Word: parkes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...national park is an outdoor gallery of nature's wonders, complexities and harmonies. But unlike a museum, a park is not independent of its surroundings. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Florida Everglades National Park, an aquatic wilderness of 1.4 million acres and one of America's last refuges of solitude. Precisely because it is linked to intricate webs of life around it, the park may now be doomed by the rising water needs of Florida's farms and cities, plus the construction of a mammoth jetport a few miles away. The result has made...
America's only subtropical national park is a multitude of habitats-inland pine sloughs, vast saw grass savannahs, hardwood hammocks and coastal mangroves with myriad islands and canals. It is a refuge of 22 endangered species, including the bald eagle, osprey, snowy egret, Florida panther and alligator. Each year, more than a million visitors peer from trails and catwalks at the antics of exotic herons, bitterns and roseate spoonbills. They are mystified by the anhinga, a prehistoric bird that must spread and dry its wings after diving for fish, or drown from lack of natural-body-oil protection...
...fate of the Everglades is absolutely dependent on water. Each year, 153.5 billion gallons flow through the swamps as a strange kind of river, less than a foot deep and up to 50 miles wide. Changes in the water's quality, quantity and seasonal rhythms endanger the park's incredibly diverse plants and wildlife. And yet, for the past two decades, nearby flood-control projects have steadily dehydrated the glades by diverting water to crop land, commercial and industrial use. The Everglades, explains Park Superintendent Jack Raftery, "is a demonstration that no natural region can be divorced from...
Since 1949, the Army Corps of Engineers has created 1,400 miles of canals in the Everglades area. The canals regularly divert billions of gallons of water into the Atlantic after irrigating crops just northeast of the park in Dade and Broward Counties. No reasonable conservationist would sacrifice those crops. But the Interior Department claims that during recent droughts, the water balance was needlessly struck in favor of agriculture, while thousands of fish, birds and animals died in the park. After long bureaucratic squabbling, the Army Corps of Engineers has agreed in principle to supply the Everglades with sufficient water...
Crippling Blow. As if dehydration were not enough, the park ecosystem is now threatened by plans for an airport six miles from its northern border. Conservationists fear the effects of jet noise, exhaust fallout, fuel and oil spills. They also shudder at the prospect of helter-skelter development around the airport resulting in pollution from sewage, insecticides and fertilizer runoff...