This month, the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida features excerpts from a May 23, 2001 interview with Johnny Jones [J], who was the Executive Director of the Florida Wildlife Federation and a prominent environmental advocate in Everglades and Big Cypress swamp preservation. He was interviewed by Brian Gridley [G]. Excerpt edited by Beth Grobman. For the full interview go to tinyurl.com/Iguana2217
G: Tell me about your professional background up to the time when you joined the Florida Wildlife Federation.
J: I finished the tenth grade, and I quit school. My father was a plumbing contractor, and there is a school you have to go to become a plumber. You know, it takes two years to become an engineer, and it takes five years to become a plumber [which I became].
All the Central and Southern Florida Flood Control Project is, is a great big plumbing system, and a very elementary one to start with. It is a simple form of plumbing, but it is in giant form. That is why I understand it so well. They taught us about over-enrichment and things like that. I was taught about the purification of sand. Water going through the sand goes into the aquifer. The nutrients and The impurities, before it gets to the aquifer, most of it is filtered out.
You can take a polluted river, let us say down in Africa where people were getting sick from drinking the water [from their] rivers. Now we have gone over there and built wells just a short distance from the river, and the water comes clear in the wells, but the water actually comes from the river.
G: How did you eventually become involved with the Florida Wildlife Federation?
J: I was in the plumbing business twenty-three years, but I was a hunter and fisherman and all that. I liked the outdoors, and I particularly liked the Everglades. I fished and hunted everywhere, and I fell in love with the Florida outdoors. It was paradise. When I was young fella, in my late teens, I used to go in the Everglades with a canoe-type boat. I went all over the Everglades duck hunting.
The Everglades were so beautiful when I was a kid. It is nothing like it is today. All you see down there today is sawgrass. People think the Everglades was always sawgrass, and it was not. When I was a kid, it was part sawgrass, but [there] was a diversity of all kinds of vegetation. You had flags, which are a form of a lily-type plant. You had giant willow heads, so big you cannot imagine how large they were. They would be maybe two or three miles long and maybe a half-mile to a mile wide. These were low depression areas of muck where, when the Everglades dried up, the water would go in there and it would collect fish and things. But I just fell in love with this thing, and I saw it just going to hell in a [hand] basket.
I became a member of the Wildlife Conservation League. I was in that club for many years. I was sent as a delegate from our club to the Florida Wildlife Federation. The National Wildlife Federation was the largest conservation organization in the world. I got [active in the Florida Wildlife Federation], and I saw some potential but I was disappointed because, [at] the time I got into it, it had become a social club, as so many of these type clubs are today. They talk about the environment but they preach to each other, like talking to the choir. They do not really get to the public, and that is who you have got to get to, the people who do not understand what is happening to their system.
When I got in the Florida Wildlife Federation, I met Tom Kimball, who was executive director of the National Wildlife Federation. He would come down from Washington and sit in on our meetings, and he could see that things were not going well, that the Federation was not doing what it should be doing.
Anyway I went [to a Florida Wildlife Federation meeting], expecting to find something that could help solve some of these problems that I [saw] happening [where] I lived — it was being destroyed by development and by drainage. After the meeting, I was asked to go to a meeting of high-ranking people in the National Wildlife Federation. When I was there, Tom Kimball sat down beside me and slapped me on the leg, and he said, “I hear you are a fire-eater. That is what he called me.”
From time to time, I did raise hell with the government when I saw things going wrong which were destroying our environment. I was not exactly sure what [Tom] was up to, but as it turned out, [there was] an election on the following day, and he wanted me to run for president of the Florida Wildlife Federation.
Well, the guy who was in line to become president was a friend of mine. I said, Mr. Kimball, I cannot take that position because of Bill [Theobold]. That man has counted on this. He has been wanting to be president, and he served all these different positions, and he is vice president now. He should be president tomorrow.
He [Kimball] said, well, would you take the position of vice president with the understanding that you would become president the following year? So, I gave in and said all right, I would do it. And I did, and I set Florida Wildlife Federation on fire. I mean, I kicked them in the butt.
After a couple of years as president of the Florida Wildlife Federation, I think it was two years, Tom Kimball came down [to spend] time with me at my home. He said, I want to see the Florida Wildlife Federation get an executive director, a full-time man to work and get it on the map, get it active [in] doing things. He said, I wish that you could do it, but I know you have a plumbing business.
I said, Mr. Kimball, if the board would accept me, I would be glad to. I [had] done pretty well, I had other sources of income. I turned my plumbing business over to my son, and Mr. Kimball went to the board of the Florida Wildlife Federation and said, I want the Florida Wildlife Federation to get an executive director.
I took the position with one understanding: that when I needed help from the National Wildlife Federation, they would help me in whatever I needed.
G: What are the two or three most important contributing factors that have led to the present problems in the Everglades?
J: Agriculture, and I do not mean family farms. Mainly agriculture and real estate, reclamation. We [are] having the same problems as they have had all over the United States, where they built these flood control projects that turn out to do more damage than they do good.
G: John DeGrove once characterized the ecological problems of South Florida as “An innocent ignorance.” Would you then disagree with that characterization?
J: John DeGrove is a nice fellow, but his interest lies in protecting those people who are the beneficiaries of this flood-control project. His heart is in the right place, I believe, but I believe he has done a great deal of damage by encouraging growth in South Florida. I do not think it was something he did intentionally. There have been many people who worked either in the legislature or outside of the legislature, [as] consultants, and the driving force was to create more real estate for more development. That is one of the terrible things that has happened to South Florida. We now have more people than we have water. That is why we have these terrible droughts.
G: So, you would not characterize the development of the Central and Southern Florida Project as innocent; it was more directed toward a specific purpose.
J: Yes. The people in South Florida were sold a bill-of-goods that this was going to be a great thing to benefit fishing and they were going to stop all this flooding. Well, we never had any flooding on the east coast where the people originally lived. It was out in the area of the wetlands, and they are supposed to flood. They were a backwater system for Lake Okeechobee, which is one of the largest lakes in the United States, and the Everglades was a river of grass that flowed from the lake down into Florida Bay and into the Gulf of Mexico, and it supplied the water for Everglades National Park. Everglades National Park has lost 95 percent of its bird life as a result of this project.
G: Do you think that those are things that people were aware of before the Central and Southern Florida Project?
J: No! Even the people who did it had no idea that they were doing so much harm, because many of them realize it now and have changed their position. That is why we were able to pass laws like the Kissimmee River restoration, which thirty years ago you could not possibly have done.
We had to educate the public, and they had to see the damage of all the nutrients [of cow manure] running straight in without any filtration from the marshes. You know, the marshes are wonderful things. The marsh around a lake or around a river is a kidney; it cleans up the water as the water runs through them, the nutrients from that water, which [are] the big damaging [factors]. It winds up [in] Lake Okeechobee and, bingo, we got a dead lake on our hands, which we just about had before this drought.
There are people screaming in Palm Beach County right now about the drought, about Lake Okeechobee and how bad it looks. The fish camps are dried up, they cannot fish, and the sugarcane [is using what water we have; they do not cut back.]
But, in fact, the draining of this lake [is a helpful thing]. The only way you can cure a dead lake or over-enriched lake is to drain it and let the sun hit the bottom. The sun will actually kill the bad vegetation, and the nutrients will dry up and blow away. It will just disappear. When it re-floods, the lake will become pure again. The water will be clean, and you will be able to use it for drinking water. Right now, it is not fit to turn into drinking water, it is so bad.
G: Earlier we had talked about Governor Graham’s Save Our Everglades program. What do you see as being the most important accomplishments that came out of that?
J: [Graham is the best.] I think [Graham] got the money from Congress. He got the Kissimmee funded, and he got the C38 de-authorized. He was behind the funding of Save Our Everglades, but we have not had a chance yet to see any benefit. The stuff they are doing, the impoundments and those deep well injections — those things are all negative things.
Everybody I know of who knows anything about this, unless he worked with the District, is opposed to what they are doing.
Actually, there is one storage area that I support. That is the one that protects the estuary there in Stuart, the St. Lucie Estuary. If they would put a storage area there — a large one, so that when we get a lot of water [that] we [have] to get out of the way, we put it in storage up there and then let it out slowly. Then it will not kill the estuary. You can dump freshwater into an estuary, and it is fine. It is when you go beyond what nature will do [that problems develop].
A river puts fresh water into an estuary, and it is wonderful what they create. It is when you put too much, then it becomes a pollutant. You take Class I water and put it in a saltwater estuary, and you have polluted it if you put too much [at] one time. But if you let it go in as a trickle in there the way it is supposed to, you are benefitting it. Trying to explain this to engineers and tell them, every time we get one educated a little bit, he is gone. That is right. Every time we get one who is doing the right thing, they let him go.
G: Final question. What are the most important lessons that you have learned from your experience with Everglades issues?
J: When you believe something, say it and do it. In other words, if you believe they are wrong, you should fight it with everything you have got to try to stop them, which I did. No one has ever fought as hard as I did, ever, and that is why I am so tired now. I am absolutely burnt out.
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