Hello friends, We will see you live in person somewhere in the United States this year.
That's right to May twenty ninth. We're going to be in Medford, mass. On the thirtieth, we're going to be in Washington, DC, and then on May thirty first, right there in New York City. In August, we're going to hit Chicago, Minneapolis, and Indianapolis on August seventh, eighth, and ninth, and then we're going to wind out the year in Durham and Atlanta on September fifth and seventh.
You can get all the info and ticket links that you need by going to linktree slash sysk Live or going to our website Stuff youshould Know dot com and clicking on the tour button.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you shouldn't So.
That's right.
Do people still say that?
Sure?
I mean I just did so. I guess somebody does.
I think of that every time I see one of those, you know, pharma commercials are the worst.
Did they say Nizzo on that? A lot?
Well, sky Rizzy is Oh, yeah, I can't even remember what it is.
I think it's for rheumatoid arthritis, like everything is for rheumatoid arthritis.
All I know is whenever I see those commercials, I just die laughing and think, what a terrible name.
So I know a lot of those jingles, and I think sky Rizzies is nothing is everything?
And then still Doug comes in at the end.
Yeah he goes for shizzle with sky Rizzle. But yeah, I've had that same thought too, and it is pretty funny.
All right, So enjoyed the free ad.
Yeah, Novo Nordisk, whoever you might be h. Yeah, we're not talking talking about pharmaceuticals today, although I'm sure there's plenty of pharmaceuticals floating around where in the area we are talking about today, Okay, exactly, it's probably screwing the frogs up something fierce.
Yeah, because we're talking.
Today about the Everglades and I know at least one person who has been recently, and I'm sure thought it was amazing, but they're in a lot of trouble. It turns out there's a we've been monkeying with the Everglades in for a century or so, and it is starting to be like that is enough. I'm sick of this. You guys better restore me or else I'm gone.
Were you talking about me? Yeah, okay, I didn't know. I thought you might have known someone else who recently went.
You're the only human being I've ever met who's gone to the Everglades.
That's not true.
Yeah, Emily's Emily's parents moved down that way or at least yeah, part time.
Oh cool.
And we took a boat, an airboat tour of part of the Everglades, a very tiny, tiny, tiny part obviously.
Hey, you sent Jerry and I a little video of you on the airboat.
Yeah, riding Toothless. It's my first airboat experience.
What'd you think.
Well, they're super loud, so it's not like a relaxing boat ride, not.
For you, not for the wildlife, not for anybody.
Yeah. I wondered about all that.
But I getting in the Everglades, and I had done a previous probably one of the most amazing trips I ever did was a three nighter in the Okefinocch Swamp. So I've always been sort of entranced by swamp land. And when I was down there, especially now that I'm older. The okey pinoke thing was twenty something years ago. Sure, I was like, you know, when you're older, you just appreciate things a little more.
I think like that, Oh definitely, when you're a kid, you don't know what the heck's going on.
Yeah, so I just marveled at the mainly the bird life, honestly, Like the alligators were fine, but the birds is what really are what really knocked me out. And you know, like this is how we learn stuff. As we see stuff, we think, oh, well, think I got a job where I can actually learn that for you know, as part of my weekly pay right. And so here we are, and so here we are, and it was amazing and I'm super excited about it.
Well, what questions did you have that made you want to research the Everglades more?
I mean, just to know more about it. Our airboat guy shout out to Kenny, like true interior Florida man. But he knew a lot, it seemed like, and he was giving us some pretty good information. I feel like it wasn't just like driving us around. He was into it, working for those tips, you know, sure, but just you know, it was just a tip of the.
Mangrove, so to speak.
Very nice, thank you, and by the bye. Kenny is such an interior Florida man. He once robbed a guest with a snake. Has that, Yes, at least once? For sure?
That's pretty smart.
Actually, I'd give up the cash register if the one put a snake in my base.
Sure for sure. So okay. So for those of you who don't know, and there's probably plenty of you who don't know exactly where the Everglades are, although I would wager that you've heard of them, but they essentially are a well, I wanted to say, a wetlands, but there is. It's a patchwork of diverse ecosystems that are extremely unique,
peculiar to the southern half of Florida. Essentially, if you want to talk geography and natural history, they go from just below Orlando all the way down to the Florida Keys. That's technically the Everglades. And then there's one strip from about Palm Beach down to Miami of high ground that holds the Everglades in place, and that represents the one border aside from the top or the Gulf of Mexico or the Florida keys is that bounds the Everglades. Does that make sense?
Yeah, totally, And it's a part of what makes the Everglades so unique. And you mentioned different ecosystems. There's a bunch of overlapping ecosystems that don't normally overlap necessarily elsewhere in the world, which is always gonna you know, anytime you have brackish or salty watery mixing in in places with fresh water, it's just going to create a unique environment. And the Everglades are that. It is seminole for well, actually, the Seminole name for everglades is pahe oki and it
means grassy waters. And they have called them grassy waters various people or river glades for a long long time until finally, in eighteen twenty three the word everglades first appeared on a map.
Yeah, and everglades itself is just one of those words you've heard so long you kind of take for granted it's its own thing, but it actually has an English meaning too. A glade is a big grassy opening in a wooded area, and ever is kind of like a short for forever, so it's like this endless glade and what they're talking about is that river of grass. There's actually a couple of what are called sloughs slu sl o u g h is how it's pronounced in America,
or how it's spelled in America. You pronounce it slough and you punctuate it with an eagles cry. And the slews are kind of what most people probably think about when they're thinking of the Everglades. It's it's wet, marshy, wetland that's pretty much flooded year round, with a specific kind of grass called sawgrass that can grow anywhere. You could take some sawgrass to the moon and it'll be like, great, thanks,
I'm gonna drive here. It'll grow in the water, it'll grow on dry land, it'll grow in saltwater, it'll grow on rush water. It'll grow under basically any condition. And so it's this flooded grassland that are really just a couple of specific ecosystems that make up the Everglades. Are what most people think of when they think Everglades, but it's far from the complete picture.
Yeah, And when we were driving over those grasses and well, you couldn't tell because they look like little roads through their little wet roads. I was like are these here because you drive over them? And he said yes, And he said and I think he saw my frownie face, but he said, man, this stuff drives up and grows right back up and you'd never know any anyone was here. Yeah, at least in this part. So you know, I still say it was fairly disturbing at least a noise.
Well, it's less impactful than the other mode of transport they use in very swampy areas called swamp buggies, which are just have these huge tires that you can't possibly get stuck in. Those definitely are more disruptive to the ecosystem than an airboat.
Yeah, And I was, I mean, every time he stopped and turned that engine off, I would look down and I was like, Kenny, brother, we're in three inches of water. Yeah, And he said, it doesn't take much. Man, he just goosed this thing and it'll get you going.
Yeah.
And also every time he stopped it and then would re crank that you know, it sounds like an airplane motor. It kind of is. I guess I was. All I could think of was please start.
Oh, yeah, for sure, because it's a little.
Like there's something about swamps when I was in the Oke Pinoki. It's the same thing, and it's not just alligators. But I think it's just not being able to see into the water, you know, because that water looks like, you know, brood iced tea. There's just something scary. Like when I was a kid, I remember thinking there was nothing scarier than because I'd seen a lot of movies like set in swamps and stuff. I was like, there's
nothing scarier. If you go into a swamp, you're gonna die. Yeah, and that's just not true.
That was the clear lesson from swamp thing and swamp thing too totally.
Olivia helped us with this, But it's also important that we point out that there's Everglades National Park, and then the Florida Everglades and Everglades National Park encompasses a lot of areas that aren't what we think of as Everglades, and the Everglades extend well beyond the boundaries of the park itself as well.
Yeah, it sounds a lot more confusing than it is. We'll line it all up into neat, little tidy packages for everybody. How about that?
How about this Everglade very large National park, smaller area within and beyond.
You did it. We can end the podcast right here, essentially because you already mentioned alligators, birds, and iced tea swamp water. So we're good.
Well, I think we should talk history because you dug up some it looks like sort of the quintessential rundown of how we got there?
Right, my friend, Yes, I wrote.
That that was good stuff.
Thank you very much. I appreciate that. I for some reason, when I started to research a little more and more of the natural history of the Everglades, they just got more and more fascinated. So's so the Florida Florida is a peninsula for those of you who don't know, and it's on top of some very very solid bedrock part of the continental plate that it's on, but a top that is a layer of limestone bedrock, and it's formed
from old like corals and shells. Because for a very long time what's now Florida was under a sea or an ocean.
Right yeah, and potentially might be again one day.
Right. So over time there's like sea level changes and rises because you know, the Earth likes to go through glacial and interglacial periods, and the during the last period where the ocean covered Florida. A new layer of really poorous limestone was laid down a top of the limestone bedrock, and that forms what's called the Biscayne Aquifer. And that aquifer is a holding tank essentially for drinking water for the nine million people who live on along the Atlantic
coast of Florida. And it's just super flat. I think there's a difference in elevation chuck from the bottom of Lake Okachobee, which is essentially the northern boundary now of the Everglades, all the way down to the Florida Keys, it just drops by like twelve to fifteen feet I think in elevation all those hundreds of miles.
And that is one thing I love about Florida, especially when I was a kid too, is you know, it's hot and stuff, but walking and jogging and riding bikes and stuff, they don't have any of those hills. So it's just much more palatable for a dude like me. Yeah, it is very flats, the hills or the killers, you know exactly.
Yeah, everybody knows that for sure. It doesn't matter whether you're walking, whether you're biking, whether you're rolling uphill. It sucks.
The important part that you mentioned though, is that there's there's not much elevation rise and change, but Florida does slope just ever so slightly, I guess what southeast, and so all the water in Florida wants to go southeast.
It does, but it runs into that Atlantic Coastal Ridge, which sounds tall, but at its tallest point it's like twenty feet above sea level.
Yeah, that's a ridge, but Florida.
Is so flat that that actually contains the water in the Everglades from going and spilling off into the Atlantic, So it funnels it down toward that southern southwestern part of Florida. And over time, as sea levels rose and declined to rose in decline. When we went through glacial periods the last time at the end of the Last Ice Age, which is about twelve thousand years ago, sea
level started to kind of stabilize. And the current climate that Florida has this subtropical monsoonal climate where there's a dry season in a rainy season, and they're in the rainy season, it really rains. There's hurricanes, that kind of stuff.
That started around the end of the Last Ice Age, right, and so over that last twelve thousand years, that big old Lake Okeechobee that forms the northern boundary of the Everglades would periodically flood, and it would send a ton of water down toward the bottom of Florida, the southern
southwestern tip. Simultaneously, all of that sea level rise and decline deposited things like shells and mud and all sorts of stuff, and that formed a natural dam, a barrier that keeps a lot of the water from flowing out of the southwestern part of Florida. And it forms the Everglades, which is essentially an extremely slow moving body of water. That is, it moves so slowly that the water has time to percolate downward through the soil into the aquifer,
become purified and be held. So during times of the wet season, it's a big repository for storm water. During the dry season, it's a source of drinking water for the people who live in Florida.
And some say that a drop of water, some meaning you, and I imagine you got this from somewhere.
Right, I didn't make that reputable.
That a drop of water takes about a year or to go from Lake Okachobee to the Florida Bay, which you know all of this talk sounds like Florida is a very scary place. It sounds like it's held together by you know, reedy roots and duct tape.
It essentially is, for sure, But it's so flat that you're really not in any danger. And it's also very shallow. I think that Florida Bay that extends between the Florida Keys and the southernmost tip of the Florida Mainland, that's like five feet an average of five feet deep.
Could you walk to the Florida Keys?
I believe so. Yeah, because from what I saw, the average the average depth is three water. Yes, that it is five feet.
That's pretty cool.
We should, It's pretty cool. I never thought about that, but yeah, you could from what I from what I can tell.
If it can be done, it has been done.
I'm sure you'd think so for sure.
I mean, I imagine Jimmy Buffett walked Traverse that many times.
Probably in his life. Uh.
Is that good? On natural history? Should we take a break?
I think so? Did? Do we cover everything? I don't remember?
I think so. I think that spells it up very nicely.
All Right, So we're gonna take a break, and we're gonna come back and talk about what Livia calls America's greatest swamp. All right, so we covered natural history, we should talk about the people of Florida. Southern Florida was it was really as far as you know, settling the America's it was one of the last pieces of the Americas to be settled by human beings.
But there's still.
Like I think twelve hundred BCE is where the indigenous population started out there, so still nothing to sneeze at. H And you know, you still see that that indigenous uh, I guess representation sort of everywhere. It's just it feels thick just from the names and just kind of everywhere
you go. It's it's it's a it's as parent almost as if you were I feel like out west of the unit in the United States, like you get a little bit of that in Georgia and the Carolinas, but it just feels heavier in Florida.
For sure. Yeah, there's a lot of Native American words that are used as place names still for sure. Is that what you're mean?
Yeah, I mean more than that, but it feels like a clunky way to say what I probably didn't even get across.
Well, the thing about the Everglades is it's how's people for, like you said, a very long time, thousands of years. And I think what blew my mind is the Everglades is we know them today, whereas I guess we would have known them if we came upon them in eighteen fifty or something like that. They were only like three thousand, thirty two hundred years old from what I saw. I saw some places five thousand, but I think the National Park Service said they're only about three thousand years old.
So people and the Everglades kind of came around that area around the same time, and they've been inhabited in some way, shape or form ever since. Because as Europeans pushed further and further west and further and further south, the Everglade you couldn't do anything with them. When Florida first was settled by European people of European ancestry, they were like, this is just a completely valueless expanse of swamp. We can't do anything with this.
You go live there, yeah, for sure, and you know in a sec we'll get to like, you know, kind of what the United States started doing once they acquired Florida from Spain in eighteen nineteen with the Adams Was it onus treaty? That's probably not pronouncing it right.
I'm not sure. I didn't see that one.
Well, that was the treaty where the United States got Florida. But as far as original inhabitants, we're talking about the Tequesta, the Yaga, and I don't know. I tried to find the pronunciation for the Ais tribe.
Do you know what that is?
Yeah? It was Ais. It was an abbreviation.
That's pretty good.
I thighs.
Maybe maybe I tried to find as it's hard to dig up pronunciation sometimes for some of this stuff. But they lived on the East coast, and then you had the Caloosa in the Southwest, and then you know, they're all over the Everglades. They're living there and they're in they're raised huts. What were those called chickie huts?
Yeah, and those were seminole, I believe a seminole invention, which is just like a platform like the one you stayed on in the Okefinoki swamp.
Well keeps even better, right, but it has.
Like sides and a roof and stuff like that. Yeah, So it's a house. It's a platform house that was designed to be to be lived in in the Everglades.
Yeah, in the Everglades. You mentioned Seminole. They were formed from a lot of displaced Creek Indians, some other indigenous groups, and then there were some Africans who were, you know, fleeing the slave trade, and a lot of these people ended up just sort of hiding in the Everglades because it is a great place to hide.
Yeah, and so still there there's Seminole tribe. The Seminole tribe has a reservation in Big Cyprus, one of their reservations in Florida, and the Mikosuk tribe apparently is made up of like former Creek members that rather than be moved westward to Oklahoma during Indian removal, they said nope, I'm staying down here, and they ended up forming basically their own tribe over time that's still around today.
I kind of like the idea of we're going to be in the middle of the Everglades, come and find.
Us, That's exactly what they did.
Yeah.
Yeah, they were like, well we'll go brave this. You. Yeah, you come after us if you want to see what happens malaria boy.
And then I'm there going don't go in there.
You die if you go into a swamp exact, you don't know what's under that water.
It's the lesson of swamp thing and.
Where they're like, uh, you know what's under this water? Food?
Yeah, bedrock.
So you mentioned the land being valueless.
That was literally what the first state legislature said that it is quote holy valueless and said, we got to figure out how to get this water out of here and make this into land we can use.
Yeah, there's like some people are actually adapting to living there. Can you believe that we will obtain this thing? And so they did very quickly. They started digging canals and ditches to drain water from Lake Okeachobee, which again has traditionally flooded its banks and sent water into the Everglades. That's where the Everglades gets most of its water. It has over time, and then it takes so long to slash out that it stays generally wet throughout the year.
If you dig canals to divert water to other places, like say an existing river or the Atlantic Ocean, you're not going to have those banks flood anymore, and the people that live along those banks are not gonna die being covered in a mud slide or a flood, or your crops aren't going to be ruined. And so that was like the first attempt to really kind of the Everglades. It was by cutting off its water supply from the north, from Lake Okechobee.
Yeah, And that happened up through the first couple of decades at least of the twentieth century, until in the nineteen twenties some people, not too many, but some people started standing up and saying, you know what, we're wrecking an ecosystem here. Yeah, it's kind of heartening. I guess to think that this was happening all the way back
in the nineteen twenties. But in nineteen twenty eight there was a land developer named Ernest f Co, a land developer who actually developed a campaign to protect part of that area as a national park, which eventually bore fruit in nineteen forty seven.
Can you believe it? He was a unicorn?
I know.
Another champion of the Everglades who came along about twenty or so years later was a journalist named Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, whose name sadly has become synonymous with a school shooting as well. And I didn't know anything about her, but she was this amazing champion of civil rights, of women's rights,
of protecting the environment. And we're talking in the forties, you know, and she was a really good writer, and she wrote a book called The Everglades River of Grass, which is a great title or whatever, but it was apparently a very popular book that changed people's attitudes towards the Everglades. It wasn't like, this isn't something to be tamed for industry and real estate. This is something to
be preserved and protected. And because she helped kind of point out just how unique the Everglades was as an ecosystem, it became protected not because it's incredibly beautiful. It's actually not. In some ways, it's not ugly, but it's featureless. And in a lot of places it was protected because of the life that it housed.
Yeah, you know, I get that it's not you know, the Rocky Mountain National Park and like all the amazing things you get out west, but I was blown away by the way it looked. And I know that swamp just has a connotation, as you know, like when we first you know, when the US first got ahold of it. They were like, this is this place is gross. Let's get all this water out of here. Youw But like I was knocked out and I the same thing happened
in the oke Finocchi. I just think it's an amazing, like visually amazing place as well.
That's awesome. Well you would have been a great early proponent of protecting the Everglades totally.
Just don't. I don't want to walk around in there, right, because you'll die.
I wanted to exist over there.
And again I talked about the birding, but apparently there was a conservative governor named spesciod Holland who was like, well, hey, you know, there's tons of birds here. We could probably bring in some money as a tourism hot spot with the Everglades.
Yeah, those nerds are loaded. They usually I don't have kids or anything else to do, really well paying job. Bring them in.
Oh God, bless the murders.
So the park started out at four hundred something thousand acres and eventually just started ballooning very quickly. I think it's about one and a half million acres now, about twenty three hundred square miles. It's big, a god gigantic, amount of kilometers and it's it is, it's giant, and you're like, wow, twenty three hundred square miles. It's a huge,
staggering size. But compared to the actual historical natural boundaries, and I'm talking like the taking anything anyone's ever said, this is the Everglades into account, naturally speaking, it's about an eighth of what the actual Everglades are meant to be. There's supposed to be something like eighteen thousand square miles, or about twice the size of New Jersey.
So like basically the entire lower half of Florida.
Yeah, up up, well into central Florida.
Yeah, for sure.
So it might even be closer to the bottom two thirds. I don't know, but it's it's a significant, huge amount of land. And the idea that the park is just protecting it, that it's like an eighth of its size, it's misleading in one way because there's actually a patchwork of Native American reservations that are protected and state parks and areas that also enjoy.
Some wildlife refuges.
Yeah, so it's actually bigger than just the National Park. But at the same time, it's still a shadow of its former South and there are two things that cause the Everglades to become a shadow of its former self. One is real estate development. So Florida's amazingly beautiful and sunny. There's yeah, there's a rainy season, but it's still worth hanging around during to make it through to the dry
because it's so nice. And then number two agriculture, because the Okachobe traditionally like overflowed its banks to the south. It deposited tons of like nutrient rich silt. Yeah, so just to the south of Lake Okachobe with some of the most fertile land in the United States, and they're like, this is wasted. We need to damn this thing. We need to build levies and dykes and everything to keep this thing from overflowing and plant there. And that's what
they did. So the Everglades were drained for real estate in this patchwork way and then cut off again, like I said, from its source of new water, Lake Okachobe.
Yeah.
And one of the main projects that kind of got that going in more recent history was in nineteen forty eight. The Hurricane George came through in nineteen forty seven, aka the Fort Lauderdale Hurricane, did a lot of damage, and then Congress said, all right, we got to do something about this for real, so they authorized the Central and Southern Florida Project for Flood Control and Other Purposes, otherwise known as the Sea and Sea ampor sand SF CNSF.
And that's what basically got it going in nineteen forty eight, Like you were talking about, when you know, just more and more canals, more levees, creating more farmland and urban areas, just swelling outward.
Yeah, because if you weren't on board with the idea of real estate development or agriculture and you wanted to protect the Everglades, every once in a while, an enormous hurricane would come through and kill a couple thousand people, it'd be like, we got to do something about that. Yeah, So it would bring everybody else into the fold. And
that's how that happened. So over time, these projects became so successful that still today, the canals and the ditches and all of that stuff that diverts water away from the Everglades outward so that we can live and farm in Florida carries about one point seven billion gallons of water a day to the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico.
That's incredible still today.
So, yes, the Everglades is essentially you would hope it's in this holding pattern, it's not. It's been cut off from its natural source of fresh water coming from the north and Lake Okechobee, and it's slowly dying. Essentially, it's still huge, but it's still being carved up. Agriculture is still being carried out, it's still being drained, and it's
it's in a little bit of trouble. So we'll talk about that, but I say we take a break and then come back and talk about some of the stars of the Everglades.
You know who else agrees with you on these points?
Who?
Kenny? All right, we'll be right back, all.
Right, Chuck. So, the National Park Service carves the Everglades up into nine habitats because I think we said at the outset, the Everglades is actually this amazing patchwork of different kinds of ecosystems, nine to be exact. And the reason that there are so many different ecosystems is because again, Florida is so flat, the Everglades are so shallow that just in a rise of a few inches can create
a completely different ecosystem. Than one that's a few inches shorter than it, because it can be dry, and so then there can be hardwood trees and then all sorts of different life comes in flocks to these little islands that form over time as the tree roots capture dirt and the round rises slowly but surely over time. Those are called hardwood hammocks, and they're just one of the ecosystems found in the Everglades.
Yeah, and people should understand every time we say the word dry, that's heavily quoted, right, dry meaning you know, it can sustain birds walking around on it and like a tree to grow.
Yeah, and it'll get flooded periodically, but it's not constantly.
Yeah, wet, And imagine if you jump up and down and stand in place, you'll sink a little bit.
You will be very sorry.
You've also got the pine rocklands. These are just beautiful areas.
These are.
Areas of forest and it has and it's very unique. It's only found in South Florida and the Bahamas and mostly in Florida. But it's got this pine canopy. You know, Florida's got these beautiful pine trees. I know people often think of like, you know, just coastal Florida with palm
trees and things like that and sand. But you know, you get interior, get into interior Florida a little bit, you've got these beautiful pine forests, and that forest canopy means that stuff grows there that doesn't grow anywhere else on planet Earth.
Right. And one of the things that's really important to the pine rocklands is they can sustain fire, and so fire periodically comes along these days. The National Park Rangers set fire on purpose for prescribed burns to mimic natural fires, and that keeps those hardwoods from coming in and establishing dominance and turning those places into a hardwood hammock. So
it stays of pine rockland, which is cool. It's its own thing, and it's probably always going to be its own thing as long as everything stays exactly the same.
Freshwater sloughs they are the Shark River slough that goes to the Gulf of Mexico and the Tailor Slew that goes into Florida Bay. They're basically two giant marshy sawgrass rivers.
Moving very slow.
Yeah, And that's again, that's what people think of typically when they think of.
Everglades, right, yeah, the rafting not so good.
There's Marl prairies, and Marl is like the opposite of Pete. It needs aerobic conditions to form. Did you just Pete because it has to do with Scotch now.
Just because we talk about Pete later, and I think Pete is just sort of amazing.
I do too.
Yeah.
Plus also it makes Scotch pretty great.
Yeah. Sure, and that's part of it.
But the maral is made up of a bunch of different weird stuff like algae and microbes and calcium carbonate, and it's a very specific kind of mud or dirt basically that feeds a lot of very diverse wildlife.
Yeah. Absolutely, So those are the Marl prairies.
Yes, Yeah. What about the cypress trees. They kind of have their own system allotted to them. But they seem to grow in various places too.
Yeah.
I mean they can grow in water like the standing water. They do really well in the wet areas. They're beautiful. They also grow in dry areas that don't have great soil, so they're pretty hardy species.
Okay, And I think I would be the jerk of the year if I took mangrove forests.
You know. I love my mangroves.
I asked Kenny. I was like, are those mangroves? He said, no, but there are some. So what I was seeing was I'm not sure what I was seeing or exactly which area I was in now that I'm looking at them all, I mean it.
Was it's.
It's north west of Fort Myers is where I was, and we were driving around through the marshy section. But there was a very large lake there that I think he said was the second largest lake.
I don't no, I'm not familiar with that area, but it sounds like you're talking about Cape Coral area.
Maybe I tried to find that lake on the map, but I couldn't. I couldn't find anything today.
Does Kenny exist? Is anything real?
He does? I took his selfie and he jumped in the back of it. He photo bombed us.
Nice.
But anyway, mangrove forests, there are mangroves there. They're in the coastal channels around the southern tip of Florida in that brackish water. So I wouldn't have seen him where we were. And you know, listen to our Mangroves episode to learn all the great things they.
Do, Yeah, for sure, and they are really great trees. The Everglades apparently has the largest contiguous mangrove ecosystem in the entire Western hemisphere, and I read that some of them are like four stories tall. Chuck, can you imnagine seeing a four story tall mangrove tree?
Man, that's amazing.
And you know, I did say, listen to that episode, but we should say at the very least that one of the big things because this will come up later, that mangroves do is protect against high water and storms.
Yes, exactly. And so there's areas that get such high waters and get such high winds during hurricanes that the mangroves are like nuts to this, I'm moving elsewhere. And those areas where they move away from or where they just can't exist are called coastal lowlands. And these are the antithesis of what people think of when they think of the Everglades, because it's essentially a scrub desert. Yeah, in that nuts, there's scrub desert ecosystems in the Everglades.
Yeah, It's it's incredible, like all the ecosystems are so varied, it's really amazing.
Yeah. So it's populated by low growing, salt tolerant plants that can handle being blown around in one hundred and eighty one hundred and ninety mile an hour winds like succulents.
And then there's Florida Bay and this is again the very very shallow coastal area that's bounded at the south by the Key, at the north by the Florida Mainland, and there's amazing fishing there and it's most people would think like, that's not the Everglades, but it's technically included in Everglades in particular Everglades National Park.
Absolutely, we got to talk about some animals here. We're not going to go into too much detail, but we got to talk about alligators and crocodiles because, as you know, if you've listened to the show, that's the only place on planet Earth that has both, which is pretty remarkable. Yeah, it is a lot more alligators and crocodiles. Of course, I think about two hundred thousand gators compared to two thousand crocs.
Yes, but the crocs numbered two hundred back in nineteen seventy five. That's pretty good comeback, yeah, because they were never gone. Same with the panthers, there's a they're still in a very precariously low population density of about two hundred. Yeah, but that's up from twenty to thirty in the nineteen seventies.
It's crazy.
So this is like these are the year or the dividends that protection yielded, Like the Florida panthers should not exist any longer were it not for people like E. F. Co and Marjorie Stone in Douglas, like they would just be long gone. And now they're starting to slowly come back. And those things are beautiful.
Yeah, they are gorgeous, big kitty cats.
Yeah, six to seven feet long.
Yeah, you don't saw a wild cow?
What?
Yeah, Kenny said, they're not wild cows, But what.
Do you call them, like a feral cows?
Maybe he did say wild cows, but wild just meaning they're not anyone's cows.
That's pretty cool.
There's a word for that. I just can't think of it.
Unowned cows, no possess they were least cows.
I think, so, yeah, that's pretty neat. Though then I don't understand how those things survive because they're just an alligator could take them down so easy.
This cow was fifty feet from an alligator.
It's so weird. I don't understand nature sometimes, even though I love it.
You've got your you've got your water mammals. Everyone loves to see a manatee or an otter or a dolphin. The manatee. There was a I feel like a push to save the manatee started in like the nineties or maybe even earlier.
Something like that, because they were in trouble and they've kind of come back too.
Yeah.
I think they went from endanger to threatened in twenty seventeen. But just a few years ago they had what's called an unusual mortality event, which looks like it is because of a loss of sea grass and water quality.
Yeah, that's a huge one. So Lake Okachobee, as we'll see as a toxic dump of farm runoff in nutrients, and because it's diverted that water's diverted now to the eastern coast and the western coast, they're very frequently algae die offs or algae that lead to fish kills and die offs, including the sea grass. So it's a huge, huge problem. Not only is it not providing the Everglades with water right now, that's actually kind of good because if it were, the Everglades would be even more poison
than they are. So instead, the coastal areas are getting poisoned, and that's where the manatees live. And when the sea grass goes away, the mandes go away. So now they've taken up programs of like feeding the manades expired heads of cabbage and lettuce and stuff from grocery stores around the state, and it seems to be sustaining them. But the key here is to is to figure out how to treat Lake Okachobe. That's the key. If you can treat Lake Okachobe, you can start moving water from Lake
Okachobe down into the Everglades. You're taking an enormous first step toward restoration, and you're also saving coastal areas that are now just completely trashed by algae blooms and agricultural runoff.
Do it turn the water on?
Well, that's what they're doing there. So are we onto conservation and climate change? Well?
I want to shout out our bird friends real quick, because, like I said, early on, the alligators were neat, although we did see baby gaiters, very very cute, all piling on one another trying to I guess get out of the water. There's like ten of them. They were just climbing all over each other.
They don't get either.
Like five feet from us is very cute, But the birds is what really knocked me out. And Emily and I have gotten much more into I wouldn't even say birding, but just appreciating birds enthusiasm. Like we got a bunch of feeders now and cameras and we're looking them up more. And she puts out her phone and then the Cornell app you know, listens and records. So we've gotten more into it. We don't actually go out with the binoculars yet.
I have a magazine you got me a subscription to that I hadn't heard of before that I love that. I think you'll like too. It's called Birds and Blooms. Oh yeah, and essentially it's almost ad free. I don't know how they publish. I guess just sudden subscribe. And it's all about birds and how great birds are and oh check out this plant and this plant beautiful. It's almost like just appreciating this stuff for ap preaching it. It's not just shoving conservation down your throat. It's not
there's agenda. There's no agenda, aside from appreciating birds and plants, it's a really great magazine.
Oh, my friend, I appreciate that that is going to be coming Emily's way, and I will tell her that you and you me are to think sure, but anyway.
It'll probably never get back to me if you don't.
The birds down there were just amazing cranes and herons, and the really the showstopper was that pink what's it called the rosette spoon bill. We came upon a big mess of them, and I was just like, you got it, Like it was in the swamp road ahead of us.
How tall I knew it he was.
I knew what he was going to do, and he cut the engine and we watched them and stuff. But then you know, he drives and they fly away, and all I could think of was sorry.
Sorry for disturbing you. Yeah, how tall are they?
They were about the same size as like a hair in her crane, it seemed like. But just the spoon bills are cool looking, and then when they take off and fly, they're just this like flamingo pink.
It's amazing.
That's really cool, man. Yeah, lots of butterflies down there, too, which I'm a big fan of as well.
Yeah, and hopefully we're going to be doing If you're saying, how can you not talk about orchids, I think we're going to do maybe a shorty.
Just on orchids.
Yes, So, as I was saying, there's some steps that need to be taken to restore the Everglades, and there's been a huge push to restoring the Everglades for decades now. Unesco put it on his World Heritage List in nineteen seventy nine, and even long before that, people will be like, we've got to stop screwing with this stuff. We have messed it up so bad with the system of canals and ditches and dykes and levees and dams. We've got
to just undo some of this. And there was a huge push to to actually do that, and in two thousand, back when Congress was capable of being bipartisan, they passed the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan SERP, and SERP essentially said we're going to undo as much of that C and SF project work as possible and just let the Everglades be what the Everglades are. And had anyone been on the ball and funding come through early, it would be
done by now. It was projected to cost eight billion dollars in twenty years, and that is not at all how it worked out at all. They're actually just now starting a lot of the projects, and by a lot of the projects, I mean a tiny fraction of what's needed to be done.
Yeah, and you know, Kenny said the same thing that you know, there's still real estate encroaching and developers encroaching, so it seems like a one step forward.
To steps back situation.
Yeah, that they're still draining more wetlands to expand you know, living space and grocery stores and everything else that people use further and further into it. So it's fairly discouraging. I know that was at one point a deal to buy back a bunch of land from US Sugar, but thanks to the two thousand and eight financial crisis that went belly up, right.
Didn't that just anger you? So this would have been a huge, huge step because this was prime agricultural land that was below Lake Okeachobean. If they could basically flood that again, it would it would restore water back to the Everglades. Would have been huge and US Sugar who up until you said it, I've been pronouncing in my head.
US Sugar. They were on board, and a lot of people were critical that Florida was going to spend one point seven five billion dollars to buy like one hundred and eighty thousand acres from US Sugar because it was a struggling company to begin with, and YadA, YadA, YadA. But all of those political obstacles and it was basically
a done deal. And then the financial crisis happened and all those stupid banks that screwed up the entire global economy also prevented the Everglades Restoration Room taking that enormous step forward because Floor is like, oh, we don't have any money all of a sudden, and we really need every penny we can get.
Yeah, that's a real thumb in the eye.
Yeah, well, we promised a little bit more talk of Pete and I'm glad Lyvia found this because I'm just I think both it was pretty knocked out by Pete. Maybe we should do a Pete cast one day. Yeah, but there's a lot of that Pete rich soil underneath the marshes there. And you talked earlier about what was it that was the opposite of pete.
Marl.
Yeah, Marl was the opposite of pete. Pete forms from organic materials that don't have oxygen. They're shielded from oxygen so they don't break down. And that's why you can find like amazing discoveries and peat bogs. The wetland dries up, though, and that stuff can all of a sudden burn that's going to release a bunch of carbon into the atmosphere, and it's you know, all of a sudden, the peat is threatened as well.
Yeah. So yeah, there's a lot of problems with climate change that climate change is going to bring to the Everglades, and one of them is that restoration. The restoration plan that was adopted in two thousand did not plan for
climate change. So they're having to figure out how to implement these these things now, the projects now, without going back to the drawing board and starting over and losing tons of ground and time, but also without spending billions of dollars on things that aren't going to work because the Everglades are going to change with the climate. So that's currently where they're what they're trying to figure out.
Oh yeah, yeah, and I recommend two different articles that have two really different views of what's going on for a really really sunny view that I almost found suspicious, as if as if some AI wrote it, knew what I was researching, and wrote it and served it up to me just in time for me to report on it to you guys. I don't think that's a thing yet, but it made me think like that's coming in the future. Yeah. I think it's called like a bypass surgery for the Everglades.
It's on fizz org and it's pretty good. It's very interesting, but again it's got a really sunny outlook for the opposite outlook. There is a up first public radio interview with Jenny Stilettovich, who's a public radio reporter who reports on the Everglades and has forever, and that's called how to Save the Everglades. Would strongly recommend listening or reading to that as well as that fizz org article, and I'll give you a pretty clear perspective on what's going on.
Phyzorg sounds like Snoop Dogg named that what a perfect way to end.
Very nice well. Chuck made another Snoop Dogg reference to circle things up again, and of course that has just triggered listener mail.
Whether we like it or not, we're gonna shout out.
I don't know if you did you see that flood of emails come in from those high school kids.
No, okay, you will.
It was sort of right in the last hour before we recorded, we got like ten or twelve emails all at the same time from a high school class. So I was like, somebody had an assignment, nice, and I'm going to read one of them and shout out the rest. This was called subject line. My teacher forced me to do this. I'm not gonna say which student Ms Tiak wrote this one, but I bet you could probably figure it out. Hey, guys, really enjoy listening to your podcast.
I've been listening for the past month or so. So far I've learned a lot from it. One of my favorite topics was the origin of math symbols, since I'm a big math person. I'm an ap English language student at Wasco High School. My teacher is a huge fan of both of you guys, and it's been making us listen to a podcast episode every week.
Nice.
So we gained general knowledge for our argument essay in the ape exam. She is now forcing us to send a listener mail for a grade.
If you happen to see this, can I get a thank you to Ms Tiak?
How do you spell it?
T y A c K.
Great name?
Unless the ta is silent, then it's just yak or unless the why silent? In this tech? Sure, what if the A silent then it'd be tyke. What if the c K is silent, it'd be tia?
Very nice?
Anything else?
I think we've covered the big ones.
I would actually like to thank you for giving our class more knowledge in order to hopefully use it in the exam. Again, thank you keep educating the world in an entertaining way. Actually, that was a nice email, so I'm gonna go ahead and say that was from a Neil Neil and big shout out to Jessica, Damien, Elijah, Abel, Dalen, Marianna, Yeah, an Angel.
Great lineup of names or in hell, I'm not sure, and it's a great lineup of people too, I'm sure.
And hey, this just in We don't normally do this, but we got a bunch of more emails from kids from this class, and you can't just read a third of the kids' names and be done with it.
You know, Chuck, what day is it? What's going on?
I mean, this is much later, but like, you got to read all these kids' names, so we're gonna do that right now. This must be many classes, there's no way all these kids are one class. But in addition to the ones we read, can we also shout out from that ap class? Ian and Brie and Megan and Eileen and Jocelyn and Marisol and Amanda and Alexis and Charisma and Celeste and Nicholas and Cecilia and Garelli and alex and Inez.
You think I'm done?
Yeah, nope, halfway there, my friend. Wow, because we also have to thank Paulina and Arturo and Jacqueline and Antonio and Lauren and Brittany I see you, Brittany and Victoria and Isack what a name Isick? And then finally Juliette, Jasmine, Ava, Sebastian and of course dearest Kiardon all wrote in and there was one student that was.
Like, don't read my name, hooper humperdink.
So we're not going to, but uh just wanted to give everyone in the class a shout out.
That's awesome. Sounds like a great bunch.
Chuck, Yeah, so uh, Miss Tiack give everyone a great grade and a big shout out to the ap English class at Wasco High.
Yeah, huge shout out. And if you want to be like Miss txx class and get in touch with us for whatever reason we want to hear from you, you can send it via email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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