Last Saturday was a gorgeous day - typical of our paradise. A bunch of us decided to take our boat down around Bowditch Point to the beach off the Surf Club to watch the cardboard boat races. It was beautiful in the back bay. As we passed around Bowditch Point into the Gulf of Mexico we were all hit in the face by what could only be described as pepper spray. We all started coughing and decided within 5 minutes that this was not what we wanted to do. So we brought the boat back home to our canal mid-island and drove down to the Surf Club. The minute we stepped out of our air conditioned vehicle we were once again hacking and coughing and ended up deciding to leave within a half hour of arriving. We ended up back in our air conditioned home, having cocktails and saying "what the heck is this?" You all know 'what I'm talking about - you've
experienced it yourself. It's the red tide that's been in the gulf since January. January! Almost ten months. Steve Greenslein, the executive director of the Sanibel and Captiva Islands Chamber of Commerce said "This is definitely a bad thing. But September is traditionally a light month for occupancy. If the red tide continues through the season, it could mean economic ruin."

There is a very real situation affecting our beach, our industry and even our lives happening right here and right now on this beach that's being overshadowed by the angry rhetoric of local political wannabes arguing over who did what to whom, how many staff should be fired, and who gels on the beach first after a hurricane. While this is apparently quite important to some of the candidates running for office there is a much bigger emergency that needs to be confronted with much more force. The Gulf of Mexico -that body of water that surrounds the fragile barrier island on which we live, work and play; that resource which draws millions upon millions of dollars to our island in the form of vacationers and tourists. That rich resource of marine life so vital to the fishing industry as well as the very ecology of our lives is slowly dying a tragic death, and we're just not taking it seriously enough.

The Marine Resources Task Force is an advisory board to the Town Council- Members which make recommendations to the Council regarding awareness, education and preservation of our community's natural resources. They held their regularly scheduled meeting on Sept 14th. The members - Terry Cain, Bill Perry, Charles Hester, John Naylor, Heather Stafford, Jeff Werner, and Mali Feeney representing the Town staff- are all dedicated to this charge.

During this meeting Jeff Werner brought up Resolution OS-21 (see sidebar for full text) and read part of it: "The Town of Ft. Myers Beach calls upon the South Florida Water Management District to immediately declare an emergency due to high flows from Lake Okeechobee and the Caloosahatchee Watershed..." He thought it was a well-written piece, and assumed the Town Attorney had put it together for the Council. Along with a copy of that resolution. Jeff distributed some pictures he had taken at the Gulf Harbor Marina on the Caloosahatchie, which clearly showed the suffocating and toxic presence of huge blooms of blue green algae. He said it was very nasty, and had been found to emit a toxin that adversely affects the liver. He said it was very scary.

Matt Feeney thought it was primarily in the dead-end canals in Cape Coral.

Heather Stafford said it was in front of her house, located on the Caloosahatchee River and not just on dead-end canals, which led her to believe it was widespread.

Bill Perry asked about what caused the algae blooms, and was told it was caused by the nutrients in the run-offs.

Terry Cain recalled that in meelings she had attended six years ago at the South Florida Water Management District, before she had served on Town Council, she and other people had begged them to deal with the nutrients that were coming down the watershed from the Caloosahatchie River, but, alluding to essentially non-action, the situation has become worse today. She said if she were a realtor or a hotel owner she would be going crazy right now. She felt the community needed to get something going, and needed to be more proactive, even if it upset people at the government level. She felt MRTF had to convey to the Council how important the issue was, and said while it was great that they had passed the resolution, the Council needed to know how concerned they should be on a continual basis, and also that they also needed to convey that concern to the County Commissioners. She acknowledged that things were being done, but said the problem started in the middle of Florida in the lakes and rivers where the nutrients were introduced into the water system from run-off. She felt that it was past time to "start screaming".

Last Tuesday Lee County Commissioner Ray Judah was doing that at a meeting with the South Florida Water Management District officials. In an article by Charlie Whitehead in the Bonita Daily News Judah was calling for the same legal authority the district board uses to drain into the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie River to instead spare the rivers and pump the water onto the sugar cane fields. Growers may need to be paid for lost or damaged crops but "ultimately it would be less than the damage to our environment and to our area."

How did we come to find ourselves in this hazardous situation?

Florida's Everglades once stretched 100 miles from the southern end of Lake Okeechobee down to the tidal estuaries of the Gulf of Mexico and Florida Bay. No longer. Over the past 200 years, Florida has lost nearly half -- 9.3 million acres - of its wetlands, much of it in the Everglades.

In fact, since the 1940s, the entire southern half of Florida has been torn up and redesigned, first by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and then by successive generations of city-builders, who fostered a coastal strip of urban development that today supports six million people. Much of the water has been diverted from the Everglades to the Atlantic Ocean as part of a vast drainage system that today consists of canals, dikes, pipelines, pumping stations, and flow-ways managed by the South Florida Water Management District.

In an area just south of Lake Okeechobee is the Everglades Agricultural Area, now home to Florida's sugar industry. The land area devoted to the Florida sugar industry has nearly doubled since the early 1970s, from 233,000 to 450,000 acres. Not only has the sugar industry further interrupted the flow of water on its way south, but its polluted runoff- in particular, the vast quantities of phosphorus that are produced by the industry's intensive farming of the area ~ has been cited by environmentalists, scientists, and federal and state officials as a primary cause of the degradation of the Everglades.

Since the water that does enter the region carries with it so much phosphorus — a nutrient — the result has been the unchecked growth of certain vegetation that has choked off other plants and pushed the ecosystem into crisis. Partly as a result, the formerly pristine waters of Florida Bay have turned a dark and cloudy brown, as tens of thousands of acres of underwater sea grass have died off and algae have billowed periodically to cover an area the size of Rhode Island.

Losing wetlands means losing both a natural water purifier and abundant wildlife, By straining out pollutants and 'recharging' the groundwater, the Everglades' characteristic peaty muck serves as a filter for the aquifer that is the primary source of drinking water from Palm Beach to Homestead.

The Florida wetlands are also home to such endangered species as the American crocodile and the Florida panther — in all 54 endangered species and another 29 species that are candidates for
the federal endangered species list.

In the western expanse of Palm Beach County, where sugar cane stretches to the horizon like an endless sea of green, sits the Osceola Farms refinery. A maze of steel pipes rings the five-story factory that billows waste from a pair of smokestacks. The Fanjul family of Palm Beach, the world's most infamous sugar barons, built this place. And with all the zeal of Colonial-era plantation owners, the Fanjuls fashioned a fortune here on the toil of immigrants from south of the border.

The Fanjul family of Cuba (pronounced Van-hool) made their fortunes by raising sugar cane, refining sugar, and controlling that staple in the world market. By the late 19th century, they were considered one of the top three sugar producers in the world. In the 1950's the family consisted of Lillian and Alfonso Fanjul and their five children. They owned, besides property abroad, an impressive amount in Cuba: four sugar mills, a cattle farm, a rice mill, four apartment buildings (with up to 27 apartments in some), and entire blocks and rows of houses and shops in downtown Havana.

At 2 a.m. on the morning of January 1, 1959, dictator Fulgencio Batista and his family boarded airplanes and flew away from Cuba. The revolution led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara had won, and, after a general strike and the fall of several government institutions, Castro emerged as prime minister on February 16. The Fanjul family had been watching a fireworks show in Havana harbor when Batista fled, but they had not been oblivious of the changing attitudes in their homeland. Jose "Pepe" Fanjul, son of Lillian and Alfonso and the current co-head of the family business, noted in an interview with London Times investigative reporter Peter Watson, "My father had tried to get Batista to allow Cuba to return to democracy. So when Castro carne in, we were not the first people he went for. Batista's immediate entourage was executed early on. But then, throughout 1960, pressures were put on the business community, and my grandfather and father thought it was wiser to leave. That year, month by month, the family emigrated."

There were no public good-byes, no tearful gatherings at the airport, and no big public sale of assets. The Fanjuls left unobtrusively with only what they could carry. They left fortunes behind, but they were far from pauperism. When they finally did apply for a particular form of American welfare, it was a far different one from that given to those living in the barrios of Miami and
Los Angeles. The Fanjuls get $65 million a year in agricultural subsidies through a federal program meant to support American farmers and sugar producers. The family sold some of their New York properties and settled in Palm Beach, Florida, where they began to reestablish their sugar business. They succeeded brilliantly.

Today, the Fanjul family, led by brothers Alfonso, Jr. and Pepe, again own one of the three largest sugar companies in the world. Annual sales, according to Pepe Fanjul, are $2.5 billion. They own 180,000 acres of sugar cane in Florida and 240,000 acres in the Dominican Republic, They have broadened out in other businesses. They closed one of their refineries, Domino Sugar, in the Williamsburg section in New York City in 2004, resulting in some 250 workers losing their jobs-Union sources attributed the closing to the Fanjuls' plans for real estate development on that site.

Not wanting to see their land seized again, as it had been in Cuba, the Fanjuls have shared their profits with politicians -including the Clintons, the Bushes, and Sen. John Kerry - through political donations. The Fanjuls have given $2.6 million to politicians and political committees since 1979, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The brothers split their allegiance fairly evenly, with Alfy supporting Democrats and Pepe Sr. cutting checks for Republicans. (In July 1999, Alfy hosted a fundraiser for the Florida Democratic Party at his Gables Estates home. The guest speaker was his friend the president, Bill Clinton. At $25,000 per person, the sumptuous event raised more than $1 million.) They even give to local officials, including a total of $6,500 to all but one Palm Beach County commissioner (Burl Aaronson). In return, politicians have given back to the Fanjuls in the form of federal sugar price supports. Sugar in the United Slates costs three times what it does elsewhere. The Fanjuls get an estimated $65 million a year from government subsidies and have received untold hundreds of millions from the price supports.

Examples of the way the Fanjuls have bought political support are plentiful. In 1996, faced with a proposal to put a penny-a-pound tax on sugar to pay for Everglades restoration - which has become a necessity largely because of the phosphorous and nitrogen that flow off the sugar fields ~ the Fanjuls and other sugar companies spent $24 million to defeat the measure. Big sugar nearly doubled the $14 million spent by Save Our Everglades, the plan's main backer, and voters defeated the referendum. Then just recently, the Fanjuls joined a lobbying blitz to persuade slate lawmakers to delay Everglades restoration by a decade or more. In the two years prior to the vote, big sugar hired 33 lobbyists, courted black legislators, and donated
$1 million to state parties. Despite harsh criticism from environmentalists and Congress, the delay sailed through the Legislature.

"We were up against a machine that had incredible amounts of money to lobby," said Joetle Lorion of Friends of the Everglades. "There's no way we could have matched the money and lobbying of the powerful sugar companies."

The sugar industry not only supported the campaigns of key Florida legislators, but also employed some of the best-known and most influential professional lobbyists. Among the sugar industry's lobbyists in Tallahassee were two former speakers of the Florida House, the governor's former chief of staff, and other former top slate officials. The Atlantic Sugar Association, the Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida, the Florida Sugar Cane League, and U.S. Sugar all deployed lobbyists from Hopping, Boyd, Green and Sams, a well-known Florida firm.

"When we went around shopping for a law firm, we had a very difficult time finding a law firm that didn't represent sugar," Florida environmental activist and businessman George Barley says. "Of the big ones, there's almost none, anywhere - Orlando, Miami, Tallahassee, Tampa. The one we finally found, who said they would do it, all of a sudden, bingo! About four days after we started talking to them, Duda hired them." A Duda & Sons is the fourth-largest sugar grower in Florida.

The sugar industry also directed millions of dollars at the scientific debate over the pollution of the Everglades. Not willing to concede anything to government and other scientists who were studying the degradation of Florida's environment, especially the role of phosphorus runoff from sugar farms, the industry spent millions of dollars to finance its own studies of the ecosystem in the Everglades. The research that resulted was highly influential in the legislative debate in Tallahassee and among public officials, especially those associated with the South Florida Water Management District.

"The politicians didn't have a clue about whether the conclusions of these scientists might have been influenced by sugar's money," says Ron Jones, an environmental scientist at Florida International University, who has argued for far stricter standards on the release of phosphorus into the Everglades. "I have the most serious questions about some of the science I'm seeing produced by sugar's consultants."

Spokesmen for the sugar industry challenge virtually every claim made by the environmentalists. They accuse some opponents of wanting to continue the battle over the Everglades until there is no more sugar industry in Florida.

While few think that the sugar industry will be forced out of business, the settlement that the
industry reached with the Interior Department and then pushed through the state legislature will cost the industry far less than most environmental organizations had wanted. Assessed at roughly $25 per acre per year, on a sliding scale that takes into account environmentally friendly farming practices, the final accord will cost the sugar industry from $230 million to $330 million, spread out over 20 years.

Taxpayers will foot the balance of the cost, estimated at $400 million to $700 million, environmentalists say.

What happens next is still unclear. The cleanup has begun, but both sides say that it may not work and that it may be too late to save the Everglades. Environmentalists contend that the half-measures in the plan all but guarantee that the slow death of the Everglades will continue. For its part, the sugar industry says that the plan won't really revive the historic "River of Grass" because phosphorus runoff was never the problem in the first place.

"We're pretty convinced that it won't work, but if it makes a settlement, have at it," says Bob Buker, a U.S. Sugar Corporation vice president. "It was a deal, that's all."

In 1996, sugar interests spent $25 million in an advertising campaign to successfully counter an environmental campaign run by Save Our Everglades.

In 1998, sugar interests in Florida spent $26 million on slate political efforts from winning refer-endums to electing Republican Jeb Bush as governor.

Between 1990 and 1998, sugar interests spent $13 million on presidential and congressional races.

In the past domestic producers sold sugar at 22 cents a pound. Producers in most other nations got 8 cents. America's artificial price prop added $1.4 billion to the shopping bills of U.S. consumers each year.

People like the Fanjuls get the best of both worlds. Owning half of all sugar lands in the Dominican Republic, they raise sugar cheaply, import it, and then sell at artificially high U.S. prices.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., called the federal sugar subsidy program "one of the most invidious, inefficient, Byzantine, special-interest, Depression-era federal programs."

Past-Vice President Al Gore's plan to restore the Everglades over 20 years would have cost taxpayers $8 billion. His program was backed by several environmental groups. But Gore's bill did nothing to regulate or curtail the vast sugar fields that created the problem in the first place.

And the Fanjuls keep raising money for the Democrats and Republicans.

Maybe the obstacles are just loo great. Unions back sugar because they fear thousands of jobs could go overseas. Politicians back sugar because they get paid so well. And, all the while, Americans are paying nearly three times too much for sugar.

Most of us realize we live in an aqua culture and know where this is leading next. Disregarding the health hazards of sugar ("Reducing sugar-sweetened beverage consumption may be the best single opportunity to curb the obesity epidemic." Says Caroline Apovian, a US nutrition expert); disregarding the apparent inter-party networking of big business and political graft and corruption going well into the millions -this problem directly ties in to our immediate health and the health of our children and their children. And maybe more importantly to some this problem could cause us to lose all our hard work done to build a life for ourselves and our loved ones, as well as our retirement plans for the future.

Think of this: Imagine the red tide hanging off our coast for most of the year. Imagine thousands of square miles of dead water where nothing lives. Imagine shorelines and dumpsters filled with decaying fish and marine life. Imagine not opening our windows or going to the beach for fear of developing upper respiratory infections, allergies, general malaise and/or fatigue. Can't imagine it? Well, look around you -it's happening right now. And this phenomenon is not silting in stasis - it's getting worse, not belter. The Fanjul family is not the source of the problem. Sugar is not Ihe source of the problem. Nor is the excessive levels of phosphorus, herbicides, pesticides or run-offs the source of the problem. A large part of the problem is our apathy over our ability to do anything about the problem. It is such a huge problem- overwhelmingly huge - that we can't imagine how one person can ever do anything effective about it. And so we let it happen. And yet if we don'l do anything about it we'll soon have no island community to come home to. This part of our country wilf become a cesspool. Is there anything we can do to slop this?

Returning to the Marine Resource Task Force Meeting... Bill Perry asked if there were blue green algae blooms in Lake Okeechobee, or was it just in the river once the lake water was released into it? Conversation went back and forth on this:

Matt Feeney said they were just putting so much "food" for the algae in the water.

Bill Perry asked how when the water had been released from the lake.

Terry Cain said the data, about how many billions of gallons of water was released daily from the lake, appeared on the weather page of the News-Press every day.

Bill asked if Lake Okeechobee wouldn't have released water naturally anyway.

Matt Feeney replied saying it wasn't the water release, per se, but what was in the water that was the problem.

Bill asked if it would have naturally gone through the Everglades, and Heather Stafford said it was all man-controlled and all of it went into the Caloosahatchee and the St. Lucie River.

To which Jeff Werner said the St Lucie River had the problem before the Caloosahatchee. He said it reached the Cape Coral bridge area at the end of August of this year.

Bill said it was a state problem.

Matt said it was a national problem.

Jeff said it was a federal problem, as it was the Army Corps of Engineers who oversaw the water releases.

Heather Stafford stressed that the problem should be more important to a person at the local level, because it was just one of many problems for folks at the county, state and federal levels. She felt all movement should start at the local level.

The Marine Resources Task Force is an advisory board to the Town Council. The MRTF generally meets the second Wednesday of every month at 6 p.m. The public is welcome and encouraged to attend. The Town Council needs to know what we want to do about this catastrophe.