After stifling under a pall of rank smoke for three weeks, officials of a dozen east coast Florida cities met last week in Fort Lauderdale to discuss what they could do about a major catastrophe. Fires—some of them presumably started by alligator hunters burning grass around their quarry’s wallow—had swept more than 1,000,000 acres east and south of Lake Okeechobee. The burned area included 154,000 acres of rich muck and peatlands which nature was centuries in laying down and which expensive drainage systems were installed to make arable. Down through the sawgrass and palmetto flats of the Everglades the flames had roared. On both sides of the famed Tamiami Trail across the peninsula, the fire still burned. About 3,000,000 more acres were threatened.
Last week Executive Director John H. Baker of the National Audubon Societies surveyed by air a lifeless desert, populated only by spinning whirlwinds of sand and hot ashes, where a green wilderness used to teem with birds—ibis, herons, cranes, ducks, snowy egrets.
Florida’s civic fathers agreed that drainage had been overdone, nature’s balance upset. They 1) named a permanent protective committee to look after Florida’s wilderness in future, 2) prayed solemnly for rain.
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