Bob Graham’s Everglades vision hasn’t fully come true but South Florida is better off | Opinion

The son of a sugar cane and dairy farmer was among the first Florida leaders to take on the monumental task of trying to bring to fruition one of the country’s largest environmental restoration efforts: saving the Everglades.

Bob Graham, the former governor and U.S. senator who died on Tuesday, might have not been the first person to understand the need to return the Everglades to its natural glory. But he understood that accomplishing that goal required political will and dialogue between environmentalists and the agriculture industry — two groups whose interests are often at odds.

“Bob Graham was a consensus-builder and statesman who could bring disparate parties to the table in the name of Everglades restoration,” Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades, told the Herald Editorial Board.

Many of the efforts to restore the River of Grass are connected to Graham’s initiatives starting more than 40 years ago — from pushing the Save the Everglades program in 1983 as governor, to brokering a historic 2000 deal in Congress to authorize the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan as senator. CERP — a partnership between the state and federal government — is considered among the most ambitious environmental restoration programs in the world and includes more than 60 individual projects that have yet to be completed.

During Graham’s governorship, the state purchased thousands of acres of threatened and environmentally sensitive lands for protection, according to the Everglades Coalition, which inducted Graham into its hall of fame. He also signed the 1985 Growth Management Act, which made Florida a leader on development and population growth planning until it was largely dismantled under former Gov. Rick Scott. To this day, lawmakers continue to chip away at local authority to curb out-of-control development.

Graham’s environmental work had a profound impact on his native Miami-Dade County and beyond. The Everglades is not simply a place for recreation and alligator sightings; it is crucial for South Florida’s water supply.

Graham was among those who, like renowned activist and journalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas, understood the damage of water management projects to alleviate flooding that essentially drained the Everglades through canals, levees and water control structures beginning in the 1940s. That disrupted the natural water flow of the River of Grass from the Kissimmee River in Central Florida, through Lake Okeechobee down to the Florida Bay at the state’s southernmost tip.

When Graham announced the Save the Everglades program in 1983, he said his intent was to ensure ‘‘that the Everglades of the year 2000 looks and functions more like it did in 1900 than it does today,” the New York Times reported at the time.

It’s been 41 years and his vision hasn’t materialized, at least not as he hoped. But there has been progress.

The Florida Legislature passed an unprecedented bill in 2017 to fund the construction of a reservoir to store water from Lake Okeechobee, clean it and send it into the Everglades. The scale of the project has been greatly reduced from what its supporters initially envisioned, and scientists have raised concerns about water-quality performance, Samples said. But construction has been under way with Gov. Ron DeSantis’ support. The Army Corps of Engineers estimates it will be completed in 2030.

Progress in Everglades restoration has been outrageously slow, and even Graham was accused of not being aggressive enough.

At the groundbreaking of a restoration project decades ago, Stoneman Douglas — who’s responsible for raising awareness about the Everglades’ importance — infamously told Graham: “Not enough, Bob. Not nearly enough.”

“Marjory Stoneman Douglas was always pushing him to do better, and he was receptive to her criticism — he even respected her for it. Not enough politicians listen closely to their critics these days,” Samples wrote in an email.

Graham did not see the Everglades return to something resembling what it was before we engineered it into degradation. This precious natural resource is still under pressure from urban growth and sea-level rise.

Graham’s efforts might not have been “enough,” but he started important work that our current and future leaders are responsible for finishing.

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