FLORIDA — Why Florida Is Important

Let’s start with an observation that’s both obvious and universally accepted. Over the past two hundred years the sustained consequences of population growth, migration, and technological innovation have changed the face of the Earth. It should be equally obvious that a great many of those changes have been extraordinary since they have improved the human condition in measurable ways. After all, how many of us would volunteer to return to the “Good Old Days” and experience surgical procedures without benefit of modern technology, including anesthetics or antibiotics? Or to experience life where thirty to forty percent of all children died before they reached age twelve and mothers regularly died giving birth, especially those poor women unfortunate enough to have had their children at hospitals teeming with septicemia and worse? Or to try to survive the four dreaded horsemen of the Apocalypse that ruled the Earth not that many hundreds of years ago?

My guess is that few of us would willingly forgo the many improvements brought to our daily lives by scientific and industrial innovations. After all, where would we be without modern food production, transportation systems, electrical generation, information and telecommunication systems, or even something as comforting but non-essential as central heating and air conditioning?

Then again, everyone not mentally challenged, comatose, or sealed in Saran Wrap knows that the Earth has been beat to shit by greedy, indifferent, or brain-dead people in ways too numerous to document in these few pages. But, have a little patience while I list a few choice examples. The majority of America’s first-growth forests have been gone for well over a hundred years. Open prairies are but faded memories as are the herds of buffalo that once darkened the Midwest and the Great Plains. Only a few sorry-ass remnants tantalize us with images of their former glory. Global warming, holes in the ozone layer, air and water pollution up the ying-yang, and cancer caused by environmental polluters are all too familiar topics. Remember Love Canal, PCBs, and mercury poisoning, among many others?

My point is simple. Although not all land-based change is negative or harmful, some is. The fact that humans have altered one ecosystem after another as they organized their lives and struggled to wrest a living from their surroundings is not an automatic and universal cause of breast-beating or weepy guilt trips. After all, animals alter their specific environments and indigenous people across the globe do the same and few would censure them for those life-giving behaviors.

What it comes down to is change is simply change. Things change, people change, and the Earth is changed as a result. Whether those changes are positive or negative depends on the specific social and environmental consequences of the action itself. And that brings us to my topic: the effects of wide-spread change caused by unsustainable growth pressure in locations with numerous delicate and sensitive environments. Which, in turn, leads us straight to Florida.

It’s one thing for people to read about the melting of some unpronounceable glacier in the heretofore frozen Antarctic and quite another to learn about the impending death of the Everglades as a natural system. The reasons for that interest are straightforward. First, what happens in America is usually regarded as more important to us because it’s our country. That may be parochial but so is life as lived. The result is that American urban and environmental issues have more immediacy in our lives. Which in my eyes is good and natural. That’s the way it should be. We’re territorial animals and this territory is ours. Second, many of us have been to Florida and relate, as visitors or residents, to its varied problems. Third, even if you haven’t been to the Sunshine State, you know at least a little about it from coverage by entertainment and news media and from reports of friends or relatives who have vacationed or lived there. Therefore, in ways significant as well as trivial, Florida is familiar to all of us and serves as an excellent example of how humans have changed their environments in the past 100 years.

Florida’s siren-songs are so sweetly intoxicating that they demand attention and pull people like iron filings to an electro-magnet. Sunshine that won’t quit. Clear waters, salt and fresh. Sugar-sand beaches to frolic in. Sub-tropical winters to die for, especially if you’re from Minnesota or, worse, from North Dakota, which so sucks the big one that every young person with a brain and access to transportation seems to be heading for some place a lot more exciting. And yes, we can’t forget Florida’s lack of income taxes so beloved by the Silver Panthers. Those narco-seductions, combined with the State’s almost pathological inability to control growth or to protect the environment in meaningful ways, have attracted migrants to Florida like the honey pots of yore drew greenbottle flies in thick clouds.

The inevitable result, in a State where environmental regulations have largely been honored by their lack of enforcement, is that over the past 150 years each succeeding wave of new residents has altered larger and larger chunks of the environment until little remains that even approaches ecosystems in a natural state. Today, no place in the State is what it was before development. Not Palm Beach. Not the Everglades. Not Key Marco. Not the Panhandle’s Emerald Coast. Not Tampa Bay or Miami-Dade. Nothing in the environment has been able to withstand the onslaught of people intent on grabbing a piece of the good life and to hell with worrying about what had to be done for them to get it.

Any number of intelligent Readers might demand indignantly: So what? Nothing in the U.S. is what it used to be. What’s the big damn deal? What makes Florida so all-fired important?

The answer is simple. Cutting-edge environmental decisions are being made in Florida as you read this page. The pace, scale, and intensity of change in fragile and sensitive environments is what separates Florida from Wisconsin, Idaho, New York, or Texas. Of course, environments across the U.S. have been and continue today to be altered by human activities. However, few states have experienced the unrelenting and sustained assault that has transformed Florida environments from natural conditions into sterile cultural landscapes in so short a time. Think of the implications of the historical fact that in 1900 1,681 people were living in Miami. That environmental assault began even before the ink was dry on its Statehood papers in the mid-1840s and is still raging out of control. In addition, no where in the world can ecosystems like the Everglades or the Fakahatchee Strand be found. Nowhere. Not just in the U.S., anywhere in the rest of the world. Once gone they’re gone forever. That ridiculously overused word unique applies to Florida environments in spades.

The powerbrokers responsible for the existing development patterns in the State are eating those sensitive and irreplaceable environments and in their place are replacing them with one sterile subdivision, regional mall, retail strip center, strip mine, or agricultural field after another. As if we desperately need those rare and hyper-critical types of land use more than we need fresh water, clean air, and healthy ecosystems. It makes me wonder if most Floridians care that their grandchildren and great grandchildren will be left with little but concrete pavements, an aridified climate, and stagnant drainage canals.

This post has two goals. First, to help Readers understand the land use patterns and development trends that led to present-day Florida and the inevitable consequences of those trends — enormous profits for some and environmental degredation of all. Land, that’s what it’s all about. Land and how we’re using it. What I’m really talking about is land as it’s affected by four very easy to appreciate elements: limitless greed, easy-virtue politicians, inadequate regulatory enforcement, and an indifferent populace. Second, and most importantly, this book identifies ways ordinary citizens can change those patterns and presents realistic, workable strategies to make that happen. In future posts the blog will also provide a hard look at the State’s future if the existing patterns of landscape alteration continue.

As the title of this post I originally used the phrase, Eating Florida, which may not be the most technically accurate way to describe what’s happening to the Sunshine State, but it conjures up the very real image of fat politicians and their greedy powerbroker lords and masters feeding at the trough. The sobering thing is, the word Eating applies perfectly to the Florida of the future if the status quo remains the rule since numerous sensitive environments will be consumed in the development process.

Although the jury is still out on that issue we’re closing in on the twelve o’clock witching hour. Decision time stares us in the face. As the well-respected biologist Ernest Partridge writes:

In a vast library of published books and papers, these scientists warn us that if civilization continues on its present course, unspeakable devastation awaits us or our near descendants. Turning away from that “present course” toward “sustainability” will be difficult, costly and uncertain but far preferable to a continuation of “business (and policy) as usual.”

But that’s what this blog is all about, to open Readers’ eyes to Florida’s harsh realities. To look past the sun and surf, the glitz and glitter, not to mention the bullshit peddled by shameless politicians and their powerbroker patrons, to see how the land has been drastically altered in such an astoundingly short time. To see how Florida’s natural places are being eaten as you read this page and many to come. To get you to realize what’s been done right and what’s been done horribly wrong, both in cities and in the countryside. My purpose in all this effort is to ensure that Readers recognize the Wizard at work, only it’s not Kansas or Oz we’ll be looking at but the powerbrokers who have shamelessly manipulated Florida politics for decades and in the process have gotten fat by eating one environment after another.

But why should ordinary people like you and me care? Because sensitive environments in the State have moved rapidly up the ladder of negative urban and consequences until they has reached a dramatic crossroad. Turn one direction and the consequence is the chaos of uncontrolled growth and non-sustainable socioeconomic and environmental conditions. Turn in another direction and the result is slightly more controlled growth that will still destroy the environment but at a somewhat slower pace than the first choice. Turn toward the third direction and the consequences are controlled growth that will not destroy what’s left of our natural environments and will preserve the remaining parts for future generations.

The critical problem is that decisions about which direction the State should take are being made by the Big Three powerbrokers — land developers, mining companies, and agribusinesses — meeting behind closed doors with their well-controlled politician pals. Not by ordinary citizens. And that’s the other real challenge this blog addresses head-on.

One intriguing way to think about Florida is that’s where one of the country’s last high stakes poker games in real estate development is being played. Only the table stakes are the future of human settlement as well as the future of fragile environments throughout the State. So, who are the players in this high-stakes poker game? The list below ranks the dramatis personae with respect to their relative importance and power.

1)         Land Developers/Large-Scale Agribusinesses/Mining Companies

2)         Three-way tie, see #1

3)         Three-way tie, see #1

4)         Federal/State/Local Politicians (in that order)

5)         U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

6)         Other Federal Agencies (EPA, Fish & Wildlife Service, etc.)

7)         State Agencies

8)         Environmental/Conservation Organizations

9)         Florida Residents/Voters

The Big Three powerbrokers are tied for first place because they are equally adept at stuffing munificent campaign contributions into the pockets of their trained puppets, the fat-cat politicians, who in turn bust their asses to do whatever they are ordered to do by their real bosses, which, naturally, are the powerbrokers. History books and the daily Florida newspapers are filled with mind-boggling examples of the venality and reprehensible actions of the Florida business community in concert with State legislators. The skeptics out there might want to read Carl Hiaasen’s columns in the Miami Herald and the work of investigative reporters Beth Reinhard and Samuel P. Nitze.

Please note the group that is in dead-ass last place on the list of players. Not only are the citizens/voters poorly informed and typically powerless, they simply are regarded by the powerbrokers as brain-dead, expendable pawns whose sole purpose in life is to be moved about the game board and even, if required, sacrificed on the Altar of Profits. That situation will be the status quo and modus operandi until and unless a populist movement rises up and drives the powerbrokers from center stage. I can hear the negative chorus from a bevy of cynical Readers: “Fat chance of that ever happening in Florida. Get real.”

Perhaps the cynics are correct. Perhaps Florida is already doomed. That’s a very real possibility. But this blog is built around the premise that similar obstacles to preserving our environmental heritage have been overcome in recent Florida history. We do not have to look elsewhere for inspiration. The road map to sustainability and environmental health can be found in places like Lake Apopka, the Kissimmee River, and, most importantly, the Cross-Florida Barge Canal. The critical lessons of environmental preservation are right in front of our eyes. All we have to do is recognize them and act accordingly. And then apply those lessons to other locations throughout the U.S.