Along the rim of Lake Okeechobee, the seasons aren’t marked by temperature or falling leaves, but rather the humidity, quality of light, and plumes of ash that blanket this part of Florida come October. For a century, sugar has grown here, becoming the State’s third largest source of agricultural revenue and making up more than half of America’s domestic production. Sugar is central to this part of Florida that locals call “the Glades” where a string of towns relies solely on the economy provided by the industry. But its history of labor abuses, dozens of lawsuits aimed at growers, and the practice of burning that haunts residents outline a complicated relationship between the Glades and the sugar industry.

Compounding the story, the sugar industry’s foothold in the center of the historic Everglades that begins north of Lake Okeechobee and stretches south to the Gulf of Mexico make it a principal impediment to Everglades restoration, the world’s largest restoration project. Water that once flowed south from the Lake through the Everglades and into the Gulf was diverted into thousands of canals that lacerated south Florida to dry the land for farming over the last 150 years. In turn, the effort not only remade the Everglades but remade the Seminole and Miccosukee Tribes’ way of life who have lived there for centuries. The industry’s origin story wove together hurricanes, revolutions, and a resurrection. In just a hundred years, it grew from infant to peerless.

Over two years, we reported this story about how the sugar industry shaped life in the Glades for Florida residents and then in the western and southern Everglades for the Seminole and Miccosukee Tribes. It’s the story of how 31,000 people live beneath a sheet of smoke from October until June each year, in towns where 1/3 of residents live in poverty, of how water policies made by the industry irrevocably altered the Seminole’s lands, and how the Miccosukee Tribe against all odds prevented the death of the Everglades through legislation in the past three decades. We spent months in the central Glades, on Seminole land and in the backcountry of the Miccosukee reservation, gaining access to parts of Florida few others have.