Know Your Neighbours: Florida's Shifting Shores

June-July 2005

This is an article from WaveLength Magazine, available in print in North America and globally on the web.
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by Bryan Nichols

Flying low over the Northwest, one gets the sense of a very solid wilderness. Below you lie massive mountain ranges, towering volcanoes, desolate snowfields and rocky coastlines. It is both imposing and reassuring, the solidity of the land helping to offset the unsettling clearcuts that creep up most of the valleys. I live on Vancouver Island, but I’ve spent the last couple of years in Florida, and while there is still some wilderness left here in the Sunshine State, solid it is not.

In many ways, Florida typifies the best and worst of Americana. Though it’s a relatively large state with unique sub- tropical ecosystems, it can appear to be nothing more than Disneyworld ringed by a huge beach. Yet Marjorie Stoneman Douglas lived here, and had the passion and foresight to help save one of the world’s most remarkable rivers, the Everglades, where fresh water oozes across vast expanses of grass, gradually morphing into the shallow, salty and productive Florida Bay. Farther north, clear springs from a huge underground river flow up to the surface and head towards the sea, providing cool summer swimming holes for people, and warm winter refuges for manatees. Above the whole state, the sun shines—a lot of it. The weather really is splendid for much of the year, though summer thunderstorms provide more than enough rain to keep it from becoming a desert.

But unlike the rocky Northwest, Florida itself isn’t solid. Beaches and barrier islands shift with the prevailing currents and storms, while soggy mangroves or marshes define the shore in other areas. The Everglades are mostly mud, the interior of the state is sandy and even the rare rocky outcrops are soft limestone, riddled with caves and sinkholes.

WILL BUILD TO SUIT

What do you do with a place where the air is warm and sunny but the ground is swamp or marsh? Well, the Calusa Indians built their villages on heaps of shellfish remains, raising them up into the sea breeze—at least they did until the Spanish exterminated them. Subsequent immigrants used the shell mounds for building as well—new structures went up on top of some, and many others provided material for road beds. Eventually it wasn’t enough, and the newer arrivals had to deal with mud. Mud might be unpleasant initially, but unlike bedrock, it’s relatively inexpensive to move around— especially after you invent bulldozers.

So you dig up some places, thereby making lakes or canals. Then you take the goop you dug and pile it up in other places, to raise the ground enough to keep it from flooding. Before you had a ‘useless’ swamp (actually highly productive wetland); now you have a valuable subdivision with plenty of ‘waterfront’ property (sending polluted runoff straight to the bay).

If you study a map or marine chart of the Florida coastline, you see this everywhere. It’s disturbing how easy it is to change something as important as the shoreline. Networks of canals riddle peninsulas, shipping channels are dredged deep into bays, unnatural chains of islands are created from the dredged soil and yards are cemented into place. Beaches, which naturally want to move, have to be continually replenished because those beachfront condos need beach in front of them.

BULLDOZING A BETTER TOMORROW

Don’t like the shoreline? Move it. Beach disappearing? Add some more. Bay isn’t deep enough? Dredge it. Your house isn’t close enough to the water? Dig a canal. The entire state of Florida is malleable and made to order, thanks to aggressive real estate developers and the Army Corps of Engineers, both of whom seem to live by the philosophy that if you can change the landscape, then you should change the landscape. In Florida, the ocean doesn’t crash against solid bedrock, and subdivisions aren’t set against the rocky spines of formidable mountain ranges. In Florida, a bulldozer can easily rearrange the landscape, and rearrange it they have.

Development has changed Florida’s wilderness so much that people don’t even realize what came before. It might have been swamp once, but long ago they dug here, filled in there, and paved all of that. Of course, many of the people in Florida arrive late in life, and have no idea what wilderness in Florida might have looked like at one time.

THE TERRORS OF THE WILD

What about wildlife? Once again, Florida is a confusing mix of good and bad. Though wild flamingos are mostly mythical, suburbanites can easily see white ibis picking through the grass in their front yard, a small gator on their golf course, or roseate spoonbills at the edge of a containment pond near work. But what about the big land predators, the ones notorious for really needing wilderness? In the Northwest, at least in some of it, there are still mountain lions, wolves and even grizzly bears, animals that inspire a mix a fear and admiration when we slip away from civilization.

Well, Florida never had grizzly bears. It did have wolves, red wolves, but ruthless extermination and habitat loss left them extinct in the wild by 1980 or so. A subspecies of mountain lion, the Florida panther, still exists here—barely. They are critically endangered, both inbred and crossbred with western stock, and barely hanging on. Florida still has black bears, some small ones anyway, in a few of the more wild spots—you hear about them occasionally when they are struck by vehicles. It would seem the remaining bits of Florida’s wilderness are not wild enough to maintain big predators—on land that is.

Now get into your kayak. The birdwatching is great, but on the water Florida’s wilderness still has some ‘bite’. Freshwater everywhere in the state can have small alligators, an interesting wildlife success story. What happens when you stop massacring a prolific and adaptable predator that still has habitat left? It can come back. In the wilder places, you might paddle past big gators—scary and very impressive. Move to salt water and there are sharks—not huge numbers of them, but they are there all right.

THE BEST AND WORSE

Kayaking the coast is a great way to sense the disparity of Florida. On one day, you’ll start at a breathtaking beach, squeeze through mangrove tunnels, pass feeding dolphins, nesting seabirds and enter an estuary alive with fish, turtles, manatees and alligators. On another day you’ll start from a polluted bay, go past endless rows of condominiums, navigate a maze of stagnant canals, pass rows of houses with their entire back yards screened in, and nearly get run down by an assortment of high speed watercraft when you reach the shipping channel.

When I drive out to visit the small town where my girlfriend’s parents live, there’s a billboard along the interstate. Actually, there seem to be thousands of billboards along that forty minute stretch, but this one in particular stands out. It’s for a cement or asphalt company, and boasts they’re “Paving Tampa Bay’s Future”. I’m pretty sure it’s not meant to be ironic.

When I head back to the Northwest this fall, I hope pavement isn’t considered the ideal future. I hope we appreciate the long-term value of our wildlife and wilderness in a world where both of those things are becoming increasingly rare. I hope we elect governments with a better sense of responsibility to wilderness, governments whose economic policies aren’t mired in an irresponsible and now ineffective past. I’ll miss the warmth and sunshine, but I can’t wait to get home and go for a paddle along a solid, rocky shoreline. I’ll be thrilled to share it with bears, wolves and mountain lions.

Editor’s Note: Daniel Boone (a direct descendent of the original) wrote to us from Florida recently to tell us of the many paddling opportunities in the part of the state which is north of Orlando and west of Jacksonville: from the secluded intimacy of Juniper Spring Run, which flows through the middle of the Ocala National Forest, to the nationally known Suwannee River Wilderness Trail. From slowly flowing streams to class III whitewater, Florida has a lot to offer paddlers.

• www.floridagreenwaysandtrails.com, 887-822-5208 (toll free)

• www.floridastateparks.org, 800-326-3521 (toll free)

• www.suwanneeriver.com: 800-868-9914 (toll free).

© Biologist Bryan Nichols would like to emphasize that there is some spectacular wilderness paddling left in Florida, and more low impact visitors will help boost its value to those who count beans. See our next issue for some tips.