When Dollars Cease to Flow, Help for a River Evaporates

In the Colorado River, the flow of water created a canyon a mile deep and 15 miles across.

On the Kissimmee River, which runs down the center of the state and connects Central Florida to the Everglades, the terrain is flat and the flow much more subtle. But its impact is no less miraculous.

Federal engineers are filling in a flood-control canal that once emptied the marshes like a bathtub drain. The wild things died or fled. But now the water is returning to its old channel, and life is returning to the river. The otters are chasing the big fish that are chasing the little fish that flee to the marsh where the wading birds are waiting for them.

It is one massive food fight and a wonder to behold.

But putting nature back together again is not cheap. The initial price tag of tens of millions of dollars has escalated into hundreds of millions of dollars. At the time this restoration was conceived, money was no object. But now, with debts and deficits, with fired teachers and the poor in need of doctors, with the Great Recession that in Florida has become the Mini Depression, paying for paradise has become a luxury item.

Florida has invested in its environment like no other state. In addition to putting our rivers and lakes back together again, we have spent billions of dollars on millions of acres of land. No price was considered too absurd for what previously had been classified as worthless swamp.

The mantra was buy it now or it would be paved tomorrow. This created a sense of urgency, a mad dash to get it while we could. We had jammed roads, crowded schools and the cultural amenities of Kazakhstan, but we had, by far, the finest system of state parks in the nation.
And then the economy came tumbling down.

It wiped out household budgets, school budgets, city budgets and state budgets.

It drained the real estate taxes and property taxes that were funding our green movement.
You need green to be green.

The growth monster that was destroying Florida also was the benefactor paying for its preservation. And now that the economy is keeping that monster in check, and worthless swamp is once again valued at the price of worthless swamp, we are flat broke.

We once spent $300 million a year buying land through the Forever Florida program. That money all but vanished back in 2008. The state keeps cranking out a priority list of parcels it wants to buy, 2 million acres at last count. But that’s like me wistfully walking through a BMW dealer lot and looking at the prices in the back windows.

There is a decided lack of protest, even from the environmentalists. It is a bit much to expect people to worry about green when they are worrying about their next house payment or losing their family’s health insurance. When a state is firing teachers, slashing nursing-home care and denying life-saving treatments for the sick, suddenly things like the food chain on the Kissimmee River become a luxury.

And there is no media to come to the rescue. As an environmental reporter, I hounded the regulators and politicians. I documented the casualties of development and flagged the worst offenders. I spent two days a month at the water management district, getting the lowdown on who was paving what and where.

The media is supposed to be objective. But the reality is that we were, in large part, the marketing arm of the green movement. You wrote about the wild things because you cared about the wild things.

But now, like everyone else, the media is in its own fight for survival. Crumbling budgets and fierce competition for Web traffic have made bird-dogging the environment expendable.

As much as I’d like to think it is, going out to the Kissimmee River and marveling at its beauty is no longer a priceless experience.

Native Floridian and longtime Orlando columnist Mike Thomas is a freelance writer.