Florida is the real Big Sky country, make no mistake. Those billowy cumulus clouds that form ten thousand feet over your head are mountains of water.
But if only man could just vacate his sub- and ex-urban habitats and undo the plumbing he imposed on the vast River of Grass we know as the Everglades!
Pictures posted on the New York Times Opinionator blog today provide arresting visual proof of a once pristine wilderness in slow, inexorable decline. Absent any massive effort by the Army Corps to unplug the 'Glades, the region is consigning the place to "death by a thousand cuts."
Edge cities like Weston, Florida, a sprawling tract home development, are partly to blame. All of 20 years old, and constructed on the eastern fringes of what we currently call the 'Glades, Weston is basically an agglomeration of thousands of cookie-cut single family homes piled onto filled land, your archetypal Florida swamp turned into "paradise."
But the root cause of lasting, cumulative damage, has been the Army Corps of Engineers' region-wide latticework of canals, pumps, bridges, and containment ponds, creating the plumbing infrastructure that makes the development of a Weston possible.
While the engineering was lauded as a monumental achievement--a conquest of man over nature, which laid the foundation for south Florida's incredible growth and future real estate frenzy--this so-called "progress" was the 'Glades' environmental regress.
See Christoph Gielen's wonderful aerial photos (of a place I know well) here:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/they-unpaved-paradise/?hp
