Word: florida
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...Army engineers eventually made the dream come true by imprisoning Lake O behind a giant dike, subduing the Everglades with 2,000 miles of levees and canals, seizing control of nearly every raindrop that fell in southern Florida. Their all-out war on natural water flow made the bottom half of the state safe for an unrestrained building frenzy that began after World War II and basically continued until Juan Puig bought his billiard table. Florida now has 18 million residents, most of them south of Orlando. Such progress had a price. Half the Everglades is gone. The rest...
...South Florida is having an ecological and hydrological meltdown, the legacy of a century of plumbing and dredging and growing without much thinking. The Everglades ecosystem now hosts 69 threatened or endangered species, and its rookeries and fisheries have crashed. Massive algal blooms are turning Florida Bay into pea soup. The region's reefs have lost up to 95% of their elkhorn coral; persistent red tides have made it tough for sunbathers to breathe at the beach...
...have water, water, everywhere, but much of South Florida's per capita use is 50% above the national average, and we've lost half the wetlands that used to recharge our aquifers. So water shortages threaten to limit growth in a way that wetlands regulations or bad headlines never could. "Florida is astonishingly wasteful," says Cynthia Barnett, author of Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S. Now the Orlando area is pushing to suck water out of rivers to its north, local utilities are jacking up water rates as much as 35%, and South Florida's water...
...just gator-huggers who say that. Back in 1995, a 42-member commission stocked with bankers, farmers and developers released a unanimous report declaring South Florida unsustainable, warning that the ecosystem's destruction was hurting people as well as panthers by lowering water tables, increasing flood risks, fueling gridlock and replacing paradise with "mind-numbing homogeneity, and a distinct lack of place." In the words of the novelist and columnist Carl Hiaasen, the bard of Florida's decline, "You don't have to be a wacko enviro to want your kids to be able to swim in a lake...
...quality of life remains the biggest risk to the Florida dream. So many Northeastern transplants are leaving Florida for other states with less congestion and better education systems that they have their own nickname: Halfbacks. In 2000, Florida attracted 19% of the nation's migrating seniors; by 2006, it was only 13%. Florida still has some of America's richest ZIP codes, but it ranks among the worst states in school spending and health coverage...