Water impoundments are man-made lakes. CERP calls for a total of 180,000 combined lake acres — split between 10 to 20 sites — designed to capture nearly 500 billion gallons of water. But that’s only 60 percent of the water storage that the hydrologists need. It’s a conundrum, alright. They can’t build more reservoirs without displacing people or farmland and thus risking the ire of Florida’s politically powerful real estate and sugarcane lobbies. They can’t dig the reservoirs deeper than 8 feet because the state sits on the country’s most porous limestone — hit that and the water would simply drain away. The only real solution is to store excess water deep underground, in wells.
I see my first well at the eastern edge of the Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge, 20 miles west of Boca Raton, in a small clearing the size of a suburban backyard. At the center of the clearing, bordered by a smattering of weeds, there’s a skinny green pipe sticking out of the ground. This is the high-tech approach.
“It doesn’t look like much,” says Nevulis. “But it can store a whole lot of water.”
He’s not kidding. This well is designed to pump 5 million gallons of water a day — or roughly what it would take to fill 100 Olympic swimming pools — down a thousand feet of pipe and into the rocky bowels of the Floridan aquifer. Normally, the aquifer is filled with seawater, but when freshwater is injected, it pushes back the brackish water. The pressure works such that very little mingling occurs. And — with 333 wells called for in the final plan — it better work.
At the height of the wet season, when all of these 333 wells are operating at maximum capacity, some 1.6 billion gallons of water will be pumped into the ground every day. Hundreds of billions of gallons — enough to submerge all of Washington, D.C., in more than 20 feet of water — will be stored underground over the six-month wet season, then released in the dry months, effectively transforming the Floridan aquifer into the world’s largest water tank.
Of course, there are issues. “This kind of volume creates tons of unanswered questions,” says Nevulis. “We’re doing calculations to determine the effects of the added pressure. Will pumping year in and year out fracture the matrix? We just don’t know.”
And that’s just the first of the unknowns. There are also chemical and biological dangers associated with moving this much liquid around. Fecal contaminants in the groundwater could spread through the whole aquifer, essentially rendering it useless and much of Florida uninhabitable. Mercury in the surface water — the same industrial toxin contaminating the fish — reacts with the sulfates in the ground to create the far more poisonous methyl mercury, and again threatens the entire ecosystem. This list goes on.
To put this in different terms, the only other time terraforming has been attempted at scale — and a much smaller scale than is being tried here — was in the early 1990s, when the 3.4 acre dome in the desert known as Biosphere 2, the Arizona-based “Earth systems research facility,” was created to see if we could actually engineer ecosystems. Unfortunately, Biosphere 2 suffered an onslaught of unintended consequences — wildly fluctuating CO2 levels, massive fish die-offs, a cockroach and ant population explosion, to name but a few — and while the lessons learned were myriad, the moral was straightforward: Playing God ain’t easy.
But, at least here in Florida, the upside is considerable. Drought has plagued this state for much of the past decade, with water rationing now the law of the land. “One thing’s for sure,” says Nevulis. “If we can solve these problems and get these wells to work, no one around here is going to go thirsty for a very long time.”
4.
As you leave Lake Okeechobee and head south, the sheer scale of the Corps’s original engineering project becomes clear. One hundred and fifty years ago, this entire landscape was swamp. Today, it’s sugarcane. Four hundred and fifty thousand acres of sugarcane to be exact. And that acreage is the next challenge the Everglades Restoration Project must face.
Sugarcane farmers use phosphorus as fertilizer — but not without consequences. When introduced into the Everglades, the chemical produces a drastic rise in exotic green algae, which kills off the native blue-green variety and enables cattails — traditionally found here in small numbers — to outcompete the saw grass. As cattail density thickens, sunlight can no longer penetrate the canopy, and the blue-green algae below begins to die. Without algae, the invertebrates go hungry and the small fish that feed on them and then the larger ones that feed on them, and so on up the food chain, until the wading birds themselves either starve or head elsewhere for a meal.
This is a complicated problem. To combat it, the restoration plan calls for one of the largest and most complicated water-quality treatment facilities ever devised. To create a buffer between the phosphorus-using farmers and the phosphorus-hating Everglades, scientists have designed six Stormwater Treatment Areas that sprawl over 41,000 acres. These areas are phosphorus-eating wetlands, giant septic swimming pools big enough to float an oil tanker. Farmland runoff will be diverted through these treatment areas before being released into the Everglades with the ambitious goal of reducing phosphorus levels from their current 200 parts-per-billion down to 10 ppb — scientists’ best guess of the early Everglades’ phosphorus levels.
“Ten ppb is the toughest phosphorus goal anywhere on the planet,” says Jana Newman, the senior scientist working on the treatment areas. “It’s on the threshold of what’s even possible to detect. We’re trying everything from green technologies to chemical technologies, but there’s a cost factor here. When phosphorus is depleted, it gets more and more difficult to remove; down around 10 ppb, it takes 400 pounds of chemicals to remove one pound of phosphorus.”
The Storage Treatment Area known as 1 West is the proving ground. It’s a swampy rat’s maze. Water enters through a giant pump station and travels along 18 miles of levees, concrete spillways, and culverts that push it into five man-made chunks of marshland, or cells. Each cell is stocked with a carefully selected mixture of cattails, submerged aquatic vegetation, floating plants, and algae. As water passes into the cells, the plants suck up the phosphorus, die off, and fall to the bottom, where they’re entombed in heavy peat. When the water exits, its phosphorus count is measured again. So far, 12 ppb is the lowest concentration achieved, but that number came during a drought in which the flow rate was exceptionally low.
As mentioned, playing God ain’t easy.
5.
One of the main difficulties with trying to save an ecosystem is how little we really know about ecosystems themselves — a lesson driven home to me when I go out for a nighttime tour of the Everglades. I had joined a couple of field biologists, Laura Brandt and Frank Mazzoti, for a boat trip into the Loxahatchee Refuge, long after the park is closed. My goal was to experience this landscape as it once was, empty of man, full of saw grass and water. Their goal was to count alligators.
Alligators are the keystone predator in the Everglades — meaning it is their health that determines the health of the entire ecosystem. The goal tonight is just simple science. We shine flashlights over the water, looking for the telltale glimmer of alligator eye-shine — the refractory glow their eyes give off at night (this is also why we’re traveling in the dark, as you can’t see eye-shine in daylight). Once a gator is sighted, we pull alongside, notate location with a GPS, and take rough size measurements as a way of determining age: newborn, juvenile, adult, senior citizen. “It may seem basic,” says Brandt, “but no one has ever done this research before. We want to save the Everglades, but really we know so little about them. The reason we’re doing this survey is to make sure that the things we want to save are really being saved.”
Our boat weaves through head-high saw grass tangles. It’s a tough old plant, evolved to withstand a tough environment. The tops of the shafts form spears, and tiny, sharp teeth run up both sides of the blade. Unsuspecting tourists have been known to gash their palms while copping a feel. The early explorers told tales of men lost for months in this maze.
Motoring on, we start to see the tree islands, places where, over hundreds of years, the sediment level has risen and seeds have blown in and taken hold. The islands are teardrop-shaped, symmetrically aligned so that the fat end faces north and the taper faces south, pointing out the water’s otherwise imperceptible flow.
At one point, we spy a marsh rabbit swimming from tree island to tree island. A few days later, when I’m back at Water Management headquarters, I mention the rabbit to one of the top scientists working the project. He looks at me like I’m crazy.
“An aquatic rabbit?”
“Yeah.”
“Aquatic?”
“It looked like it was doing the breaststroke.”
“No shit,” he says. “I had no idea there was such a thing. We really don’t know much about the Everglades — that’s the real challenge.”
6.
Few people understand the challenge better than Jerry Lorenz, a marine ecologist with the National Audubon Society who studies spoonbills in the Florida Keys. “In the sixties,” he says, “when the system started to break down, we had no idea what was going wrong, let alone how to fix it.”
But over the past thirty years, ecology has morphed from a fuzzy, soft art into a rigorous statistical science. What started out as fragmented crisis management — an endangered species here, an oil spill there — has become a unified systems-based theory. But it’s a very new theory.
“Realistically,” continues Lorenz, “ecosystem ecology itself is quite young. What we have in South Florida right now is a bunch of separate ecosystems. If you want to save the whole thing by piecing them back together — what’s called landscape ecology — then you’re dealing with an entirely new field. Ten years ago, the whole philosophical underpinning that’s driving this restoration project didn’t even exist.”
I am riding next to Lorenz as he pilots a small boat across the Florida Bay. He wears jungle fatigues, a bandanna to cover his head, and has a long ponytail trickling out the back. We slide inland, up a feeder river, one of the many that connect freshwater to saltwater. In seconds, dense canopy blots out the daylight. Lorenz hardly notices: He’s too busy shouting about spoonbills over the engine.
“You know, people say that this project is about restoring the hydrology of the Everglades. Yet, down here, at the end of the pipe, you can get the hydrology perfect for 360 days a year, but if you fuck it up for five days, then Florida Bay takes it on the chin. If you get a surprise storm and the farmers start bitching about excess water in their fields and that water gets dumped at the wrong time, say during breeding season, then the spoonbills are screwed. All the modelers and engineers deal in averages. They’ll tell you five days is a blip on the radar, that it’s inconsequential. Well, it’s not inconsequential if you’re a spoonbill in heat.”
Thus, much in the same way that Brandt and Mazzoti are collecting alligator data, Lorenz is collecting spoonbill data. The results of all this research is sent to the computer modeling department at the Water District offices, where scientists are doing their best to fight against that five-day blip, among other catastrophes.
It’s another massive undertaking. The database being built doesn’t just contain facts about the Everglades present, it’s a treasure trove of the entire natural history of the area. There are botanical tidbits gleaned from eighteenth-century survey records, expedition accounts and agricultural deeds, interwoven with thirty years of hydrological data, including information about evaporation, canal flow, levee seepage, and water quality. There are disaster patterns from fires and tropical storms, topographic facts, population numbers, and all levels of biotic minutia: everything from the mating habits of aquatic insects to statistics on the Florida panther.
The model tells the engineers in the field what to do — which dam to blow up, how much water to store — but the model’s predictions could be wrong. Thus, the only way to change the Everglades is to change it slowly, carefully, monitoring each step and being prepared to unstep at any moment. In other words, just as ecology gave way to engineering in an attempt to dismantle the past, ecology must once again become engineering to reassemble the future.
But even that past is a mystery. No one really knows what the Everglades used to be — sure, there’s the random fact scooped out of the muck of soil deposits, yet there’s no groundwater table for the Mesozoic era, no aerial photographs from the Dark Ages. This is the largest eco-engineering project ever undertaken, our greatest effort to undo the damage we have done. Yet the scientists and engineers are hydroforming blind, as their actual goal exists only in imagination.
Lorenz and I are punching out into the Florida Bay, with nothing but empty ocean stretching out to a far horizon. I spin around and look back toward the land, but we’ve moved too far away to gain any perspective. I see neither mangroves nor saw grass prairies nor behemoth lakes nor meandering rivers. There’s only the thin edge of the continent: a green line over the shimmer of water.
“It’s just seems too damn big to fix,” I say.
“Yeah,” says Lorenz, “yet the plan is tiny compared to what it represents. The Everglades aren’t the planet’s only endangered ecosystem. The whole world is watching — if we fail here, then people aren’t even going to want to try elsewhere.”
Buckaroo Banzai
THE ARRIVAL OF FLYING CARS
It was 2004. Hollywood, California. I was sitting in my apartment in the late afternoon, writing the initial pages of what would eventually become my second book, when the doorbell rang. It was Dezso Molnar, the aerospace engineer we met in the Preface (when he worked with Craig Breedlove in the attempt to drive a car through the sound barrier). In the years since, Dezso and I had become friends, but — back then — we hadn’t seen each other in a little while.
He walked into my apartment with an armful of schematics and a smile on his face. “I solved it,” was the first thing he said.
“Solved what?”
“The flying car.”
Then he unrolled the schematics.
Now, sure, this was not the first time in history someone told their buddy that they’d figured out how to build a flying car. After all, when it comes to our science fiction dreams, what’s dreamier than a flying car? But here’s the thing: Dezso’s flying car — which, albeit, is actually a flying motorcycle — really flies.
At a personal level, nothing is more emblematic of the radical change being described in this book than that conversation. It was my “Welcome to Tomorrowland” moment — not just a paradigm shift, but a paradigm shift in my freaking living room.
1.
The Calfee Design Factory is 10,000 square feet, a few stories high, and perched on the edge of a lonely bluff in La Selva Beach, California. Below the bluff, the Pacific rumbles and moans. Above it, in the factory, on most days, they build bicycles — technically some of the very best in the world. Today is not most days.
Today is October 20, 2005. An afternoon of dark skies and light rain. A man named Dezso (pronounced Dezh-ur) Molnar is braving the elements, pushing a strange, three-wheeled contraption out of the warehouse and onto a 2,000-foot runway. A few years back, when Molnar started hunting for a place to build this contraption, he had three key needs. The first was isolation. What he wanted to build in his skunk works was the kind of project that attracted all sorts of unwanted attention. Calfee’s warehouse fit the bill. It sits on 379 acres of private land and sees few visitors. His second need was expertise. Molnar’s contraption had to be light — very light. Calfee’s bicycles are made from carbon fiber. They weigh about 12 lbs. The engineers who work here understand light. Molnar’s last requirement was a straight stretch of pavement. It didn’t have to be a runway, but — considering the true nature of Molnar’s invention — it was a fitting touch.
The true nature of Molnar’s invention is hard to discern at a glance. The machine looks like some Mad Max version of a recumbent bicycle, only with training wheels, a giant steel roll cage, and a 68-inch, three-bla
ded propeller strapped to the back end. Today is the very first day Molnar is going to fire up that propeller and see if it can push his machine down the road. He’s hoping for speeds about fifty mph — because, at least according to Molnar’s calculations, that’s about what it should take to get his flying motorcycle off the ground.
2.
The flying car, the flying motorcycle, the stuff of dreams — of very old dreams. Aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss invented the first flying car back in 1917: a forty-foot-long tri-winged beast made from aluminum. The beast never did fly, but it did manage to hop. That hop was enough, inspiring almost a century of innovation. Next came Waldo Waterman’s 1937 winged Studebaker — dead because of lack of funding. A bad crash destroyed the 1947 ConvAirCar. The Aerocar, perhaps the most famous of all roadable aircraft, went through six iterations before the oil crisis of the 1970s killed off production plans. Since then, there have been dozens of other attempts; a few have flown, most have not. Today, the two most widely known versions are Paul Moller’s M400 Skycar and the Terrafugia Transition. Both of these vehicles are currently for sale; neither of them have actually been delivered to a customer. And that’s really the issue. Out of the 104 roadable aircraft (80 of which have patents on file), none have seen mass production.
There are, of course, good reasons for this. While the upside of a flying car is easy to imagine — no traffic jams, shorter commutes, another excuse to quote Blade Runner — the downsides are considerable. Cost and noise, for starters (at $196,000, the Terrafugia has already been branded a rich man’s toy, to say nothing of Moller’s $3.5 million reserve price).
Safety and ease-of-use are bigger stumbling blocks. As with anything that flies, the consequences of pilot error can be severe. Add in the possibility of bad weather and it’s no surprise that the safest pilots are the ones with the most practice and the best knowledge of their airplane, twin requirements that further put the flying car out of reach of the average citizen. Moreover, right now, most small planes require constant (and expensive) upkeep. They also tend to be gas-guzzlers. Flying cars, especially if they become everyman tools, can be neither. And this list doesn’t include the bevy of concerns that arrive when one wants to create a street-legal aircraft.
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