Harvey Ward
August 5 ·
I am neither scientist nor historian. I've hesitated about posting the following, but decided it's worth helping people understand why things from the gulf are washing up on the beaches dead.
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This is Florida, from Ocala south.
That big lake is Okeechobee. For millennia, water that fell inland between there and Orlando either drained into the aquifer or worked its way through an intricate and delicate system of prairies, swamps and creeks to the ocean, the gulf or the lake. Most of it to the lake.
From the lake it flowed further south through an even more intricate system that eventually became Big Cypress to the SW and the Everglades due south and SE. They processed all of it and poured clean, sweet water into the Caribbean and the Gulf through the 10,000 Islands and the Keys.
Then about 120 years ago a few people realized how cheap the land was and that if you applied the right techniques (in other words, terraformed and fertilized it) to enough of it you could grow a butt-ton of vegetables like, say, tomatoes to the south and oranges (as far as the eye could see) to the north, and ship them all over the country on boats and trains. And you'd still have enough room for some of the world's largest cattle operations.
On the heels of that, a lot of those same folks realized that medicine could fix yellow fever and such, and started chopping up that cheap land and growing homesites on it.
Those landowners suddenly had a bunch of money, which they used to grow influence in Tallahassee and D.C. They managed to make draining swamps and rerouting water a full-time occupation for the US Army Corps of Engineers. And they built more farms and homesites on that newly-dry land.
People and crops kept growing in their unnaturally-hospitable home south of the lake. And then Castro happened. Cuba, until that point, supplied most of America's sugar. But the Fanjul family, ousted from their home, brought their fortune to Florida and created "Big Sugar." (Yes, US Sugar has a longer history, this is the turning point.) Hundreds of thousands of acres of south Florida suddenly converted to growing sugar cane with breathlessly-thankful anti-communist subsidies from D.C. and Tallahassee.
Cane naturally grows well in Cuba. It does not naturally grow well in Florida's limestone soil. So what you have to do, you see, is rebuild several inches of hospitable soil every year on those hundreds of thousands of acres of south Florida. Partially with taxpayer money.
Cane is also difficult and dangerous to harvest (as are tomatoes and all those other crops growing south of the lake). So you have to import people to do the work. And many of those people you don't help get documentation, so they're in the US illegally. But if you're a US Sugar stockholder that ain't your problem, it's theirs. You can replace them with somebody else more desperate to leave Haiti or Guatemala or the wherever you can bring them from.
Of course all those people have to live near the crops, so Indian posts and crossroads like Clewiston and Belle Glade and Immokalee and Pahokee become company slum-towns.
All this time more and more people from other places move to the coasts (or within thirty miles of them), and the people who are already there aren't leaving, so you get the Army engineers to create even more land to build cities on.
Sooner or later, the Army engineers, at the demand of politicians and developers and farming corporations, end up pumping most of the water that used to flow into the swamps either east through the St. Lucie River or west through the Caloosahatchee River. Untreated by nature's filtration system or anything else. Keep in mind, ALL the water flowing into the lake and south of it is now supercharged with Big Ag runoff and human detritus.
And you have to build bigger and bigger dykes, canals and levees south of the lake because without them not only will you destroy Big Sugar's investment, you'll drown hundreds of thousands of the poorest, most desperate people in America.
The same fertilizer and supersoil that makes crops grow in places they shouldn't also makes algae grow in quantities it shouldn't. So under the right circumstances all that water flowing into the swamps and those two rivers turns green and slushy. Which is not good for the things that are supposed to grow where it flows.
If you keep doing thatyear after year after decade after decade, you pump enough foreign matter into the ocean and the sea and the gulf that nature can't figure out what to do with it.
And that is the story of the dead fish on the gulf coast.
