Florida: drought, hurricanes, and population growth
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Posted on May 31, 2007
Filed Under Ecological overshoot, Consumer culture, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
What a mix, no? Florida has multiple ecological crises going on these days, and there will always be more. It’s the nature of that boot sticking out from our continental US, which we have horribly abused.
The worst crisis right now is the historic, truly historic, drought that has plagued the state for the past year-and-a-half, one of the reasons it has been on fire this year. After being clobbered with vicious multiple hurricanes in 2004 and 2005, this is nature piling on the state of Florida. Maybe it’s trying to tell us something.
Today the big story is what is happening to Lake Okeechobee, one of the largest fresh water lakes in the country. 
Its level is about to surpass on all-time record low, nine feet below sea level. As if to punctuate the point, some of the lakebed grasses and muck, now exposed to the sun and drying out, has caught on fire.
There are a couple of issues related to our topic that I want to point out this morning. If you click on this article from ABC News, you will read about one of them.
The state is taking the opportunity of the drought to clean up some of the muck, the polluted yuck stuff, that has fouled the lake for a long time. The muck is phosphorous-laden, 50,000 tons over 300 square miles. It snuffs out life.
Where did all this come from? ABC tells us:
Lake Okeechobee has suffered from years of dikes, dams and diversions intended for flood control. Its main water source, the Kissimmee River, starting to the north near Orlando, was diverted in the 1960s by the Army Corps of Engineers with a 22-mile canal.
The move flushed massive amounts of water and pollution from urban runoff and agriculture into the lake.
This is one of my pet annoyances in life — how we have in many ways engineered our way into the multiple ecological crises that affect our world. We stop nature from acting naturally and it usually backfires on us big time. Another example — the damming and dredging and redirecting of the Mississippi River, and the building of canals for the oil industry in the Mississippi Delta, which contributed to the destruction of the City of New Orleans in 2005.
But beyond the engineering is the whole issue of mal-development which has plagued the state of Florida. And this gets to another of my obsessions — how population growth left in the hands of the private sector, of developers and the real estate industry, and local governments hungry for tax dollars, has so often bypassed any constraints of nature and left us with polluted waters, destroyed wetlands, ravaged forests, and whole areas vulnerable to the impacts of severe weather.
We don’t like limits in this culture — but the limits come get us anyway. And there is no better example than the State of Florida (except, perhaps, the insanity of population growth and sprawl in Las Vegas, another of my favorite metaphors for what is wrong with us, for our cultural mental illness).
From 1900-2000, Florida’s population growth rate was a stunning 23.5%. From 2000-2004 the population grew by 1.5 million, or 9.6%.
Current projections have the state’s population growing from 19.1 million in 2010 to 30.1 million in 2030.
A state prone to hurricanes, floods, and rising sea levels as the globe warms. A state now facing a historic drought.
Meanwhile, if you read the ABC News article, you will note that this project to scrape the muck out of Lake Okeechobee will not solve the problem. It will help for a while, reminding everyone of what a healthy habitat once looked like; but unless the model of development and engineering that caused the pollution to begin with is reversed, the problem will return over time.
Audubon of Florida scientist Paul Gray called the effort a step in the right direction, but noted, “it’s not going to save the lake.”
“It’s still a really good thing,” Gray said. “But if the lake would fluctuate normally, we wouldn’t have to do this. Mother Nature would fix it.”
Yes, if only we would let Mother Nature fluctuate normally… She would heal many of our wounds and put us on the path towards restoring the health of our precious planet — maybe our spirits as well.
Technorati Tags: Lake Okeechobee, Florida drought, development causes pollution, mother nature
Photo credit:
Scott Fisher, Sun-Sentinel
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