Waters of Destiny

Waters of Destiny tells the story of how sugarcane came to be produced at industrial scale in the Florida Everglades, thanks to a federal flood-control system that led to the devastation of downstream ecosystems and communities. It tells how the demand for both flood protection and water supply outstripped the system’s capacity to deliver, necessitating painful tradeoffs. Water managers and advocates have been trying to solve this operational conundrum for decades, but South Florida’s environment radically limits water-control options. Scientists advocate restoring drained wetlands to allow floodwaters to once again spread across the landscape, but they have been repeatedly foiled by Big Sugar, for whom any loss of cane acreage threatens their refineries’ profit margins. Drawing on scores of interviews and years of observation, Schwartz reveals how, in the late 1990s, state and federal officials squandered a moment of peak bipartisan support for Everglades restoration, enacting an $8 billion program that—while much ballyhooed—relied on speculative technological “moonshots” in lieu of confronting Big Sugar. The program’s “failure to launch” in the quarter-century since, Schwartz argues, was an inevitable consequence of this political failure.