page_title: Friends of the Everglades
section_title: Legal and lobbying actions
hierarchical_section_title: Friends of the Everglades / Legal and lobbying actions
context_page_description: Friends of the Everglades is a conservationist and activist organization in the United States whose mission is to "preserve, protect, and restore the only Everglades in the world." The book Biosphere 2000: Protecting Our Global Environment refers to Friends of the Everglades as an organization that has fought to preserve North America's only subtropical wetland.
  The organization was created in 1969-1970 by journalist, author, and environmental activist Marjory Stoneman Douglas who wrote the book The Everglades: River of Grass in 1947, about the Florida Everglades. When the organization was first founded, it soon had 500 members, eventually reaching 6,000 members. Douglas was 79 when she founded the organization. Current membership is approximately 5,000.
  It outlines its goals as being to:
  Compel government agencies to comply with existing environmental laws, and resist any efforts to weaken such laws.
  Encourage politicians to recognize the long consequences of their actions.
  Spread awareness of the importance of the Everglades to the South Florida ecosystem.
context_section_description: Friends of the Everglades has taken legal actions over the years to protect the Everglades from overdevelopment and pollution.
  When Marjory Stoneman Douglas first began the organization, Friends, along with the work of other individual activists, was instrumental in persuading the Richard Nixon administration to stop the development of the Miami International Airport in the Everglades.
  It has taken legal action to stop South Florida Water Management District from back-pumping agricultural chemicals from Big Sugar’s plantations into Lake Okeechobee and to require proper treatment of agricultural chemicals discharged to the Everglades from the Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA). Friends also has protested government plans to build 63 square miles of stormwater treatment area (STAs) or filtering marshes to absorb excess nutrients resulting from the agricultural pollution of Big Sugar plantations. Then-president of Friends of the Everglades, Joette Lorion (1998) stated, "Why should taxpayers be made to pay a billion dollars to clean up after big sugar, just because the government agencies don't have the will to enforce the Clean Water Act and make the polluters pay?" Friends continues to fight against this issue in the courts (2011).
  Legal actions by Friends of the Everglades have gone to the Supreme Court of the United States on two occasions. In 2003 Friends of the Everglades and the Miccosukee Indian Tribe argued the so-called "S-9" lawsuit over the protection of the Everglades. The Supreme Court sent the case back to the District Court to be reargued in the fall of 2004. Current Florida Governor Rick Scott has stated that he favors "restoration, not litigation," which provides a hopeful rallying cry for environmentalists. However, state funding for what is required to prevent and clean chemical pollution in the Everglades is not adequate to address the needs of the ecosystem. Enforcement of "better management practices" in big sugar farming cuts off the pollution at its source. The state seems willing to negotiate the two sides of the contentious debate, that of big sugar and conservationists, but environmentalists are not convinced that it will be enough to adequately address the needs of the Everglades.
  Friends of the Everglades has strongly criticized the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, stating that it does not adequately address many critical needs. However, it does support the broader goals of this Federal plan, which dates from 1948, to protect the Everglades.
  In 2004, the Miccosukee tribe along with Friends of the Everglades initiated a lawsuit which accused the Environmental Protection Agency and DEP of failing to enforce the federal Clean Water Act.
  In 2009, a court victory for Friends of the Everglades was overturned by an appeals court, where the federal appellate court based its opinion on the  "unitary waters" theory, which is an interpretation of the Clean Water Act which treats all bodies of water in the United States as a single body. The implication of this was that transferring polluted water from one body of water to another, even if polluted water was being transferred to pristine water, is considered to be legal. The focus of the ongoing legal debate has been on the definition of the word "addition" in the Clean Water Act. The Clean Water Act mandates that the addition of pollutants to clean water requires a federal permit. If polluted water is being transferred one body of water to another, some courts have interpreted this as meaning no permit is needed, whereas other courts have maintained that the wording of the Clean Water Act was not intended to allow transference of polluted water from, for example, a polluted stream to a pristine lake. 
  The Columbia Journal of Environmental Law states that environmentalists are opposed to the "unitary waters" theory because it exempts polluters from obtaining federal permits which are usually required for polluting bodies of water, so long as the transferrer does not add additional pollutants to the transferred water.
  According to Friends, in the c
caption: Everglades National Park. A white ibis flying over the "River of Grass", with tree islands in the background.
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