A Billionaire, a Scientist, and a Secret in the Florida EvergladesA yearslong battle between a celebrated hydrologist and a respected environmen...

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A Billionaire, a Scientist, and a Secret in the Florida EvergladesA yearslong battle between a celebrated hydrologist and a respected environmen...
A Billionaire, a Scientist, and a Secret in the Florida Everglades
A yearslong battle between a celebrated hydrologist and a respected environmental juggernaut led to accusations about political motivations and stealing trade secrets

By Michael Adno

Nothing could prepare Dr. Thomas Van Lent, one of Florida’s most celebrated scientists, for jail. Before he turned himself in, he bought glasses, laceless shoes, and pants that sat on his hips without a belt. Early on July 17, Van Lent took the Metrorail with his wife to the Miami-Dade County Courthouse. Then, he walked inside to a courtroom where a bailiff placed him in handcuffs as his family watched from the jury box.

Van Lent had devoted his career to the Florida Everglades, becoming its foremost hydrologist, mapping the flow of water and studying how that affected the entire system. He helped build the first computer model of the gargantuan attenuated river, shaped the way scientists communicated across disciplines, and eventually helped lead one of America’s most powerful environmental nonprofits working to save the Everglades, an area larger than the state of Delaware and among the most intricate on Earth.

In the county’s detention facility, only 30 miles from the western rim of the Everglades, Van Lent found himself in a sea of orange jumpsuits, explaining to another inmate what a Stanford Ph.D. did to earn a seat here. He told him he was a scientist, formerly the chief scientist of the Everglades Foundation. Then he explained how the foundation, where he worked for 17 years, sued him. In their lawsuit, the foundation alleged a “secret campaign of theft and destruction” by Van Lent that was motivated by a plot to “enrich himself” by “misappropriation of trade secrets.” Ultimately, a judge found Van Lent guilty of indirect criminal contempt, forced him to pay the foundation’s legal fees, and sentenced him to 10 days in jail. The case unraveled Van Lent’s career, forced him to declare bankruptcy, and it revealed how the Everglades Foundation operated under its CEO, Eric Eikenberg.

For more than a decade, the foundation was central to almost every decision, appointment, and piece of earth moved in an at least $25 billion Everglades restoration project. The effort, approved by Congress in 2000 as the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Project (CERP), is the largest in the world and among the most physically and politically complex, too. The project’s goal is to restore the flow of water through the lower half of Florida’s peninsula that once naturally ran from Lake Okeechobee through the Everglades into the Gulf of Mexico. Central to that plan is a vast reservoir that would store and clean water from the lake before sending it further south into the southern Everglades. But in 2016, the reservoir’s construction became a battlefield between science and politics within the Everglades Foundation, and more broadly among the Everglades coalition. It led Van Lent to resign and spurred the foundation’s lawsuit.

Attached link

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/everglades-foundation-thomas-van-lent-lawsuit-1235504135

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