Is Florida Just One New Development Away From Environmental Ruin?

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

The area's mainstream environmental organizations gave up long ago on trying to call a total halt to encroachment on undeveloped lands. "We know there will be growth," Ryan said. "Florida has landowner-friendly property-rights laws that allow one housing unit for every 5 acres, and you can't take that right away in this state."  She says the new strategy of clustering development isn't as bad -- at least theoretically -- as having development spread uniformly across the county.

But as plans have evolved, the amount of landscape to be built up has already almost tripled, and that, says Ryan, is certain to disrupt panther habitat and much more.  Planners can call as loudly as they want for nice-sounding elements like villages, nodes and mass transit, says Ryan, but if developers get their way, "we'll have glorified subdivisions leapfrogging one another 20 miles east of Interstate 75 [the former eastern boundary of sprawl], and everyone will be driving in to Naples."

From Sunshine State to Land of the Air-Conditioned Flea Market

Novelists, historians and journalists have exhausted entire thesauruses in their attempts to capture the exuberance with which Florida has welcomed hordes of diverse new residents and all sorts of zany enterprises for over half a century.

Now, as Ellen Peterson watches what she sees as "developers' greed" fueling the relentless encroachment on wetlands, she sees a golden goose killing itself: "Without large wetlands to the east, this area won't be beautiful anymore." But, I asked her, if the environment that originally attracted people to southwest Florida is largely gone, why do people keep coming? "A lot of people who live here don't know what it used to be like, so they don't know what they're missing," she says. "Fifteen years ago, just sitting on my porch, I'd hear a symphony of fish every evening, when they were jumping in the Imperial River. Now it's silent, and it's all because of development." 

The sun and winter warmth are still there, says Ryan, but not much else is left. "Now this area looks like everywhere else. It's all one damn strip mall. One intersection on Bonita Beach Road has pharmacies on three of the four corners! Speculation and greed have ruined it here."

Balmy weather, sand and sea have been bringing people to southwest Florida for decades, but the recipe for perpetual economic growth includes ingredients of a very different kind. The most recent project to take its name from the ecosystem it's helping to destroy is Naples' Big Cypress Market, just outside the city's southern frontier.  The vast, bland, metal-and-concrete structure features an 87,000-square-foot, 300-booth, air-conditioned flea market, mini-winery, performance stage, farmers market and tiki bar.

Maybe sun and fun once were enough to keep people here happy, but, according to Big Cypress Market's developer, "A lot of people are looking for something other than going to the beach and golfing down here. They go shopping to be entertained to some degree.''

A Florida vacation used to be like a trip to an exotic foreign country, but today new residents and visitors need not fear homesickness. They can spend increasing numbers of hours each day in air-conditioned houses, offices, stores and restaurants just like those they left back home, and enjoy familiar scenery as they sit through ever-worsening traffic jams. Many go for long periods without ever catching a glimpse of a beach, let alone a cypress forest or mangrove swamp. 

Meanwhile, developers and environmental planners will continue to haggle over acres of land and gallons of water, more shining-cities-on-the-swamp will be built, and environmental quality of life -- as always in the Sunshine State -- will be available for sale or barter.  

An anecdote related by Michael Grunwald sums up the extent of physical and mental dislocation that growth has inflicted on the region. When, he wrote, a highway extension threatened 1,500 acres of Lee County panther habitat a few years ago, a county commissioner argued the roadbuilder's case by saying, "Look, we've got tens of thousands of people sitting in traffic. That's not good for the environment either."

In southwest Florida as in the rest of America, everyone cares about protecting the environment, but no one seems to agree on where to find it.

See more stories tagged with: water, florida, growth, development

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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