Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 4, 1994 TAG: 9405040145
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A9 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
``This is certainly not the end,'' Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt said. ``You might consider it the end of the beginning, but it is only the beginning.''
The legislation calls for spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build huge marshes designed to filter pollution out of water seeping toward the Everglades. It is patterned after an on-again, off-again compromise between the federal government and the sugar industry that fell apart in December.
That settlement would have been fought out in court if not for intervention by the legislature, urged on by Democtratic Gov. Lawton Chiles, and the Clinton administration.
Nobody - not in Tallahassee, Fla., not in Washington, and not in the Everglades, a fecund remnant of wilderness surrounded by development - can say how much more money, time and effort will be needed to restore the fragile ecosystem's health.
Chiles signed the bill, known as the Everglades Forever Act, Tuesday.
``I think it is a tremendous step forward,'' Babbitt said in a telephone interview after attending the ceremony. ``It is a historic step toward systematic restoration of the Everglades.''
But he acknowledged that the law was only the latest step in an effort to broaden the Everglades program to encompass the entire ecosystem of South Florida.
Environmentalists portrayed the legislation as a victory for farmers, pointing out that the bill gave the industry many years to achieve clean water standards. The legislation sets a temporary clean water goal of 50 parts of phosphorous, a fertilizer, per billion parts of water, and it delays setting a final goal for as long as 10 years.
``They got took,'' Timothy Searchinger, a senior lawyer at the Environmental Defense Fund, said, referring to the administration. ``They don't appreciate how much they got took, but they did.''
Environmentalists also said they doubted the administration's will to continue pressing for broader programs to save the Everglades.
``From a political perspective, one of my fears is that given the profile they have given to this, there will be a strong impulse on the part of the public actors to think they have solved the Everglades problem, when in fact what they have done is to settle a lawsuit,'' said Jim Webb, an Everglades expert at the Wilderness Society.
Babbitt, who has called the Everglades a crucial test of the administration's plans to manage whole ecosystems rather than addressing one problem at a time, disagreed. Federal and state agencies, he said, would present a much broader master plan by the end of this year showing how the region's water flows might be restored, which scientists consider the key to saving the Everglades.
by CNB