Is Florida Just One New Development Away From Environmental Ruin?

By Stan Cox, AlterNet. Posted January 15, 2009.

In contrast to Immokalee's trailers, Ave Maria's solid, climate-controlled properties are built atop a colossal earth-moving project that was needed to render the area suitable for building. Now, when the residents and students of Ave Maria go for a walk beyond their town limits, they have plenty of open countryside in which to wander.  Having found a haven from Naples' frenetic development to the east, and what Mormino calls "the other Florida" in Imokalee to the north, they will also be sheltered, as Ave Maria University advertises in its promotional literature, "against the windstorms of secularism and apostasy which seem to overwhelm our nation and our church." (That lofty goal is reflected beautifully in the shape of the Oratory's facade, which brings to mind ceremonial papal headgear).

Another town, to be called Big Cypress, will be located between Ave Maria and Naples. Still on the drawing board, it will include -- just for a start -- 9,000 residences, a 500-room hotel, ample shopping, schools, a 200-bed hospital and the requisite golf course. Between and surrounding the two new towns will remain some of the more ecologically important zones of the Big Cypress Swamp. And the towns, say developers and some environmental groups, will be pioneer settlements in a new era of green planning, meant to protect rather than degrade the region's land- and waterscapes. 

An order signed by Gov. Jeb Bush in 1999 urged Collier County to protect 200,000 acres of land in the Immokalee area by concentrating development in "urban villages," "new towns" and "satellite communities" rather than on larger, traditional rural housing tracts. In 2002, a plan called the Rural Land Stewardship Area created a complex credit-trading system that allows developers to build on certain numbers of acres if they preserve other areas.

Some major environmental groups have endorsed the county's plans to allow dense settlements in the Big Cypress region. One Audubon of Florida representative told the press, "People will look back a decade from now, and we'll have protected a million acres of land based on this model, and we'll say, 'It all started right there in Immokalee.' "

But others have sounded alarms over the environmental impact. I asked Ellen Peterson, who chairs the Sierra Club's Calusa Group in southwest Florida, if the region's self-styled "green" developers like Barron Collier and the Bonita Bay Group have earned the plaudits they've received from major environmental groups, including Audubon International.   

Peterson has no faith in developer-led conservation: "You can't put people close to panthers and not end up killing panthers. And anytime there is increasingly dense development around water, you get runoff of fertilizers, pesticides and other chemicals." The economic and ecological costs of the vast infrastructure needed to support new housing developments, she said, turn out to "far exceed the one-time environmental impact fee that developers pay." 

Land preservation can take strange forms in Collier County. After the county commission purchased a 2,500-acre former ranch last fall under a program called Conservation Collier, it began weighing the possibility of allowing recreational all-terrain vehicle use on the property.  The program's acquisition director said the property, "will be used for all sorts of things the Conservation Collier ordinance allows … which is quite a bit." 

In December, there surfaced a map illustrating the potential for "build-out" into the Rural Land Stewardship Area that has been designated in eastern Collier County. On the map, a large portion of the RLSA is peppered with 22 black ovals designating "development areas" laced together by four- and six-lane roadways and bypassed by a few "panther corridors." The effect is reminiscent of the most tortuously gerrymandered legislative districts, or perhaps Israeli maps of a vision for the West Bank.  Ostensibly development-free parts of the RLSA are cut by six-lane thoroughfares that will take residents in to Naples, Fort Myers and Bonita Springs on the coast.

Published on the Naples Daily News Web site, the map was applauded by some environmental groups but eyed with deep suspicion by others. The Conservancy of Southwest Florida was swift with its negative reaction. Conservancy spokeswoman Nicole Ryan told me that most of the stewardship area is the property of a half-dozen large landowners who contracted with a private firm to come up with a way of building new subdivisions that would be acceptable to the county commission. The map, she says, illustrates the principle that, "When a plan is drawn up at the developers' request, it will be done to their benefit."

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Stan Cox is a plant breeder and writer in Salina, Kansas. His book, Sick Planet: Corporate Food and Medicine, was just published by Pluto Press.

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