At the center of the clearing, bordered by a smattering of weeds, there’s a skinny green pipe sticking out of the ground. This is the high-tech approach.

“It doesn’t look like much,” says Nevulis. “But it can store a whole lot of water.”

He’s not kidding. This well is designed to pump 5 million gallons of water a day — or roughly what it would take to fill 100 Olympic swimming pools — down a thousand feet of pipe and into the rocky bowels of the Floridan aquifer. Normally, the aquifer is filled with seawater, but when freshwater is injected, it pushes back the brackish water. The pressure works such that very little mingling occurs. And — with 333 wells called for in the final plan — it better work.

At the height of the wet season, when all of these 333 wells are operating at maximum capacity, some 1.6 billion gallons of water will be pumped into the ground every day. Hundreds of billions of gallons — enough to submerge all of Washington, D.C., in more than 20 feet of water — will be stored underground over the six-month wet season, then released in the dry months, effectively transforming the Floridan aquifer into the world’s largest water tank.

Of course, there are issues. “This kind of volume creates tons of unanswered questions,” says Nevulis. “We’re doing calculations to determine the effects of the added pressure. Will pumping year in and year out fracture the matrix? We just don’t know.”

And that’s just the first of the unknowns. There are also chemical and biological dangers associated with moving this much liquid around. Fecal contaminants in the groundwater could spread through the whole aquifer, essentially rendering it useless and much of Florida uninhabitable. Mercury in the surface water — the same industrial toxin contaminating the fish — reacts with the sulfates in the ground to create the far more poisonous methyl mercury, and again threatens the entire ecosystem. This list goes on.

To put this in different terms, the only other time terraforming has been attempted at scale — and a much smaller scale than is being tried here — was in the early 1990s, when the 3.4 acre dome in the desert known as Biosphere 2, the Arizona-based “Earth systems research facility,” was created to see if we could actually engineer ecosystems. Unfortunately, Biosphere 2 suffered an onslaught of unintended consequences — wildly fluctuating CO2 levels, massive fish die-offs, a cockroach and ant population explosion, to name but a few — and while the lessons learned were myriad, the moral was straightforward: Playing God ain’t easy.

But, at least here in Florida, the upside is considerable. Drought has plagued this state for much of the past decade, with water rationing now the law of the land. “One thing’s for sure,” says Nevulis.
“If we can solve these problems and get these wells to work, no one around here is going to go thirsty for a very long time.”

4.

As you leave Lake Okeechobee and head south, the sheer scale of the Corps’s original engineering project becomes clear. One hundred and fifty years ago, this entire landscape was swamp. Today, it’s sugarcane. Four hundred and fifty thousand acres of sugarcane to be exact. And that acreage is the next challenge the Everglades Restoration Project must face.

Sugarcane farmers use phosphorus as fertilizer — but not without consequences. When introduced into the Everglades, the chemical produces a drastic rise in exotic green algae, which kills off the native blue-green variety and enables cattails — traditionally found here in small numbers — to outcompete the saw grass. As cattail density thickens, sunlight can no longer penetrate the canopy, and the blue-green algae below begins to die. Without algae, the invertebrates go hungry and the small fish that feed on them and then the larger ones that feed on them, and so on up the food chain, until the wading birds themselves either starve or head elsewhere for a meal.

This is a complicated problem. To combat it, the restoration plan calls for one of the largest and most complicated water-quality treatment facilities ever devised. To create a buffer between the phosphorus-using farmers and the phosphorus-hating Everglades, scientists have designed six Stormwater Treatment Areas that sprawl over 41,000 acres. These areas are phosphorus-eating wetlands, giant septic swimming pools big enough to float an oil tanker. Farmland runoff will be diverted through these treatment areas before being released into the Everglades with the ambitious goal of reducing phosphorus levels from their current 200 parts-per-billion down to 10 ppb — scientists’ best guess of the early Everglades’ phosphorus levels.

“Ten ppb is the toughest phosphorus goal anywhere on the planet,” says Jana Newman, the senior scientist working on the treatment areas. “It’s on the threshold of what’s even possible to detect. We’re trying everything from green technologies to chemical technologies, but there’s a cost factor here. When phosphorus is depleted, it gets more and more difficult to remove; down around 10 ppb, it takes 400 pounds of chemicals to remove one pound of phosphorus.”

The Storage Treatment Area known as 1 West is the proving ground. It’s a swampy rat’s maze. Water enters through a giant pump station and travels along 18 miles of levees, concrete spillways, and culverts that push it into five man-made chunks of marshland, or cells. Each cell is stocked with a carefully selected mixture of cattails, submerged aquatic vegetation, floating plants, and algae. As water passes into the cells, the plants suck up the phosphorus, die off, and fall to the bottom, where they’re entombed in heavy peat. When the water exits, its phosphorus count is measured again. So far, 12 ppb is the lowest concentration achieved, but that number came during a drought in which the flow rate was exceptionally low.

As mentioned, playing God ain’t easy.

5.

One of the main difficulties with trying to save an ecosystem is how little we really know about ecosystems themselves — a lesson driven home to me when I go out for a nighttime tour of the Everglades. I had joined a couple of field biologists, Laura Brandt and Frank Mazzoti, for a boat trip into the Loxahatchee Refuge, long after the park is closed. My goal was to experience this landscape as it once was, empty of man, full of saw grass and water. Their goal was to count alligators.

Alligators are the keystone predator in the Everglades — meaning it is their health that determines the health of the entire
ecosystem. The goal tonight is just simple science. We shine flashlights over the water, looking for the telltale glimmer of alligator eye-shine — the refractory glow their eyes give off at night (this is also why we’re traveling in the dark, as you can’t see eye-shine in daylight). Once a gator is sighted, we pull alongside, notate location with a GPS, and take rough size measurements as a way of determining age: newborn, juvenile, adult, senior citizen. “It may seem basic,” says Brandt, “but no one has ever done this research before. We want to save the Everglades, but really we know so little about them. The reason we’re doing this survey is to make sure that the things we want to save are really being saved.”