“I believe until
fairly recently our destructions of nature were more or less unwitting -- the
by-products, so to speak, of our ignorance or weakness or depravity. It is our
present principled and elaborately rationalized rape and plunder of the natural
world that is a new thing under the sun.” ― Wendell Berry
Everything
in nature, the sum total of heaven and of earth, becomes a temple and an
altar for the service of God. - Hildegard of Bingen
A Prelude
I drove across the state Monday to see a dear
elderly aunt, the last of my parents’ generation, who was hospitalized in Pasco
County over the weekend. Ordinarily I would have taken I-4 southwest to
Lakeland and northwest up US 98 to Dade City. It’s the shortest and fastest route
requiring only about an hour and a half. At least in theory.
But these are not ordinary days here in what is
left of Florida.
Google maps is now routinely routing people headed
from Orlando to the Tampa Bay region west across the state to I-75 and only
then south to their destinations. State Road 50, the main east/west artery in
Orlando where it is named Colonial Drive, stretches across the state to its
terminus at Weeki Wachee Springs on the Gulf Coast. That’s one of the few surviving
tourist traps of pre-interstate Florida, now a state park which has preserved
its air hose enabled mermaids performing their daily shows in a crystal clear
natural spring.
Former Groves That Sprouted Subdivisions
SR 50 passes through the rolling hills and lakes
that once were fragrant citrus groves, now jammed with tract housing, strip
malls and the resulting traffic snarls. The Citrus Tower in Clermont, standing
over 300 feet above sea level, one of the highest points in Florida, was built
in the 1950s to showcase Florida’s then unchallenged citrus empire. But there
are no more groves within its 35 mile visibility, the trees having succumbed to
tropical diseases arriving on the heels of climate change, the hills having
sprouted one subdivision after another generating traffic that routinely slows
to a standstill. And that is hardly the only sign that the Florida of my
childhood is dying.
About an hour outside Orlando, where SR 50 crosses the
southern end of Sumter County where I grew up, the once pastoral drive through the
Withlacoochee State Forest passing tiny communities with lyrical names like
Mabel, Linden and Tarrytown, is being four-laned to handle east/west traffic
across a state busting at the seams. No doubt it will soon become a slow motion
parking lot as well.
Monday’s Google maps route sent me north from
Orlando on the Florida Turnpike, the opposite direction from where I was headed.
It proved to be a miserable half hour endurance of construction and accidents
mercifully limited to 18 miles. From there I was routed back south down a two-lane
road into Groveland on SR 19, joining 50 there to head west. It was an
unpredictable pattern, to say the least, but it saved me 20 minutes and an
inestimable amount of stress by avoiding I-4, an almost impenetrable stretch of
asphalt that has become one of the longest parking lots in the country and now holds
the distinction of being America’s deadliest interstate highway.
Sadly, this is not a unique story in Florida these days. To our north, the traffic on the turnpike routinely becomes a parking lot as one approaches The Villages and remains such until one is well north of Ocala, a good 40 mile stretch. The same nightmarish accounts are routinely heard from motorists north and south of Tampa Bay and in the megalopolis of Miami from Jupiter south.
That Floridians find themselves in an almost
complete standstill on our major highways has done nothing to slow down growth.
People are moving to Florida out of avoidance of taxes and winter weather. And
builders are more than happy to provide them more of the same congested suburbs
and exurbs even as they are not required to provide for highways and utilities in
impact fees to handle the new arrivals. One wonders how these new residents
will assess their calculus in coming here as they sit in lines of stalled
traffic fleeing the vulnerable coasts, unable to escape the approach of the
next killer hurricane.
“Development,” A Self-Aggrandizing Term
The real estate moguls and builders call themselves
“developers.” It’s a self-aggrandizing term that suggests that their
enterprises somehow leave the land in a better state than when they began their
enterprises. But the destruction of the natural environment that prompted
earlier visitors from the Spanish conquistadors to Harriet Beecher Stowe to describe
Florida in Edenic terms evidences the fact that these enterprises, while
profitable for a few, have NOT left the state in better shape than before.
Their profits have come at a high price, not the least of which is the quality
of life of its residents. If anything, Florida is rapidly becoming Eden
squandered, a Paradise rapidly being Lost.
There is a description of this unregulated building
and resultant overcrowding that is much more accurate than the misleading term
“development.” Unlimited growth that occurs at the expense of a host organism is
rightly recognized in the medical world as pathological.
Its common name is cancer.
A Jammed Highway in the Middle of Nowhere
Monday’s encounter with the New Florida was not a
revelation. My heart has been broken over and over as I visit places I knew
from my childhood that now bear no resemblance to the natural beauty over which
I once marveled. But it was on my return trip to Orlando Monday that the depth of
this loss became very clear to me.
From Zephyrhills, Google maps had routed me east to US 98 and, after a couple of miles south, north on SR 471. This 21 mile stretch from SR 50 to US 98 runs through the middle of the Green Swamp. It is the watershed for Central Florida and the carbon sink for an I-4 Corridor that now hosts nearly six million residents.
Originally seen by many as a boondoggle, it was named the E.C. Rowell Highway in honor of Sumter County’s representative to Florida’s Pork Chop legislature, a racist, rural-dominated state government that required a U.S. Supreme Court decision to finally reapportion itself in the 1960s.
But that was not what I encountered Monday.
The road was jammed with semi-trailer trucks. My little Prius shook as these huge vehicles hurtled past at 70 mph, their fumes polluting the once pristine air, their toxic fluids leaking onto the asphalt to drain into the swamplands on either side of the highway. And all around me were SUVs hogging more than their share of the narrow highway, distracted drivers weaving across the center line as they texted. Clearly I’m not the only one relying on Google maps to provide them with detours to avoid the parking lot on I-4.
Heavy Machinery That Pierces the Soul
I came home from my day trip exhausted and
depressed. It wasn’t just the traffic that disturbed me, though increasingly I
do find that difficult to deal with. Part of that is age but another part of it
is my deep revulsion toward the explosion of congestion that I observe everywhere
I go in this state where my family has lived six generations. It speaks to the
rape and pillage of the Earth and the jamming together of new inhabitants who
don’t know their neighbors, who have no clue what community means or interest
in discovering it.
I felt like my very soul had been pierced.
Little wonder I was in bed by 8:30 Monday night and slept for 13 hours.
The Spiritual Dimensions of Despoliation
I think I am beginning to see why people like Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, who made the preservation of the Everglades her life work, feel called to such Quixotic challenges. As she neared the end of life, Douglas had come to believe it was impossible not to act in light of what she was seeing happening in the unique ecosystem that is the Everglades.
But the work Douglas engaged was much deeper than
mere public policy. It sought to respond to the implicit spiritual questions
that become increasingly unavoidable as one watches the destruction of the very
good Creation.
At 70 years of age, I find myself with a new
appreciation for her work as well as that of Marjory Kinnan Rawlings. She spoke
of the enchantment of nature that, once lost, rarely returns. Sadly, I see that
all around me.
Increasingly I find that the words of poet Wendell
Berry speak my soul’s agonies as he notes that what was once a thoughtless despoilation
of our world has become conscious, systemic and brutal. And as Engaged Buddhism
founder Thich Nhat Hanh has articulated, this despoilation is not isolated to
the natural world; when we harm “this fragile Earth, our island home,” (Book
of Common Prayer), we inevitably impact ourselves in a deeply negative
fashion.
Three years ago, I had a chance to spend glorious day in the ruins of the monastery once led by 12th CE Rhineland, mystic Hildegard
of Bingen. She declared nature
to be the temple at whose altar the Creator is venerated. That is how I have
always experienced it. And that makes what I observed happening in the Green
Swamp Monday simply untenable. It is an ongoing desecration.
The Deepest Wound of an Unenviable History
I need to note here that I do not wax nostalgic in any way about
the social, cultural or political Florida of my youth. The Florida of the 1950s
and 60s was a seething caldron of racism, sexism and inveterate homophobia.
With a handful of notable exceptions, our power holders rarely made us proud.
And, as is always the case in major growth explosions complete with big demographic
shifts - not the least of which was the arrival of thousands of Cuban refugees
- no small amount of xenophobia and tribalism dominated Florida’s airwaves and
newspapers in my days growing up here.
I remember well the attempts of Governor Claude Kirk to prevent integration of the Manatee County schools in 1970, a highly publicized move that gave rise to a ballot measure in 1972 opposing forced busing cast in segregationist sentiment. It passed widely throughout Florida. I can recall the moral panics aimed at LBGTQ Floridians that played out first in the witch hunts of the 1960s Johns Committee and later in the sad “Save Our Children” movement of the mid 70s led by a fading beauty queen, Anita Bryant, which overturned Miami’s first human rights ordinance. And I remember well the ubiquitous bumper stickers of the early 80s that read “Will the last American leaving Miami please bring the flag?”
Sadly, the devolution of Florida to Fascista, the culture
war driven expression of authoritarianism that now dominates our political discourse,
educational systems, libraries and lawmaking, suggests to me that we Floridians
have learned very little from our experience over my 70 years of life.
I do not delude myself to think that Florida can return to its primordial status in the wake of this tsunami of unplanned and unregulated growth. The damage has been done. I do wonder how many of the newcomers will stay once the climate change fueled super-hurricanes begin to wreck their homes and they cannot find an insurance policy to cover them, a reality already beginning to play out across our state. Even so, I do not wish them ill. I know what it feels like to lose your home to a hurricane. And I know what it is like to sit in a 50 mile traffic jam with thousands of one’s most intimate friends fleeing our coasts in the face of an approaching storm.
I do not wish that on anyone.
Our state must do a better job of regulating this
avalanche of newcomers if we are to survive. It must insist that builders no
longer be allowed to offshore the bill for the infrastructure required to host
their customers onto Florida taxpayers and preserve green zones where building cannot occur. And it must find ways to fund the massive infrastructural
improvements long overdue in this increasingly overcrowded state that has
historically been prone to social irresponsibility. That means that a state
with a long history of adolescent behavior must come to grips with its arrested
development and assume its adult social responsibilities.
But I’m not holding my breath.
I know Eden is not returning. But we still have a
chance to prevent an intractable urbanized cesspool before it is too late. While
I have to admit that I do not expect that, I’m still hoping to be surprised.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Harry Scott Coverston
Orlando, Florida
If the unexamined
life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious
or political, is not worth holding. Most things worth considering do not come
in sound bites.
Those who believe
religion and politics aren't connected don't understand either. – Mahatma
Gandhi
For what does G-d require
of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your
G-d? - Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures
Do not be daunted by the
enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly
now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to
abandon it. - Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the Jewish Sages (1993)
© Harry
Coverston, 2024
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
