Florida’s Environmental Failures Are a Warning for the Rest of the U.S.
mschmitz
https://time.com/6288683/florida-desantis-environment-climate-change/
Florida’s Environmental Failures Are a Warning for the Rest of the U.S.
BY JEFF VANDERMEER JULY 12, 2023 8:00 AM EDT
Early in the 20th century, engineers blew up waterfalls and rapids in Miami rivers to clear the way for a canal. Wildcats scattered and fish floated to the surface, paralyzed. As legend has it, at least one alligator’s body went flying in the explosion, gawked at by local dignitaries.
Dynamite and dredging were the tools chosen to drain the Everglades and tame the waters. What once belonged to the Tequesta Native Americans, amid a wealth of wildlife, became parking lots and hotels owned by white people. Today, many of those parking lots are submerged during storms and, in some areas, the hotels overlook waters toxic with industrial and construction waste.
Florida is a bellwether for the rest of the nation; the surge water rise that besets Miami today will, soon enough, beset states ranging from California to New York. The state, of necessity, should be a leader in U.S. climate resiliency. But rather than acknowledge a crisis and build out a holistic approach to climate change, Florida, led by Governor Ron DeSantis, denies the urgency and applies a hodge-podge of contradictory initiatives designed for short-term applause. Some come with large amounts of money attached, while the state simultaneously ignores the peril of poorly regulated industrial-scale farming, ranching, and development that intensifies the crisis.
Ruinous policy in Florida affects 11 million acres of wetlands, thousands of lakes, more than 1,300 miles of coastline, and hundreds of freshwater springs. From rock pine to salt marsh, from sandhill scrub to lush semi-tropical ravines and dozens of other unique ecosystems—the point lost on DeSantis and the Republican legislature is that these are not tourist sights housed in an amusement park, but vital parts of the actual world that humans occupy and need to thrive, perhaps even to survive.
Yet, even as he pivots to a presidential run, DeSantis continues to downplay the risks of climate change.
Asked about hurricanes and climate change during a FOX News interview on May 24, DeSantis said he “rejects the politicization of the weather,” echoing his 2022 statement that “I can’t control the climate. I’m not doing mandates on any of that.”
That same day, the Sierra Club gave DeSantis an F for his environmental record, citing, in part, his attitude toward climate change and general “mismanagement.” Florida lags behind many states with decades-old energy efficiency guidelines while a recent DeSantis line-item budget veto disqualified Florida from receiving $346 million in federal funds from a program meant to improve energy efficiency across the country. DeSantis also signed legislation taking clean energy decisions away from local government; has yet to ban certain kinds of fracking; allowed exploratory oil drilling in the ecological sensitive Apalachicola River Basin; and, despite 2018 campaign promises, failed to lodge an objection to recent federal permits allowing drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.
Mismanagement, in this case, compromises the future of a state that has the fourth-largest economy in the U.S. and 14th largest economy in the world, just above Mexico. (In response to a detailed list of questions sent to the DeSantis team, a spokesperson did not respond directly to this or any other issue. Instead, they sent a list of monetary outlays for environmental issues made under the DeSantis administration.)
The stakes involved are not just the quality of life for Floridians, but actual lives—and the potential, as DeSantis exports his brand, that ecosystems nationwide will suffer from weakened regulation and be left for dead.
A coarsening of political ecosystems
If Florida’s wild places have evolved, with exceeding sophistication, to excel in a geographically fragile setting, then, in recent years, an opposite devolution has occurred politically in the human world.
When former governor Rick Scott took office in 2011, the state’s environmental regulation still supported some measure of sensible policy. But Scott had no vision for conservation, only an agenda beholden to aggressive business interests. This included dismantling good policy and banning use of the terms “global warming” and “climate change,” while stacking agencies, commissions, and departments with political appointees—many of whom lacked the qualifications necessary for the jobs, according to civil servants within state agencies who requested anonymity for fear of retribution—while forcing out scientists and other experts.
DeSantis, on paper, looks better than his predecessor, but he hasn’t rolled back Scott’s bad decisions. The Department of Economic Opportunity Scott created—to replace a Department of Community Affairs devoted to sensible citizen-responsive land management decisions—continues, now as the Department of Commerce, to divide up Florida into economic zones that often end up helping extractive industries or huge developers. DeSantis also has accelerated the practice of politicizing appointees, based on campaign donations, even as he gives lip service to environmental issues.
Recently, DeSantis announced billions of dollars for Everglades restoration, but the move may come with hidden political strings and calculations. Environmental analysts believe that some of the planned water projects may benefit large-scale agriculture more than the area’s habitat and biodiversity. It will take time to track how the money flows and where, and how much becomes trapped in eddies and swirls of bureaucracy or lines the pockets of DeSantis donors.
The projects DeSantis has greenlit often lack the scope to fulfill lofty promises. The governor’s “crown jewel” of Everglades restoration, the EAA Reservoir artificial wetlands project, allocates 16,500 acres for restoration—a pittance of the 60,000 acres stipulated in the Congressional Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan.
In the language of ecosystems, the reservoir has not evolved in a complex enough way to sustain itself over time. In the language of human policy, as Eve Samples, executive director of the Friends of the Everglades, notes, “Pumping record amounts of taxpayer money into earth-moving restoration projects will only be effective if these projects are properly scaled and designed to address Florida’s water-quality and water-quantity needs.”
Good policy requires an integrated plan, including adequate staffing. Natural ecosystems are self-sustaining because they come “fully staffed” with the organisms that keep them running. In the human world, staffing should occur as a core principle of project management, especially in projects with hundreds of millions of dollars behind them. But experts believe that the EAA Reservoir and other new projects may actually force existing state employees, already spread thin, to be pulled from maintenance of other essential projects.
For all of these reasons, there may not be an EAA Reservoir in a hundred years, even if rare ghost orchids still bloom in the area. This hasn’t stopped DeSantis from pointing to Everglades restoration as a reason to call him the “Teddy Roosevelt” of conservation—despite overruling a judge’s findings to support a Miami-Dade County highway extension that would encroach on important wetlands and endangered panther habitat. The loss of wetlands for projects like highways signifies the loss of sophistication and complexity in landscapes. A road means the poisoning of surrounding groundwater by toxins from tires, pollution of the air from fuel emissions, and untold numbers of organisms hit or run over by cars—for decades.
Wetlands are happy places because they provide space for so much biodiversity that the ground, air, and water cannot be anything but utterly alive. The loss of voices in wetlands is the loss of leopard frogs croaking and spring peepers chirping, the thready morse code of marsh wrens, the throaty roar of alligators during mating season, the whirring brittle sound of many species of dragonfly, with names like clubtails, darners, and red saddleback.
Yet these habitats also mitigate flooding, filter out human-made pollutants, provide buffers from storms, and are so essential to resiliency that when removed the state may, as in the Everglades, spend billions of dollars to restore the positive effects it once enjoyed for free.
In Florida, almost everything but uplands and rock pine habitat is some kind of wetlands, and subject to the rule and generosity of water.
The dismantling of wetlands is in a sense the dismantling of Florida itself.
In the human world, an inversion of success
If solid ground is an illusion in Florida, so too is the political landscape, especially for the average citizen. Neglect, greed, and business interests are regularly privileged, and sometimes even celebrated, over the rights of communities.
Under Scott and now in cascading ways under DeSantis, a host of preemption bills have stripped self-rule from local governments and made it easy to cut down trees, pollute, and subvert regulation. On May 24, DeSantis signed a bill, SB 540, overwhelmingly opposed by environmental groups, that makes it difficult for citizens to legally oppose changes to county comprehensive plans—often amended because of pressure from developers, now emboldened.
Samples calls it “a death knell” for smart growth in Florida that undermines resiliency and contradicts DeSantis’ own Executive Orders 19-12 and 23-06, 2019 Executive Order 23-06, which supported safeguards for responsible long-term planning. “Citizens were the last line of defense against unchecked sprawl,” says Samples, “and SB 540 has effectively stripped Floridians of our ability to challenge environmentally damaging, legally flawed projects that encroach on waterways, wetlands and green spaces.”
In June, DeSantis also signed into law SB 170, which allows businesses to sue local governments over so-called “arbitrary or unreasonable” laws, and SB 718, which prohibits voter referendums of ballot initiatives on land development regulation. Samples notes that these laws “defy logic,” in that “lawmakers in Tallahassee like to talk about the importance of ‘home rule’—then they undercut it year after year, to the detriment of our natural environment.”
It’s hard to ignore an investigative report published by the Daytona Beach News- Journal, that found 41% of state legislators have real estate ties—while these same lawmakers loudly proclaim that this fact has no effect on their votes.
Intensifying the potential damage, many special interests on the developer side are often companies that prefer to use prefabricated designs ill-suited for Florida’s unique topography. Decades ago, with better tree-protection ordinances, it was not out of the ordinary for a house in the capital city of Tallahassee to be carefully constructed around a massive live oak or even a mighty pine—with surrounding urban forest used as flooding and erosion mitigation. Yet now, new development tends to place expensive houses or apartment complexes cheek by jowl in ways that destroy biodiversity by cutting down most trees, removing the soil down to the clay, and filling in natural stormwater mitigation features in favor of holding ponds that do not effectively filter pollution.
Parts of Florida fade into invisibility every day, without being much chronicled, given over to a secret history of loss. Large patches of sky-blue lupine, a once common and dramatic sight in dry uplands, are disappearing due to development. Lupine often die if transplanted. Teams of volunteers rescuing native plants from future sites of clearcutting in Central Florida must leave these deep-rooted plants to their fate, sometimes lamenting as well the presence of gopher tortoises who also cannot flee, and sometimes end up being killed in the name of development.
Such places have intrinsic value and integrity. According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), biodiversity annually contributes $125 to $140 trillion worldwide to economies and communities that extend to wildlife the basic right to life and land.