WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — I am saying farewell to nearly 44 years of daily broadcast journalism on March 14. I picked the date because it marks my 14th anniversary of working at WPTV.
Something that has always marked my time as a South Florida newsman — first in Miami and later in the West Palm Beach/Treasure Coast area — is the story of the Everglades.
WATCH BELOW: How Everglades restoration continues decades after canals disrupted ecosystem
I have been going back to listen to the voices of people who have made the Everglades their life's work.
I went to the northernmost reaches of the Kissimmee Valley outside Orlando to the southernmost point at Florida Bay at the bottom of our sprawling peninsula. Once again, I was reminded that what happens in one place impacts all of us.
Beginning in the north was a good place to start this journey. I went first to the 7,700-acre Shingle Creek Natural Area in Osceola County amid the sprawl of greater Orlando. Shingle Creek is part of the headwaters of the Everglades ecosystem that connects so many millions of us across Florida.
Here is how nature designed this complicated ecosystem: Those headwaters fed a chain of smaller lakes that sent their water into Lake Kissimmee. That water, in turn, flowed into the Kissimmee River and twisted slowly down a broad floodplain into Lake Okeechobee.
Florida's largest lake then sent the water into the Everglades, where it nurtured the so-called "river of grass" as it made its way to Florida Bay.
But humans had other ideas, with multiple canals constructed across the region in the first half of the 20th century. Modern Florida, they said, demanded that the water be tamed.
I went to Highlands County off U.S. 98, northwest of Lake Okeechobee, on a January morning. I met Dr. Paul Gray from Audubon Florida, an organization dedicated to conserving and restoring natural ecosystems. The sprawling Everglades is Gray's passion.
"Back in the 1960s, when we decided to drain Florida, we dug a canal from Kissimmee to Okeechobee that was 30 feet deep and 100 yards wide," Gray explained.
Canals crisscrossing south central and southern Florida were built with a vision of water management and flood control. Draining the land has made room for an explosion of development over the decades. Disturbing the ecosystem and the natural water flow has also led to unintended consequences.
Almost as soon as the 50-mile-long Kissimmee Canal was finished, the environmental move to undo its impact began.
As he stood next to the Kissimmee River, Gray explained the impact of the canal.
"This whole floodplain, which is like 2 miles wide, suddenly all the water went down the canal and we lost all the wetlands, the river channels quit flowing," Gray said. "We lost more than 90% of the wading birds."
In the 1990s, work to restore the Kissimmee River to its natural contours began. The engineers who dug a canal began backfilling it.
Now, nearly half of the canal is filled in, allowing the Kissimmee River to find its wide, meandering path again as nature intended.
Even in the middle of the dry season, when I visited, you could see water on the broad floodplain where once it was starved for that water.
Gray has watched it come back to life.
"We now have, when things are right out here, huge clouds of birds, ducks and everything else," Gray said. "It works. Nature heals itself, and so all we have to do is put the water back in the river in the pattern we think it used to (be), and the river takes care of the rest."
A thirsty Kissimmee Valley needs clean water, and so does Lake Okeechobee.
All of us count on those natural water sources to quench our thirst — at home and on farms. Too often, though, it is dumped east to our Treasure Coast and west to the Caloosahatchee River where, far too often, it has produced harm.
"Now when we get a storm like (Hurricane) Irma or Ian, the whole watershed drains in like one month," Gray said. "We slap six months of water in the lake in one month. It makes it get deep, and we dump all the water. Then when a drought starts, there is not enough water, and we get water shortages and rationing."
Environmentalists argue that part of the answer is to continue the work of recreating what nature once did on its own.
"And so, what we are trying to do," Gray said, "is slow this water down and in the summer when it lands here, keep it up here (north of Lake Okeechobee) as much as we can, and then slowly move it to the lake."
