Paradise Lost: Reflections on

Florida’s Environmental History

 

Jack E. Davis

University of Florida

 

We all probably know that grand old American proverb: If a tree falls in the woods when no one is around to hear, it will make no sound.  This idea was first introduced to me by one of my grade-school teachers. I don’t recall her name but I recall her presenting this idea like a law of nature. Although I lacked much of an analytical mind, the idea just didn’t mesh with my black-and-white, pre-adolescent logic.

I wondered about it for some years, in fact. Did this law of nature mean that when no person was around, frogs in a swamp would not hear themselves when they sang their frog songs? When the birds awoke in the morning, were there no sounds coming out of the trees until you raised your windows or walked outside? Did all the earnest rustling and crackling noises of the woods and rushes wait to arise until some human came tromping along? Did the winds of a hurricane out in the middle of the Atlantic blow silent until the hurricane approached land where people lived and listened?

I have since figured this: while there was much that my teacher knew and of value that she could pass along to her students, there were some things she got wrong, and she got some things wrong because society got them wrong. The noises of nature don’t depend on a human presence. The idea of silent nature sans humans reflects the artificial stratification of culture over nature, a stratification that has roots reaching back to the rise of Christianity and fortified by the subsequent rise of anthropocentric science. This human construction of the order of things remains as strong today as ever, I would argue, but with a greater danger to the non-human world since we have technologies that allow us more easily to fulfill the divine instruction as recited in the Old Testament verse in Genesis 1:28: “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”

If you think people long ago stopped subscribing to this belief consider this: When the Dade County Port Authority was determined to build the biggest airport in the world in the middle of the Everglades in the late 1960s, the deputy director of the Authority, Richard Judy, cited the scripture, saying he had  pledged the Port Authority to fulfilling “the responsibilities of all men to exercise dominion over the land, sea, and air above us as the Higher Order of Man intends.”[1]

As a result of this dominion, within our national borders, 500 of those living things no longer moveth upon the earth. Since the U.S. was duly constituted in 1791, they have become extinct, and today 20,000 more are endangered.[2]

We who know the history of Florida–where the state’s list of endangered, threatened, and commercially exploited species is well over 500--more than our fair share--know that domination has been the rule rather than the exception, that millions of trees have fallen within the earshot of humans, for it was humans who felled those trees.[3]

And since Florida became a U.S. territory in 1821, humans have not only cleared Florida’s woodlands; they have drained and filled and dried up Florida’s wetlands. Wetlands, to use the words of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was writing from Florida in the 1870s, were “the most gorgeous of improprieties.” And yet they are not simply habitat essential to indigenous creatures who break the silence with grunting and bellowing and busy little noises for all to hear–humans or no humans--they are the source of vital sustenance for the human population–and as we have recently been reminded with Hurricane Katrina, they are sometimes buffers against extreme weather.[4]

This latter fact is actually not a new revelation. When Congress was debating what became the 1850 Swampland Act, the act that put all of Florida’s wetlands, once belonging to the federal government, in the hands of the state for the purpose of developing them, lawmakers talked about the flood-control benefits of wetlands. They knew that wetlands were buffers; they knew that wetlands were recharging areas for ground water. Yet, a swamp was a swamp and worthless--hideous, desolate were the words commonly used--until it was drained and converted into productive land.[5]

Not long before, John James Audubon, who spent his winters in Key West--and incidentally killed thousands of Florida birds for sport or to render them in ink--said, “A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children.” Past generations in Florida borrowed heavily against future generations. Earlier generations believed that nature needed to be improved upon, needed the human touch, and historically it was a heavy one, so heavy that Everglades environmentalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas decreed in 1982 that “conservation is a dead word.”[6]

And the news today is grim. Until the 1970s, Florida’s aggregate 49 percent wetland loss roughly paralleled the country’s loss–a mere 53 percent. Yet since then, since the passage of the 1976 Clean Water Act, which was intended in part to protect wetlands, Florida has lost another one million acres, outpacing the national trend. As the St. Petersburg Times reported, the Army Corps of Engineers in 2003 rejected not a single permit to destroy Florida wetland; it in fact approves more permits in Florida than in any other state.[7]

Forty-eight percent of the Everglades has been lost to development and agriculture; Ninety percent of the Everglades bird population has disappeared. Forty percent of Florida’s inland bodies of water are too polluted to be safe for swimming or fishing. Florida’s unsurpassed collection of 720 freshwater springs are one by one silting up because they are overcharged with nitrates from lawn fertilizer; the Floridan and Biscayne aquifers are losing water; Florida’s coral reefs are bleaching out from warming ocean temperatures and dying from freshwater run-off carrying high loads of sewage and nitrogen and phosphorous. Out in the Gulf of Mexico is a dead zone, where virtually no sea life can live, the size of the state of Massachusetts, caused by the toxins and waste that come down the Mississippi and other rivers dumping into the Gulf. Florida has 49 Superfund sites, Florida’s own Love Canals, areas contaminated by extreme amounts of hazardous or toxic waste that endangers public health. Sulfur-dioxide emissions from power plants has increased since the beginning of the 21^st century rather than decreased. According to the Florida Public Interest Research Group, in 2003 in Tampa, which has the worst air quality of all Florida cities, 265 deaths, 380 heart attacks, and 26,000 lost work days were associated with soot pollution from power plants. Our state has more golf courses than parks; we have 8.3 state parks per 1M people, but 26 shopping malls per 1M people, the third highest ratio in the country. We’re losing twenty acres an hour to development And because of this development, 74,000 gopher tortoises, by state approval, have been buried alive since 1990.[8]

In fact, these sorts of historical developments in Florida, accelerated after World War II, produced what is acknowledged as the first ecological novel, the late John D. McDonald’s A Flash of Green. McDonald was a fiction writer, but he was writing the truth about development in Florida trumping preservation. And he captured it all in one poignant sentence: “As the quiet and primitive mystery of the broad tidal bays disappeared, as the mangroves and the rookeries and the oak hammocks were uprooted with such industriousness, the morning sound of construction equipment became more familiar than the mockingbird.” What’s particularly remarkable about his book is that it was published in 1962, the same year that Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, the book everybody says kick started the modern environmental movement. But when McDonald was writing, and about that movement, it was already in gear in Florida. And he also was very clear about what his adopted state, of only 5 million residences at the time, was leaving for future generations.[9]

Today’s young people, and newcomers to the state, know the concrete Florida better than the green Florida, the Disney-artificial better than the Silver Spring natural. Plant Florida’s young people in a place committed to nature conservancy, such as the Mount Monadnock region in southern New Hampshire, which is desperate not to know changes that Florida has known, and they will long for the artificial things. This is not surprising; they know Florida by its built environment; their Florida is defined not by nature, but by plastic franchises with plastic pastel signs, theme parks, air-conditioned shopping malls, treeless parking lots, car-stuffed streets, and cookie-cutter houses in sprawl developments where the architectural inspiration is as barren as the bulldozed landscape. 

As early as 1929, naturalist John Kunkel Small warned that Florida’s “Eden” was becoming a “Sarah.” “Tragedy” was another word John Kunkel Small used to describe the fait of Florida’s natural endowments. Tragedy and irony are the stuff of powerful drama and of great works of art. And so I’ve often wondered why Florida doesn’t have a literary tradition that compares with Mississippi’s, at least in popular recognition, since tragedy and irony have been so much a part of Florida’s environmental history. Perhaps this is because Faulkner, Welty, Richard Wright, and others were inspired by a sense of place bound to human events in Mississippi’s tortured past. Although Florida’s past is replete with human calamity, and although Florida produced the likes of Zora Neale Hurston and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, it has lacked Mississippi’s feel of changelessness in both the social and physical settings. A sense of place is hard to come by in a state where change is so rapid, whether we’re talking about Florida’s ever-expanding population or its metamorphosing landscape. How can a cultural tradition burrow roots and thrive when the physical setting is disturbed so frequently, when there is little permanence in the land?[10]

But Florida’s landscape was not always so artificial or so homogenized; there was a time when it wasn’t looking more and more like the national-franchise landscape that is gobbling up the rest of the country. Interestingly, it was the birds, the trees, the rivers, and even the scrub land, not the beaches or theme parks that drew the first tourists here in the 19^th century. Nature also captured the imagination of the first American writers to take an interest in Florida.

Among the first to leave behind a literary record of wild Florida was naturalist William Bartram. He arrived on the eve of the Revolutionary War (1774), coming from Philadelphia and traveling to remote parts of what was then known as British East Florida. To Bartram, whom Florida had previously broken financially and psychologically when he tried to wrest a plantation-living out of the land, Florida was an Elysium, as he put it, an enchanting living natural museum of the most amazing specimens of plants and animals. He ultimately published the journal of his excursion in 1791 in a fat book with a cumbersome 50-word title that we now refer to as simply The Travels. Eighteenth-century readers, including other naturalists, of The Travels believed he was engaging in fiction writing rather than developing a taxonomy because he recorded such incredible things in Florida: 25- to 30-pound large-mouth bass; 10- to 12-foot diamondback rattlers; live oaks 12 to18 feet in girth and with horizontal bows that reached out as far as the tree was high; grape vines a foot in diameter; bald cypress with trunks 8 to12 feet in diameter and with straight shafts shooting up to 50 feet; and alligators, a primordial creature unknown to most of his fellow colonists, so thick in the waters that he said a man could walk across their heads from bank to bank if he weren’t likely to be eaten. Bartram recorded zoological firsts: 125 species of flora not known to whites, three snakes, six frogs, two lizards, several scores of birds, three fishes, the gopher tortoise, and the black-and-white Florida wolf. He saw springs and caverns and sinks. He encountered so much and had not even ventured into the subtropical zone of southern Florida, where there was even more to see.[11]

Despite the critics who complained about fanciful observations, his recordings in the Travels in fact anticipated and inspired the Romantic writers and poets of the next century–Coleridge, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau, and James Fenimore Cooper. Some took images and settings directly from Bartram’s depictions of Florida places.[12]   

Some came to Florida, too. A century after Bartram came Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sidney Lanier, Stephen Crane, Henry James, John Muir, the former slave turned poet Albery Allson Whitman, and painters Winslow Homer and Martin Johnson Heade.  Florida evoked visions of nature’s paradise. “Nature,” I have written elsewhere, “was Florida’s living aesthetic--the indigenous and distinct flora, fauna, and climate that brought life and color to the landscape and gave the state its character apart from human creations.”[13]

Few in her day were as keen an observer of this living aesthetic as Stowe, whom of course we better know as the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. When she looked out from her winter cottage in Mandarin on the St. Johns River, she reveled, as she wrote, in the “flowers and arabesque and brilliant coloring. . . . Nature has raptures and frenzies of growth, and conducts herself like a crazy, drunken, but beautiful bacchante.”[14] 

Not long after, the habitually dour Henry James said a trip to Florida in the 1880s made him “Byronically foolish about the St. Johns River.” He wrote, with “the velvet air, the extravagant plants, the palms, the oranges, the cacti . . .–one might also have been in a corner of Naples or Genoa.” And James ventured no farther than Jacksonville.[15]

Typically, Florida tourists got out of Jacksonville, the principal Florida city at the time, and took a steamer up the St. Johns and the Ocklawaha rivers to visit Silver Springs. Over 50,000 tourists a year did this. Silver Springs was the Magic Kingdom of its day. It was one that charmed visitors not with a brigade of costume-version cartoon characters but with a flush of butterflies, wading birds, otters, turtles, and alligators. Travel writer Edward King called Silver Springs Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth and “one of the wonders of the world.” And the Ocklawaha impressed him with its “sylvan peace and perfect beauty.”  Sidney Lanier delighted in the Ocklawaha. It was "the sweetest water‑lane in the world," he said.[16]

One particular interesting writer who came to Florida in the late 19^th century was John Muir. When he was twenty-nine, Muir set out on a thousand-mile walk from Indiana to the Gulf, ending his overland journey at Cedar Key. Florida gave him his last intimate look at the continent’s eastern environment before he took passage to California, via Cuba and New York City, to become eventually the long-bearded mountain man of the Yosemite and the country’s foremost guardian of nature. Upon first arriving in Florida at the port of Fernandina in October 1867, he found, as he said, “a dry spot on some broken heaps of grass and roots” where he rested on his elbow and proceeded “eating my bread, gazing, and listening to the profound strangeness.” It was indeed the strangeness of the Florida wild that pulled him without delay on his walk across the peninsula. He confined himself mainly to the corridor of David Levy Yulee’s Florida Railroad, for the state, he said, was “so watery and vine-tied that pathless wanderings are not easily possible in any direction.” Despite this observation, he could not keep himself from wanderings into Florida’s garden of anonymous plants and birds and sounds. Not long before this trip, he had abandoned his father’s Calvinist faith for Transcendentalism, and when he sauntered away from the railroad tracks, he was entering the temple of his God, a transcendent world of green beauty and curiosities that heightened the senses to near collapse. His trek not surprisingly was slow. He explored pine and wiregrass flatwoods, hardwood and palm hammocks, and scrub land where for miles the saw-palmettoes stretched. He called them “dazzling sun-children.”[17]

Seven days after leaving Fernandina, he arrived in what was then called Cedar Keys. After emerging from the wooded enclosure of his journey, he was immediately struck by the contrasting vastness of the Gulf. Whether he realized it, he was looking out on the rich deltaic estuary system of the Suwannee River. His view took in a cluster of small islands. They were thickly studded with live oaks, junipers, longleaf pines, and of course cedar trees. 

But Muir was not simply gazing out at a pristine seascape. He was witnessing Genesis 1:28 in action; he was witnessing the fulfillment of the nation’s perceived manifest destiny. Florida was still a frontier in 1867, and Americans had always believed that it was their divine and patriotic duty to spread civilization across the continent, to unventured places like Florida, and part of that meant making good use of the country’s magnificent natural resources. Not doing so meant wasting them. So when Americans looked out upon a forest, they saw merchantable timber; when they scanned a prairie, they saw farmland; when they looked into the water of a river, they saw an avenue of transportation or a source of industrial power, and in later years a dumping place for their industrial waste. In other words, they commodified nature.

Cedar Key’s reason for being had always been associated with nature–or more accurately in the US experience with marketable natural resources. No more than 400 people were living in the area, but nature made theirs the busiest port on the peninsula’s west coast. Fishes, crabs, green turtles, and eventually oysters were the basis of a vibrant seafood industry. Down the Suwannee River came millions of board feet of timber--cypress, cedar, and pine--from Florida’s Gothic-like interior forests to be milled locally or shipped to ports elsewhere. The prized among the pines was the stout, termite resistant heart pine of the longleaf. It was the monarch of the pine species and once ranged across 92 million acres from Virginia across to Texas and down to Lake Okeechobee. A traveler couldn’t avoid the longleaf. Bartram admired how they towered in perfect posture and not too closely, and he liked to listen sounding from their flattened crowns from 50 to 75 feet above “the solemn symphony of the steady Western breezes,” as he put it, “playing incessantly, rising and falling through the thick and wavy foliage.”[18]

The most important wood for the people of Cedar Keys came from their namesake tree. There were several lumber mills, employing over a hundred people, which milled local red cedar into pencil blanks and pen holders that were shipped to New York and other pencil factories in Europe. By 1890, Cedar Keys’ four pencil factories were consuming 100,000 logs a year, and producing enough pencil blanks to circle the globe nearly five times.[19]

Muir saw the factories in action, and he saw the beauty of the region. But to his misfortune, he was struck with typhoid fever, which to fellow humans reflected the dark side of the Florida paradise. Muir took a slightly different view, however. He was forced to convalesce until January, and took the opportunity to get to know the natural characteristics of the area. He also began to reassess the human place on earth, that is, the stratification of culture over nature. His bout with typhoid fever convinced him that, as he wrote in his journal, “certain parts of the earth prove that the whole world was not made for” humans. He went on for pages challenging religious claims to the earth and indeed the cosmos, at one point concluding that “it never seems to occur to . . . farseeing teachers that Nature’s object in making animals and plants might possibly be first of all [for] the happiness of each one of them, not the creation of all for the happiness of one. Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation?”[20]

Muir’s question was not one that most people who came to Florida asked. His was not the insight that shaped Florida history. What few people understood, and many don’t today, is that humans are themselves a component of nature, that the health of wildlife populations is a barometer of the health of human habitation. Cities are not disconnected from the countryside, ecologically. You kill the fish in the river with toxic chemicals or nitrogen-enriched fertilizer run-off from farms or kill the marine life in open-water estuaries with partially treated sewage and you affect your quality of life, your health--no matter where you are–and you affect someone’s livelihood..

This is not to say that Florida’s past has been all about despoliation and exploitation. Florida was home to the first state Audubon Society in the Deep South, organized in 1900, and it was the men and women, mostly women, of the society who were instrumental in the creation of the first federal wildlife refuge, the Pelican Island National Wildlife Refuge (1903). Florida was one of the first states, if not the first, to employ an ecological study to try to protect nature, doing so in the 1950s, nearly 20 years before the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s adoption of environmental impact statements, when Gov. LeRoy Collins tried to stop a dredge-and-fill project in Boca Ciega Bay in St. Pete. And it was men, women, teenagers, Seminoles, Miccosukees, and sportsmen who organized to stop Richard Judy and the construction of the Everglades jetport.[21]

Florida seems to be shifting ever so slowly to what has the potential to be a new historical course. In recent years, agriculture has taken great strides to protect the aquifer and rivers and bays by developing elaborate filtration systems for run-off. Restoration of fourteen miles of the natural ox-bow flow of the Kissimmee River, which was channelized in the 1970s to drain central Florida, has shown how vibrant ecosystems can come back to life. Lake Apopka, once Florida’s second largest lake shrunken down to its fourth largest because of agricultural encroachment, and rendered a dead body of water because of run-off, is being restored and is now a reincarnated body of water. Power companies have converted their power-line right of ways into wildlife habitat and corridors, and Progress Energy of Florida has teamed up with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to develop a sustainable hydrogen generator and fuel cell for the Homosassa Springs Wildlife State Park. In-fill is the new buzz word in development these days as an alternative to sprawl. The new Republican governor, Charlie Crist, has made appointments applauded by the environmental community, and the Republican senate president is a multi-generation Floridian who wants to get serious about growth management. Geometrically, Florida has more protected land and water than any other of the contiguous United States, and Florida has both politically red and blue counties that are as green as can be.

Such an admixture of colors–red, blue, and green together--as well as Florida’s history, shows that environmental protection is not a special interest; it’s a vital interest, one that makes a difference in the lives of everyone–even those who take dominion over the rest.

Here is my point. We might think of history for young people and newcomers as the memory they never had. Memory is an invaluable resource in a state where change, often unhealthy and problem-plagued change, comes in an eye-blink of time. Why not create for young people historical references to Florida unlike say WDW or the Rodman dam on the Ocklawaha River, mere shrines to the built environment, but references that point to a healthier Florida with a better quality of life for us all, a Florida that is still within our grasp; references such as the longleaf pine, the standard bearer of a unique ecosystem that includes the gopher tortoise and when healthy means we’re doing something right; references such as Florida’s unsurpassed collection of freshwater springs or its ecologically flush wetlands, which when clean and well charged means our aquifer is well charged and our drinking water is clean; references such as the Big Cypress Swamp, whose founding as a national preserve is a reminder of a big picture that once was, the picture in the 1970s of a public that was vocal about environmental protection and of a Republican presidential administration that took bold initiatives, to outdo its Democratic rivals, and did more for the advancement of ecological protection than any administration since, Democratic or Republican.

Give these young people, who at the moment are expected to see Florida’s population of 18 million double in 50 years, in historical knowledge the power to make informed decisions about whether their Florida should stay the course followed in the past or whether they should chart for themselves a new course, glimpses of which we are seeing now. 

Nature has become a rare commodity in a state where it was once so common, and consequently an expensive one. Lets teach young people what my teacher failed to teach my generation: to listen when the tree falls.