Ecosystem-Based Solutions: Restoring the Florida Everglades
Author(s)
Layzer, Judith A.
Abstract
Like the New England fisheries and spotted owl cases, the Everglades case demonstrates how environmentalists have used litigation to change the political dynamics of an environmental issue. For years, the ecological decline of the Everglades was apparent, yet agricultural interests — and particularly the sugar industry — were sufficiently ensconced within state and federal policymaking institutions to resist efforts to revive the ecosystem. At the state level, sugar executives had strong, longstanding ties with members of the legislature, a relationship whose effects had been magnified by the historic malapportionment of state legislators to rural areas. The sugar industry had also fared well in the U.S. Congress, discreetly obtaining subsidies that enabled it to remain more than competitive with Caribbean sugar. And sugar was a force within the state and federal agencies responsible for allocating water in South Florida; their historic ties had developed into a symbiotic relationship in which sugar interests had an assured water supply at the expense of the environment. In its lawsuit against the state of Florida, the federal Department of Justice argued that the state had failed to enforce its own water pollution laws in South Florida. The legal hook, while novel, was less important than the way the lawsuit transformed the politics of Everglades restoration. Above all, the litigation simultaneously created myriad opportunities for press coverage and fractured the alliance among the Corps, the SFWMD, and the sugar industry. From environmentalists’ perspective, the lawsuit served a third, critical function: through the technical agreement, it assembled the disparate science into a coherent consensus, which in turn provided a firm foundation for a compelling political story in which the villainous sugar industry had heedlessly destroyed one of the nation’s most precious wetlands, the Everglades.
