Bright Lit Place, a new podcast from member station WLRN tells the story of the long-running effort to undo the damage to the Florida Everglades.
ANDREW LIMBONG, HOST:
In South Florida, 9 million people rely on the Everglades to absorb floodwater during storms and provide drinking water. But it’s also an ecosystem in crisis. Bright Lit Place, a new podcast from WLRN, tells the story of the long-running effort to undo the damage to the Everglades and help us survive in a warmer world. Here’s an excerpt from host Jenny Staletovich
JENNY STALETOVICH, BYLINE: As a boy, Michael Frank lived on a tree island surrounded by miles of sawgrass in the Everglades.
MICHAEL FRANK: Be careful now. There’s some holes. Lime rock underneath, but then again, there’s holes. a
STALETOVICH: Islands like his once dotted the vast, shallow river of grass that spilled over the banks of Lake Okeechobee and flowed south towards the place where we’re walking, across the sawgrass marshes and south to the tip of Florida. The marsh has formed a bowl between the coastal ridge along South Florida’s east coast and the cypress and mangrove swamps to the west, before dumping into the Gulf of Mexico and Florida Bay.
FRANK: If you feel that soft spot, there’s a hole in the lime rock.
STALETOVICH: Frank is showing me how to find water in the dry season by digging a hole. It’s kind of like a well.
FRANK: What you would do, you go ahead and make your hole. You know, put the mud on the side. This way, you know where it is (inaudible). And during the dry season, the only way you can get water is through that hole. And not only you. The rest of the animals would congregate at that hole. OK. You want to go further or…
STALETOVICH: Yeah. Yeah.
FRANK: My knees are gone. So that’s how I got to just walk gently.
STALETOVICH: Frank’s an old man now. He’s a tribal elder with the Miccosukee Tribe. And the world he grew up in is mostly gone. The sprawling river was dammed up…
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