Word: waterous
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...Water Crisis Mortgage Fraud Political Dysfunction Algae Polluted Beaches Declining Crops Failing Public Schools Foreclosures...
Otherwise, there's trouble in paradise. We're facing our worst real estate meltdown since the Depression. We've got a water crisis, insurance crisis, environmental crisis and budget crisis to go with our housing crisis. We're first in the nation in mortgage fraud, second in foreclosures, last in high school graduation rates. Our consumer confidence just hit an all-time low, and our icons are in trouble - the citrus industry, battered by freezes and diseases; the Florida panther, displaced by highways and driveways; the space shuttle, approaching its final countdown. New research suggests that the Everglades is collapsing...
Florida was once a swampy rural backwater, the poorest and emptiest state in the South. But in the 20th century, air-conditioning, bug spray and the miracle of water control helped transform it into a migration destination for the restless masses of Brooklyn and Cleveland, Havana and Port-au-Prince. Florida developed its own ventricle at the heart of the American Dream - not only as an affordable playground and comfortable retirement home with no income tax but also as a state of escape and opportunity, a Magic Kingdom for tourists, a Fountain of Youth for seniors, a Cape Canaveral...
...coming due. The housing bust has exposed a human pyramid scheme - an economy that relied on a thousand newcomers a day, too many of them construction workers, mortgage bankers, real estate agents and others whose livelihoods depended on importing a thousand more newcomers the next day. And the elaborate water-management scheme that made southern Florida habitable has been stretched beyond capacity, yo-yoing between brutal droughts and floods, converting the Everglades into a tinderbox and a sewer, ravaging the beaches, bays, lakes and reefs that made the region so alluring in the first place. "The dream is fading," says...
...Water, Water, Everywhere Nobody used to worry about the Big One hitting Florida, because it was a waterlogged wilderness. "It is a land of swamps, of quagmires, of frogs and alligators and mosquitoes!" a Congressman scoffed. "A man, sir, would not immigrate into Florida - no, not from hell itself!" In 1880, Florida ranked 34th of 42 states and territories in population, and the census found only 257 residents in most of South Florida. (See pictures of the world's water crisis...