Should we drain the Everglades?
rabbitcavern.substack.com
rabbitcavern.substack.com
1. The author, who actually cribbed from wikipedia, gets the willies when he sees shallow water infested with tens of thousands of perfectly happy alligators. All he thinks is that amazing commerce will happen when he kills all the kind gators, flushes the state, and runs away before the next time it rains.
2. Everyone throughout history has wanted to Drain The Swamp. Every one of those amazing historical people has seemed perfectly reasonable and without a doubt was an incredibly towering bastion of science who wanted to drain the Everglades. Too bad they were all incompetent.
3. Please leave Florida Man and Gator Lake alone. They separate the Gulf of America on the West from the Sea of Florida on the East.
was?
this article is hilarious as-is
Another example of draining wetland is Mexico City I think. Drained to farm and then developed on.
When civilization ends, we will look back at podcast episodes more numerous than the stars in the sky, and wonder if it that was really the most productive use of our entropy.
If you're not aware, python hunting is a state funded industry with the stated goal of controlling the spread of the invasive species in the Everglades. It has done very little to slow the growth of the python population in Florida but has created a demand for new roads and service buildings. Most python hunters farm overflow areas near roads, canals and flood gates, avoiding nests.
And on the largest scale, there is a limit to the amount of fresh groundwater that wells along the South Florida coast can get. Once they exceed that amount, they'll be pumping brackish water seeping in from the ocean. Then they have to desalinate the brackish water.
But the last time I was there, they were still building new houses.
As I understand it, that’s not possible in Florida, or at least in places like Miami, where the soil is almost entirely sand.
Holland has been creating progressively better soil surveys since the 1800’s, partially to allow them to place dykes intelligently.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00167...
https://floridaphoenix.com/2024/05/15/desantis-signs-bill-er...
For context; only the hurricane we have a clear record of had 8.5 meter storm surges. I’m not sure, can the Dutch barriers hold that back?
Places like St Augustine, Fl or Alexandria, VA; and, although not a city, even Jamestown, Va all have records of regular flooding since their establishment centuries ago and well before the Industrial Revolution during strong king tides when you get a confluence of effects like the moon and the sun’s tidal forces amplifying each other, rains have swelled waterways and saturated ground, and the fact that they are situated and basically at water level. I’ve experienced it personally in a few places, ands considering that those places built a long time ago clearly have structures built to accommodate strong king tides is an indicator to me that they knew it happens every once and a while even before the Industrial Revolution.
but parts of the Netherlands are -3 below sea level, it kinda evens out.
I think the other point to mention is that there isn't one barrier, there are a fuck load of them. (https://nltimes.nl/2024/09/03/tech-failure-nearly-caused-mas... but they also need to be close to work....)
12-15 ft may really not be enough for very long.
I don’t get this idea where if a building can’t stay in a spot forever, it should not be built at all. Why not build and enjoy while you can?
When the land floods it floods, you move on. Until then don’t worry about it.
Anyway you don't feel leeches coming off? That's surprising.
A funny story: a few years ago I went canoeing up a small river with my younger cousin. There's not a lot of current because the river is shallow and there are beaver dams around every corner. Most of the dams are unused and broken up, but the river's so shallow in the late summer that they block quite a bit of water anyway and necessitate portaging.
My cousin, being young, gets bored and stops padding, though he's still willing to help portage. We zig zag up the small river, crashing into either side every few paddlestrokes, because I hadn't realized that being the heavier one, I should be in the back of the canoe.
Eventually we get to a large felled tree blocking the river, and we attempt to portage around it, but the banks are quite steep and thick with brush, and I end up losing the canoe down the river. The current is slow, still, but the canoe is floating away, so I have to strip down and jump in after it. Unfortunately my feet touched the bottom and I was covered in bloodsuckers large and small, some of which hid themselves under my feet and between my toes for the rest of the excursion.
When I got back to the house, I lifted my leg, put my foot in the sink, and said "get the salt!"
That's why it gets so much more dangerous if you're swimming. If a crocodile is above the water, then it can only see your head. And it's just the right size to be its prey.
And if the crocodile is underwater, then it may be even worse. Humans usually look clumsy when swimming, just like an animal in distress. In other words, an easy prey.
Then allow me to ease your mind. Leeches are not a problem in the marine environment of the Florida Keys, unless you are a turtle. They person you replied to changed the topic slightly from the Everglades, where they could be a problem. In either case I'd worry about midges and mosquitos first.
Similarly with alligators, they are primarily freshwater and uncommon in the keys. American crocodiles can tolerate the marine environment better, but they are threatened as a species and have just two confirmed attacks in 75 years.
So wear a personal flotation device and you should be okay.
I understand the psychological aspect but they are otherwise totally harmless.
> Leeches freak me out, I can't imagine swimming with (or falling on) the gators!
FWIW, neither leeches nor alligators are indigenous to salt water, which is what surrounds the Florida keys.
The easiest way to discern each is based on their snout. If the reptile you saw has a blunt nose about the same width as its jaw, then it's a gator. If, instead, the jaw looked more like a trapezoid, then it's a croc.
Both are opportunistic hunters capable of taking down mammals up to adult bovines or horses. The latter two examples are rare as the size of the croc/gator has to be rather large.
I don’t think there is one like this.
It was eye opening to visit, have never been this close to Aligators.
It should be preserved in totality, for as long as we can, it is an American treasure. Unsustainable building in Florida is not a good enough reason to drain the Everglades.
Ah, yes, terrible consequences, such as, the irrigation and suitability for farmland of central California, the lack of frequent flooding of the Mississippi river and tributaries and the present dryness of the Netherlands.
I don't think draining the everglades is tractable and I think it's more valuable as is since you're not gonna out farm the midwest. But it's really easy to be on a high horse and not appreciate the successful projects that we benefit from the results of.
_The Great River_ by Boyce Upholt from last year is a good place to start learning about the Mississippi.
The unsustainable irrigation that's draining aquifers during droughts and causing permanent damage[1] to groundwater retention? The irrigation that's causing changes in land topography[2]?
> the lack of frequent flooding of the Mississippi river
You mean the system which is a well known ecological disaster?[3][4][5]
And no frequent flooding? Since 2017, the Mississippi River Corridor Critical Area (which covers only a small portion of the watershed) has seen the USDA pay out $11.4 billion[6] to cover damages from flooding. I live in the watershed and for most of the summer I get flood alerts every time it rains. Damages are on the news constantly. In 2008, a tributary river flooded so badly it destroyed two mid-sized cities in Iowa[7]. Then you have the the 2011 flooding[8] of the Mississippi which was the most disastrous since before most modifications had been made to the river. Lack of frequent flooding? Just because you don't hear about it doesn't mean it's not happening.
Like what are we talking about here? Even reaching for what you assume to be innocuous examples, empirically observable negative consequences hang off of them like fruiting bodies. Who knows what the consequences will look like in 100-200 years when they've had time to iteratively feed back into themselves.
[1] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30197456/
[2] - https://www.usgs.gov/centers/land-subsidence-in-california
[3] - https://repository.lsu.edu/geo_pubs/2126/
[4] - https://repository.lsu.edu/geo_pubs/1614/
[5] - https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/03/230306143336.h...
[6] - https://www.ewg.org/research/usda-policies-fall-short-helpin...
[7] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa_flood_of_2008
[8] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Mississippi_River_floods
The part of CA we're talking about was a desert shithole before (arguably still is). There's debate about just how much we can sustainably irrigate it, but at least we can irrigate it. The alternative is basically no agricultural activity. Maybe some grazing.
Ditto for the Mississippi. It floods "a little" now vs "somewhere on it is getting wiped out just about every year" before. If it's only happening once a decade now that's a huge improvement. You can mislead all you want by saying things like "worst since X" and whatnot but the fact of the matter is that the system clearly works ok if most of the Xs are from before the system was there.
The material wealth generated by the economic activity enabled by these two projects is almost impossible to quantify.
I think it speaks volumes that you didn't even attempt to address my 3rd example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salton_Trough
It sounds like you're talking about the Imperial Valley, which is a different ball of wax from the whole wetland-draining argument here.
I object to "desert shithole" --- the Sonoran Desert is an ecosystem worthy of value in its own right, we just don't benefit from it as humans unless we turn to resource extraction or agriculture.
Although I think it's best for nature to leave things how they are, draining the Landes in France (a swampy area comparable to that of the Everglades) and replacing it with a pine forest only had positive impacts on the humans living there (if only because it was a major step towards eradicating malaria in France).
To be honest though, it was originally a forest, and had turned into a swamp after being deforested by humans in the early middle ages.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/scotttravers/2025/03/25/why-chi...
Fun story: I was slaloming bank to bank down that canal and wiped out. The canal is narrow enough the boat has to slow down and idle around the u-turn to then plane up to get back, so it takes a bit. There was a high arched water pipe over the canal and a kid parked on the apex. Kid sez, there's a gator next to you. I said, sure, right kid. Kid sez, there's a gator next to you... and I look and yep, maybe a 6', 7' gator about 10' away. Well... not much to do... I started waving the ski and a couple of minutes later they throw me the rope and I orientated and up and away I went. ha haha. Good times. I think I was 15.
Another one: Buddy of mine is on two skis and is kinda mellowing out just running down that same canal and I'm driving and see a gator ahead in the middle of the canal, and why not, I steer around the gator and then steer him right over it and it explodes in a huge splash ha aha haar I am just laughing at the memory and he looks back and then back at me with a big shit eating grin. I was probably 16.
Same canal: I got this hot gf I'm trying to teach to ski and she's fiddling with the skis, as you do starting out, and a nice 5' tarpon rolls about 6' away from her. Panic! We're like no no no they do not bite, it's just a tarpon, they're friendlies! Oh well, no water skiing for her. I was... 17.
But I'm not here to tell you these stories. I'm here to talk about the river of grass, the Everglades. Many millions have lived around the periphery but you can look at maps and see it's a long way across with "nothing" there. How would you see the vast scope of the interior, in an efficient way, right down at water level?
Family 2 doors over in Melaleuca Isles (still exists, I see) the father was the district superintendent (I think) for the Florida Fish & Game Commission, or whatever it's called these days. In those days the US was a normal country and everybody hung out, the kids, the parents. So I'm over there in the morning and he says want to go on patrol. I say sure. So we drive the airboat out to the launch point on 84 (Alligator Alley) and off we go. This thing had a Lycoming flat six and there's not much to the boat but the Al flat hull, the two tier seats, and the enormous engine and propeller. And for 5 hours, at speeds peaking at 100mph[1], we criss cross the entire sector of the Everglades north of Hghwy 84. I stopped counting deer in the sawgrass in the water at 100. The vistas were of an endless prairie of sawgrass. He drove across the hammocks where there was grass by just powering the boat onto the land and then over.
I came away from that experience with a full appreciation of the scope of the Everglades, the idea of it, and am sad that the idea of wilderness has softened like melting fat into an ideal of a cozy unthreatening warm bath. There is nothing that can be accurately described as wilderness unless organisms endemic there are present and may be out to eat you. Starting with mosquitos and ending with alligators.
[1] In those medieval times we did not know nor understand the term "eye protection" and so I had none, though my neighbor did. He didn't care. At 100mph your face is quite distorted. Some debris is getting through the screen on the front of the boat. What a MF adventure.
People can't stop building here. I don't get it. It's going to be under water in under 50 years. Yet for some reason there's a 100+ story building going up across from Bayfront Park and Ken Griffin is spending a billion on a massive tower in Brickell.
To suggest draining such a vital natural landscape and replacing its inhabitants with "friendly" animals ignores the intricate interdependencies that sustain these ecosystems. This not only threatens extinction of unique species but undermines the health of the entire region, affecting millions of people who rely on its ecosystem services. Demanding nature conform to a sanitized or human-safe version reflects a narrow, anthropocentric arrogance.
The wildness of the Everglades is part of its profound purpose and beauty. Any view that diminishes this is reductive, environmentally ignorant, and ethically troubling. Nature is not a backdrop to human desires but a living system demanding protection, understanding, and awe.
To be fair, in most religions (including christianity and atheism) it kinda does
If this is true (and I believe it is), then it does not really matter much what humanity does in the big picture. Might as well drain some swamps and seas to reclaim some land.
> On earth, there are living creatures with their own motivations that inhabit all the remote wildernesses and deep seas
You can both acknowledge that, and believe that human must do what's good for humans and animals that are good for humans.
Nature existed before we did and will exist after us, it can't be true that it exists for us.
You're saying it as if you assume some external entity judging whether something exists for somebody or not.
As an atheist you would acknowledge that the entire concept of "existing for something/somebody" is entirely a construct of human mind, which human mentally applies to the observable universe around them. So for an atheistic human mind, everything exists for human, as there's nobody else to exist for.
It's not a zoo. Jungle Island might be more your speed. Staff have chastised me for rubbing the kangaroos' bellies, saying they really don't like that, but in my defense he rolled over for me to do it. YMMV.
What lead me to appreciating the Everglades was randomly deciding to go to Shark Valley / Bobcat Boardwalk Trail on some cold day in February. The annoying bugs were mostly gone to wherever they go when it's cold, the 'gators were lounging around trying to catch some warmth, and the anhingas and other water birds were quite active. I caught a guided walking tour somewhere and what really stuck with me was how every tiny rise in elevation up to a few feet completely changes the ecosystem. I'd lived in Florida practically my whole life until then and never really "seen" that but from then on I could never not see it. I left 15 years ago and whenever I drive home for a visit, crossing that threshold into southern Florida where I start seeing it again brings me comfort.
>>The enlarged water control structures around Lake Okeechobee and in the Everglades did not prevent either frequent floods or dry spells in which cattle died for lack of water and fires burned in the peat of the Everglades.
>So yeah, that’s a no. A big ol’ drought (technical term) ensued!
This is a good example of how a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. We actually do know that the Hoover Dike worked: it survived Hurricanes Andrew, Francis, Wilma, Milton, and several others I probably forgot to mention.
So, IIUC, if the censor identifies something nonsensical, it throws the amusement switch, to keep your brain from integrating the wrong thing.
While we might think that the presentations of fact in the article are informative, the humor-saturated prose could be a good way to cloud any thinking about the topic.
Does this mean it's OK to mention expanding the Florida Everglades? One could plan out a path of bulldozing, excavation, and flood fills, given an existing map of gerrymandering for national elections.
lol
Hey! You can’t say that! That’s wrong speak!