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.
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.
