We were headed to the Florida Everglades. I must have smiled the entire 80-mile drive from Palm Beach County to Homestead, Florida. I’d never been, yet always wanted to visit the Everglades National Park. The idea of being within an arm’s reach of exotic birds and fish—and the possibility of a panther sighting—had long intrigued me. Even better: This trip was a chance to experience the historic wetland with my son.
Joseph’s encounters with Florida’s outdoors to that point had been minimal, aside from the occasional sightings of squirrels or iguanas. Only months before, we’d relocated from Baltimore City to West Palm Beach, and it was energizing to fill my recreational schedule with fishing and swimming. I wanted that for him, too, and the reality of casually walking past alligators and egrets was about to really be a thing for my son.
We entered the park at the Shark Valley Visitor Center and headed for an airboat tour. The solitude of the space entranced us, the SOS signal on my phone confirming we were truly behind God’s back, deep in the Everglades.
JoJo beamed when the tour guide full-throttled the airboat over the shallow water. Wearing his noise-canceling headphones, the only 5-year-old on the boat asked the guide every question a curious kid might imagine: “Excuse me, are there sharks in there?” “Do alligators eat boats?” “Why are blue herons blue?” To my son’s benefit, every hilarious inquiry was met with the guide’s patiently enthusiastic response—with biological and scientific proof to support the answers, capped with a laugh for good measure.
Then, JoJo asked a question that made everyone on the boat chortle with anticipation of the guide’s response: “Where does the water come from?”
Simple questions like this elude simple answers. They can be deceptive, but not because more scientific research is needed. When it comes to managing humans’ effects on nature, we are recurrently a blind dog in a meat house—totally neglecting the order of the land, ignoring answers within reach of our understanding.
My son’s line of inquiry could be even harder to answer depending on when you lived in South Florida. There’s the basic version: The Everglades gets a lot of its water from rainfall, an average of around 60 inches per year. When it starts raining over this part of Florida, it rains everywhere. That includes Lake Okeechobee, about 100 miles north from where we coasted along the water in our boat. The flow from Lake Okeechobee to the Everglades plays a crucial role in maintaining the balance of the South Florida ecosystem.
Then there’s the real answer: Where and how the water travels from one place to another in Florida has changed drastically, impacted by urbanization and affluence. The natural flow of water from the lake once nourished the Everglades, but human alterations—the construction of canals, levees, and even whole communities—disrupted it years ago. As environmental injustices and water shortages have become more common, Floridians aren’t immune to what’s next. You can only manipulate, construct, and disrupt for so long until nature fights back.
“Shit runs downhill,” the old saying goes, and in this case, it’s almost literal. The disruption of natural waterways in Central and South Florida begins with the Kissimmee River, which carries overdevelopment and pollution in its path. The three-mile-wide river that runs from Lake Kissimmee in central Florida to Lake Okeechobee was once meandering, all over hell’s half acre. Now it is channelized and straight.
“When it comes to managing humans’ effects on nature, we are recurrently a blind dog in a meat house—totally neglecting the order of the land, ignoring answers within reach of our understanding. ”
These man-made maneuverings are the genesis of South Florida’s water issues. Between 1962 and 1971, the United States Army Corps of Engineers channeled the Kissimmee River and created a 30-foot-deep, 300-foot-wide, 56-mile-long drainage canal. Though it is now bound and contained, it still flows south to lower elevations through Lake Okeechobee, the Everglades, and into the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean, lending truth to the crude aphorism about what kind of gunk goes where.
Urban sprawl is behind much of this. Fact remains, humans have always plucked from the Everglades for means of survival—just not as much in the last 115 years. Native Americans, principally the Calusa tribe, first occupied this region from what is now Orlando down to Homestead, covering both the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. Upon the arrival of Europeans, little was made of the “vast and useless marsh.” It took a while for the rest of the U.S. to buy into the idea of homesteading in South Florida, until 1904, when a candidate for governor named Napoleon Bonaparte Broward ran on a mission to drain the Everglades.
Before LEGOLAND, Buc-ee’s, or fishing for Peacock Bass, life in Central and South Florida was a test of survival. Mosquitoes and dense, never-ending swamps were littered with alligators, more than 300 species of birds, and aquatic vegetation providing habitat for Florida’s rich fisheries. Broward's vision seemed laughable to prospective homesteaders, yet over time, the task of draining the Everglades helped Florida become an agricultural oasis and a vacation destination for beachgoers. Much of this came at the cost of endangering hundreds of bird species for fashion plumage, tampering with the natural order of waterflow in the region, and the overuse of water to maintain false senses of prosperity.
Maryann Marinho, captain of Boa Vida Charters and a native of Sunrise, Florida, has memories of what once was. She grew up one block from the Everglades, in a neighborhood situated on a series of canals that fed into the flooded grasslands. A brief walk west of her neighborhood landed her in swampland.
“When we were kids, into early teens, the canals behind our houses had no shortage of bream, bass, snook, tadpoles, ducks, water snakes, and of course alligators. Aside from the usual brackish water, grass and mossy growth, the water was crystal clear,” Marinho recalls. “By my late teens, that had all changed. The water was murky and had little life. There were still tadpoles and few bream, but everything else disappeared.”
Now, Floridians express regret for Broward’s drainage scheme, acknowledging decades of human wrongdoings. During the stages of Broward’s drainage plans from 1904 until his death in 1910, engineers emphasized Lake Okeechobee—the largest freshwater lake in the Southeast at 730-square miles. Not long after Boward’s death, Florida’s population was just over 1 million people, but it’s now around 22 million. It’s estimated that 1,000 people move to South Florida alone every day. Demands from this growth—water for drinking, caring for lawns, and washing cars—is sapping natural resources and freshwater. It’s perhaps an inevitable outcome given Broward’s grand plans, but the severity of what it means is worse than he ever could have imagined: inadequate sanitation, economic decline, and disease.
“Broward’s vision seemed laughable to prospective homesteaders, yet over time, the task of draining the Everglades helped Florida become an agricultural oasis and a vacation destination for beachgoers. Much of this came at the cost of endangering hundreds of bird species for fashion plumage, tampering with the natural order of waterflow in the region, and the overuse of water to maintain false senses of prosperity.”
Today, the lake also provides water for more than 900,000 acres of farmland south of its banks and the surrounding communities in Palm Beach County, a population of roughly 1.5 million people. Farmers work the region because water once flowed over the land naturally, before it was drained. In return, the soil, or “muck,” is now Florida gold: Agriculture around Lake Okeechobee is extremely profitable, bringing in over $1.5 billion annually. Thousands of acres are responsible for growing winter vegetables and producing the largest crop of sugar in the U.S.
All this wealth, the literal richness of the soil, is possible because of thousands of years of free-moving water. South Florida couldn’t reap billions of dollars from agriculture had water not had its way. The result: thousands of acres that provide food for citizens, trust funds for the wealthy, and an environmental crisis for all.
The muck soil of South Florida, along with her fertile and profitable grounds, is the nexus of the community and its culture. JoJo and I headed to the Muck Bowl, a high school football game between Belle Glade and Pahokee High Schools. The two towns and schools are separated by a 10-minute drive and are both hotbeds for football talent, having produced around 80 professional football players and about 400 college players since the late 1950s.
One thing I knew before we moved to South Florida—I would be able to carry on my family’s tradition by introducing my boy to the game of football. I began playing at 6, and was eager for my son to do the same—taking in many of the same lessons I’d learned from the sport. When the season started, Pahokee High School became our official team and we attended four games, mostly because JoJo loved the school band and I appreciated its history of producing high-quality players. But by the end of the season, we discovered the Muck Bowl was going to be a horse of a different color. Pahokee was set to take on crosstown rival Glades Central in their annual rivalry game, with the winner earning bragging rights over the most important game in the most important sport in this area of the state.
But these games took on a new meaning every time we made the drive from West Palm Beach, seeing how communities thrived or suffered as they passed by our windows. The Muck Bowl itself is a point of pride and history for these cities, but what that muck represents and its connected history to altered waterways has made for a wild contrast in who has benefited from these changes. Palm Beach County has the 10th-highest median household income in the state, just over $76,000. But as you travel closer to where the Muck Bowl is played, things change.
Okeechobee County ($50,476) ranks 51 out of 67 counties in Florida for median household income. And Glades County ($37,221) is dead last, 45% below the state’s household income average and 2,976th out of all 3,141 counties in the U.S. Almost 20% of people in Glades County live in poverty, per the U.S. Census Bureau, about 8% higher than the national average. And yet, as you’ll find in towns facing economic challenges coast-to-coast, the camaraderie built among Glades’ people adds a richness their bank accounts could never amount to.
On the Beeline Highway headed west from Palm Beach Gardens, views of middle-aged joggers, convertible Porsches, and meticulously manicured landscapes slowly began to fade. The newly developed communities swiftly blended into sporadic swampy wetlands—until we approached the massive acreage of sugarcane fields, chameleon-colored donks, and vacant, boarded-up real estate.
The utter contrasts were easy to spot. I often tell my son: You like your friends no matter how big or small their house is. Having him enjoy playing with different kids from a variety of walks of life, in a variety of spaces, affords him the skill to accept differences as normalities—a motto that could one day be an asset for him, as he encounters social disparities as an adult. Despite how dissimilar the town of Pahokee may have looked to other towns he’d seen, Joseph’s only concern was whether the band was going to play and kids were going to be there.
When we arrived at Anquan Boldin Stadium two hours before kickoff, it was immediately clear this game was more of a celebration of community than anything else. Where typical high school football games offered hot dogs and hamburgers at concession stands, the scent of grio, smoked jerk chicken, and fried blue crab filled the air in a peculiar marriage with grim clouds from sugarcane burning. The Muck Bowl wasn’t just a Friday night high school football game—it was a weekend of events to galvanize the small community. From kickball tournaments to a sip and paint brunch, not only was this the biggest ticket in Florida football, it was a party.
A dense crowd of people surrounded by cane fields showed an affinity for laughter and hugs. From my outsider perspective, it was a spectacle: community amidst destruction. For local fans, the burning cane and its lingering impacts were part of just another Friday night. After JoJo received a free strawberry icee from one of the vendors, a Pahokee football player crowned with wicks and slugs draped his arm around JoJo and jokingly asked him, “Aye jit, lemme get some of your icee.” Our first visit to Pahokee for the Muck Bowl was unlike any other first.
We didn’t know any of the players by name, but the feeling of an affable hug covered us both. Still, it was strange, trying to understand how so much joy could exist in the epicenter of Florida’s water, agricultural, and environmental issues. Just as Lake Okeechobee is at the center of a sustainability crisis, it shares its banks and tributaries with the folk tales and injustices of each town they touch.
“When it comes to football in the Glades—it’s like a release; it’s like church.”
Woven into it all is the soil, people, and politics of the area known as, Muck City, complete with a tagline: “Her soil is her fortune.” As water hurries down the channelized Kissimmee River and into Lake O, much of the agriculture surrounding the lake benefits from the fertile soil south of Okeechobee—none more so than the sugarcane fields. One natural resource is diverted by those with the money and power to make it so, enriching a business that then sponsors a football game played by the people who suffer most from the changed landscape.
It’s a kind of reverse terraforming—instead of converting a barren space to resemble healthy earth, these areas around the Everglades have mutated from their idyllic natural origins to conform to demands for profit. One-third of the global output of sugar is farmed in Palm Beach County. Yet, most of sugar’s production and profits in the U.S. never leave the hands of one family. Lake Okeechobee is the benefactor controlling it all.
For the Glades, the proximity to Big Sugar companies generating billions is less than a stone's throw. The cloud of smoke I witnessed during the Muck Bowl was telling of the shared real estate. The “black snow” from cane burning is a source of constant, ongoing debate, raising concerns of environmental damage. Burning sugarcane is cheap for the corporations that do it. Machines that could avoid the process would cost more, and politicians have admitted as much. Investigative reporting by Rolling Stone, ProPublica, The Palm Beach Post, and others have documented the respiratory woes residents suffer when sugarcane is burnt. A 2022 Florida State University study found that particulates in the air are “a factor in mortality rates across the region” and are responsible for between one and six deaths per year in South Florida. The practice persists.
“The pollution produces all kinds of carcinogens, benzene, and pollutants such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and large amounts of particulate matter pollution,” says Patrick Ferguson, organizing representative with the Sierra Club. “Folks who live closest to where sugarcane is burnt have a 10-times-higher mortality risk rate than those living further away.”
Coupled with the many smiles and warm greetings at Muck Bowl festivities, Pahokee, South Bay, and Belle Glade residents unwillingly take on many burdens of urbanization and agriculture.
Overseeing each burn is the Florida Forest Service, which has the authority to deny a permit for burning. But instead of broadly considering human health, the Forest Service is more likely to deny permits when the wind speed and direction blow the pollution toward Central and Eastern Palm Beach County. Communities to the East of the sugarcane fields–including the affluent equestrian town of Wellington—receive prioritized protection. The wind and speed rules were created in the early 90s, when Wellington and Central Palm Beach County were being developed. There’s very little restriction on burn permits when wind direction and speed would likely cause pollution to travel towards the Western, more rural communities.
“When those folks started experiencing the smoke and ash firsthand, there was a public outcry. The state and the sugar industry very quickly put in place wind-, speed- and direction-based rules,” says Ferguson. “You have a Glades community, particularly South Bay, Belle Glade, and Pahokee—predominantly Black and brown lower-income communities—that have to disproportionately bear the burdens of pollution.”
The hospitality, warmth, and joy my son and I experienced at the Muck Bowl was truly an act of steadfastness. In the vast stretch of sugarcane fields where the pursuit of football dreams collides with environmental challenges, “chasing rabbits” becomes a badge of resilience, and a skill added to the arsenal of aspiring pro football players: the lateral movement and quick pivots needed to catch rabbits translate well to the game of football. Unyielding conditioning in the pursuit of excellence matches the community's struggle against environmental injustices imposed by powerful corporations.
“When it comes to football in the Glades—it’s like a release; it's like church,” says former mayor Colin Walkes. For athletes in the close-knit community of the Glades, the probability of making it to the "league" is slim but far higher than in most communities in the country. Still, the pursuit is a testament to the community’s unwavering dedication to a life of optimistic options and experiences beyond the Glades.
“You have a Glades community, particularly South Bay, Belle Glade, and Pahokee—predominantly Black and brown lower-income communities—that have to disproportionately bear the burdens of pollution.”
Against the backdrop of adversity, chasing rabbits exemplifies not only physical training, but also a way to navigate the complexities of environmental stressors. In a community facing the consequences of corporate agricultural negligence, a bag of rabbits becomes more than a catch; it becomes a tangible response to challenges. The people of the Glades can exhibit not just physical prowess but a unique blend of perseverance and benevolence, finding strength in unity and a shared struggle against the odds—outrunning the wind.
People and the water itself bear the same burden. The seed of Lake Okeechobee's issues lies in its nutrient-dense water, but “nutrient” in this case doesn’t carry a positive connotation. The water’s nutrient density comes from rain runoff from the sugarcane fields—carrying pesticides, insecticides, and herbicides—which leaves loads of phosphorus throughout the region’s waterways. It contributes to toxic algae blooms that kill aquatic animals and plants and pollute the main water source that feeds the everglades. The South Florida Water Management District says total phosphorus loading into Lake Okeechobee is approximately 600 metric tons per year. (An annual load of 140 metric tons is considered the sweet spot to maintain a healthy lake.) Today, agricultural and urban development contributes to the hundreds of metric tons of excess.
The striking news footage that turns our stomachs: toxic algae blooms and red tide, dead animals on beaches. Due to the channelization of the lake, the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee Rivers suffer similar fates. During summers, Florida’s rainy season, Lake Okeechobee’s water level rises. The St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee are put to work as water is released to the east and west—to the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico. As a result, much of the Everglades doesn’t receive the water it needs to survive. Just as one hand washes the other, the Everglades’ issues are seen and felt in the Florida Keys as well.
“This trickle effect may not be seen in the form of ‘red tide’ in Monroe County [the Florida Keys]—just in the last decade I have seen a serious decline,” Captain Marhino explains, about the aquatic life in the Keys. “In not only sport fish, but the backcountry critters—I have seen a serious decline in sport fish, endless Spanish dancers, horseshoe crabs, several types of crabs—they’re just gone.”
For the St. Lucie River, Lake Okeechobee’s water releases have devastating impacts. Algae blooms and too much freshwater kill the estuary. When this happens, the overabundance of freshwater mixing with salt water kills oyster reefs, seagrass beds, and other aquatic life. For the lake, when levels are too low due to releases, new dangers exist for local charter fisherman.
“[Lake Okeechobee is] already a shallow rocky fishery—when the lake gets too low, you can hit a rock and knock your whole lower unit off your boat or flip,” says Jeffrey Willis, Captain of MCA Fishing.
The agricultural industry bears most of the blame for red tide and blue-green algae. However, both are natural occurrences, but both are exacerbated because of the local farming industries. Red tide’s effects can kill fish by producing a brevetoxin, which affects the central nervous system of fish and can harm birds and humans. For blue-green algae, much of the same is true, in that it is harmful to humans and animals.
“We have this 100-year-old problem now—we’ve had seagrass die off, manatee mortalities, and we’re feeling the effects of years and years of mismanagement,” says Casey Kniffin, the advocacy coordinator for the Florida Oceanic Society.
The effects of agriculture and urbanization stretch as far as the Florida Keys, through the region’s many waterways—flushing along regrets from century-old blunders of channelization, and toxic agricultural practices that have led to massive fish kills and species endangerment. All part of the South Florida water narrative.
The core of it, the answer to JoJo’s question of where the water comes from, can’t ignore human impact in the pursuit of affluence and man-made communities. What happened 130 years ago resonates today, and it’s perpetuated by moneymaking choices that show a terrifying truth: There is a possibility of no longer having access to clean water for all in South Florida.
We may think it can’t happen, but we’re living in the throes of a water crisis, in real time. When Joseph and I set out to visit the Everglades, I was beyond enthusiastic to see the extensive river of grass. I was eager to pinpoint for him the importance of preserving nature. Then it became clear I’d need to have a father-son talk to explain something I never expected: We’re actively eliminating what we need to survive.
“We have this 100-year-old problem now—we’ve had seagrass die off, manatee mortalities, and we’re feeling the effects of years and years of mismanagement.”
“The Everglades has a water quantity and water quality issue," explains Begone Cazalis, the director of communications for The Everglades Foundation. If there’s not enough clean water moving south to the Everglades, sources become scarce. Miami’s Biscayne Aquifer provides fresh water to 5 million people—including the hundreds moving to the area every day—yet it continues to shrink.
As with any tragedy, glimmers of hope make room for belief and faith.
Bipartisan political efforts and support from local businesses are meant to drive progress in restoring the Everglades. Congress has established the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, requiring a state and federal cost share and providing over $1 billion to help the effort. With historic funding levels and collaborative work, hope exists in smaller glimmers—as evident in the potential delisting of the wood stork from the endangered species list due to a resurgence in its population. Of course, there’s the fear it’s too little, too late, after 100 years of human impact. As residents of the Sunshine State, my family was, regretfully, part of the problem: We inhabited domains where water once flowed freely and consumed sugar that was harvested from the fields of dream chasers.
The human footprint throughout the Everglades is just as massive as the river that once occupied Central and South Florida. History has allowed our mismanagement of water and land to proceed in ways that seem impossible to undo. At the least, it could prompt an awareness among human beings to never overextend our relationship with nature. At this point, a naturally flowing river from Orlando down to the Florida Keys might not align with contemporary logistics. Which buildings to demolish? Which fields to allow to flood? Which families to uproot? As the future looms, humans will have to be put in place with nature, as opposed to redirecting it. For if we don't, Joseph’s question of where the water comes from could be exclaimed in a different context: Where will the water come from?
After one year of living in South Florida, Jamaal Lemon and his family relocated back to the DC Metro area.
Illustrations created by Colette Holston.
Words + Photos by Jamaal Lemon
