Bright Lit Place

WLRN has been examining what happened to Florida’s promise to restore the Everglades with a massive plan approved in 2000. These are some of the people who’ve spent decades waiting for progress. Those hit hardest measure losses in their checkbooks and family businesses — or even their homelands. Others have devoted their careers to getting restoration done right.

Judge Carlos Lopez ordered longtime Everglades scientists Tom Van Lent, 67, to spend 10 days behind bars for violating a court order stemming from a bitter court battle with the influential nonprofit Everglades Foundation.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to the massive Everglades restoration project dissected in the WLRN podcast Bright Lit Place is the water polluted by phosphorous and other nutrients that run off from sugar cane farms.

WLRN environmental editor Jenny Staletovich and Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Patrick Farrell talk about what it was like to wade through the muck of the Everglades to check on the decades-long battle to make the River of Grass work as nature intended.

We listen to the part of the first episode of Bright Lit Place, a new WLRN podcast distributed by the NPR Network. It was reported by WLRN's environment editor Jenny Staletovich. We also hear behind-the-scenes stories from Jenny and Patrick Farrell, the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer who worked on the project.

In 2000, the U.S. set out on one of the most ambitious environmental projects ever attempted: to wind back the clock and make the Everglades function like it once did — in 1900. The plan could have given Florida a 20-year head start on climate change, but that didn't happen. Listen to WLRN's new podcast series Bright Lit Place.