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Reggie,. Thank you once again for these informative articles by Craig Pittman of the Florida Phoenix. I really enjoy the subjects he writes about. This article is upsetting, because when that many mangroves are destroyed, it cannot be undone. What is done is done, and the environment suffers. I think about when we went up to Rodman Reservoir, there at the dam, and fished there. I looked across the waters there, and we talked about coming back sometime and bring our boat. Well, much later, we went there to the dam again, without the boat though, and the dam was at drawdown then, and OMG, then it was a different story....as far as I could see were stumps of the cutdown cypress trees, and other trees, thousands, if not millions of trees. The destruction was incredible, what the Army Corps of Engineers had done to construct the Cross Florida Barge Canal from the Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico. It was stopped by President Richard Nixon and never completed. People for and against the cross barge canal. Started, stopped, started, stopped. What was left was like devastation trail, kind of similar to what I saw in Hawaii, from the volcanic lava flows. This was man's devastation though, not nature's, all in vain. Thousands of wildlife gone, thousands and thousands of trees chopped down, cypress, pines, oaks, and tall bridge pilings never completed.....If you check out the devastation, go during the dam drawdowns, or otherwise, you will not have a clue what the higher water level hides. When it was ordered stopped, it was only about 28 percent completed, and it also displaced thousands of people from their homes,. These very high bridges left were where big ships could come across Florida to the Gulf of Mexico. The one that comes to my mind is at Eukera, Fl., where we stopped and had a picnic at the end of the bridge at a park once.