Эколог и дочь легенды спорта оценили состояние ландшафта перед превращением в «Крокодиловый Алькатраз»

Reflections on some photos Win Everham — Professor Edwin “Win” Everham, Ph. D. — has studied altered landscapes since 1996 from his post now at The Water School at Florida Gulf Coast University. I asked him to look at photos of the near 40-square-mile landscape taken not long before it became Alligator Alcatraz and tell me what he saw. This week’s lead story includes those photos from Jessica Namath, founder and director of Floridians for Public Lands. Born and raised on the Loxahatchee River, the daughter of Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Namath, who still lives there, she’s the mother of four and has spent considerable time recreating and camping with her husband and children on and near the site. Here’s what Everham said. “What beautiful shots of our home. So much of South Florida is still beautiful. These images are before Alligator Alcatraz, but not before this landscape was hugely modified by human activity. Resistant, resilient, beautiful still. I am attracted to moments of still water when you seem embedded in the water, land and sky. The sunset with the dirt track is my favorite — the changing day, seasons, and our pathway through it. The only constant is change. “I study change in ecosystems: the ‘natural’ disturbances like hurricanes, fires, and droughts, and the more direct human changes like invasive exotics, development, and restoration. It’s taught me that ecosystems are resilient — but more so to disturbances they have seen through evolutionary time. “So forests recover from hurricanes, riverine systems from floods, and grasslands and pine lands from fire. The latter so much so that when we manage those systems with prescribed fire, a disturbance becomes a critical part of the cycle of their lives. “Ecosystems struggle more with disturbances that are new, yet (Namath’s) pictures are all from a landscape that has human-altered hydrology and nutrient loading, invasive species from plants to pythons, and human-driven climate change. Just as our human community was shocked by the reality of Alligator Alcatraz in our backyard, the larger biotic community there should not be expected to be resilient to a disturbance they have never seen. “Sometimes there are legacies of previous disturbances. My friend Jess used the metaphor of a palimpsest from the days of pen and ink — that a scraped or cleaned piece of parchment often had a residue of writing, where the old story can bleed through. Our landscapes similarly have legacies of previous disturbances that can be ‘seen’ in the structure of the ecosystems today. For example, there are likely lingering legacies of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill yet in the Gulf of Mexico, 16 years after. Toxic compounds, particularly heavy metals that don’t decompose, or complex organic compounds that may magnify through food chains, can affect the reproduction, growth, survival, and distribution of species for generations. “One question for the post-Alcatraz landscape is this: What legacies were left, and how long will they last? “Aldo Leopold, in his essay “The Land Ethic,” compared the changing ethic of our species, once owning and selling each other as property, to our attitude toward the land. He suggested we have grown ethically beyond slavery and need the same growth in our attitude toward the land. He encouraged us to “change the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for our fellow members and also respect for our community.” “How we treat people is how we should treat the land. In this place, though, we fell back to being conquerors, treating other humans inhumanely, as objects, as animals, as not worthy of respect. How could we expect people who treat other humans without respect to respect the land? “In his call for a ‘land’ ethic, I think Leopold restated a basic ethical framework: ‘A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.’ How can this concentration camp be considered anything but wrong? “I have hope for the resiliency of our landscapes, I have hope for a return to ‘beauty,’ I have hope for the wisdom that can come from mistakes. “I have hope for forgiveness in how we treat our land and each other.”