Unfortunately, Florida Power & Light (FPL) is still raising high the torch and carrying on the South Florida tradition of acting without regard for consequence or reason. But no longer will we grant them easy passage…

The Swamp's Final Days?
FPL has proposed two huge fossil fuel power plants in the Everglades region-coal burning in Glades County and gas/oil in Palm Beach County. They are both being presented as the cleanest, most efficient, 'best' available technology; but the facts and statistics show quite the contrary.

The reality is, no industry has ever presented itself as the toxic, destructive, expensive, irresponsible entity that will poison and overextend the water supply; spew harmful substances into the air causing cancer and emphysema; leak, spill or explode; facilitate unwanted urban growth; heat up the planet's temperature, killing the last living reefs, increasing the ferocity of hurricanes and spread of tropical disease.

No profit-driven corporation proposes a project with the preface that it will compromise the world's largest and most expensive restoration project ['CERP'], which is being crafted for the Everglades using billions of public dollars.

Companies simply don't present themselves with these images. They only speak of the jobs and tax base increases they bring. In FPL's case, the often-fabricated economic benefits are followed up with a heavy green washing campaign, where small environmental efforts are touted to hide their detrimental projects from public scrutiny. While FPL boasts openly of a 250 kilowatt solar power project on the Gulf Coast (which has not actually been completed), it also hires a high-power public relations firm, Wragg & Casas, to sneak atrocious fossil fuel plants, totaling over 5000 Megawatts (MW), past the public-right here in the world-renowned Everglades.
[Some may recall Wragg & Casas, the corporate public relations firm that spun Big Sugar's plea to defeat the penny per pound clean-up tax amendment and later made Collier Resources Corp look good for giving up drilling rights in the Big Cypress National Preserve for a mere $120 Million out of Interior Department's meager coffers (AKA, our pockets); they have come now to represent FPL in the Everglades.]

Between the 1960 MW coal plant in Glades and the 3300 MW gas plant in Palm Beach: the hazardous emissions total over 25,000 tons annually (approx. 21,200 and 4,800 tons, respectively; including NOx, SO2, CO, Particulate Matter/PM10, Volatile Organic Compounds and Sulfuric Acid Mist); CO2, a leading global warming culprit, totals near 28 million tons a year; around 200 pounds of highly-toxic mercury (mainly from the coal); billions of gallons of water every year from surface and aquifer sources; facilitation of near a million new units of development, much of which will be aimed at re-zoning land in rural/wild South Florida for commercial, residential and industrial construction.

These power plants are the dirty engines of an urban sprawl bulldozer. As one Everglades Coalition participant put it at the '07 annual conference: "It used to be that the Park Service saw Big Ag as the enemy, but now with urban sprawl, agriculture looks good!" Urban demands are sucking the Biscayne Aquifer dry, causing further salt-water intrusion; and now South Florida Water Management District wants to increase extraction from the Floridan Aquifer. We are losing open, water-permeable space to concrete at unprecedented rates. Between concrete and canals, we are altering the essential evapo-transpiration cycle-the combination of evaporating water and transpiring plants-that keeps wet ecosystems like the Everglades alive and productive.

Everything on the planet (including us) will survive, and potentially thrive, without fossil fuel generated electricity; but without clean, fresh water, there is nothing left of the Everglades ecosystem.

A Call to the Frontlines of Restoration
What the Everglades needs is grassroots momentum against FPL from legal, legislative and extralegal efforts (think: Boston Tea Party). To most of us who know South Florida as home, or who follow national environmental issues, this urgency is not new news. The 'Glades region has been on the life support system of pumps and canals for several decades, but the threat is now of a new caliber. These two new power plants, proposed on either side of Lake Okeechobee, represent the ultimate assault on this ecosystem and on those of us who make it our home, from the Chain of Lakes to the Keys.

In the entire world there is no other place like the Everglades. It is a relatively young land, geologically speaking, having formed a brief 10,000 to 12,000 years ago from the most recent rising and falling of sea level. The land is very low, barely above sea level and is underlain by a layer of rock, the Miami oolite. The Everglades is a giant watershed, originally starting at Lake Kissimmee, down through the Kissimmee River to Lake Okeechobee. Historically, water would overflow from Lake Okeechobee in giant sheets over the southern third of Florida until it reached Florida Bay, the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico. It is home to thousands of animal and plant species.
Now the Everglades is one of the Earth's most threatened ecosystems. In the last 100 years the Everglades have declined to less than one half, a mere remnant of their original area, and of that, large portions of the remaining areas are severely degraded.

While many work diligently and sincerely at getting the River of Grass, with its historic family of rivers, sloughs, ridges, creeks, estuaries, lagoons, and reefs, off of a failing life support system, others are insistent on continuing to inflict development's deep wounds. Restoring the Everglades and healing those wounds depends on first fending off the attackers. In this light, stopping this massive new fossil fuel infrastructure and its "fire-breathing dragons" (as an FPL opponent in Glades County calls them) from being built in our Everglades is the real frontline of restoration efforts.

FPL is the Achilles' Heel of stopping further destruction in South Florida. At the recent pace of commercial, industrial and residential development, there appears to be no hopeful light at the end of progress' dark, destructive tunnel. But without new, giant power plants the machine is forced to slow itself. Conversely, with small-scale, renewable, clean, safe energy sources replacing fossil fuel and nuclear infrastructure, a restored Everglades and a sustainable economy become something we can actually envision.

What South Florida could really use right now is an uprising of hearts and minds, a Fellowship of the Swamp, to stop FPL's awful plans using all the tools in the activist toolbox-from letter to lawsuits to monkey wrenching-and initiate a new vision of growth, energy and human development here in the 'Glades. While we still have a chance.

Get Involved, Get Organized!
Everglades Uprising! (EU!) is a newly forming movement of radical environmental activists in South Florida-affiliated loosely with the international Earth First! network-advocating no-compromise positions around environmental issues and utilizing cutting-edge direct action in the Kissimmee-Okeechobee-Everglades bioregion.

Along with the Southern Energy Network and Environmental Justice Network, EU! will be helping to host a week-long student and community organizing training camp dedicated to addressing these FPL plants, as well as other numerous proposed fossil fuel energy projects in Florida. More can be found at www.energyjustice.net/ejs/florida.html

We are pushing for a holistic critique of FPL that encompasses an opposition to their new fossil fuel plants in the Everglades as well as a shutdown of their dirty and dangerous old plants along the coast, in low-income urban areas. In their place, we propose the realistic alternative of massive conservation efforts and sustainable innovations.

We truly cannot afford the arrogance of the energy industry any longer. Their fear-mongering about potential blackouts resulting from the environmental community's challenges is completely absurd in the face of melting ice caps, increased storms, poisoned fish, massive droughts, world wars for oil (and, soon, clean water) and all of the other well-documented, catastrophic impacts attached to FPL and other energy giants' profit margins.

We will not stand by as human greed and indifference causes our wetlands to dry and our oceans rise around us… Will you?

*The subject of global warming and its potential impact to South Florida is clearly worthy of a whole page on its own… More info can be found in the Florida Wildlife Federation's 2006 document An Unfavorable Tide or www.nwf.org/globalwarming

**the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEE) released a recent study entitled "Potential for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy to Meet Florida's Growing Energy Demands" (Feb. 2007), which offers a glimpse of insight into what is possible.