Upon moving back to my beloved home state of Florida in the beginning of 2024, I began to experience a disorientation. This seemed counterintuitive; after all, I was coming home. But Florida has increasingly become a no-place, a space in which it is very difficult for humans to make a home.
In many ways, South Florida is the perfect microcosm of modern civilization. Among the lines of palm trees and manicured lawns, those who know a bit of its history and ecology can discern the artificial and imposed suburban product that has been constructed on top of a wild and fascinating place. Parts of natural Florida remain, but the expansive and encroaching concrete jungle and desolate stroads that carry most Floridians to and fro threaten to blot out these remnants of the authentic Florida.
We have to consider the primary nature, character, and attributes of a place in order to make any judgment of how it ought to be today. What was Florida like before real estate speculators began remaking it?
Pre-twentieth century Florida was a raw, sublimely beautiful but pestilential wilderness: one that had tenfold more (non-native) disease-carrying Aedes aegypti mosquitoes than it had people. It was a region dominated by subtropical rainforests with an immense, slow-flowing “River of Grass” in its interior, which fed and nourished with pure, nutrient-poor water, all surrounding coastal areas. The seasonal overflowing of Lake Okeechobee through the region called the Everglades created a watery sawgrass habitat, dotted with “tree islands” rich in biodiversity, which has been seldom seen or duplicated elsewhere in the world. Near the coasts, vast forests with hardwood hammocks and sand -pine scrub predominated, which provided ample habitat for mammals like raccoons, opossums, deer, black bears, squirrels, river otters, coyotes, and the much-maligned Florida Panther. Of course, toothy reptiles including a multiplicity of snakes (many of which were and are poisonous), as well as alligators and crocodiles were (and are) also present in abundance.
At the coasts, the delicate balance of an immense interior wetland coupled with salty, sun-drenched coastal areas carved out vast and elaborate rivers and brackish estuaries that were once teeming with life. Many modern readers will be familiar with Florida’s “Intracoastal Waterway,” which was an “improvement” upon nature, whereby existing barrier islands were repurposed and connected as deemed necessary to form an inland latitudinal vein for commerce and transit. Inlets were then dredged in predetermined areas to allow ocean access. These historical disruptions in hydrology remain poorly understood, but their effects are felt all over South Florida today.
Mangrove forests are ubiquitous in coastal Florida.
Nonetheless, in the pre-industrial homeostatic environment, vast expanses of coral proliferated off the eastern coast of South Florida (from Stuart to the Dry Tortugas, which lie about 70 miles west of Key West), creating Florida Reef, which has now been reduced to about 1% of its pre-industrial stony coral cover. Over eons—and with changing climates that caused sea levels to ebb and flow—the Florida Keys, which are the only subtropical coralline islands in the contiguous United States, were formed. The islands which today constitute the terrestrial Florida Keys were once underwater coral mountains, where the living colonial organisms known as coral polyps once thrived and built immense reef structures in a bank-barrier arrangement spanning nearly 350 statutory miles along North America’s continental shelf. Today, one will find the remnants of the modern reef structure eroding at an alarming rate; in the vacuum afforded by the mostly vanquished reef-builders, soft, weedy, and opportunistic corals and sponges (particularly zoanthids) have proliferated—but each year, Florida Reef inches closer and closer to geologic death: a tipping point whereby the reef system is eroding faster than new coral tissue can accrete via recruitment and calcium carbonate deposition. This demise, which began over 3,000 years ago, was comparatively glacial until the early 1980s, when the Diadema antillarum sea urchin—which consumes benthic algae and detritus for sustenance—suffered a Caribbean-wide mass mortality event likely due to a single-celled ciliate pathogen that was only identified in 2022. Since 1983, coral—particularly the fast-growing (and critically endangered) Acropora species, cervicornis and palmata respectively—have died in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary at a breakneck pace.
Coral decline at Carysfort Reef; pictures by Phil Dustan.
The Industrialists Who Made Modern Florida
Most people don’t realize just how recently “civilization” in an industrialized sense was brought to Florida. While Europe was marching off to war in the summer of 1914, Florida was still a vast and largely untamed wilderness (and comparative civilizational backwater). In Western popular culture, the United States' “Wild West” is often considered the last truly free and wild frontier, but historically it was Florida, which was not fully settled or adorned with modern conveniences like intricately connected (st)roadways and other infrastructure (like a network of drainage canals), air conditioning, or culture—the latter of which would eventually take the form of amusement and entertainment—until the latter half of the twentieth century. In general terms, it wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that the two innovations of land reclamation and air conditioning are by and large what made Florida desirably inhabitable.
Before 1850, Florida and its ecology were largely unknown to westerners, except as a hellish bog which proved an impenetrable expanse during the Seminole Wars of the nineteenth century (which afforded the ragtag Seminole and Miccosukee tribes the distinction of never being formally conquered by the United States or Western Civilization).
As Michael Grunwald elucidated in The Swamp, which is perhaps the best history written on the development of South Florida and its large-scale draining and repurposing of the Everglades, Florida had been a haven for boondoggling drainage and development schemes after the abatement of the Seminole Wars in 1858. But it was industrialist Hamilton Disston in 1881 who first conceptualized a practicable concrete plan to reclaim up to twelve million (beginning with four million) acres of Florida, which he purchased via a “sweetheart deal” from the Florida Legislature to bail out its bankrupt internal improvement fund for a mere one million dollars. To date, Disston’s land acquisition remains the largest private acquisition of land in world history. Disston, who after his purchase became the largest individual landholder in the country, saw Florida and its “land by the gallon” through the lens of a speculative prospector, wanting to make in this world something that was truly his, not merely a product of his fortunate material heredity. It seems that Disston believed if only the vast sheets of standing water could be drained, the rich biological muck left behind would constitute an agricultural hinterland, with rich and nutritive soil for the yeoman farmer and industrial agribusiness alike. In this way, it was Disston’s seeming ambition to make something of himself in the civilized socialite world–by remaking in his image the unique subtropical frontier that was Florida–which fueled his quest to dredge and drain natural Florida.
A depiction of US soldiers looking for Seminoles within the Everglades.
Despite Disston’s best attempts–which eventually drove him to sell off his inherited sawmill empire in order to provide additional funds–Florida’s Everglades remained steadfast in their refusal to submit to the will and wishes of men, however great his tools and technologies were becoming. As a result, Disston’s efforts to drain Florida’s Everglades yielded but few tangible results: the dredging of eighty some odd miles of drainage canals to the north and west of the lake, as well as the leveling of an indiscriminate amount of land in the Kissimmee Basin to establish pastures. Yet, even these accomplishments (that took years to complete) ultimately made matters worse, as Disston decided (against the advice of his chief engineer) to eschew the arduous and prohibitively expensive (but necessary) drainage canals to the south and east of the lake. Once his reclamation efforts to the north drained the Kissimmee flood plain, the shallow three-mile ditch dug west to connect Lake Okeechobee to the Caloosahatchee couldn’t handle the increased flow and so inundated much of the temporarily dry land in South Florida. Once a temporary drought subsided, Disston's efforts made flooding worse.
As a result, an 1887 State Commission declared Disston’s best organized and industrial machinations to be evanescent, tattering his image for posterity and leading him to be largely viewed as the latest carpetbagging Northerner in a long-winded procession going back decades. But as Michael Grunwald argued in The Swamp, this condemnation was misguided, as Disston did accomplish part of what he set out to do: permanently draining much of the Kissimmee valley and digging one of a litany of drainage canals from Lake Okeechobee to the sea. It is just a simple fact that the Everglades were too vast to have been conquered by one man and his legions of nascent steam-powered machines.
Lost in the immediate aftermath of Disston’s futile quest is the following reality which has repeatedly unfolded throughout history: those who pioneer or prove an idea or concept are seldom the beneficiaries of their own genius. The contemporaneous invention of the light bulb is but a prime example of this historical phenomenon. Thomas Edison, due in large part to his marketing genius which aimed to fulfill the requisite contingency of corporate profitability, was able to become inextricably linked for all posterity to both the light bulb and electricity in a more general sense. This historical perception formed despite Edison merely perfecting and commodifying the former, while politicizing and dogmatically campaigning for a technologically inferior version of the latter under the guise of safety. Edison–in both of the previous cases–skillfully maneuvered in such a way that would have made Machiavelli blush, utilizing the insurgent techniques and technologies of “public relations” (which is to say, propaganda). And so, while Disston was the first to conceive of the mechanized reclamation of nature in Florida, he would die before another would make fruit of his budding and audacious seed.
Napoleon Bonaparte Broward and his Disciples
Proceeding Disston was Florida’s nineteenth (and perhaps most infamous) governor, Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, for whom “Broward County” in South Florida is aptly named. Broward, a democratic populist who was reportedly reluctant to run for office, took it upon himself to channel and voice the budding popular desire to harness and bend Florida’s natural world to the wishes of men through land reclamation, flood control, and water management. Broward thus campaigned upon the promise that “water runs down hill” and once taking office, he attempted to drain the swamp but also ran into difficulty. Broward was out of office by 1909 and died unexpectedly the following year. But despite not living to see the fruits of his machinations, Broward’s legacy persists to this very day: for Broward began, on a public governmental level, what Disston had failed to do through private enterprise. The problem, as we have come to find out, was this process of indiscriminate drainage–begun on an industrial scale by Disston and Broward–done impudently and in a non-deliberative manner, with little consideration for potential negative consequences: for at this time Florida was still the edge of the civilized world, and as a result, land-reclamation grew into a popular movement rife with religious fervor aimed at fulfilling pretenses of “Manifest Destiny.” The drainage of South Florida even drew academic intrigue and curiosity from Scientific American and Teddy Roosevelt, who paid a visit to South Florida to witness for himself the ongoing “work.” And yet, even early conservationists, who attempted to protect South Florida’s wading birds from plume hunters–and certain ethereal forests like Paradise Key from development–were completely oblivious to the wanton ecological degradation that would “flow” from drainage efforts by way of irreparable hydrological alteration. Thus, drainage and land reclamation proceeded recklessly and unabated (except by nature itself), without proper oversight or planning; what God-like human being could plan such a feat as the draining of the Galapagos of North America without it proving disastrous?
Flagler’s Folly: The Railroad That Went to Sea
Just after the turn of the twentieth century, Florida’s status as a prospective frontier “boom town” began to become a reality via the advent of Henry Flagler’s “Florida East Coast Railway” (in addition to Henry Plant’s west coast railroads) which would eventually connect Jacksonville to Key West, with notable stops along the way at St. Augustine, West Palm Beach, Ft. Lauderdale, and Miami. But this process of creating logistical transportation arteries via railroad-ification—which dammed and severed Florida’s natural lands and watersheds—did not transform Florida over a fortnight. In fact, when Flagler’s railroad did reach Key West in January of 1912—a mere four months before the sinking of White Star’s infamous RMS Titanic—his conquest of the sea was relatively short-lived: for in 1935 one of the most powerful hurricanes in recorded history pummeled the Florida Keys, destroying large spans of the “Railroad that Went to Sea,” rendering Key West inaccessible via modern overland transportation. For a brief period in the depression-ridden mid-1930s, it seemed as though man’s attempted conquest of nature was all for naught–except perhaps as ample fodder for satirized accounts of his folly. But it is hard to know whether it is nature or man that is more stubborn and persistent: for by 1938, the defunct and destroyed remnants of Flagler’s “Overseas Railroad” (that was also bankrupt) were resurrected and repurposed into the construction of the “Overseas Highway,” which had begun in 1927, bringing with it civilization— and its discontents.
The Overseas Railway
While it is perhaps foolish to pin the blame for what has happened to Florida in the century since on three once renowned and celebrated–but increasingly infamous–men, it should be noted it was their collective idea to civilize the seemingly un-civilizable as a sun-soaked northerner’s winter playground, an agricultural Eden, and an urban paradise that has ultimately led to the creation of what Florida is today—for better and worse. I therefore think it reasonable to assert that Hamilton Disston, Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, and Henry Flagler are three of the “Founding Fathers” of artificial Florida, (along with Julia Tuttle, Henry Plant, and a few others).
Environmental Fallout From Continued Conquest of the Natural World
Following Flagler’s triumphant conquest of Florida’s east coast–as well as Disston and Broward’s efforts to drain her interior–Lake Okeechobee itself was diked in the 1910s, which was done first with a miniscule 6’ earthen dike that would later burst twice in the hurricanes of 1926 and 1928 respectively, killing approximately 2,500 (most of whom were poor farmers) overnight during the latter raging tempest. Concomitantly, two functionally equivalent but distinctive waterways were dredged to drain surplus water (and also allow for trans-Florida navigation) from Lake Okeechobee during the wet season, which were connected to two previously existing, coastal rivers: the St. Lucie in the east and Caloosahatchee in the west, respectively. Other elaborate canals (some also connecting to existing rivers like the Miami) were dug through urban southeast Florida to fulfill similar drainage and navigational ends. After the disaster that was the Okeechobee Hurricane of 1928, the Army Corps of Engineers–led by trained engineer and president, Herbert Hoover–began construction on a 30’ concrete dike that completely encircled the lake, in order to cut it off from the Everglades ecosystem on its immediate southern shore.
The result of this process was to cut off the Everglades from their historical watershed in the Kissimmee River Basin—which was also later straightened (and then partially restored) to allow for more efficient agricultural usage with ill ecological effects. As such, South Florida has been plagued with a manmade water management crisis for nearly one hundred years where Florida Bay has become both—alternatively and dependent on season—a warm, hyper-saline environment, as well as a eutrophied and turbid watery expanse with vast quantities of polluted freshwater. Both of these unnatural conditions have increasingly contributed to mass die-offs of expansive subaqueous seagrass meadows, which then in turn float to the surface and decay in the intense sunlight, providing ample fodder to fuel massive algae blooms and red tides, both of which have been increasing in frequency and intensity in recent years (and have created immense hypoxic oceanic “dead zones'' that kill aquatic creatures numbering in the millions).This is to say little of the nutrient pollution of the Everglades ecosystem itself in which invasive plants now proliferate—as well as the coastal rivers and estuaries—which have all but been destroyed by the introduction of massive quantities of nutrient and heavy-metal laden freshwater and sediment, into what were historically nutrient-poor brackish and saltwater coastal regions.
What is Artificial Florida? An Exploration of an Imposed Reality
Without becoming bogged down in the muck, the preceding context provides a backdrop for the following assertion: Florida, as it exists today, is an almost entirely artificial creation. Don’t get me wrong: there are still remnants of the old sublime and essential Florida in abundance—particularly in various state and national parks, as well as along the coasts. On a personal level, some of the most exhilarating and memorable moments in my life have been spent on Florida Reef, despite having only experienced it in a degraded form. Thus, if one so chooses, he or she may find and live (almost entirely) in “Old Florida,” while reaping the rich benefits and conveniences of modern life. It is not for these people (often not native to Florida) to whom I am writing, but rather those who occupy and defend—whether overtly or implicitly—the artificial, unreal Florida.
Before proceeding further, I must issue the following disclaimer to state definitively and clearly that I’m not arguing against the progress that is civilization, when properly applied, which I take to mean: the sensible improvement of nature so as to preserve its essential order while creating a more habitable place within which humans can live well. The principle of an edifying rational and reverential dominion and coexistence with nature was perhaps the dominant ethos for Anglo-American civilization until the decadent utilitarian materialism of post-WWII Americana came to dominate our Old World roots, culturally and philosophically speaking. With the preceding in mind, one may also consider the indigenous inhabitants of North and South America who fulfilled the oft-issued–but usually unqualified–colloquial platitude of “living in harmony in nature” to a degree that most westerners (including myself) can seldom conceive: for their very existence was intimately tied to the very land (and sea) from which they sprung, in a way that made their religiosity and reverential spirit virtually indistinguishable from (both individual and societal) practical actions undertaken; archaeological digs of the Calusa that once occupied “Florida’s Ten Thousand Islands,” have proven as much for the Calusa ate the very animals they worshiped. When analyzing a magnificent achievement like Flagler’s “Railroad That Went to Sea,” which was once-dubbed an eighth wonder of the world, I am not sure it would fall outside of the bounds of the preceding expressed principle, as who can argue in good faith (and whilst typing on a device as similarly miraculous as a laptop) that Florida would have been better in its primordial form without a network of railways and hotels? I cannot think of any polemical charge more audacious, myopic, and privileged.
Miami’s “Freedom Tower”
This leads me to state for the record that I am not oblivious to the historical reality whereby a lack of power due to insufficient and ineffectual technologies in large part necessitated that man’s hubris and willful desire to dominate nature iron-fistedly be blunted, tempered, and stultified. Learning to have power and exercise it wisely for the sake of the “Good” is an existential and spiritual problem of monumental proportions that is uniquely endemic to modern civilized man–and perhaps in our critiques of those who occupied the (recent) burgeoning industrial past, we should bear this reality in mind. For it is men like Hamilton Disston who defined and occupied the “Gilded Age” where the idea of America as a land of infinite and expansive progress and technological innovation took shape (and subsequently the Jeffersonian ideal of a humble agrarian republic was inexorably and irrevocably rejected), embracing instead the idea of a limitless “Kingdom of Man” in the temporal realm, promising material abundance and luxury seldom conceived as remotely possible before the modern age. And so, my argument is simply that as human technologies become more powerful and more able to fulfill human dreams, our hubris and tendency to dominate nature, to its and our detriment, must be chastened.
Can we–i.e. those living with the comforts, luxuries, and safeties afforded by modernity–truly conceptualize a world (or pre-industrial Florida) in which 2,500 souls could perish from a storm surge in one night–without any prior warning? Early settlers in Florida must have felt a profound vulnerability in light of the pure inhospitality of a place that was a seeming paradise and yet also, without a moment’s notice, could become a portal to an inner circle of hell. Such a condition is arguably more foreign to a modern civilized human being than the indigenous peoples of Florida appeared to the first Spanish explorers of the sixteenth century. As a matter of historical reality and interpretation, it may very well be that the Spanish had more in common with the native peoples than we moderns have with either. As evidence of this, consider that mosquitoes (and no-see-ums) were once so voracious in South Florida (before the advent of modern methods of pest control) that shipwrecked sailors buried themselves in the sand on Florida beaches up to their heads to prevent being assailed by miniature vampires from head to toe, instead choosing consciously and under duress, to leave only their rational faculties exposed. And so, in light of such beautifully terrifying and persistent forces of nature (with its multiplicity of pestiferous dangers), one may come to understand modern man’s quest to subdue the vast wilderness that was primordial Florida.
For Guidance, Maybe We Ought Look to Early -Modern Europe
Nevertheless, there is a key distinction between desiring to tame and govern wisely and attempting to merely dominate and impose upon. As evidence of the previous claim regarding the ethical governance of nature by civilized man, one may consider the creation of the many gardens in Europe during the early -modern and modern periods. Despite differences in style between the English and French, gardens represent man seeking to cooperate with nature in order to improve her, aiming at the ideals of beauty and harmonious order. It is in the vast gardens of Europe, particularly those competing gardens of Blenheim and Versailles, where nature has been put on display in such a way to demonstrate the beauty of creation, as well as man’s stubborn persistence and ingenuity to carve out an improved and cultivated environment to inhabit. Taking the raw material of nature and envisioning improvement constitutes a supreme act of creation, which is neither an imitation nor a replacement of nature, but rather a stewardship that makes the world more beautiful and habitable so that civilization and its higher offspring like art, literature, and philosophy may flourish.
By seeking to replace nature with an imposed human vision, Florida’s “robber baron” visionaries transformed it largely into a pleasure-seeker’s paradise. Today’s Florida is then–in many ways–working as intended, since it was designed (in large part) to capitalize on the insatiable and morbidly inflamed human desires for escapism, the pursuit of temporary and transient pleasures, amusements, and entertainment: the latter of which is forever enshrined in the public’s unconscious consciousness by way of Florida’s litany of theme parks. I’m not suggesting that human culture should be dour, pretentious, or in any way “un-fun,” but amusement in the absence of substance is cancerous and a surefire way to eventual meaninglessness and nihilism. Walking the streets of twenty-first century Florida, I intuitively sense a materialistic hedonism gilding a deep-seated and internal teleological dearth; this cultural decadence makes Florida seem–in many ways–more vain, hollow, and vacuous than other places that I have lived or visited.
At Florida’s inception as a civilized land of new opportunities, other possibilities for exploration and adventure were present, which were (and still are to some extent) provided by eco-tourism and the like. But it seems that as time has progressed (and South Florida has become further developed and gentrified by landed corporate interests), these more primal pursuits have been increasingly sanitized and made sterile—and are perhaps on the way to being retired altogether. And this progression from the raw, unabated natural Florida to the ever -more artificial Florida, has grave consequences for both the geographical locale and the people who inhabit it. Some of these maladies are obvious: incessant traffic and construction, environmental pollution and degradation of apocalyptic magnitude, an exorbitant cost of living, a general lack of freedom, increased legislation and taxation, and a palpable increase in general social dysfunction and hostility; other effects are much more difficult to detect and discern and so remain more elusive but insidious.
Can Community Take Root in Artificial Florida?
Florida as an intensified microcosm of patterns that are unfolding all over the United States and other western countries presses upon us fundamental questions: what does the Florida-fication of the world do to human culture and community? Can people make common cause and find a common home in an environment so manufactured and didactically imposed upon the natural world? Florida’s rapid 150 year transformation—from raw, rugged, and expansive wilderness, into a largely artificial concrete jungle aimed at fulfilling the perpetual human appetites for quick, easy, and transient pleasures—is an experiment that offers some answers to these questions.
Living in a degraded and deracinated place such as South Florida has an effect on its inhabitants that is seldom consciously conceived or analyzed. After all, a common colloquial trope in the immensely beautiful but morally decadent Florida Keys is “come on vacation, leave on probation.” This statement is generally said tongue-in-cheek, but humor often has the ring of truth. This is why in Florida, “Florida Man” abounds. This is why in Florida, privileged teens may be seen–brazenly under the light of day and whilst knowingly being recorded–dumping buckets of trash overboard their parents $300,000-400,000 luxury vessel, presumably to avoid a BUI charge after a day of vacuous, vain, and hedonistic partying at “Boca Bash,” which is but one of South Florida’s watery public orgies. Such episodes occur in abundance in South Florida because a blithe, viscerally selfish, and overtly vain “look at me” superficial materialism is one of its defining cultural motifs, which undergird its unconscious and unstated collective metaphysical assumptions. To me, a second-generation native Floridian and lover of the authentic Florida, the lack of responsibility for one’s own actions, community, and place are revolting.
This is not to say that there are not a multitude of wonderful individuals and families who occupy South Florida (I am proud to know and call many of these friends and loved-ones), and there are even pockets of coherent community that have taken hold along the margins of this manufactured environment. I simply want to acknowledge that living in a place where there is an overbearing and oppressive societal pressure that directs humans away from higher and more permanent things towards those which are more shallow and ultimately fleeting has a marked effect on people. To what extent this effect is irresistible I cannot say, for the human spirit is an incredibly resilient metaphysical force. I fear, however, that in an increasingly concrete, glass, and plastic world—cut off from our collective Source of which nature is the most emblematic and readily apparent sign—the effects of such corruptions will continue to increase in intensity and frequency. This is why the Florida of 2024, intuitively from my vantage point, seems to have further degraded from 2014 (or 2004) Florida.
Upon moving back to Florida in 2024 after a four-year hiatus, I have been flummoxed by the general lack of community, sense of common good and purpose, and lack of respect for others and place; there even seems to be a palpable, overarching hostility that governs how many Floridians interact with one another. But perhaps this is to be expected in such an over-developed, artificial, and heterogeneous place that serves to make purposelessness a hegemonic principle: one in which tolerance seems to be the highest ethical principle. Can it be any other way? It seems to me that without a uniting ethos, convictive purpose, or general principles held in common—and excepting even a given place that the community shares—there is nothing to stitch disparate individuals into a coherent culture. Hence social fragmentation appears (to me at least) to be the defining characteristic of contemporary Artificial Florida.
Despite these criticisms, I still must acknowledge my deep-seated reverence and love for Florida and its natural world (what’s left of it anyway), which is perhaps more beautiful and unique than any other place in North America–especially for those who value rich biodiversity and turquoise seas teeming with life. If Florida could reinvigorate its adventurous and brave frontier ethos, I think it would (subjectively) feel much more authentic once more: for that more primal strand of its culture is not only tolerable but desirable. It has been an inner conflict between love for the natural and a visceral distaste for the artificial that has governed my return home and that has now presented a silver lining: experiencing Florida once more has given me a renewed appreciation and thirst for community, belonging, and place in a metaphysically significant manner. It has also given me a renewed desire to venture into the wild and unknown. Weighing these competing and paradoxical factors is no small task, but it may be that I will have to leave Florida once more to find such a place, where both community and watery wilderness can exist in tandem.
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Against the Florida-fication of the World (By Drew Maglio)
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Upon moving back to my beloved home state of Florida in the beginning of 2024, I began to experience a disorientation. This seemed counterintuitive; after all, I was coming home. But Florida has increasingly become a no-place, a space in which it is very difficult for humans to make a home.
In many ways, South Florida is the perfect microcosm of modern civilization. Among the lines of palm trees and manicured lawns, those who know a bit of its history and ecology can discern the artificial and imposed suburban product that has been constructed on top of a wild and fascinating place. Parts of natural Florida remain, but the expansive and encroaching concrete jungle and desolate stroads that carry most Floridians to and fro threaten to blot out these remnants of the authentic Florida.
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What is Authentic Florida?
We have to consider the primary nature, character, and attributes of a place in order to make any judgment of how it ought to be today. What was Florida like before real estate speculators began remaking it?
Pre-twentieth century Florida was a raw, sublimely beautiful but pestilential wilderness: one that had tenfold more (non-native) disease-carrying Aedes aegypti mosquitoes than it had people. It was a region dominated by subtropical rainforests with an immense, slow-flowing “River of Grass” in its interior, which fed and nourished with pure, nutrient-poor water, all surrounding coastal areas. The seasonal overflowing of Lake Okeechobee through the region called the Everglades created a watery sawgrass habitat, dotted with “tree islands” rich in biodiversity, which has been seldom seen or duplicated elsewhere in the world. Near the coasts, vast forests with hardwood hammocks and sand -pine scrub predominated, which provided ample habitat for mammals like raccoons, opossums, deer, black bears, squirrels, river otters, coyotes, and the much-maligned Florida Panther. Of course, toothy reptiles including a multiplicity of snakes (many of which were and are poisonous), as well as alligators and crocodiles were (and are) also present in abundance.
At the coasts, the delicate balance of an immense interior wetland coupled with salty, sun-drenched coastal areas carved out vast and elaborate rivers and brackish estuaries that were once teeming with life. Many modern readers will be familiar with Florida’s “Intracoastal Waterway,” which was an “improvement” upon nature, whereby existing barrier islands were repurposed and connected as deemed necessary to form an inland latitudinal vein for commerce and transit. Inlets were then dredged in predetermined areas to allow ocean access. These historical disruptions in hydrology remain poorly understood, but their effects are felt all over South Florida today.
Mangrove forests are ubiquitous in coastal Florida.
Nonetheless, in the pre-industrial homeostatic environment, vast expanses of coral proliferated off the eastern coast of South Florida (from Stuart to the Dry Tortugas, which lie about 70 miles west of Key West), creating Florida Reef, which has now been reduced to about 1% of its pre-industrial stony coral cover. Over eons—and with changing climates that caused sea levels to ebb and flow—the Florida Keys, which are the only subtropical coralline islands in the contiguous United States, were formed. The islands which today constitute the terrestrial Florida Keys were once underwater coral mountains, where the living colonial organisms known as coral polyps once thrived and built immense reef structures in a bank-barrier arrangement spanning nearly 350 statutory miles along North America’s continental shelf. Today, one will find the remnants of the modern reef structure eroding at an alarming rate; in the vacuum afforded by the mostly vanquished reef-builders, soft, weedy, and opportunistic corals and sponges (particularly zoanthids) have proliferated—but each year, Florida Reef inches closer and closer to geologic death: a tipping point whereby the reef system is eroding faster than new coral tissue can accrete via recruitment and calcium carbonate deposition. This demise, which began over 3,000 years ago, was comparatively glacial until the early 1980s, when the Diadema antillarum sea urchin—which consumes benthic algae and detritus for sustenance—suffered a Caribbean-wide mass mortality event likely due to a single-celled ciliate pathogen that was only identified in 2022. Since 1983, coral—particularly the fast-growing (and critically endangered) Acropora species, cervicornis and palmata respectively—have died in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary at a breakneck pace.
Coral decline at Carysfort Reef; pictures by Phil Dustan.
The Industrialists Who Made Modern Florida
Most people don’t realize just how recently “civilization” in an industrialized sense was brought to Florida. While Europe was marching off to war in the summer of 1914, Florida was still a vast and largely untamed wilderness (and comparative civilizational backwater). In Western popular culture, the United States' “Wild West” is often considered the last truly free and wild frontier, but historically it was Florida, which was not fully settled or adorned with modern conveniences like intricately connected (st)roadways and other infrastructure (like a network of drainage canals), air conditioning, or culture—the latter of which would eventually take the form of amusement and entertainment—until the latter half of the twentieth century. In general terms, it wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that the two innovations of land reclamation and air conditioning are by and large what made Florida desirably inhabitable.
Before 1850, Florida and its ecology were largely unknown to westerners, except as a hellish bog which proved an impenetrable expanse during the Seminole Wars of the nineteenth century (which afforded the ragtag Seminole and Miccosukee tribes the distinction of never being formally conquered by the United States or Western Civilization).
As Michael Grunwald elucidated in The Swamp, which is perhaps the best history written on the development of South Florida and its large-scale draining and repurposing of the Everglades, Florida had been a haven for boondoggling drainage and development schemes after the abatement of the Seminole Wars in 1858. But it was industrialist Hamilton Disston in 1881 who first conceptualized a practicable concrete plan to reclaim up to twelve million (beginning with four million) acres of Florida, which he purchased via a “sweetheart deal” from the Florida Legislature to bail out its bankrupt internal improvement fund for a mere one million dollars. To date, Disston’s land acquisition remains the largest private acquisition of land in world history. Disston, who after his purchase became the largest individual landholder in the country, saw Florida and its “land by the gallon” through the lens of a speculative prospector, wanting to make in this world something that was truly his, not merely a product of his fortunate material heredity. It seems that Disston believed if only the vast sheets of standing water could be drained, the rich biological muck left behind would constitute an agricultural hinterland, with rich and nutritive soil for the yeoman farmer and industrial agribusiness alike. In this way, it was Disston’s seeming ambition to make something of himself in the civilized socialite world–by remaking in his image the unique subtropical frontier that was Florida–which fueled his quest to dredge and drain natural Florida.
A depiction of US soldiers looking for Seminoles within the Everglades.
Despite Disston’s best attempts–which eventually drove him to sell off his inherited sawmill empire in order to provide additional funds–Florida’s Everglades remained steadfast in their refusal to submit to the will and wishes of men, however great his tools and technologies were becoming. As a result, Disston’s efforts to drain Florida’s Everglades yielded but few tangible results: the dredging of eighty some odd miles of drainage canals to the north and west of the lake, as well as the leveling of an indiscriminate amount of land in the Kissimmee Basin to establish pastures. Yet, even these accomplishments (that took years to complete) ultimately made matters worse, as Disston decided (against the advice of his chief engineer) to eschew the arduous and prohibitively expensive (but necessary) drainage canals to the south and east of the lake. Once his reclamation efforts to the north drained the Kissimmee flood plain, the shallow three-mile ditch dug west to connect Lake Okeechobee to the Caloosahatchee couldn’t handle the increased flow and so inundated much of the temporarily dry land in South Florida. Once a temporary drought subsided, Disston's efforts made flooding worse.
As a result, an 1887 State Commission declared Disston’s best organized and industrial machinations to be evanescent, tattering his image for posterity and leading him to be largely viewed as the latest carpetbagging Northerner in a long-winded procession going back decades. But as Michael Grunwald argued in The Swamp, this condemnation was misguided, as Disston did accomplish part of what he set out to do: permanently draining much of the Kissimmee valley and digging one of a litany of drainage canals from Lake Okeechobee to the sea. It is just a simple fact that the Everglades were too vast to have been conquered by one man and his legions of nascent steam-powered machines.
Lost in the immediate aftermath of Disston’s futile quest is the following reality which has repeatedly unfolded throughout history: those who pioneer or prove an idea or concept are seldom the beneficiaries of their own genius. The contemporaneous invention of the light bulb is but a prime example of this historical phenomenon. Thomas Edison, due in large part to his marketing genius which aimed to fulfill the requisite contingency of corporate profitability, was able to become inextricably linked for all posterity to both the light bulb and electricity in a more general sense. This historical perception formed despite Edison merely perfecting and commodifying the former, while politicizing and dogmatically campaigning for a technologically inferior version of the latter under the guise of safety. Edison–in both of the previous cases–skillfully maneuvered in such a way that would have made Machiavelli blush, utilizing the insurgent techniques and technologies of “public relations” (which is to say, propaganda). And so, while Disston was the first to conceive of the mechanized reclamation of nature in Florida, he would die before another would make fruit of his budding and audacious seed.
Napoleon Bonaparte Broward and his Disciples
Proceeding Disston was Florida’s nineteenth (and perhaps most infamous) governor, Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, for whom “Broward County” in South Florida is aptly named. Broward, a democratic populist who was reportedly reluctant to run for office, took it upon himself to channel and voice the budding popular desire to harness and bend Florida’s natural world to the wishes of men through land reclamation, flood control, and water management. Broward thus campaigned upon the promise that “water runs down hill” and once taking office, he attempted to drain the swamp but also ran into difficulty. Broward was out of office by 1909 and died unexpectedly the following year. But despite not living to see the fruits of his machinations, Broward’s legacy persists to this very day: for Broward began, on a public governmental level, what Disston had failed to do through private enterprise. The problem, as we have come to find out, was this process of indiscriminate drainage–begun on an industrial scale by Disston and Broward–done impudently and in a non-deliberative manner, with little consideration for potential negative consequences: for at this time Florida was still the edge of the civilized world, and as a result, land-reclamation grew into a popular movement rife with religious fervor aimed at fulfilling pretenses of “Manifest Destiny.” The drainage of South Florida even drew academic intrigue and curiosity from Scientific American and Teddy Roosevelt, who paid a visit to South Florida to witness for himself the ongoing “work.” And yet, even early conservationists, who attempted to protect South Florida’s wading birds from plume hunters–and certain ethereal forests like Paradise Key from development–were completely oblivious to the wanton ecological degradation that would “flow” from drainage efforts by way of irreparable hydrological alteration. Thus, drainage and land reclamation proceeded recklessly and unabated (except by nature itself), without proper oversight or planning; what God-like human being could plan such a feat as the draining of the Galapagos of North America without it proving disastrous?
Flagler’s Folly: The Railroad That Went to Sea
Just after the turn of the twentieth century, Florida’s status as a prospective frontier “boom town” began to become a reality via the advent of Henry Flagler’s “Florida East Coast Railway” (in addition to Henry Plant’s west coast railroads) which would eventually connect Jacksonville to Key West, with notable stops along the way at St. Augustine, West Palm Beach, Ft. Lauderdale, and Miami. But this process of creating logistical transportation arteries via railroad-ification—which dammed and severed Florida’s natural lands and watersheds—did not transform Florida over a fortnight. In fact, when Flagler’s railroad did reach Key West in January of 1912—a mere four months before the sinking of White Star’s infamous RMS Titanic—his conquest of the sea was relatively short-lived: for in 1935 one of the most powerful hurricanes in recorded history pummeled the Florida Keys, destroying large spans of the “Railroad that Went to Sea,” rendering Key West inaccessible via modern overland transportation. For a brief period in the depression-ridden mid-1930s, it seemed as though man’s attempted conquest of nature was all for naught–except perhaps as ample fodder for satirized accounts of his folly. But it is hard to know whether it is nature or man that is more stubborn and persistent: for by 1938, the defunct and destroyed remnants of Flagler’s “Overseas Railroad” (that was also bankrupt) were resurrected and repurposed into the construction of the “Overseas Highway,” which had begun in 1927, bringing with it civilization— and its discontents.
The Overseas Railway
While it is perhaps foolish to pin the blame for what has happened to Florida in the century since on three once renowned and celebrated–but increasingly infamous–men, it should be noted it was their collective idea to civilize the seemingly un-civilizable as a sun-soaked northerner’s winter playground, an agricultural Eden, and an urban paradise that has ultimately led to the creation of what Florida is today—for better and worse. I therefore think it reasonable to assert that Hamilton Disston, Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, and Henry Flagler are three of the “Founding Fathers” of artificial Florida, (along with Julia Tuttle, Henry Plant, and a few others).
Environmental Fallout From Continued Conquest of the Natural World
Following Flagler’s triumphant conquest of Florida’s east coast–as well as Disston and Broward’s efforts to drain her interior–Lake Okeechobee itself was diked in the 1910s, which was done first with a miniscule 6’ earthen dike that would later burst twice in the hurricanes of 1926 and 1928 respectively, killing approximately 2,500 (most of whom were poor farmers) overnight during the latter raging tempest. Concomitantly, two functionally equivalent but distinctive waterways were dredged to drain surplus water (and also allow for trans-Florida navigation) from Lake Okeechobee during the wet season, which were connected to two previously existing, coastal rivers: the St. Lucie in the east and Caloosahatchee in the west, respectively. Other elaborate canals (some also connecting to existing rivers like the Miami) were dug through urban southeast Florida to fulfill similar drainage and navigational ends. After the disaster that was the Okeechobee Hurricane of 1928, the Army Corps of Engineers–led by trained engineer and president, Herbert Hoover–began construction on a 30’ concrete dike that completely encircled the lake, in order to cut it off from the Everglades ecosystem on its immediate southern shore.
The result of this process was to cut off the Everglades from their historical watershed in the Kissimmee River Basin—which was also later straightened (and then partially restored) to allow for more efficient agricultural usage with ill ecological effects. As such, South Florida has been plagued with a manmade water management crisis for nearly one hundred years where Florida Bay has become both—alternatively and dependent on season—a warm, hyper-saline environment, as well as a eutrophied and turbid watery expanse with vast quantities of polluted freshwater. Both of these unnatural conditions have increasingly contributed to mass die-offs of expansive subaqueous seagrass meadows, which then in turn float to the surface and decay in the intense sunlight, providing ample fodder to fuel massive algae blooms and red tides, both of which have been increasing in frequency and intensity in recent years (and have created immense hypoxic oceanic “dead zones'' that kill aquatic creatures numbering in the millions).This is to say little of the nutrient pollution of the Everglades ecosystem itself in which invasive plants now proliferate—as well as the coastal rivers and estuaries—which have all but been destroyed by the introduction of massive quantities of nutrient and heavy-metal laden freshwater and sediment, into what were historically nutrient-poor brackish and saltwater coastal regions.
What is Artificial Florida? An Exploration of an Imposed Reality
Without becoming bogged down in the muck, the preceding context provides a backdrop for the following assertion: Florida, as it exists today, is an almost entirely artificial creation. Don’t get me wrong: there are still remnants of the old sublime and essential Florida in abundance—particularly in various state and national parks, as well as along the coasts. On a personal level, some of the most exhilarating and memorable moments in my life have been spent on Florida Reef, despite having only experienced it in a degraded form. Thus, if one so chooses, he or she may find and live (almost entirely) in “Old Florida,” while reaping the rich benefits and conveniences of modern life. It is not for these people (often not native to Florida) to whom I am writing, but rather those who occupy and defend—whether overtly or implicitly—the artificial, unreal Florida.
Before proceeding further, I must issue the following disclaimer to state definitively and clearly that I’m not arguing against the progress that is civilization, when properly applied, which I take to mean: the sensible improvement of nature so as to preserve its essential order while creating a more habitable place within which humans can live well. The principle of an edifying rational and reverential dominion and coexistence with nature was perhaps the dominant ethos for Anglo-American civilization until the decadent utilitarian materialism of post-WWII Americana came to dominate our Old World roots, culturally and philosophically speaking. With the preceding in mind, one may also consider the indigenous inhabitants of North and South America who fulfilled the oft-issued–but usually unqualified–colloquial platitude of “living in harmony in nature” to a degree that most westerners (including myself) can seldom conceive: for their very existence was intimately tied to the very land (and sea) from which they sprung, in a way that made their religiosity and reverential spirit virtually indistinguishable from (both individual and societal) practical actions undertaken; archaeological digs of the Calusa that once occupied “Florida’s Ten Thousand Islands,” have proven as much for the Calusa ate the very animals they worshiped. When analyzing a magnificent achievement like Flagler’s “Railroad That Went to Sea,” which was once-dubbed an eighth wonder of the world, I am not sure it would fall outside of the bounds of the preceding expressed principle, as who can argue in good faith (and whilst typing on a device as similarly miraculous as a laptop) that Florida would have been better in its primordial form without a network of railways and hotels? I cannot think of any polemical charge more audacious, myopic, and privileged.
Miami’s “Freedom Tower”
This leads me to state for the record that I am not oblivious to the historical reality whereby a lack of power due to insufficient and ineffectual technologies in large part necessitated that man’s hubris and willful desire to dominate nature iron-fistedly be blunted, tempered, and stultified. Learning to have power and exercise it wisely for the sake of the “Good” is an existential and spiritual problem of monumental proportions that is uniquely endemic to modern civilized man–and perhaps in our critiques of those who occupied the (recent) burgeoning industrial past, we should bear this reality in mind. For it is men like Hamilton Disston who defined and occupied the “Gilded Age” where the idea of America as a land of infinite and expansive progress and technological innovation took shape (and subsequently the Jeffersonian ideal of a humble agrarian republic was inexorably and irrevocably rejected), embracing instead the idea of a limitless “Kingdom of Man” in the temporal realm, promising material abundance and luxury seldom conceived as remotely possible before the modern age. And so, my argument is simply that as human technologies become more powerful and more able to fulfill human dreams, our hubris and tendency to dominate nature, to its and our detriment, must be chastened.
Can we–i.e. those living with the comforts, luxuries, and safeties afforded by modernity–truly conceptualize a world (or pre-industrial Florida) in which 2,500 souls could perish from a storm surge in one night–without any prior warning? Early settlers in Florida must have felt a profound vulnerability in light of the pure inhospitality of a place that was a seeming paradise and yet also, without a moment’s notice, could become a portal to an inner circle of hell. Such a condition is arguably more foreign to a modern civilized human being than the indigenous peoples of Florida appeared to the first Spanish explorers of the sixteenth century. As a matter of historical reality and interpretation, it may very well be that the Spanish had more in common with the native peoples than we moderns have with either. As evidence of this, consider that mosquitoes (and no-see-ums) were once so voracious in South Florida (before the advent of modern methods of pest control) that shipwrecked sailors buried themselves in the sand on Florida beaches up to their heads to prevent being assailed by miniature vampires from head to toe, instead choosing consciously and under duress, to leave only their rational faculties exposed. And so, in light of such beautifully terrifying and persistent forces of nature (with its multiplicity of pestiferous dangers), one may come to understand modern man’s quest to subdue the vast wilderness that was primordial Florida.
For Guidance, Maybe We Ought Look to Early -Modern Europe
Nevertheless, there is a key distinction between desiring to tame and govern wisely and attempting to merely dominate and impose upon. As evidence of the previous claim regarding the ethical governance of nature by civilized man, one may consider the creation of the many gardens in Europe during the early -modern and modern periods. Despite differences in style between the English and French, gardens represent man seeking to cooperate with nature in order to improve her, aiming at the ideals of beauty and harmonious order. It is in the vast gardens of Europe, particularly those competing gardens of Blenheim and Versailles, where nature has been put on display in such a way to demonstrate the beauty of creation, as well as man’s stubborn persistence and ingenuity to carve out an improved and cultivated environment to inhabit. Taking the raw material of nature and envisioning improvement constitutes a supreme act of creation, which is neither an imitation nor a replacement of nature, but rather a stewardship that makes the world more beautiful and habitable so that civilization and its higher offspring like art, literature, and philosophy may flourish.
By seeking to replace nature with an imposed human vision, Florida’s “robber baron” visionaries transformed it largely into a pleasure-seeker’s paradise. Today’s Florida is then–in many ways–working as intended, since it was designed (in large part) to capitalize on the insatiable and morbidly inflamed human desires for escapism, the pursuit of temporary and transient pleasures, amusements, and entertainment: the latter of which is forever enshrined in the public’s unconscious consciousness by way of Florida’s litany of theme parks. I’m not suggesting that human culture should be dour, pretentious, or in any way “un-fun,” but amusement in the absence of substance is cancerous and a surefire way to eventual meaninglessness and nihilism. Walking the streets of twenty-first century Florida, I intuitively sense a materialistic hedonism gilding a deep-seated and internal teleological dearth; this cultural decadence makes Florida seem–in many ways–more vain, hollow, and vacuous than other places that I have lived or visited.
At Florida’s inception as a civilized land of new opportunities, other possibilities for exploration and adventure were present, which were (and still are to some extent) provided by eco-tourism and the like. But it seems that as time has progressed (and South Florida has become further developed and gentrified by landed corporate interests), these more primal pursuits have been increasingly sanitized and made sterile—and are perhaps on the way to being retired altogether. And this progression from the raw, unabated natural Florida to the ever -more artificial Florida, has grave consequences for both the geographical locale and the people who inhabit it. Some of these maladies are obvious: incessant traffic and construction, environmental pollution and degradation of apocalyptic magnitude, an exorbitant cost of living, a general lack of freedom, increased legislation and taxation, and a palpable increase in general social dysfunction and hostility; other effects are much more difficult to detect and discern and so remain more elusive but insidious.
Can Community Take Root in Artificial Florida?
Florida as an intensified microcosm of patterns that are unfolding all over the United States and other western countries presses upon us fundamental questions: what does the Florida-fication of the world do to human culture and community? Can people make common cause and find a common home in an environment so manufactured and didactically imposed upon the natural world? Florida’s rapid 150 year transformation—from raw, rugged, and expansive wilderness, into a largely artificial concrete jungle aimed at fulfilling the perpetual human appetites for quick, easy, and transient pleasures—is an experiment that offers some answers to these questions.
Living in a degraded and deracinated place such as South Florida has an effect on its inhabitants that is seldom consciously conceived or analyzed. After all, a common colloquial trope in the immensely beautiful but morally decadent Florida Keys is “come on vacation, leave on probation.” This statement is generally said tongue-in-cheek, but humor often has the ring of truth. This is why in Florida, “Florida Man” abounds. This is why in Florida, privileged teens may be seen–brazenly under the light of day and whilst knowingly being recorded–dumping buckets of trash overboard their parents $300,000-400,000 luxury vessel, presumably to avoid a BUI charge after a day of vacuous, vain, and hedonistic partying at “Boca Bash,” which is but one of South Florida’s watery public orgies. Such episodes occur in abundance in South Florida because a blithe, viscerally selfish, and overtly vain “look at me” superficial materialism is one of its defining cultural motifs, which undergird its unconscious and unstated collective metaphysical assumptions. To me, a second-generation native Floridian and lover of the authentic Florida, the lack of responsibility for one’s own actions, community, and place are revolting.
This is not to say that there are not a multitude of wonderful individuals and families who occupy South Florida (I am proud to know and call many of these friends and loved-ones), and there are even pockets of coherent community that have taken hold along the margins of this manufactured environment. I simply want to acknowledge that living in a place where there is an overbearing and oppressive societal pressure that directs humans away from higher and more permanent things towards those which are more shallow and ultimately fleeting has a marked effect on people. To what extent this effect is irresistible I cannot say, for the human spirit is an incredibly resilient metaphysical force. I fear, however, that in an increasingly concrete, glass, and plastic world—cut off from our collective Source of which nature is the most emblematic and readily apparent sign—the effects of such corruptions will continue to increase in intensity and frequency. This is why the Florida of 2024, intuitively from my vantage point, seems to have further degraded from 2014 (or 2004) Florida.
Upon moving back to Florida in 2024 after a four-year hiatus, I have been flummoxed by the general lack of community, sense of common good and purpose, and lack of respect for others and place; there even seems to be a palpable, overarching hostility that governs how many Floridians interact with one another. But perhaps this is to be expected in such an over-developed, artificial, and heterogeneous place that serves to make purposelessness a hegemonic principle: one in which tolerance seems to be the highest ethical principle. Can it be any other way? It seems to me that without a uniting ethos, convictive purpose, or general principles held in common—and excepting even a given place that the community shares—there is nothing to stitch disparate individuals into a coherent culture. Hence social fragmentation appears (to me at least) to be the defining characteristic of contemporary Artificial Florida.
Despite these criticisms, I still must acknowledge my deep-seated reverence and love for Florida and its natural world (what’s left of it anyway), which is perhaps more beautiful and unique than any other place in North America–especially for those who value rich biodiversity and turquoise seas teeming with life. If Florida could reinvigorate its adventurous and brave frontier ethos, I think it would (subjectively) feel much more authentic once more: for that more primal strand of its culture is not only tolerable but desirable. It has been an inner conflict between love for the natural and a visceral distaste for the artificial that has governed my return home and that has now presented a silver lining: experiencing Florida once more has given me a renewed appreciation and thirst for community, belonging, and place in a metaphysically significant manner. It has also given me a renewed desire to venture into the wild and unknown. Weighing these competing and paradoxical factors is no small task, but it may be that I will have to leave Florida once more to find such a place, where both community and watery wilderness can exist in tandem.
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