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There was an interesting article about Christopher on the front page of the Palm Beach Post:
Researcher questions Everglades plan focus By Bob
King, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer Inside a 1907 clapboard house fitted with solar panels, where a stationary bike powers a black-and-white television and the coffee is ground by hand, dwells the author of an unfinished book almost nobody has read. Yet this book's contents are creating a scientific stir. Has Chris McVoy -- Lake Worth resident, folk dancer, peace activist, part-time yoga instructor and speaker of six languages -- uncovered fatal flaws in the $8.4 billion plan to restore the Everglades? Some environmentalists think he has. He's also caught the ear of certain federal scientists, who say the plan is sound but that McVoy has found ways they can improve it. The book painstakingly describes the wet, wild, flowing Everglades that existed before the 1880s, when early drainage projects began its slow death. That picture differs from the scientific thinking behind the restoration plan -- either a little or a lot, depending on whom you ask. Here's the awkward part: McVoy is a wetlands scientist at the South Florida Water Management District, one of the prime forces behind the $8.4 billion plan. Some district managers say they're still eager to publish the book he's been working on since 1995, originally as an employee of the Environmental Defense Fund. But McVoy has landed in hot water with bosses who have accused him of publicly promoting ideas that hadn't received scientific scrutiny. "I think there are some people who would be quite happy if I fell off the face of the earth," said McVoy, a thin 44-year-old with a birdlike nose and quiet, Dutch-influenced voice. "But I think there are also people who think there might be something worth looking at." 'A wake-up call'His supporters are already convinced McVoy has uncovered something important: evidence that the Everglades originally thrived because its water flowed. "What Chris McVoy's work did was give us a wake-up call," said Ronnie Best, who runs the U.S. Geological Survey's Everglades program in Miami and took part in developing the restoration plan in the 1990s.
"I think his work is brilliant," said Jonathan Ullman, South Florida leader of the Sierra Club. "He's like a detective. He's trying to figure out what things were like before the crime was committed."
But skeptics say they're not convinced that flowing water is as important as McVoy thinks it is. Meanwhile, longtime Everglades researcher Ron Jones said, some groups are using McVoy's work to further private agendas.
"It's a good piece of science and it's been turned into a bad piece of politics," said Jones, a Florida International University biologist.
The simple fact that the Everglades flowed is hardly a revelation, of course.
"The water moves," Marjory Stoneman Douglas wrote in The Everglades: River of Grass, the 1947 book whose title contradicted the then-common notion of the marsh as a stagnant swamp.
But McVoy believes the water did more than simply glide from Lake Okeechobee to Florida's southern tip. It gouged the landscape into a swooshing, washboard pattern of high and low ground, he concluded, based on more than 700 historical maps, surveys, explorers' chronicles and other accounts dating to 1830.
The complex landscape of high ridges and long, low sloughs hosted a variety of wading birds, fish, snails, saw grass and water lilies.
Today, dammed by dikes and levees, the landscape has flattened and the numbers of critters have dwindled. The upshot: To revive the Everglades, the water must flow again.
But many environmentalists and other critics say that the $8.4 billion plan wouldn't create enough flow. The plan calls for removing 228 miles of levees and canals inside the Everglades but would leave others in place. It also calls for elevating or bridging Tamiami Trail north of Everglades National Park but says the details will be decided later.
Critics say the plan relies too much on a complex apparatus of storage wells, rock pits and pumps that would route water around the Everglades, not through it.
In a crucial test case, groups including the Sierra Club want to create a $136 million elevated skyway to replace 11 miles of the Tamiami Trail, which has dammed water upstream of the park ever since the highway was finished in 1928. Scientists from the U.S. Interior Department have endorsed the cause.
Some environmentalists would like to do the same to Alligator Alley, which crosses the heart of the Everglades between Weston and Naples.
Such changes wouldn't require scrapping the plan Congress approved.
The plan leaves most of its details to be decided later by the the water district and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The corps has yet to take a position on the skyway.
But some groups, such as Friends of the Everglades, are pressing for more sweeping changes, such as a government buyout of many or all of western Palm Beach County's sugar farms. They say water could then flow directly from Lake Okeechobee to the Everglades.
People were debating the sugar buyout long before McVoy arrived, and the corps dismissed the idea a decade ago as an impractical scheme that would do nothing for the Everglades.
Much of the restoration plan is based on the Natural Systems Model, a computer program containing water managers' depiction of the 19th century Everglades.
As closely as possible, the plan aims to match the model's water cycles -- how deep water should be in particular places at particular times, in cycles of months, seasons and years.
The model includes information on water flow, but the Geological Survey's Best said scientists didn't realize flow's importance when they created the plan.
Retired Army Corps of Engineers Col. Terry Rice disagrees, saying flow is less important than getting the water depths and timings right.
Water too deep drowns trees and disintegrates islands. Water too shallow allows disastrous fires. Water at the wrong time floods alligator nests or causes baby wood storks to starve. And in today's Everglades, shrunken and drained by engineering, nature can't run the show without help, Rice said.
"You cannot just say, 'Get rid of things,' " said Rice, who commanded the corps in Jacksonville from 1994 to 1997. "You cannot create what used to be without engineering."
McVoy believes that if water flowed freely, nature would eventually right itself without help from engineers' knobs and levers. "The system originally operated without any knobs," he said. Too much of a perfectionist?Being outside the mainstream is nothing new for McVoy. He owns a television he hasn't switched on since the Olympics. He rarely turns on his air conditioner. In car-happy South Florida, McVoy owns only a Trek bicycle, with bags to carry his laptop and a change of clothing on his 6 1/2 -mile commute to work.
In the upper floor he rents in a historic Lake Worth home, furnished in a mixture of thrift shop and Popular Mechanics, solar panels and 12-volt batteries power his lights, computer and fans. His typical electric bill: $12 to $15 a month.
His stereo is a Walkman tape player, a portable compact disc player and an amplifier made from a kit. The phone is a black rotary dial. The coffee grinder is hand-cranked, as is the pencil sharpener and can opener. Even his small aquarium is low-tech, filled with spike rush, peat and amber water from the Everglades. Treading lightly on the Earth isn't his only passion. He performs in a Chilean dance troupe and teaches at Yoga & Inner Peace.
On his kitchen table you'll sometimes find evidence of his work life, such as an Everglades sediment meter he's soldered together from the guts of an ancient dot-matrix printer.
"I do sort of live an odd lifestyle," McVoy said. "But a principled one, I guess." Challenge to assumptionsMcVoy grew up in Wisconsin and has spent time living in Costa Rica, Germany and the Netherlands. Armed with a doctorate in soil science from Cornell, he arrived in South Florida in 1995 as an employee of the Environmental Defense Fund, an advocacy group that has fought the district in court over its handling of the Everglades.
The group -- now called Environmental Defense -- was looking for someone to research the Everglades' history and compare it with the assumptions behind the restoration.
It was supposed to be a six-month project, attorney Tim Searchinger recalled. Instead, McVoy "went into this in an incredibly rigorous and detailed way," Searchinger said.
McVoy dug into the district's archives, queried historical societies and museums, and studied explorers' field notes.
He got copies of old surveys and aerial photos taken from dirigibles.
Information flowed from Everglades National Park and the Library of Congress.
Eventually he amassed more than 700 documents dating back to the 1830s.
And he did what nobody else had done, assembling the records into a huge database and pinpointing the measurements on a map.
He didn't stop, even after Environmental Defense ran out of money for the research. "There was a stretch when I came to work every day and nobody was paying me," he said. Advocacy toleratedMcVoy's work raised some eyebrows even then because he was working at the water district while the environmental group paid his salary. Some board members questioned why someone from an advocacy group was getting desk space and working with district scientists.
In 1997, he joined the district, first as a leased employee, then as a permanent staff member. "We had the need for somebody like him," said Jayantha Obeysekera, the district manager who hired McVoy. "This is a valuable project.... I still believe in it."
McVoy was still working on the study in 1999, when the district and the Army corps sent the restoration plan to Congress.
At some point the project became a book manuscript, with McVoy sharing the writing with Obeysekera and senior district scientist Winnie Said. They produced more than 400 pages of text, with dozens of photos and graphics.
But McVoy and his co-authors could never entirely agree on all the details of water flow, according to district records and a June 2000 draft of the book, which The Post obtained under the state Public Records Act.
McVoy also missed repeated deadlines to finish his writing, frustrating his bosses. Meanwhile, word of McVoy's research was spreading. On the Internet, environmentalists began asking why the district wouldn't publish it.
"The public perceives the district as withholding information," two of McVoy's bosses complained in a January 2000 memo about his missed deadlines.
They were also nervous about what he was saying in public.
Before he could speak at a national conference of Everglades activists in Naples, the district made McVoy promise to read a 49-word disclaimer calling his research a "work-in-progress."
When the conference organizers ran out of time and pressured McVoy to rush his talk, he displayed the disclaimer on a screen but didn't read it aloud -- generating memos accusing him of "deception."
By 2001, the book was 90 percent finished. But McVoy's supervisors wrote that it had become "unmanageable," too big for one person.
They told him to break his work into smaller scientific papers and make his findings more immediately useful to the restoration.
John Ogden, leader of a restoration science committee for the district, said water managers just want McVoy's conclusions to go through the same scrutiny the agency expects of all its research before it goes public. Ogden said McVoy deserves credit for amassing so much data, but he says the failure to publish the book is "entirely Chris."
"Chris is very methodical and maybe a perfectionist," Ogden said. "He rarely seems to reach closure on things." McVoy admits he's at least partly to blame. "It's not fair to beat up on the district for this." 'Science on the hot plate'Word was continuing to spread. At the end of 2000, the district and other agencies took part in an Everglades science conference where McVoy gave a presentation on his findings.
The Science Coordination Team, a panel that advises local, state and federal agencies on an Everglades task force, also took up the issue.
It asked McVoy and Elizabeth Crisfield, a hydrologist at Everglades National Park, to write a paper that could help shape restoration decisions.
They produced a draft last July that made a plea for free-flowing water and urged elevating the Tamiami Trail.
Meanwhile the science team's leaders, the Geological Survey's Best and Ogden, wrote a letter urging the corps to support the skyway, citing the historical evidence.
The letter got results: Restoration leaders accused the team of overstepping its bounds, and some questioned whether it should exist.
"That was not a science paper, it was a policy paper, and unfortunately that may destroy the Science Coordination Team," said Rice, a team member. "Scientists should not ever recommend policy. Scientists should bring truth to the table."
Best said that's what he tried to do.
"Right now science is on the hot plate," Best said.
The latest draft of McVoy's paper doesn't mention the skyway, a result of a decision by the team to focus solely on science.
Members decided to make the paper a product of the entire team -- which means McVoy won't be listed as an author.
Ogden said he hopes the paper will cause leaders at the corps, district and other agencies to consider flow when they make the many decisions still to come.
McVoy says that at least his ideas have entered the debate. "I think I've had a positive influence," he says. "I just wish more of it had been written."
Then on Friday, May 3, 2002, the Palm Beach Post printed the following editorial: New look at Everglades deserves a hard look A creative thinker has new ideas for restoring the Everglades. His plans, which The Post reported this week, do not include the storage of water in expensive underground wells, which is untested science that may not work. Rather than create giant reservoirs for high-priced above-ground storage, the scientist suggests letting water flow south from Lake Okeechobee, as it once did, across lands owned by sugar growers. The state-federal team planning the $8.4 billion restoration could buy those lands and return them to their original use as sloughs, with fast-moving water and plains filled with water-cleansing grasses. Another idea is to turn the Miami-Naples section of the Tamiami Trail into a skyway and let water flow under it to Everglades National Park. Credit Chris McVoy, former Environmental Defense Fund staff member and now an employee of the South Florida Water Management District, for the ideas. Mr. McVoy put them in an unpublished book manuscript that is generating attention within the district and generating controversy among Army Corps of Engineers scientists planning the restoration. Mr. McVoy's ideas, however, also have caught the interest of the water district's executive director, Henry Dean, who said they bear "serious investigation. I'm very intrigued by them." Mr. McVoy did what no one else had thought of doing: homework on the history of how water flowed to the Everglades before a dike contained Lake Okeechobee and water was routed to canals. Using water district archives, old surveys and aerial photos from dirigibles, drawing on documents from the Library of Congress, explorers' field notes and documents dating to the 1830s, he put together restoration plans based on the way water once moved south from the lake without man-made canals, dikes, locks or engineering devices. Some have welcomed his ideas; others say the Everglades is too far gone to be brought back without extensive, expensive engineering solutions. Yet Mr. McVoy's research and his ideas have made a strong and favorable impression on his colleagues and on environmental groups. Mr. McVoy hasn't quite finished his work. Mr. Dean suggests that he do so soon, then submit it for review by other scientists. That seems reasonable, though some working on restoration have accused a team on which Mr. McVoy served of overstepping its bounds. Still, Mr. Dean is optimistic that Mr. McVoy's ideas could reveal "what should be done that's feasible to restore the system the way it's meant to operate." That prospect alone means the ideas need a hearing. For an after-Hurricane-Wilma article about Christopher's solar power: www.yogapeace.com/christopher2.htm |
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