Ron DeSantis<\/a>\u2019 administration, according to Van Lent and former employees. Nearly the entire science wing of the foundation left, and some claimed that the science-based nonprofit silenced dissent and transformed into an appendage of the Republican Party under DeSantis. While the foundation secured a steady stream of funding as well as political will for the Everglades, DeSantis recast himself as an environmentalist with the foundation\u2019s support. The question was what that exchange would cost America\u2019s Everglades? And what secrets could even belong to an environmental nonprofit? As Stuart Pimm, the chair of conservation ecology at Duke University, wrote in an op-ed defending Van Lent for the Miami Herald, \u201cThere are no trade secrets in science.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\tFOR GEORGE BARLEY, A SEVENTH-generation Floridian who worked as a developer, his bond with the Everglades began in Florida Bay\u2019s backcountry and its fishery. When that ecosystem collapsed in 1992, he lobbied, becoming the first advisory council chairman for the new National Marine Sanctuary, and recruited the Everglades\u2019 most tenacious guardian, Paul Tudor Jones II. Jones had built his own hedge fund, becoming a billionaire as eccentric as he was successful. Barley persuaded Jones on the bow of his boat to fund Everglades advocacy, and Jones made good on the promise.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n
\n\tIn March 1993, Barley and Jones founded the Everglades Foundation, and the following year, Barley formed the Everglades Trust. The goal was simple: to resurrect and protect the place. They hoped to coalesce the knot of groups working on restoration and shape legislation, because while there were a handful of organizations working in South Florida, everybody remained siloed when it came to the Everglades. They believed a collaborative effort was key.<\/p>\n
\n\tThen, in June 1995, Barley died in a plane crash. Jones\u2019 devotion grew as he grieved, and Barley\u2019s widow, Mary, became the foundation\u2019s de facto operator. In Barley\u2019s funeral book, Jones wrote, \u201cRest Easy. I Got Everything Under Control.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tOver the years, the foundation\u2019s influence grew vast, with a board composed of South Florida power brokers. It included the heirs to commercial fortunes, the C-suite of industries, and celebrities like the late Jimmy Buffett. With an annual revenue that reached $28 million in 2024, the foundation dispenses grants to smaller environmental organizations, awards scholarships, and, as its mission states, \u201cis devoted to restoring and protecting America\u2019s Everglades through science, advocacy, and education.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cThe idea was never to have a big organization,\u201d Mary Barley tells me. \u201cWhat we wanted was to build up these organizations, so that they could do what had to be done. My job was to coalesce these groups, to speak with one voice, to understand the science.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\t\t\t\t\tThe reservoir was the heart of a litigious battle within the Everglades Coalition.<\/p>\n
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\t\t\t\t\tGov. Ron DeSantis appeared at the groundbreaking for the reservoir\u2019s inflow pump station.<\/p>\n
\n\tBy the early aughts, as CERP, the restoration project, started to take shape, Florida\u2019s environmental community focused on advocacy, largely legislation, because there was almost no formal science staff at nonprofits in South Florida. The Audubon Society was the sole organization with a hydrologist on staff in Florida, but after CERP passed, the goal of most organizations working there shifted to verifying the accuracy of reports, data, and modeling. The members of the Everglades coalition, versed in ping-pong, were now playing tennis. The foundation hoped to mirror government agencies with its own staff so that it could help shape policy but also draw the roadmap for restoration.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tFirst, it hired a hydrologist, then an ecologist, and finally a water-quality scientist. With a tight science wing, an influential board, and a trust to lobby with, the Everglades Foundation became indispensable to the federal and state effort to restore the Everglades. It advised the Army Corps as well as the South Florida Water Management District, the two agencies responsible for the project. And over the past three decades, Barley tells me, \u201cProjects are actually getting in the ground,\u201d before she adds, \u201cIf they\u2019re not successful, then who\u2019s going to believe what we\u2019re trying to say? Who\u2019s going to believe in our science?\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tAS A KID IN BERESFORD, SOUTH DAKOTA, Thomas Van Lent moved stones in a creek bed to mold the water\u2019s path. He did the same with rocks in the storm drains outside of his house. By the end of high school, he knew he was going to be a water-resources engineer, and his curiosity compassed his career after studying French literature and civil engineering.<\/p>\n
\n\tHe began at the South Florida Water Management District in 1982. At the time, it was building the first comprehensive computer model of the Everglades \u2014 the water source for 9 million Floridians between Orlando and Miami today. The first time Van Lent visited Grassy Waters Preserve, an eastern spur of the Everglades, he looked down at the slow sheet of water flowing through the grass and thought about friction. The elaborate network of rainfall, rivulets of ditches, and control structures became a sort of language for Van Lent. \u201cI love thinking about the physics of it,\u201d he says. \u201cThat\u2019s how my career in the Everglades went. It was just that day-to-day astonishment at things. It gave what you did everyday a purpose and a meaning \u2014 that this place is beautiful. It\u2019s important to save it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tVan Lent returned to Stanford for his Ph.D. before becoming the chief hydrologist at the Everglades National Park. In 2000, a plan to restore the Everglades galvanized with CERP, an at least $25 billion effort shared by the federal government and the state of Florida. When CERP took shape, Van Lent criticized it. Many in the environmental community felt that the proposed plan to \u201crestore\u201d the Everglades was better described as a plan to \u201creengineer\u201d the millions of acres not into a natural state but into an engineered jigsaw puzzle assembled in slow-moving water.<\/p>\n
\n\tAll of the engineering and ecological blueprints were bound in an impenetrably dense document known as the Yellow Book. But when Van Lent spoke out in public meetings, he used simple language instead of jargon. And when ecologists or biologists or even fishing guides pointed out blind spots in the plan, Van Lent listened. \u201cI think I caught the attention of a lot of people in the environmental community because I was clear,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd more often than not, I was right.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tSoon, he became known not just as an expert on the Everglades but as a scientist who gave straight-forward analysis, unafraid of the political zeitgeist. Peers in the community sometimes wrote to him after he spoke, calling him a \u201crock star.\u201d That\u2019s when a board member approached Van Lent to join the Everglades Foundation in 2005 as its first hire. He oversaw the foundation\u2019s science wing, often appeared in public, became the foundation\u2019s de facto IT specialist, onboarded new employees, and even operated as the interim CEO before Eikenberg took the reins. In his initial interview, Van Lent asked why they were recruiting him. \u201cWell because you speak truth to power,\u201d he remembers one of its founding members said. \u201cAnd that\u2019s what we want.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tIN JULY, I ARRIVED AT THE Everglades Foundation\u2019s offices in an immense glass complex encircled by dense stands of trees like gumbo limbo and strangler fig just south of Miami. In a retention pond out back, two crocodiles slid around. From Eric Eikenberg\u2019s office on the sixth floor, you can look north toward Miami\u2019s skyline, east across Biscayne Bay toward the chain of coral falling into the Atlantic, and south toward the Everglades.<\/p>\n
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\t\t\t\t\tThe state of Florida and Army Corps of Engineers began reservoir construction in 2020.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tRose Marie Cromwell<\/p>\n
\n\tEikenberg at 50 is understated, clean-cut in round glasses, and seems like he\u2019d fit in as well in a boardroom as he would at a tiki bar. His enthusiasm feels potent enough to charm a rattlesnake. Although he grew up on Long Island, Eikenberg moved to Fort Lauderdale in high school, where the western edge of the county overlaps the Everglades. His mother served as the Broward County Republican Party\u2019s committeewoman and his father as president and co-chairman of various Broward County Republican groups. Eikenberg fell under the spell of civics in high school when his classmates studied the Bill Clinton campaign in 1992. When he attended college in D.C., he returned home to Florida to answer phones in Congressman Clay Shaw\u2019s office during the summer. Two years after graduating college, he ran Shaw\u2019s reelection campaign. In 2006, Eikenberg became Gov. Charlie Crist\u2019s top aide, and the Everglades absorbed thousands of hours of Eikenberg\u2019s life. By 2012, after moonlighting as a lobbyist, he joined the Everglades Foundation as its president and CEO. When he arrived at the foundation\u2019s office, it was Thomas Van Lent, serving as interim CEO, who gave him a tour.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tWhen Eikenberg started, the foundation had 15 employees, one lobbyist, and $5 million in revenue. Eikenberg\u2019s salary was then $112,020. The next year, discharges from Lake Okeechobee into the coastal estuaries fueled algal blooms that blanketed the bays in cyanobacteria and red tide. Rafts of fish carcasses collected, and tourism ceased in those areas. The foundation seized the chance to show Floridians how the Everglades was inextricably tied to these coastal estuaries via water management, and in turn, they cultivated political will for restoration projects collecting dust \u2014 like the reservoir. Not only would the project help the Everglades by reconnecting its historic water source \u2014 Lake Okeechobee \u2014 to its southern edge, but the reservoir would reduce the discharges from the lake that drove red tide and cyanobacteria.<\/p>\n
\n\tIn only three counties that border the Everglades in southwest Florida, water quality shapes 43,000 jobs, helps generate $5 billion in recreational tourism, and supports an outdoor industry that exceeds $8 billion. In the years when algal blooms blanket the coast, those jobs and figures vanish. Last year, the foundation funded a study by nonprofit Earth Economics that reported more than 84,000 businesses were tied to the health of the Everglades, composing 3 million livelihoods.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tBy 2016, discharges from Lake Okeechobee fueled another summer of toxic algal blooms, and a bare-bones nonprofit called Captains for Clean Water formed. Founded by two fishing guides, it toured around the state to tell the story of Florida\u2019s disappearing livelihood, linking it to the longstanding neglect of the Everglades. Soon after, the foundation funded Captains for Clean Water, and Eikenberg appeared alongside the nonprofit at events. That summer, the foundation lobbied the state\u2019s senate president to green-light the reservoir that Eikenberg believed was \u201cthe only project that was going to get to the heart of the issue.\u201d That was when the foundation\u2019s internal troubles began, with competing visions for the future of the Everglades.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe plan as outlined in CERP was for a massive reservoir to send water south from the Everglades Agricultural Area into the Everglades National Park 50 miles away. Captains for Clean Water, among other environmental organizations, started to use the phrase \u201cSend the water south,\u201d and it became an anthem for the reservoir and Everglades restoration broadly.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tBut as bulldozers gathered at the site, the foundation raised questions about the reservoir and the land available to build it. The main question was whether the proposed amount of stormwater-treatment areas could in fact meet water-quality standards, because otherwise, the water the reservoir stored wouldn\u2019t be allowed under federal law to enter the national park. In other words, the multibillion-dollar project wouldn\u2019t be operational if water-quality standards weren\u2019t met. Even more concerning was that the reservoir continually shrunk in its scale as owners of the land refused to sell, forcing engineers to work with a smaller footprint and alarming scientists.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe National Academy of Science, a congressionally funded scientific organization that authors an independent assessment of Everglades restoration biennially, raised the same questions about water quality. The Army Corps also wondered whether this would work. Otherwise, American taxpayers would fund a $4 billion pool with no ability to restore the flow of water into the Everglades.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tIn October 2016, Van Lent published an article with other foundation staff questioning the reservoir\u2019s viability. Eikenberg was livid that Van Lent published the article without his approval. Soon after, the foundation agreed to meet with the Water Management District. Eikenberg, the foundation\u2019s chief counsel, Van Lent, and Dr. Melodie Naja, then the Foundation\u2019s chief scientist, sat down with more than two dozen district staffers. What they intended to be a back-and-forth about their findings turned into an interrogation of Van Lent and Naja, according to Van Lent. Van Lent felt that Eikenberg did little to defend his staff against the district. Afterward, Eikenberg said he offered to publicly chastise the district. Van Lent told him he\u2019d handle it by writing a letter. Something changed, though, because the next morning, Van Lent and Eikenberg entered into a screaming match in Naja\u2019s office for everyone to see. It was the first sign of their feud.<\/p>\n
\n\tStill, the foundation pushed on. As it persuaded the Legislature to build the reservoir, it lobbied other Everglades organizations as well. Cris Costello, the senior organizing manager at one of America\u2019s largest grassroots environmental organizations, the Sierra Club, remembers that in 2017 the chief operating officer of the foundation called her to say \u201cDon\u2019t make any fireworks,\u201d regarding the reservoir. The foundation\u2019s COO assured the Sierra Club that the reservoir\u2019s design would be solid but \u201cdone behind closed doors.\u201d (The foundation\u2019s COO, now its chief policy officer, says, \u201cI don\u2019t remember making such a statement to anyone.\u201d) The Sierra Club often disagreed with the foundation\u2019s approach to policy, but the foundation contributed more than $100,000 annually to fund a position at the Sierra Club solely devoted to the Everglades, so it tended to compromise.<\/p>\n
\n\tLater that year, Florida\u2019s gubernatorial race began, and a congressman named Ron DeSantis won with a thin margin. By December, Eikenberg joined DeSantis\u2019 transition team, and he appeared so frequently with DeSantis that some members of the coalition joked the governor traveled with a cardboard cutout of Eikenberg, Costello says. Back in Miami, foundation employees watched Eikenberg\u2019s confidence soar. \u201cThere was an enormous shift,\u201d Van Lent says.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tOn his third day in office, DeSantis funneled $2.5 billion into environmental spending and asked the Water Management District\u2019s entire board to resign \u2014 the appointed body had been seen as too sympathetic toward polluters for years. DeSantis parlayed the foundation\u2019s tacit support into a powerful image of an environmentalist devoted to water, and as he ascended toward his presidential bid, the foundation drew all they could from the relationship. The reservoir suddenly became the \u201ccrown jewel\u201d of Everglades restoration in speeches and brochures. The governor used the hyperbolic phrase as did the foundation. Soon, the Audubon Society used the same language. Captains for Clean Water did, too. Overnight, a project that once was mired in doubt turned into a silver bullet that could save the Everglades. Some members of South Florida\u2019s environmental community wondered whether this project, this crown jewel, was good for the Everglades or good for the Republican Party.<\/p>\n
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\t\t\t\t\tScientist Thomas Van Lent worked for 17 years at the Everglades Foundation before quitting and then being sued by the organization.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tAlicia Osborne Photography<\/p>\n
\n\tThe foundation always leaned Republican. Campaign contributions flowed from its founders and board to Republican candidates each cycle, although Jones once held fundraisers for President Barack Obama and often donated to both parties. But the foundation\u2019s first president, a former senator, once stabbed a baby doll on the Senate floor to protest abortion and was described by a reporter as \u201cwilling to arm fetuses.\u201d And as Michael Grunwald, the author of the 2006 book The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise, says of the entire Everglades coalition, \u201cIt\u2019s willing to anoint any politician who says nice things about the Everglades and pushed for funding as a champion of the Everglades.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tBy 2018, things turned sour as the foundation, the state of Florida, and the National Academy of Sciences exchanged concerns about the reservoir meeting water quality standards with the available stormwater treatment areas. To eliminate doubts, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection signed a guarantee that the state would meet water quality standards once the reservoir came online. Eikenberg left that meeting relieved. In his mind, it was better than walking away with less than nothing. Van Lent left disappointed, believing it was just a means of delaying the issue. Cris Costello, the Sierra Club\u2019s senior organizing manager, agreed that the guarantee was as good as the paper it was printed on. \u201cThat was the last straw,\u201d Costello says. Soon after, there was another disagreement between the foundation and the Sierra Club about the use of state funding regarding restoration. Afterward, Costello says she got a call from the foundation\u2019s COO, who warned, \u201cYou either agree with us, or we\u2019re going to cut you off.\u201d (The foundation\u2019s former COO says that is \u201cnot a statement I would make in any context.\u201d) But in 2019, the Sierra Club lost its annual grant funding from the foundation.<\/p>\n
\n\tIt was well-known that the foundation\u2019s grants doubled as a means to whip votes on issues within the coalition, because any movement required unanimous agreement among dozens of members. \u201cThey used those groups to carry their message,\u201d Van Lent says. Policy calls for grantees each week were allegedly mandatory, and when I asked Eikenberg, he said, \u201cMessaging is important.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tIn May 2021, the foundation appointed its former vice president of communications and engagement as chief science officer. The direction he issued to staff was \u201cmore messaging, less modeling,\u201d according to Van Lent. That\u2019s when he thought, \u201cI can\u2019t work here anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tOn Feb. 10, 2022, Van Lent resigned with an email. After 17 years as the organization\u2019s top scientist, he was done. \u201cMy career at the foundation has been a source of personal pride, and I wish the Everglades Foundation continued success,\u201d he wrote.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tBut on his last day two weeks later, he posted a tweet that recast his life. \u201cToday marks my last day after nearly 17 years at the Everglades Foundation,\u201d he wrote. \u201cWill soon work with [the nonprofit Friends of the Everglades], who put facts over politics.\u201d Van Lent was leaving the unparalleled nonprofit for a much smaller organization founded by author and Everglades activist Marjory Stoneman Douglas. Soon after, the board chairman at the time called Van Lent confused. He thought Van Lent was retiring, not taking another job. Then Van Lent said a threatening call followed from Paul Tudor Jones II, the foundations\u2019 co-founder, as well as another board member in March. (Jones declined to comment.) A letter followed outlining the foundation\u2019s request for Van Lent to return any files belonging to the foundation. \u201cWithout your complete cooperation, however,\u201d it read, \u201cthe foundation will have no choice but to turn this matter over to outside litigation counsel.\u201d Weeks passed as the foundation waited, claiming that Van Lent missed six deadlines to comply. The lawsuit came next, alleging that Van Lent disappeared with decades of data belonging to the foundation.<\/p>\n
\n\tBY APRIL, THE FOUNDATION\u2019S BOARD AGREED to file its lawsuit, retained lawyers, and submitted its complaint, alleging the destruction of thousands of files and accusing Van Lent of corporate espionage. Van Lent waved it off as a nuisance lawsuit, hiring an attorney who had helped him close on a condo in Tallahassee. He swore under oath that the only things he deleted from his computer were photographs, medical records, and personal emails. But in the foundation\u2019s initial affidavit, it cited evidence from a forensic analyst it had hired, who showed that Van Lent deleted hundreds of thousands of files, not just from his laptop, but from shared servers that he managed at the foundation. Van Lent claims that he only deleted redundant files to carve out space. Another staffer confirms this was standard practice. But the foundation claimed he deleted memos, strategy documents, as well as other scientists\u2019 work. Soon, the foundation and Van Lent reached a settlement before it collapsed.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tTwo days after the foundation filed its initial complaint, it requested an ex parte temporary injunction, an emergency court order meant to prevent Van Lent from destroying anymore of the foundation\u2019s intellectual property. The language was broad enough that when the judge granted the injunction, it meant that Van Lent could violate it just by using any of his devices, including his cellphone. In May 2023, the court found that Van Lent committed indirect criminal contempt by continuing to delete files from his devices and \u201cintentionally\u201d violated the court\u2019s temporary injunction, although Van Lent was never found liable for anything the foundation alleged in court.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tAfter leaving the foundation\u2019s office in South Miami, I drive up US 98, passing through the part of Florida that remains an uninterrupted line of springs, rivers, and forest to meet Van Lent in Tallahassee. He appears uneasy, almost somber, but when he starts to talk about the Everglades, his pupils narrow and his hands rise out of his lap to articulate each point of his story like a conductor.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe story Van Lent tells is how the nuances of the reservoir fell sway to the broader messaging of the foundation. Van Lent and other staffers didn\u2019t think that the reservoir was bad, but that the foundation and the governor were overstating its benefits. By 2020, Van Lent believed that foundation members suspended their own doubts to nurture their growing influence with the DeSantis administration, even if it meant contradicting or ignoring their staff. \u201cThat\u2019s why everyone left,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
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\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tRose Marie Cromwell<\/p>\n
\n\tSix members of the foundation\u2019s science wing left between 2021 and 2022. After DeSantis\u2019 election, the relationship between Eikenberg and Van Lent metastasized, creating a noxious atmosphere for the science team. By January 2021, the exodus began with the team\u2019s director, followed by the termination of its ecological economist, who studied the monetary impact of natural resources. Then its senior hydrologist left. Van Lent resigned next. The foundation\u2019s water-quality scientist and environmental engineer followed two months later.<\/p>\n
\n\tThat year, the foundation\u2019s revenue exceeded $28 million, and Eikenberg\u2019s salary was more than $400,000. Under his leadership, dozens of lobbyists joined the fray, an education wing formed, and annual revenue grew significantly. Leaders claimed science remained the foundation\u2019s core mission. As Jones told Amy Green for her 2021 book, Moving Water, \u201cSo much of the state and federal policy has been driven by our scientists because they know we are 100 percent committed to scientific truth and nothing else.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tBut internally, even its own scientists questioned the commitment. One former member of the team was told that a study they produced for the foundation didn\u2019t align with the case it hoped to make to legislators. The former staffer was told that the leadership was \u201cunhappy with the numbers.\u201d A month later, they were fired. (The foundation denies asking any staff to change conclusions in any report.)\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tFormer foundation staffers were reluctant to talk with me, fearful of how it might affect their careers, future dealings with the foundation, and how the organization might respond in light of its lawsuit against Van Lent. Those who did speak with me under the condition of anonymity confirmed that all of their work, whether it was modeling, PowerPoints, or data was shared openly. They say that they took their work with them when they left, and some saw the lawsuit against Van Lent as an attempt to either humiliate him, destroy his reputation, or diminish his influence. Van Lent declared bankruptcy after the court forced him to pay $178,000 for the foundation\u2019s legal fees. \u201cFor the first time in my life, I\u2019ve had anxiety attacks,\u201d he tells me. \u201cYou feel like your whole career, your whole life was a waste. Seventeen years with the Everglades Foundation, and it all went up in smoke.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tANOTHER MORNING IN JULY, I pass through a strand of heavy rain along the edge of Shark Valley. Just before I arrive at the dock on the Miccosukee reservation, the sky returns to blue. I step onto an airboat with Eric Eikenberg, the foundation\u2019s VP of communications, its chief science officer, and our guide.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tWhen I ask what really happened with Van Lent, Eikenberg bristles but then leads me through his side of things. \u201cFrom our perspective,\u201d he says, \u201cwe got everything we had wanted. Reservoir, approved.\u201d That\u2019s when it soured with Van Lent. \u201cAll I know, his attitude, his persona, how he carried himself was completely different than what I had ever seen before.\u201d Still, Van Lent continued to lead the science wing and participate in board meetings. \u201cThe leadership style or the path we were going down was open to anybody,\u201d Eikenberg says. \u201cThe direction in which we were going was not one individual going rogue.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tAfter Van Lent joined the Friends of the Everglades in April 2022, the much smaller but historically important nonprofit, the foundation accused him of destroying its intellectual property, including what Eikenberg claimed was \u201cmultiple other scientists\u2019 work,\u201d due to his administrative privileges over two of the three servers containing the foundation\u2019s intellectual property. Soon after, the foundation hired a third party to oversee its digital architecture.<\/p>\n
\n\tAccording to Eikenberg, the foundation lost the entirety of Van Lent\u2019s 17 years of research, two other employees\u2019 libraries, including memos, presentations, and hydrological models. \u201cIt was determined that he had left us no other choice,\u201d Eikenberg says. \u201cAnd the board ultimately, the organization made the decision. That\u2019s the property of the Everglades Foundation. That\u2019s the organization\u2019s work that\u2019s funded by the generosity of its donors.\u201d A pause comes, and Eikenberg asks the guide to take the long way back home as we watch the Everglades pass by in a torrent of green and silver.<\/p>\n
\n\tTwenty minutes later at the dock, Eikenberg adds, \u201cIt\u2019s made us stronger.\u201d I ask if he meant the litigation or something else. \u201cGoing through it,\u201d he says. \u201cWe\u2019ve been able to bring on and establish a tremendous science team. The foundation continues to do its mission-driven work, and it\u2019s made us stronger.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tIt\u2019s true that without the Everglades Foundation, the restoration of this unparalleled ecosystem might still be collecting dust in technical papers and hearing committees. The foundation and its supporters have played the long game, nurturing longstanding relationships with whatever governor or president was in office, sometimes to the dismay of its critics. It has drawn funding from every administration, kicked and screamed until spades tore into the earth, and carved a path for water to return in some form.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tI ask Eikenberg if he thought the Everglades would reach a point of restoration in his lifetime that he\u2019d be happy with. \u201cThere\u2019s no doubt in my mind,\u201d he says. \u201cYou cannot afford to lose it.\u201d As for the legal odyssey that followed Van Lent\u2019s resignation, Eikenberg tells me, \u201cIt\u2019s a sad affair that took place. It could have been avoided. And in fact, we attempted to end it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n
\n\tA YEAR LATER, ON JULY 27, Van Lent waited to hear his name called in jail. Once they called him, he shed his jumpsuit, walked outside, and reunited with his wife. They drove back to Tallahassee that day, traversing his beloved Everglades along the Tamiami Trail, and his mind ran through the saga of the past few years. He found nothing redemptive about that 10-day nightmare in a cell, but when he left, he felt his commitment to the Everglades, to science, and to truth was galvanized. \u201cI will continue to speak up,\u201d he says, \u201cto tell the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\t\u00a0This article is supported by the\u00a0Economic Hardship Reporting Project<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"N othing could prepare Dr. Thomas Van Lent, one of Florida\u2019s most celebrated scientists, for jail. Before he…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":323393,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[242,1210,85,46,29254,58821,141],"class_list":{"0":"post-323392","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-environment","9":"tag-florida","10":"tag-il","11":"tag-israel","12":"tag-long-reads","13":"tag-ron-desantis","14":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=323392"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323392\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/323393"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=323392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=323392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=323392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}