By
Alan Farago
January
21, 2010
http://www.counterpunch.com/farago01212010.html
It was a gamble what time to leave Coral Gables. I would
either make the meeting on the other side of the state or waste the day missing
it.
A
hundred miles away in Naples, Collier County commissioners scheduled a 9:00 AM
public hearing on its growth management plan. Included, an item brought forward
by Miami-Dade County commissioners: whether or not to amend their comprehensive
growth map to create a recreational area for off road vehicles in the middle of
the Everglades in land owned mostly by Miami-Dade County but on the border with
Collier County and designated within the federal boundaries of the Big Cypress
National Preserve.
Driving
west down Bird Road then across to SW 8th, Tamiami Trail, toward the
Everglades, more rush hour traffic. Cars seep in from everywhere, every
subdivision, nook and cranny: hundreds of thousands of commuters pouring from
the urban fringe and ring suburbs to jobs in Miami. The engineers, consultants,
road pavers, construction crews, builders; they made their money upfront.
Most
live in gated communities in Coral Gables or Pinecrest. Out here as the newest
suburbs push against the housing crash, the world is clearer: at the edges of
failing places, it is all hit and run. All about flood control. And, now, about
giving people more space in wilderness beyond the last subdivision, an hour
into the Everglades, a new place to ride.
The rock
mines are on the north side of Tamiami Trail; the original way across the
Everglades. The mines are hidden behind fences and stands of invasive exotics.
Hundreds of acres of denuded and poisoned Melalueca. Krome Avenue. A barbeque
joint. Then the tribal lands of the Miccosukee Tribe.
From the
roadway, you can’t see the Everglades to the north. The Glades are obscured by
a rock spoil dredged from the canal running the entire length of the Trail,
except for breaks where water district pumps are built up on berms; their
massive motors idle and quiet.
To the
south, off the road, are tribal villages and indifferent tourist traps of one
kind or another, selling trips to view from airboats a damaged panorama.
There
were two agenda items before the “recreational” issue I was gambling my day on,
as volunteer conservation chair for Friends
of the Everglades. The planners urging the change were from Miami-Dade that
shares a border with Collier. They had to cross the Everglades, too. Maybe they
spent the night at a Super 8 in Naples or spent a few unpredictable hours
driving across the Everglades like me.
When the
road crosses into the Big Cypress National Preserve, the landscape changes
dramatically. On this cold winter morning birds were huddled in the trees by
the canal or at the shoreline, protected from a sharp northeast wind in the
wide open just beyond sight. White ibis and herons, anhingas, wood storks,
vultures and hawks, cormorants. As I sped by I spotted a kestral perched high
on a branch intently focused on a water bird in a lower branch drying its
wings. Panther crossing signs. Mercury warning signs.
There it
is: an hour from Miami, the road to the north for the Everglades Jetport. In
the 1960’s this was the dream plan to destroy the rest of the Everglades and
deliver billion dollar increments of growth through a massive new airport
serving both coasts of Florida.
Although
the massive runway was built in the middle of the Glades, the airport was
halted by controversy, including the birth of Florida’s movement to save the
Everglades and the intervention of senators and a US president. It is used
lightly, today, as a training facility (called the Miami-Dade Collier Training
Facility) and the entire area—the Big Cypress—is subject to forays by operators
of swamp buggies with elevated platforms and huge, fat tires and smaller, more
nimble off road vehicles, or ATVs like little raptors.
For decades,
groups like Sierra Club have fought a simmering, low intensity war with
regulators to control the access and destruction of delicate, fragile resources
in the 700,000 plus acre preserve. Ochopee. The post office.
The
wilderness gives way to signs of civilization. A development built in the
euphoria of the boom on the Turner River, arcing off towards the Ten Thousand
Islands. Signs for Chokoloskee, Imokalee, and Fakahatchee Strand.
These
are famous places in Florida’s short history of settlement. They are ancient
places too that thrived not so long ago with a diversity of wildlife nurtured
by the intersection of a vast flow of pure freshwater and the ocean and bays.
It will
cost taxpayers twenty billion and counting to keep its beating heart alive. And
in the middle, that’s where local elected officials see nothing wrong with
inserting a 1680 acre park with off road vehicles; controlled, it is claimed,
by a visitor's center.
Suburban
Collier County collides with the Everglades, forty-five minutes drive from the
heart of the Big Cypress National Preserve. Tamiami Trail, on the other side of
Florida, looks like every other place in Florida nurtured by the crack cocaine
of the building boom.
The
development on the west coast of Florida in the past decade has been even more
efficient than in Miami where an urban development boundary and more intense
flood control infrastructure at least checked leapfrog sprawl to a degree. Just
like Miami-Dade, in Collier County the flatness of the landscape underscores
the same mistakes of automobile centric growth. Strip malls. Shopping centers.
Massage Envy. Mattress Giant. Nail Palace. All the appeals to what consumers
want.
Traffic,
on this side, slows to the same crawl. Soon enough, right on the Trail, the
largest building of all: the seat of county government. Inside, a security
checkpoint, officers with guns, an x-ray machine for briefcases, plastic
containers for cell phones and metal objects: everything inspected for conformity
and everything ordered by the protocol of risk.
A stroke
of good fortune. I arrive, at ten thirty, just as the off-road vehicle park in
the Everglades is about to be heard.
A third
floor hearing room, raised dais, television monitors, proscenium seating on a
single level. Five commissioners seated behind their microphones and the
quotidian exercise of municipal authority. Stenographer and the county attorney
to one side. Planners and staff at the other side. Two lecterns for speakers,
supplicants, and applicants.
On a
table outside I leaf through the planning document. It is three inches thick
with photos, testimonials, maps and engineering drawings; all prepared with
great care and expense by consultants. Grist for the permitting mill.
A Miami Dade
parks official gives a twenty minute presentation on the plan. Well rehearsed,
fully briefed. Collier County planning staff has objected to the plan clearly
and succinctly in its own written comments, ignored by Miami-Dade’s
representative.
So far,
I’ve invested hours and days in conversations and reviewing documents. I
haven’t spoken to a single Collier County or Miami-Dade County Commissioner
about the idiocy of putting loud off road vehicles in the middle of public
lands that are designated with the highest standards of environmental
protection.
The
pretense of a level playing field is just so ridiculous, like an $18 billion
nuclear power plant on the edge of Biscayne National Park or an inland port and
rock mines at the western edge of Palm Beach County: if a single person
or even a dozen activists had five lifetimes, they still wouldn’t be able to
keep up.
I have
three minutes to make my comments. It is eleven thirty. I won’t return home
until late afternoon. Three minutes.
I use
two minutes to explain how forty years ago the disposition of this land
embroiled the nation in one of the signature battles to protect and preserve
America’s fabled natural heritage. Marjory Stoneman Douglas, who received the
highest presidential medal for her work for the Everglades, founded the
organization where I serve: Friends of the Everglades.
I take a
minute to be sincere and convincing when I state that on a scale of one to ten,
that the objection to this plan is more or less, a ten.
Two
decades ago, when I first began to speak in public hearings, I used to stammer
with anxiety. I spent hours writing speeches that exceeded the allotted time
for the public in public hearings. I rarely looked up from my pages, printed
and covered in edit scribbles and notes.
By this
point, having waited for hours to speak, I had already jettisoned paragraphs
like bags from an over-weighted plane. I changed. Now I scribble a few phrases
at the last moment. I might not even refer to my notes.
What I
value as I speak—and I’ve become a connoisseur of this moment—is to look into
the eyes of officials I am speaking to, for any sign of life. From the
audience, or the view of a television camera, the local commissioners appear to
be listening. That is a different matter from hearing.
In all
these cases where the imperatives of the economy and of special interests
conflict with the environment, at all these “hearings” where legal requirements
are subject to the shadings of influence peddlers, the scripts are thoroughly
written beforehand. The environmentalists ask for a stop to all damaging uses,
a user asks for more. A commissioner smiles and says, ‘Don’t be greedy. This is
a start.’
The
county planning staff asks for protections that include “shall” in enabling
language, the special interests push for “may”. Between “shall” and “may” a
small fraction of birds and panthers occupy an irritating space that is
nonetheless very good for the business of attorneys and lobbyists. It is a good
space for consultants and engineers, and anyone banking the arbitrage between
the intent and result of environmental rules and regulations.
Now, as
I look into the eyes of the county commissioners behind the dais, I can tell
that each is as indifferent to what I am saying as someone navigating around an
empty shopping cart trying to find their car in a Walmart parking lot.
The
first step toward putting an off-road vehicle park in the middle of the
Everglades passes by a vote of 4-0.
With the
two other environmentalists in the audience, I adjourn for lunch in a strip
mall across Tamiami Trail. There is no accommodation for pedestrians. Crossing
eight lanes of traffic by foot makes you alert as a panther. As we step over
low shrubs and pine bark chips in the median, I remark that this protected area
is our own wildlife corridor.
The crab
cakes covered in melted cheese and French fries taste like punishment. I clean
my plate.
I’m
halfway back across the Everglades before I realize it is so hot in the car
because the temperature thermostat is turned up to 76 degrees. The birds
by the canal haven’t moved, dipping in the water, moving their necks like
rubber bands or still and immobile as a painting.
Finally,
the Christian broadcast channels—everywhere on the dial on the west coast of
Florida—blessedly fade to static. There is a place where reception of public
radio from the west coast of Florida ends and from the east coast, begins.
A moment
of quiet. It is right about at the Everglades Jetport. I can’t imagine
truckloads of all terrain vehicles being hauled into this wilderness for riders
to race their engines and such pleasures. Let them have at it at the
edges of suburbia, with their gear and fat tires and engines or in the urban
acres blasted by foreclosures and real estate pipe dreams and Glen Gary Glen
Ross times 10,000.
However
wrecked Florida is, however the most remote parts of the state are damaged by
our persistent, invisible fingerprints: there are places we honor by shielding
them, imperfectly, from our mudding, rutting, insistent desires.
Alan
Farago, conservation chair of Friends of the Everglades, lives in south
Florida. He can be reached at: afarago@bellsouth.net