"Environmental groups want to use engineered wetlands to help replenish the river of grass and address toxic algae. The state’s politically powerful sugar growers say those wetlands are for their own polluted water."
"Scattered between the vast sugar cane and vegetable fields of Florida’s heartland and the fragile marshes of the Everglades are a series of wetlands, resembling nature but hardly natural, that together represent the largest experiment of its kind in the world.
The wetlands were built over the last 30 years to serve as a buffer between the farms that make the region south of Lake Okeechobee among the nation’s most bountiful and the Everglades, where a $21 billion restoration effort is one of the most ambitious of its kind in human history.
Spanning some 62,000 acres, the wetlands are composed of cattails, southern naiad and other plant species that function as natural water filters, the vegetative tissues absorbing pollution flowing from the farms that would threaten the river of grass. Nowhere else on Earth have human-made wetlands such as these ever been implemented on such an expansive scale.
Called stormwater treatment areas (STAs) in the bureaucratic parlance of Everglades restoration, the wetlands now are at the heart of a new controversy over a calamity elsewhere in the watershed, which encompasses much of the peninsula and is responsible for the drinking water of some 9 million Floridians. That calamity begins in Lake Okeechobee."
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