"There Are No Other Everglades In The World"

Many of you have asked me how I like living in Florida. On these occasions I mention that moving from the Pacific Northwest to Florida is true culture shock. I'm sure many of you remember your own shock upon arrival here. As with any major change, there are trade-offs. On the down side, mosquitoes and no-see-ems have sent out word that there's virgin blood to be sucked down on Harbour Point Drive. I have welts all over my body. On the plus side, I get to watch the sun come up every morning as I walk along Halifax River. Unless you've lived in a country where it's overcast more days of the year than not you have no idea what a spectacular sight it is to see the sun almost every morning! On the down side, my body misses the inclines and valleys of a country with mountains and sudden vistas of whole ranges of mountains, as well as the solitary splendor of Mt. Rainier, which was called Mt. Tahoma by the first peoples. On the up side, I love walking on the beaches, seeing the many different kinds of plants, both in the ground and in the air, and hearing the songs of birds which don't live in the Pacific Northwest. On the down side, I've learned that tornadoes follow electrical storms. The first electrical storm I experienced was exciting, exhilarating, a great light show. I didn't know then about the devastation which would be created by the tornadoes in its wake. The second electrical storm was scary. I couldn't sleep until the storm had passed and all probability of a tornado with it. On the up side, one at least has warning of a tornado. Not so earthquakes.

Of course, I haven't experienced a summer yet. I've been steeling myself for the heat, but recent reading reveals I must also steel myself for rain - lots of it - and the possibility of hurricanes. I'm even working on learning a jingle - something from Florida lore -- to remind me of when hurricane season starts:

June too soon

July stand by

August look out you must

September remember

October all over

Which isn't really true, as I understand it. November 15th is the official close of the hurricane season, I'm told.

I'm also learning to accustom myself to the fact that your largest national park is valued not for its spectacular geology, like Mt. Rainier National Park, but for its wildlife. I wish I'd known this when I first visited the Everglades. I went with a North westerner's eyes, looking for scenery. I also went at the wrong time of the year - in June. It was hot and humid. During our visit it poured rain, and we got drenched. We saw only one alligator, lots of water, and lots of cattails. I've learned since that visit in the early nineties that cattails are not a good sign in the Everglades. These non-native plants grow there because polluted conditions will not support the native sawgrass.

Our seventh principle calls us as Unitarian Universalists to affirm and promote respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. In Florida, the Everglades are a very visible part of that existence. How does our relationship with the Everglades inform our lives? The geography of the place where we live is often our point of reference. In Seattle, mountains - especially Mt. Rainier - were our most important geographical feature. Here in Florida the Everglades are the notable natural attraction. Therefore, I will use the Everglades today to guide my thinking about our seventh principle.

In preparation, I read The Everglades, River of Grass by Marjory Stoneman Douglas and Voice of the River, her autobiography. Both of these books have helped me build a relationship with the Everglades that informs my life. I am grateful for Ms. Douglas' singular achievement in making the general public aware of how important it is to save the Everglades. I am also grateful to Florida authors, Carl Hiassen included, for their ironic portraits of Ms. Douglas in novels with characters patterned after her. To know the Everglades is also to know this remarkable woman, for whom the 1.3 million acre wilderness area in the national park was named last November.

Incidentally, this weekend, at the Annual Assembly of the Florida District of the Unitarian Universalist Association I met members of our newest sister congregation - River of Grass - which spun off from the Unitarian Universalist Church of Ft. Lauderdale. They expect to have their Charter Sunday in the Fall.

The things that most affected me when I read River of Grass were the maps. As a recent newcomer to Florida I have been studying Florida maps. When I looked at the map of the Everglades as it was in 1947, fifty-one years ago, when Ms. Douglas wrote her book I was shocked. The Everglades use to be co-terminus with Lake Okeechobee. The Everglades used to begin at the southern edge of Lake Okeechobee. Now the Everglades area begins 25 miles south and the north boundary of Everglades Park is almost 70 miles south of the lake. The reason is simple. We Euro-American humans - with our impressive technology - have taken dominion over the Everglades. We did not recognize the Everglades as the wonder it is. We saw only (to use Ms. Douglas' words) "a series of vast, miasmic swamps, poisonous lagoons, huge dismal marshes without outlet, a rotting, shallow, inland sea, or labyrinths of dark trees hung and looped about with snakes and dripping mosses, malignant with tropical fevers and malarias, evil to the white man."

We Euro-American humans, who came out of the Judeo-Christian culture, said to ourselves, "If ever there were a place where we should have dominion, this is it." The Genesis creation story gave us permission. "God said to [the people], 'Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.' " We have been subduing and having dominion for millennia. Rather than respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part, we have been exercising our God-given right to tread down, to subjugate, to prevail against, to reign and rule over, to take all that is natural. It is only in the last one hundred years, with help from people like Marjory Stoneman Douglas, that we have recognized the error of our ways. Only in the past decade has the general population begun to realize that the word dominion should be translated as care and stewardship. Only recently have religious groups started to designate themselves as Earth Care congregations.

The problem is that we have almost destroyed the Everglades. The Everglades thirst for water. What is available now is a trickle compared to a century ago. By the 1970's we drained over half the Everglades. We built 1800 miles of canals and levees and lowered the water levels of Lake Okeechobee, which feeds the Everglades. Instead of letting the Kissimmee River meander its 106 miles from the lake to the Everglades, we created a 52 mile straight channel, destroying the natural pulses of water delivery into the Everglades. All of this construction has ruined the natural, oh-so-gradual surface flow of water into the Everglades.

Much of the water which does reach the Everglades now is polluted, carrying agricultural and industrial pollutants, including phosphorus and mercury. The pollutants kill not only tiny creatures, but big ones, like the Florida panther.

The rich peat soil has eroded. In some places it is only inches deep where once it was 15 feet deep. Lack of water has caused the soil to burn up and blow away.

All this change to the ecosystem has affected the wildlife. It has decimated the numbers of wading birds because their food sources have been killed. It has increased others, like deer, because exotic plant life which is not native now grows in the Everglades. At one point the deer so threatened the Everglades that the deer were slaughtered. Pink shrimp catches in estuaries fed by the Everglades are declining.

Plant life is affected. Urban development has destroyed 90% of the tropical hardwood hammocks in the Everglades and 90% of the Dade County pine rock lands. Both forest types are not found anywhere else in the world. Non-native trees, like the Australian melaleuca, are taking over in the Everglades, crowding out native plants. There are 92 species of Florida wildlife on the threatened and endangered list, many of them in the Everglades.

Population growth is a big problem all over Florida. We are challenged to start a new school every five days to keep pace with growth in this state. Population growth takes water and habitat from plants and animals.

Only recently has there been any hope at all. Ms. Douglas' book, written over 50 years ago, started waking people up to the problem. Thirty years ago Ms. Douglas started an organization called "Friends of the Everglades". It is over 6000 members strong today, and serves as an important advocate. (I'm wondering if any of you are members of this organization. If so, would you raise your hands?)

Over the last few decades there has been sophisticated research, sufficient that a symposium was held in 1989 in Key Largo. There Tom MacVicar presented a computer model suggesting that the answer to the problem of the shrinking Everglades is not only water management, but also more water - not in gushes through canals, and not to be stopped at levees. What is needed is a constant, gentle flow of water along the surface of the land, unimpeded, as once it flowed a century ago, creating a river of grass.

This decade has seen the enactment of the state Everglades Forever Act, passage of a voter initiative which requires anyone in the Everglades Agricultural Area who pollutes the marshes to pay 100% of the cleanup costs, and passage of the federal Water Resources Development Act. A little more than one year ago 250 conservationists, farmers, politicians and bureaucrats, and business leaders met to celebrate the beginning of two major Everglades restoration projects totaling more than a quarter of a billion dollars in federal and state moneys.

Cyril Zaneski, environmental writer for the Miami Herald said of that gathering, "They were talking now about the long haul. They were talking about how the new pumping stations would restore flowing fresh water to the parched hearts of the Everglades National Park and Florida Bay by just after the year 2000. They talked about how there would be healthier vegetation, bigger flocks of wading birds, ample drinking water for growing cities, and growing revenue from tourists coming to enjoy the healthier environment."

The story of the interdependent web we call the Everglades carries with it many lessons. Since I'm talking about our seventh Unitarian Universalist principle today, let me name seven of them:

First, we must learn to acknowledge the aspects of our own selves which we would like to project onto the environment and/or to people different from us. If we truly admitted our own sinister qualities, were to learn how these personal qualities function in our day-to-day lives, perhaps we would be less inclined to try to subdue or dominate aspects of creation outside ourselves which we have labeled threatening or evil. No one is totally good. We all have qualities which are destructive rather than constructive, both individually, and in company with others as communities. When we can see our own "shadow sides" (as psychologist Carl Jung called this human construct), then we have less of a need to attribute our own shadows to other parts of creation, be they human, animal, vegetable, mineral, or ecosystem.

If you're not sure what I mean by a shadow side, think back to your childhood days and the stories you loved to hear - like The Three Little Pigs. How many of us identified with the big, bad wolf? Or the little pig who built his house of straw? Or the little pig who built her house of twigs? Or the little pig who built his house of bricks? We definitely didn't want to be the wolf. And many of us, especially those of us who were to grow up to be Unitarian Universalists, didn't want to identify with the two dumb pigs. Instead, we wanted to be like the pig in the brick house - safe and secure. Yet many of us have shadow qualities like the wolf and the two lesser pigs which we don't like to look at. And, in truth, even the pig in the brick house has his shadow side - but that's another sermon!

When we cast our shadow sides onto nature - for instance, foxes are tricky and swamps decay, then we deny that we, too are tricky and decaying.

Our second challenge is to let go of the dominator's view of creation as fragile. Marjory Stoneman Douglas said it this way, "People often describe natural places - the mountains, waters, deserts, swamps, and forests - as fragile. They mean well; they mean to argue for their preservation. But they do them a disservice. Natural places, ecosystems, are not fragile. They are, in the main, tough as an old tire. The capacity of the earth for compensation and forgiveness after repeated abuses has kept the planet alive, but it has also encouraged more abuse."

As long as we view another part of creation as weaker than we, we are in a dominator role. When we can view another part of creation at least as strong as we and as co-creators, then we are functioning as part of the interdependent web. This goes for human relationships as well as eco-system relationships. We Unitarian Universalists have a tendency to think of ourselves as superior, both as individuals and as a movement. It is this kind of thinking which keeps our congregations from becoming more inclusive. We need to view all life - including all people -- as mutually enhancing. If we don't, we risk slipping back into a Genesis mode of action - subduing and having dominion over once more.

Our third lesson is to take cognizance of our relationship with Florida as a whole. We precede the land. We as a species were created before Florida heaved itself up out of the sea, not the other way around. This knowledge astonishes me, and forces me to take a whole new perspective. I think of the dominator model as coming from our having been created on the sixth day, as the final piece de resistance of creation. God said to us, here is my creation. I give it all to you. You can do with it anything you like.

Somehow it makes a huge difference to me that Florida, and all its land and fresh water and creatures and plants, rose up out of the sea after we Homo sapiens were more than a gleam in God's eye. It makes us more like siblings, older siblings at that. This new creation, this tender, young part of the world known as Florida is younger than we are and needs our special care! Learning this is like changing the story. I imagine God saying to us, as Florida is being born, "This is your baby sister. Take good care of her. Be a mentor for her. Treat her kindly. What she knows of me she will learn from you." Maybe I think this way because I am the first born in my family.

The challenge, in providing special care for this newer creation, is not to dominate it, as older siblings are wont to do - but to truly love and care for it as one does a beloved.

The fourth lesson comes out of the third. Before Florida rose above the surface of the ocean it still existed - out of sight, in the depths of the ocean. So, too the spiritual realm is often out of sight, hidden, covered up, not available to us when we are rushing around, engaged in our day-to-day activities. It is only when we stop and take time for prayer or meditation or reflection that we become aware of all that is available to us. We function day to day like the Florida we see today. Yet, beneath our day-to-day functioning is another realm, just as real and just as rich. As Unitarian Universalists we are free to explore this other realm in a variety of ways and to give it different names. What we cannot do is ignore it.

So, now we have four lessons - acknowledge the shadow side of ourselves; be in mutual relationship; treat the new creation, Florida, as a beloved younger sibling; and explore the spiritual realm for what is not yet manifest. Now comes the fifth lesson: It's never too late to make amends. Let's face it. Siblings are often at each other's throats. The Bible is full of stories of brothers and sisters being mean to each other - well, brothers anyway. The people who wrote the Bible stories weren't much interested in women. But I know sisters can be mean, because I am one. Even though we have been wreaking havoc in the Everglades for over a hundred years, the plans we are implementing to restore the Everglades as much as possible are working! The 1995 rainfall was excessive. While it damaged crops and livestock and many homes and businesses, it also created a boom in mosquito fish, kill fish, and sunfishes, which meant food for wading birds, and, subsequently, food for alligators and crocodiles. In 1995 a biologist noted an increase in species of fish from 15 to 30. What good news! It's taken us a long time to get with the program, and even though we are coming around after decades of neglect and abuse, our amends are working! When we see ourselves as part of the interdependent web of all existence and respect that web and act accordingly, life in all its glorious diversity thrives!

There is one amends going on that tickles me no end. The very same Corps of Engineers, which transformed the Kissimmee River from a 106 mile meander to a 52 mile ramrod straight canal, is now in the process of turning it back into a meander. hey expect it will take 15 years. Some may see it as job security. Some see it as a giant amends - they are undoing what they did earlier this century.

Our sixth lesson is that creation comes in pulses. Douglas wrote in a 1997 epilogue to her book, "Scientists began to understand the importance of cycles of droughts and floods in making the Everglades so productive. The natural cycles organized the system into pulses of great productivity - droughts concentrating food for alligators and wading birds into wet areas and periodic marsh fires releasing nutrients that allowed for bursts of life."

Not only are our late amends forgiven, their lateness may even be a boon to the creative process. I may risk extrapolating that which is not intended, however I am impressed that none of us ever leads a perfect life. Who here ever gets all their thank you notes written? Who here ever gets all their thank you notes written in a timely manner? The fact that our creative, generous energy pulses is natural. What's important at this point is that we recognize how important the Everglades are - not that we are a century or more late.

Lesson Seven, our final lesson, is that we humans have a tendency to become complacent. It's part of the pulsing thing. We do something creative, and then we tend to stagnate again. If we are to restore the Everglades, then we must be vigilant about our efforts. The Everglades were a significant environmental issue in the last presidential elections. Both Bill Clinton and Bob Dole were instrumental in furthering efforts to save the Everglades. Now other issues capture the political fancy, and Dade County threatens to build a commercial airport just 12 miles from the Everglades. Friends of the Everglades has read the environmental impact statements, and has trouble with some of the facts - some are overstated and some are understated. Hearings are going on right now which will decide whether or not to build the proposed airport. Perhaps my message today will encourage you to read some of the material I've posted on the Social Justice bulletin board and to write a letter or two. Getting involved with this problem would be one way to honor our seventh Unitarian Universalist principle: to affirm and promote respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

There are no other Everglades in the world. There is only one River of Grass. We are grateful for this unique natural wonder in Florida. May we carry with us the lessons to be learned from our historical relationship with the Everglades. Let us sing hymn 100 "I've Got Peace Like a River". Instead of the sixth verse as printed in our hymnals, let's sing "I've got life like the Everglades."

PLEASE CIRCULATE THE FOLLOWING PETITION AS A FOLLOW UP TO REV. MORGAN'S EVERGLADES SERMON. RETURN TO THE COMPLETED PETITION TO COMMUNITY CHURCH. WE WILL SEND IT TO THE WHITE HOUSE.

TO: President Clinton

We, the undersigned, urge you to instruct the Air Force to prepare a Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) on the proposed construction of a commercial airport at the former Homestead Air Force Base site.

The EIS performed for the airport was woefully inadequate for the following reasons:

It only examined the potential impact of a mythical small general aviation airport, not of the real two-runway commercial airport the size of New York's JFK, that Dade County plans to eventually build. It virtually ignored the potential impact of the inevitable air and water pollution on the surrounding area, including Everglades and Biscayne National Parks and Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. It failed to
properly study the devastating impact that noise and pollution could have on the areas wildlife, including the endangered wood stork, manatee, crocodile, and Florida panther. It ignored the implications of placing an airport less than five miles from Turkey Point nuclear power plant. It neglected secondary impacts from industrial and residential development the airport would spawn. It did not explore environmentally benign alternatives for the site that would yield similar economic benefits.

You pledged to protect and restore the Florida Everglades, and we call upon you to keep your promise. It is ludicrous for our government to commit billions of our dollars to Everglades restoration, while endangering the effort by refusing to require a sufficient study of a potentially devastating development. This airport could also harm other national treasures belonging to all Americans, including Everglades and Biscayne National Parks and Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. We cannot stress enough how dearly we value these natural resources. We trust that you will keep your promise to the American people by enforcing NEPA, the backbone of this country's environmental legislation, by requiring a SEIS before you allow the Air Force to turn the former Air Force Base over to Dade County for the construction of a major commercial airport.

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