Artigo Revisado por pares

Rural clean water: The Okeechobee story

1988; Soil and Water Conservation Society; Volume: 43; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00224561.1988.12456240

ISSN

1941-3300

Autores

Charles E. Little,

Tópico(s)

American Environmental and Regional History

Resumo

LAKE OKEECHOBEE, FLA.—Jack Stanley loves this lake, which in Seminole means “big water.” It is aptly named. Okeechobee is the second largest lake in the United States, Lake Michigan being the largest. Its 700 square miles of freshwater are essential as a water supply to South Florida and ecologically in-dispensible to the delicate natural balances of the Everglades—the “river of grass” that begins at the lake's southern boundary and runs southward to the sea. He loves to fish Okeechobee, Stanley does, for bass and “specks”—speckled perch, a local name for black crappie—or sometimes just to pot around in his beat-up bass boat. He knows the maze of narrow alleys through the lush littoral zone of the lake as surely as an old Anhinga, the snake bird, knows where to cruise for fry. There is a pure and quiet wilderness here, of clumps of spikerush and buttonbush and bullrush and beakrush, of hyacinth and cordgrass and sawgrass, of cattail and willow and water-lily rising through the water in green islands sheltering countless tropical creatures. Stanley can tell you where big 'gators …

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