Look how beautiful it is
Posted in General on 30. Jul, 2010
“Look how beautiful it is.” Noemi, who is collecting honey from rows of brightly painted hives, is clear: “My husband doesn’t leave the bees Never, no way”. Would Jorge, a tall and handsome man with a right hand contorted from a bullet wound suffered in prison, abandon his stables? He replies fiercely, stretching his command of English to the limit: “Hell, no.”. With the park and the environmental community leaning on them, the water commissioners may soon resurrect the buy-out proposal. But the prospect of eviction is more than most here can contemplate.”We have a tranquillity that you will find nowhere else,” argues Lao as he takes me on a tour of the Area in his roofless Ford pick-up “Look,” he says. The Miccosukee believe that nothing will be done to save the River of Grass, their sacred land, until the issue of the Eight-and-a-Half Square Mile Area is resolved. And the fastest way to do that, they concluded, would be to build the levee that was promised in 1992.Their victory may be a brief one.
In fact, moving them out may make things worse.” He, too, is concerned that the fight over the Area is threatening the entire restoration effort. “Since 1992 we have absolutely moved nowhere”.Last month, the Water District was forced to shelve the buy-out decision in the face of a lawsuit filed on behalf of the Cubans by an unlikely ally, the tiny Miccosukee Indian tribe, whose reservation is on the north edge of the Everglades. “We cannot get fixated on things that are going to stop us from moving forward. It is an obsession with a tiny area in a system covering 18,000 square miles.”Lending his voice to the Area’s cause is Lt Terry Rice, a hydrologist and commander of the Corps of Engineers until 1997 “There is no reason that these people should be moved out.
“This is the most ambitious environmental restoration in human history,” remarked Joette Lorian, who was president of the Friends of the Everglades until she resigned last year because of the dispute over the Area. Until the matter is resolved, most of the restoration project will remain stymied. But work on the levee was never even begun.The stakes are huge for the Cubans and for the Everglades. “I think they’re going to have to send in the National Guard to get us out of here,” she warns.The Cubans have this on their side: in 1992, the US Congress approved an earlier, less ambitious, restoration plan that specifically stated that instead of flooding the Area, the government should build a new levee around it as protection from newly rising waters. We are going to fight because we know we are in the right.” His sister-in-law, Ibel Aguilera, heads an alliance of local residents who are waging war on the commissioners.