Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to re: Think as you drink!

And not a drop to drink.
ER — (archived)

It's bizarre all right, but not unexpected. During the real estate boom of the twenties, thousands (yes, thousands!) of miles of canals were dredged to drain the Everglades and coastal swamps for cheap real estate and intensive agriculture (flood control was not much of an issue when the place was practically uninhabited). It was planetary engineering on a vast scale. There was a time when you could pole a dugout canoe from Orlando to the Keys. The Everglades stretched from Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay.

The agriculture here is extremely water intensive. Well water and Lake Okeechobee became the major source of water for an exploding population. Today, the swamps are mostly dried out and development has made flood control a major issue. The wells are being intruded by sea water as the pumping from the aquifers lowers the water table. The paving over of vast areas keeps the water from soaking into the ground and replenishing the aquifers. It is flushed out through storm drains right into the ocean. The Lake is 30% below it's normal level due to a drought that's been getting progressively worse for the last 20 or 30 years. When it does rain, the water rushes out to sea through straightened, concrete-lined canals. Or water is deliberately released during hurricane season to make room for the pulse from a big storm.

My high school buddy, a former chief chemist for the Tampa
sewage treatment plant, put it better than I ever could: "We live in a swamp and we're running out of water." South Florida was not meant to support 5 million people and sugar cane and citrus and golf courses. For those of us who know the place, and were born and raised here, and have seen the changes just in our own lifetimes, it is an unimaginable tragedy. It's not just the fuzzy-wuzzies in the 'Glades who are in danger of becoming extinct, it's the people. We can buy our bottled water at 7-11, but we can't run our economy like this much longer.

Terraforming may work fine on Mars, but it's been a failure in Florida.

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