Qualla: Everglades National Park

Everglades National Park: Introduction

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Marjory Stoneman Douglas needed five words to change how Americans saw this place: The Everglades, River of Grass. Before her 1947 book, the Everglades was a swamp - something to be drained, developed, and forgotten. After it, the Everglades became what it always was: a river, fifty miles wide and six inches deep, flowing almost invisibly from Lake Okeechobee southwest into Florida Bay. The national park that bears its name protects the southern twenty percent of the original Everglades, the largest tropical wilderness in the United States and the largest wilderness of any kind east of the Mississippi. It was the first national park created not to preserve spectacular scenery - no canyons, no geysers, no granite peaks - but to protect a living system. Nine distinct ecosystems interlock within its boundaries, each dependent on the others, all dependent on water. UNESCO recognized it as a World Heritage Site. The Ramsar Convention listed it among the world's most important wetlands. It is one of only three places on Earth to appear on both lists and also as an International Biosphere Reserve. And it is dying.

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Everglades National Park: Where Water Decides Everything

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Everglades is an argument about water. Every living thing in the park - every sawgrass blade, every alligator, every roseate spoonbill - exists because of where water is, how deep it sits, and how long it stays. Freshwater sloughs, the broad shallow channels that give the Eve...

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Everglades National Park: Ten Thousand Years of Footprints

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Humans arrived between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago. The Tequesta settled the eastern coast near the mouth of the Miami River. The Calusa, more numerous, occupied the western shore, building canals and shell mounds that archaeologists still study within the park. The Spanish estim...

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Everglades National Park: Draining the Empire

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Napoleon Bonaparte Broward won Florida's governorship in 1904 by promising to create "The Empire of the Everglades" through drainage. His canals succeeded well enough that developers sold tracts for thirty dollars an acre. The 1920s land boom that followed was, in author Michael ...

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Everglades National Park: The Creatures That Remain

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Thirty-six federally protected species cling to existence within the park. The Florida panther, one of the most endangered mammals on Earth, numbers roughly 230 in the wild, stalking the hammocks and cypress swamps of the Everglades and Big Cypress. The American crocodile - disti...

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Everglades National Park: A Park on Life Support

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The brochure handed to every visitor states it plainly: "Freshwater flowing into the park is engineered. With the help of pumps, floodgates, and retention ponds along the park's boundary, the Everglades is presently on life support, alive but diminished." Less than fifty percent ...

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