Last Stand

Inside the $50 million casino resort that Florida's Miccosukee Indians have just opened near Miami, it's hard to imagine that the rows of blinking machines could have any purpose more sublime than electronic bingo. That's why Miccosukee chairman Billy Cypress likes to usher guests onto the rooftop and point west to his tribe's home: the Everglades. An 18,000-sq.-mi. expanse of shimmering water, waving sawgrass and emerald tree hammocks, it is one of America's most vital but abused natural treasures. Like the endangered wood storks that glide overhead, the fewer than 500 Miccosukees rely upon this unique "river of grass" for their survival as a tribe. And they rely on gaming profits to buy the multimillion-dollar legal and scientific clout they need to protect the Everglades. "The money allows us to be like the cowboys," says Cypress, 48. "We can bring in the hired guns."

The Miccosukees have proved to be some of the quickest draws on the peninsula. This week President Clinton is scheduled to submit to Congress an $8 billion, 20-year plan to restore the Everglades, the most massive environmental project ever undertaken in the U.S. Native Americans are usually cast as p.r. decor during campaigns like this: the sad, silent Indians lamenting pollution on TV spots. But this time, Cypress is determined to "do something a lot of politicians and environmental groups don't always like Indians to do: speak." And win lawsuits. The tiny tribe has seized a leading role in the Everglades restoration by outmaneuvering some of Florida's and Washington's strongest lobbies in a legal campaign to help set tougher water-quality standards and break bureaucratic logjams.

The Miccosukees are trying to navigate an environmental Third Way. They've stood up to Everglades polluters like Florida's powerful sugar industry. But they've also taken on ecology groups who complain that the plan won't restore the Everglades to anything like its original condition--an idealistic stance that the Miccosukees say could only slow the project and cloud its focus. "The Miccosukees' role has been prophetic," says Allison DeFoor, Everglades adviser to Florida Governor Jeb Bush. "They've articulated a vision for the Everglades and made it move."

To the Miccosukees, the region's revival needs to move as quickly as its demise has. They've always known that the Everglades is as essential as a blood supply--a knee-deep sheet of water that rolls half a mile a day, from the Kissimmee River to Florida Bay, sustaining life in marshes, coral reefs and cities. But a half-century ago, everyone else deemed it a mosquito-infested alligator swamp that was in the way of sugar fields and pink ranch houses. So the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built canals and levees to drain, rechannel--and utterly trash--eons of delicate natural plumbing. Result: 90% of South Florida's wading-bird population is gone, and the human population, set to double to 12 million in 50 years, is facing potentially catastrophic shortages of drinking water, partly because drainage canals carry off too much water to the Atlantic Ocean.

Under the rescue plan, whose costs would be shared by Washington and Florida, the Army Corps has the Panama Canal-size task of undoing the damage. To restore some semblance of the Everglades' historic flow pattern, roads have to be raised, several canals eliminated and more than 100,000 privately owned acres adjoining Everglades National Park bought up to expand the water's main natural channel, known as Shark River Slough, southward.

South Florida once defined itself by the flashy, boomtown images of Miami Vice. But now the plight of endangered alligators, panthers and sparrows is spoiling the party. Even development-obsessed Floridians reluctantly admit that the environment is the economy, stupid--that commercial pillars like tourism depend on restoration of the Everglades. And its fate may foreshadow what happens to America's other wilderness areas. "This is a test case for the entire country," says Stuart Strahl, the National Audubon Society's Everglades director. "How well we resolve this will set a precedent for all our remaining environmental crises."

It may decide the Miccosukees' future too. As the Everglades came under assault in recent decades, the tribe feared extinction. Then, in 1988, Congress legalized gambling on Indian lands. That same year, Miami's then acting U.S. Attorney, Dexter Lehtinen, sued Florida to clean up Everglades water flowing into the Miccosukees' reservation, 40 miles west of Miami.

Suddenly the Miccosukees had money--the tribe's annual gaming revenues top $20 million--and a high-level political ally. Some Indian reservations are accused of squandering their gaming millions, but Cypress and the Miccosukees resolved to be players in the save-the-Everglades movement. "Their entry was key to the restoration," says Lehtinen, now the Miccosukees' top attorney. "They're more dogged and independent than anyone else." The once very private tribe has lately assumed a high public profile to advertise its gambling businesses and educate the public about ecology--even sharing electronic billboard space with major corporations at Miami's Pro Player Stadium.