Everglades Restoration Project Pt. 1: Introduction

Anyone who has been to South Florida and knows anything about environmental science (or civilization for that matter) likely has one word that comes to mind to describe it:
F@#$%d

I spent enough time in Florida to need hope, since there is very little of it there. I also spent enough time there to never want to go back, but like en ex girlfriend with no soul, I still stalk her sometimes on the Internet, because there were occasional good times, improbably but somehow.



The magnitude of the problems facing the state were made apparent to me in once brief incident when a USFWS guy busted a friend I was snorkeling with for an undersized lobster (it was close, I must admit, a judgement call, and to make it funnier, this guy ran for Mayor of Key West a few years later.). There was something about the two FWS guys demeanor that told me that they felt pretty hopeless about their work here, like it wasn't what they had gone to college for, like they were fighting the environmental Vietnam, and even though they could win it with the proper support, they were loosing it, and this was the equivalent of one more village they had to go into and torch, busting us for this lobster, when the big fish were hauling down the Ho Chi Minh trail unopposed, Sugar Companies, Condo Developers, Road Builders and Army Corps Ditch Diggers the NVA divisions of old to our little rabble of potential VC.. we tried to lighten the discussion by talking about water quality while they wrote up my buddies ticket, and on the subject of Nitrogen in the water, the guy, in that hopeless way that happened to all non-alcoholics stuck in the keys, he shrugged his shoulders and corrected us that there was too much nitrogen, not too little, which we were bantering about nervously since he had cut us a break a bit, and never even took his eyes off his pad, as if it saddened him, the Sargent Elias of his Platoon, affected...
After this I picked up a book on Manatees and water in the South Florida Water District, and like everything in the Sunshine State, it was tragically hilarious. This was in like 2009, the winter that had a gale storm every 3 days and Key West hit it's coldest temperature ever, 38 degrees, which led to fish kills and dead manatees, numbering in the low single digit thousands in South Florida to begin with.
http://wlrn.org/post/red-tide-claims-170-manatees-south-florida-population-should-be-spared
http://grist.org/news/toxic-algae-is-wiping-out-florida-manatees/
 Stories abounded about invasives like Burmese Pythons in the Everglades,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burmese_pythons_in_Florida
 arguments over Australian Pine in Key West,
http://saveourpines.com/
 and legends of dead coral all through Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary
http://phys.org/news184044612.html
It seemed pretty hopeless back then to this uneducated observer, the torpor of Florida, the endless resentment the place seemed to breed to balance it's inebriated and oblivious good times, it's shark fishing for kicks and cigarette boat addictions unabated by the maturation the rest of America had gone through since the '80s, poor planning choices and subtle but endless corruption, culture clashes and the endless idiocy of it's destitute sun seekers, but slowly, and now quickly, things started to happen, and as I dig, things were happening all along.
On to Part 2..