ABSTRACT
The early 1970s will be recorded as the years when Florida's environmental crisis, or, more specifically, its land crisis, was proclaimed. Ever since intensive settlement of Florida began a century ago, people have been trying to remake, with increasingly troubling results, a delicate, low-lying peninsula wrought by natural forces over the geological ages . Florida is for the most part a long, relatively narrow subtropical appendage of the main landmass of the continental United States. It embraces an area as large as England and Wales (or 58,560 square miles, to be precise) , extending 400 miles from north to south and (at the peninsula's widest point) reaching some 130 miles from east to west (see figures 1-1 and 1-2). There is a coastal lowlands province extending well inland all along Florida's 1,300 miles of general shoreline, and a "highlands" province going three-quarters of the way down the peninsula like an irregular backbone. The whole state rests on a deep bed of water-bearing limestone and even the highest point is not more than a few hundred feet above sea level. In a time of good rains, the peninsula is a long, nearly unbroken mat of green, beginning with the
1 THE LAND AND THE CRISIS
200 1 pine and hardwood forests of north Florida, down through the citrus-clad hills and lakes of the Central Highlands, the pine flatwoods, cypress heads, and prairies and marshes of the Kissimmee and Saint Johns river basins, the sugarcane fields south of Lake Okeechobee, the vast wetlands complex of the Everglades and the Big Cypress Swamp, and finally, the crescent of mangroves around Florida's southern tip. On the peninsula's Atlantic side, a long series of barrier islands with appealing sandy beaches lie between the salt marshes and the open ocean; on the Gulf of Mexico side, a similar series of barrier islands exists, but is less complete, there being long stretches where labyrinths of mangrove islands or of salt marsh laced by tidal channels face directly on the open Gulf. Of all Florida's natural features, the most remarkable and distinctive is the Everglades, that wilderness of saw grass where alligators in incredible number once dominated the ecology as completely as the buffalo once dominated the ecology of the Great Plains.
