Sierra Club Statement in Support of the U.S. Sugar Land Purchase

(June 30, 2008) - The Sierra Club strongly supports the purchase of 187,000 acres of land from U.S. Sugar to restore the flow of clean, fresh water at the right time each year to the Everglades from Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay.

Governor Charlie Crist deserves our thanks for his leadership on this point: yes, there are risks and costs, but long ago we agreed that the destruction of the Everglades exposes taxpayers and future generations to unlimited risk.

The purchase has the potential to provide several major benefits:

• It would help fill in a missing link in the connection of Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay.
• It would provide adequate spatial extent—if the lands are in the right location—to restore wetlands and wildlife in the northern Everglades.
• It would take one-third of sugar lands in the Everglades Agricultural Area out of production, thereby reducing nutrient pollution of the entire Everglades system down to Florida Bay.
• It would restore the northern Everglades as a major tourist attraction and reinvigorate commerce from the shore communities of Lake Okeechobee to the fishing communities of Florida Bay.
• It would allow much improved management of Lake Okeechobee water levels. Excessive fresh water in Lake Okeechobee would be released south into the Everglades, thus protecting the St. Lucie Canal and Caloosahatchee River from harmful releases following tropical storms and other periods of heavy rainfall.
• It would serve as a large, natural water storage area and would eliminate the ill-conceived plan to construct 333 aquifer storage and recovery (ASR) wells as the centerpiece of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan.

The Sierra Club realizes that there are many details that need to be worked out to complete the purchase of the U.S. Sugar cane fields and to create a contiguous corridor from Lake Okeechobee to the Water Conservation Areas south of the Everglades Agricultural Area. In the process, the State of Florida must remain faithful to the overarching goal of restoring the natural flow of water as well as the vast expanse of marshes and sawgrass that once stretched southward from Lake Okeechobee more than a hundred miles to Florida Bay. Such restoration should use the best science available to minimize the use of artificial structures and maximize replication of historic flows.

Governor Crist should move quickly to lay out common sense rules for this acquisition: initiate land swaps to provide contiguous tracts as soon as possible; require that U.S. Sugar parcels swapped to other landowners carry permanent conservation easements and be used for environmentally-friendly purposes; and prohibit land uses incompatible with restoration (e.g. rock mining, power plants and urban development).

We see this purchase as a very important step towards the restoration of the Everglades, which exist nowhere else in the world, as so eloquently described by Marjory Stoneman Douglas in the River of Grass.