At the Edge of the Everglades

Drive east from downtown Naples and within an hour you are inside the Big Cypress National Preserve, about seven hundred twenty thousand acres of cypress swamp, sawgrass prairie, and subtropical forest, one of the largest federal preserves east of the Mississippi River. Continue south and you reach Everglades National Park, the largest subtropical wilderness in the United States and the only one of its kind in the world. The Everglades is not a swamp in the conventional sense but an enormous, slow-moving river of grass, a sheet of fresh water flowing southward from Lake Okeechobee through a broad, shallow basin toward Florida Bay and the Gulf, typically averaging about six inches deep and sixty miles wide.

The national park was established in nineteen forty-seven after decades of advocacy led by Ernest Coe. Writer Marjory Stoneman Douglas published her book The Everglades: River of Grass that same year, and it changed how Americans thought about the landscape. Today more than one third of the Everglades' historic water flow has been diverted for agriculture and urban use, and the effort to restore the ecosystem is one of the largest and most expensive ecological engineering projects in human history.

Naples sits at the western edge of this restoration effort. The health of the estuaries, the fisheries, and the seagrass beds along the Gulf coast of southwest Florida depends directly on how much freshwater completes the journey from the Kissimmee River basin through the Everglades to the sea, a hydrological story that flows right through the streets of Naples.