Curious thing about laws: They only work when people agree to abide by them and when the people administering them are committed to preserving their intent. Take either away and, well, laws aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. So can we trust Florida?
Take littering, for example. I’d no more toss a bag of fast food trash out my car window than I’d leave it on my living room floor. I don’t need an anti-littering law to make me put my trash in a can. It’s simply the right thing to do. Clearly that’s not enough for a lot of people. Just ask the dedicated volunteers who pick up gallons of cigarette butts and assorted trash every week in Key West.
There’s nary a place on the planet where littering isn’t outlawed. But people litter so extravagantly there’s no way to stop them, not with tickets, signs or education. I’d bet we could remove every anti-littering law from the books and the mess would get neither worse nor better. Some folks will always do the right thing, laws or no; the rest go along until it’s a personal inconvenience and then just ignore it.
So when I ask if we can trust the State of Florida to abide by its laws to protect its environmentally sensitive land, the answer is “Please excuse me while I laugh so hard I snort the coffee outta my nose.”
In 1847 an Everglades visitor wrote: “Could it be drained by deepening the natural outlets? Would it not open to cultivation immense tracts of rich vegetable soil? Could the waterpower, obtained by draining, be improved to any useful purpose? Would such draining render the country unhealthy? Many queries like these passed through our minds. They can only be solved by a thorough examination of the whole country. Could the waters be lowered ten feet, it would probably drain six hundred thousand acres; should this prove to be a rich soil, as would seem probable, what a field it would open for tropical productions! What facilities for commerce!”
In 1881 real estate developer Hamilton Disston figured building canals to drain the Everglades, which at the time encompassed the entire lower third of the state, was a great idea. In 1904, as part of his gubernatorial campaign, Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, promised to keep draining the swamp, which he did, sparking a land boom that made for giddy (and gullible) tourists, land developers and thousands of hunters in search of rare bird feathers for the ladies’ hats around the world.
Even if I allow for the catastrophic environmental ignorance of almost two centuries ago, Florida wanted no part of preserving the swamp that was South Florida. Henry Flagler wanted his railroad, developers wanted their cash and everyone wanted to live and play in the Sunshine State.
Trust Florida and DeSantis? Heck no
In 1969 the Dade County Port Authority announced its plans to build a new airport — bigger than JFK, LAX, Dulles and O’Hare combined — on 39 square miles of Big Cypress Swamp, just six miles north of the Everglades National Park. Floridians learned of the plan from the Miami Herald on the day it was announced.
Which brings us to “thank heaven for former President Richard Nixon.” In 1972 Nixon overruled his Department of Transportation, which supported the Everglades airport, and instead established the Big Cypress National Preserve.
In almost four decades following, Florida paid more than lip service to protecting the state’s fragile ecosystems. It established criteria for purchasing and protecting irreplaceable land and funded those purchases to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. It supported and expanded its state parks systems and made climate change an integral part of its environmental protection and land use regulations.
Doing so was never a wholly successful balance between raging development and land preservation, but the environmentalists won often enough that the rest of us could believe there might actually be real Florida left for our children.
In 2012, then-Gov. Rick Scott floated his idea to create more jobs by turning the state parks into something resembling high-end resorts. Everyone went nuts and that idea went nowhere (until Gov. Ron DeSantis resurrected it a couple weeks ago). So Scott spent the rest of his time in the Governor’s Mansion denying climate change and overturning everything his predecessor, Charlie Crist, had done to protect the environment.
Twelve years of ignoring the laws, twelve years of deliberately, even secretly selling off state-protected land to reward allies, from housing developers and Big Sugar to the Boy Scouts.
(Missed the Boy Scout thing? The executive board of the Sand Hill Camp in Brooksville is considering selling off 500 acres for residential and commercial development. Even though the land’s donor restricted all such development, a Florida judge has ruled the will’s restrictions don’t apply anymore.)
You wonder why I snorted the coffee outta my nose about that question of trust? There’s no way we can trust the current governor and his enablers in Tallahassee to uphold the state’s environmental protection laws. They’ll either rewrite them to suit their purposes or ignore them altogether.
And if one decides to stand against the political charade? Just ask James Gaddis, the 41-year-old Department of Environmental Protection cartographer who leaked the secret DeSantis plan to add three golf courses, 350-room, high-end lodges and pickleball courts to nine state parks. He got notice this week that the state’s going to fire him. Conduct unbecoming, said the notice. I mean the man surely made the guv snort “his” coffee. And not because he was laughing.
Learn more
https://www.arcgis.com/apps/Cascade/index.html?appid=455fac62c3bc49bc82df3433f3b27458
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draining_and_development_of_the_Everglades
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