Still reading: Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U. S., Cynthia Barnett
First we had some water, then we didn't (who knows if we'll ever get to say "and then we did"). It's hard out here for a Floridian, and Mirage makes it clear it's our own damn fault.
After the prehistoric period, the colonial period, the lamentable period of Andrew Jackson and the Seminole Indian wars, the civil war era and just until the Gilded Age, a lot of Florida's history can be described in two acts: (Act 1) a valiant, idiotic, ultimately successful struggle to drain the state's wetlands, and (Act 2) a halfhearted (expensive) attempt to patch up the destruction, mainly to provide adequate water for developers, whose Sunshine State party has been going on since the 1920s, and their thirsty customers, who dote on green grass, at home and on the golf course.
Development and its discontents have had consequences: Florida's droughts are droughtier, its sinkholes sinkier, its saltwater intrusion more intrusive. Wetlands would have ameliorated all this. We have worse freezes and more fires. For the most part, when Florida became a state in 1845, these were not concerns to the extent they are now. The first state flag said "Let Us Alone." (We wish.)
Many of these inconveniences and disasters can be traced to early giveaways of land and water--for example, an 1879 bill awarded 10,000 acres for each new mile of canal or railroad track built. Through a deal brokered to pull Florida out of a legal crisis, Pennsylvania mogul Hamilton Disston bought four million acres for 25 cents each, in return for draining 12 million acres north and west of Lake Okeechobee. If Disston pulled this off, half of these 12 million acres would return to him. Clobbered by the 1890s depression, Disston began to mortgage his land for loans and then to default; in 1896, he committed suicide.
A precedent had been set; giveaways continued as development accelerated after WWII. From 1970-80, Florida "had among the the most extensive wetlands loss in the nation." I could not but find a sort of grim amusement in the irony of my state first getting rid of its water and then trying to put it back.
Barnett has written an invaluable history. Her style is clean, clear and fast, making Mirage a pleasure to read. The book just gets better as she discusses Everglades restoration, how lack of wetlands affects the weather, the eager concessions made to JOE, "the state's most ambitious developer since Hamilton Disston," and the first shots fired in the water wars.
Now I'm up to the chapter on water bottlers. The concessions given to water bottling companies make the ones to St. Joe look meager, so at the moment, I'm taking a break from the embarrassment of living in this not-so-brave new Florida that has such government in it. (to be continued)
