"Restoring the Fountain of Youth"
Remarks of Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt before the Everglades Coalition
Naples, Florida on January 7, 1999

I am pleased to be with you once again to report progress with our great task of restoring the Everglades. The Everglades Coalition has consistently been a powerful force in setting directions and mobilizing public support for restoration. You are leading the way.

I especially want to recognize and thank your chairman, David Guggenheim, for his leadership.

My Assistant Secretary for Water and Science, Patricia Beneke, will soon be leaving the Interior Department to return to private life. Patty has chaired the South Florida Ecosystem Restoration Task Force with great skill and insight, and with the patience and goodwill needed to bring harmony out of such a highly motivated and diverse group. She will be missed, and we are all most grateful for her outstanding public service.

Yet the stars are falling into alignment, for Patty's successor is a natural for the job. In fact she is here today, and I hardly need to introduce her, for she is known to all of you as a former Florida resident and Dean of the University of Miami Law School. Mary Doyle came to Washington as Counselor to the Secretary at the very moment of transition, and I am pleased to announce her appointment, beginning today, as chair of the South Florida Ecosystem Task Force.

The year ahead, 2000, is a watershed where our decisions and renewed commitment toward common goals must converge. After months and years of steady progress, scientific study and assessment, we are now at the threshold of a momentous decision: Whether, and how, to provide the financing for a twenty year program of comprehensive restoration. That decision will be made in Washington by the Congress, and in Tallahassee by the Florida Legislature. But their deliberations will be heavily influenced by public opinion.

Since I share your appreciation for the unique beauty and ecological importance of this landscape, and since I share the passion of Floridians for the future of this great state, I believe the right decisions will be made. But it is not inevitable. Your leadership, and our mutual commitment to press the case for comprehensive restoration, are crucial to Florida's future.

Before I speak about that future, and the debates that will surely come with it, look back with me at the tricky passes we have crossed together over the last decade:

In 1992 the Everglades itself was bogged down in the muck of litigation over phosphorous; the manmade runoff that polluted and ate away at the fields of sawgrass in the timeless flow of the River of Grass. With Governor Chiles and the Florida Legislature, we broke the impasse, settled the litigation and enacted the Everglades Forever Act. Even as I speak, out there to the northeast, the storm water treatment areas created below the Everglades Agricultural Area, are functioning effectively, absorbing phosphorous like a set of giant, landscape kidneys.

When we began, the watery landscape of South Florida was a collection of disjointed, dysfunctional parts, severed from one another by decades of ill conceived attempts at flood control and inappropriate development. But bit by bit, over the past seven years, we have worked with the State and the South Florida Water Management District to acquire half a million acres of land -- including Talisman and other sugar holdings in the Everglades Agricultural Area -- in order to store water, integrate private inholdings in the East Everglades, create buffer zones and protect sensitive lands like the Florida Panther and Ten Thousand Islands National Wildlife Refuges. Notably, we have secured all the funds to complete acquisitions within Everglades National Park.

Then we extended this principle further: beyond mere land to the slow moving water which infuses it. In 1994 the Corps of Engineers was authorized and funded to embark on a Restudy of how best to reconnect the severed hydraulic arteries of the whole system and to provide additional water both for the Everglades itself and for the increasing demands of the growing South Florida cities. Last July the Corps met its own very ambitious work schedule by presenting the Comprehensive Plan to the U.S. Congress. We were extremely pleased that this plan includes assurances to secure the necessary water for Everglades National Park and Biscayne Bay.

We have also completed one of the nation's largest Multi-Species Recovery Plans, addressing recovery for the 68 federally listed threatened and endangered species in the entire South Florida ecosystem. Our efforts are grounded in innovative use of the best science, and I am pleased that Congress has provided funds to establish a science review panel under the National Research Council to oversee our multiagency efforts.

Most important for the work still ahead, we have, over seven years, established an effective partnership between State and Federal agencies now recognized by statute as the South Florida Ecosystem Restoration Task Force. That partnership rests on equal footing, with each side splitting the costs 50-50. At the State level, the Governor's Commission has provided a parallel process for stakeholders to work on a comprehensive approach to growth issues in South Florida, and we look forward to working with the newly appointed members.

We should all take pride and confidence from the view behind us; let us now turn to the rugged terrain ahead.

We must continue to work on necessary land acquisition, and we must make the case to both Congress and the Florida Legislature to continue their support for these programs. Land use decisions will have a profound effect on our ability to carry out our long term restoration goals. I would like to call attention to two specific issues of great importance to our future.

Last week the Air Force released a supplemental Environmental Impact Statement for public comment as part of its process to dispose of Homestead Air Force Base. As you all know, the Base lies squarely between Biscayne National Park and the Everglades. The Interior Department feels development of a commercial airport could seriously degrade both of these national parks, and remains deeply concerned over its potential adverse impacts to the surrounding pristine landscape. And we urge the parties to give careful consideration to other alternatives that lead to better development and more jobs at less environmental cost.

Second, the 8 � square mile area continues to frustrate plans to restore natural water flows to Shark River Slough and the East Everglades. This area, perched in a natural flow-way on the 'wrong' side of the protective levee, should never have been developed. That is not the fault of the residents, but of the government. But that is no reason for us to compound the mistake by spending hundreds of millions of dollars on flood protection measures that will not solve the problem.

We must instead take action so that the water can flow as naturally and cleanly as possible into Northeast Shark Slough and the habitat can be restored. We fully support the Water Management District's willing seller acquisition program, and anxiously await the pending NEPA review of additional options available to us. These options include: offering voluntary buyouts of both undeveloped and developed property, or providing life estates (or the equivalent) to residents who want to stay on and who are prepared to cope with living on the wet side of the existing levee.

Our major task for the coming year will of course be obtaining approval of the Restudy and long term financing for its implementation. The major policy question will be "assurances," or, simply put, defining how additional water that is developed and conserved will be allocated between restoring the natural hydrology of the Everglades, and augmenting water supplies for the communities of South Florida.

Interior Subcommittee chair Ralph Regula and Senator Bob Graham have both put us on notice that this issue must be addressed in the coming year, and history bears witness to the importance of their concerns. Throughout the history of Florida (and indeed of our entire country), water development projects, whether for navigation, flood control, power, agriculture or irrigation, have too often starved the natural systems which produce pure water and carry out priceless environmental services, not to mention the beauty of our natural world.

That means that Federal legislation authorizing and financing the Comprehensive Restoration Plan must explicitly ensure that the natural system benefits are achieved in a timely manner and maintained forever. These assurances must address the proper quantity, quality, timing and distribution of water for the natural system, even in times of stress on the water system. Once restored, these assurances must guarantee that never again will we sacrifice the state's rich, wild, natural character.

We have come, at the end, back to where I started. Now is the time to put the next twenty years in place. Your Governor, Jeb Bush, has demonstrated his commitment to Everglades restoration, and I have enjoyed a close working relationship with both him and his staff. Our Administration remains committed to using our final year to help in every way possible. The Florida delegation continues to prove itself united and effective in its bipartisan support in the Congress. The budget restraints are easing ever so slightly, economic growth in Florida remains vibrant, and there is every reason to expect that we should be able to gain approval and financing from both the Congress and the Florida Legislature in the course of this year.

To say why that will happen, why Florida and the nation are united so firmly behind the Everglades, we must look not to abstract charts, financing proposals, or the whole complex of policies. We must look into the nature of restoration itself.

And that takes me back almost five centuries ago, just north of here, when Don Juan Ponce de Leon tried to establish the first European colony upon the shores of a land he had discovered and christened "Pascua Florida." He had coasted almost the entire island (as it was first thought), navigating down the east coast from the mouth of the St. John's River, to Cape Kennedy and Biscayne Bay, around the Florida Keys and the Tortugas and up past Naples to Charlotte Harbor and Estero Bay

Like most Spanish conquistadores, Ponce de Leon was motivated by "gold, glory and God." Yet he also sought an elusive "fountain of youth." Scholars dispute what this meant to him. Some say he believed in legendary waters which, if drunk or bathed in, kept one forever young. Others argue that, when bumped from titled office in Puerto Rico, he felt his good name had been damaged and so sought a political rebirth with new honors, not a physical rebirth with wonder water. And revisionist historians claim the pragmatist, knowing the requirements for a permanent colony, simply led his troops in search of a freshwater spring.

In any case, for whatever reasons, and by whatever name, Ponce de Leon died without ever discovering his fountain of youth. But we have. We have rediscovered a magnificent, slow-flowing fountain so vast that it can create and modify its own weather systems, so powerful it filters and purifies rainwater runoff, so refreshing it can evaporate up and shower down the same pure water again and again in one day. It is a fountain that replenishes and sustains all plant and animal life. A fountain so complex only the Creator could have designed it. So valuable we almost destroyed it. So beautiful it has united us here today to restore it forever.

If we succeed in our efforts, the magic in water will heal not only mankind, but the whole of creation; it will keep the landscape itself in a perpetual state of renewal, of youth, of wonder. It will baptize us, surprise us, recharge our spirits. It will flow through our fountain - our River of Grass -- from which hope springs eternal.

Thank you.

U.S. Department of the Interior