A see-saw battle to save a Florida Swamp is being fought in the federal courts;¹ it stems from President Nixon's 1970 decision to terminate construction of the Cross-Florida Barge Canal. Proponents of the canal, notably persons with a financial stake in recreational development along parts of the planned 107-mile waterway, secured a preliminary injunction to prevent the Corps of Engineers from lowering the water level in an artificial lake that is part of the canal project, although the Forest Service considered this drawdown essential to save the thousands of hardwoods that are the basis of the swamp's ecosystem. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, in a withering opinion, overturned the district court's grant of the injunction, but shortly before the decision was handed down, the district court had ruled on the merits in favor of the canal's backers, declaring the president's cancellation of the project an illegal violation of the separation-of-powers doctrine. The case will be appealed to the Fifth Circuit, but even if it again reverses the lower court, the all-important hardwoods may well have perished by then from prolonged submersion of their roots.

The tangled story of the Cross-Florida Barge Canal goes back to 1935, when the Roosevelt Administration, eager for public works projects with which to combat unemployment, conceived the plan. Work on the canal began in that year but soon stopped. Congressional authorization was not secured until 1942, when heavy losses of shipping to German U-boats in the waters off Florida made a short-cut across the peninsula strategically desirable. Only in 1964, however, were funds finally appropriated for the project. Construction resumed, and four years later, Rodman Dam, designed to impound the waters of the Ocklawaha River and create an artificial lake for recreation, was completed. Of the 20 square miles flooded by the lake, known both as the Rodman Pool and Lake Ocklawaha, two square miles consist of hardwoods.