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Why We Need to Protect the Soul of South Florida

The Everglades are the economical and ecological soul of South Florida. Our lives, our health, well being and economic prosperity are all linked to restored and functioning Everglades’s ecosystems. Everglades’s ecosystems directly support fishery, recreational and tourism industries as well as supplying water and flood control for agriculture, businesses and residents. Healthy Everglades’s ecosystems will make South Florida more resilient to adverse effects of sea level rise such as salt water intrusion into our drinking water aquifer. We cannot engineer a better solution, even if we could pay for it. Protect our environment and our economy, restore the Everglades. It simply makes good business sense to do so.
Both economics and ecology come from the Greek work “oikos” or house. Economics literally means the rules of the house and ecology the study of the house. In current use, economics deals with finances and business — money, while ecology focuses on explaining why plants and animals live where they do — nature. It has always seemed to me that there was a natural relationship between economics and ecology, yet the reality is that today they are usually set against each other. That is you can have economic prosperity, but only at the expense of a healthy environment — the economics vs. ecology dichotomy.
This is not only a false dichotomy, but a potentially dangerous situation to have.
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