Word: watered
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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 the Everglades a battleground between conservationists and developers-and a testing ground for U.S. environmental policies...
...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...
...Dade County Port Authority does indeed loom as the crippling blow. Paying private landowners an average price of only $180 an acre, the Port Authority last year quietly began to acquire 39 square miles on the edge of Big Cypress Swamp, which supplies 38% of the park's water. As originally stated, the purpose was to build a "training" jetport for five airlines, whose landing fees will finance a $10 million bond issue for the first runway, which Eastern Air Lines will open next month. Able to handle the new super jets due in 1970, the field will divert...
...Port Authority has proposed a 750-ft.-wide corridor from Miami to Naples, and highway planners are "dotting in" roads that would further upset the park's water cycle. When completed, the jetport itself would displace some 200 Mikasuki Indians, who were guaranteed a small area in which to continue their tribal ways and colorful rituals. Superintendent Raftery and an Interior lawyer also contend that a clause in the Transportation Act required a study of alternatives as well as proposals to prevent or minimize environmental damages. Raftery argues that Transportation ignored the clause. Instead, he says, the agency encouraged...