"Elegy for the Sunshine State"
A very good, very true article from an old high school friend of mine (and best-selling author of "The Forever War" ) .
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/requiem-for-the-sunshine-state
Elegy for the Sunshine State
By Dexter Filkins
If you grow up in Florida, you watch the natural world around you disappear. It’s just a fact you live with. The verdant, miles-long stretch of dune and palm, rustling to the beat of the waves? Paved over. The brackish stream that flows from ocean to intercoastal, giving life to manatees, alligators, and tarpon? Turned into a parking lot. The swath of live oak trees, the Spanish moss clinging to their branches like the mists from a Faulkner novel? It’s an apartment complex called Whispering Pines.
It doesn't matter when you moved to Florida. Ever since the nineteen-sixties, the stream of people pouring into the state has been relentless: an average of eight hundred newcomers a day. All of them need places to live. Where I grew up, in Cape Canaveral, the destruction of nature happened so fast that it was often disorienting; passing a stretch of woods for perhaps the eight-hundredth time, I would stare at the backhoes and cranes and wonder what had occupied that space only a week before. On a few occasions, my teen-age friends and I got so angry that we scaled the fences of construction sites and moved the survey points that were marking the spot for the next foundation—the next pour of cement. We failed, of course, to stop what the builders were building, or even to slow it down. The joke among us was that every housing development in Florida was named to memorialize the ecosystem it replaced: Crystal Cove, Mahogany Bay, The Bluffs. For about a year, I lived in an apartment complex, paved from end to end, called “In the Pines.”
It’s useful to remember this now, as Hurricane Irma lays waste to much of Florida: the destruction of the state has been unfolding for decades, and, for the most part, it wasn’t done by nature. It was done by us. In the nineteen-nineties, I covered the Miami-Dade county commissioners as a reporter for the Miami Herald. Miami is a vibrant, tumultuous city, remade every few years by the energy of its new arrivals. But, in the time I worked there, one thing never changed: the enthusiasm with which the elected commissioners greeted every new housing or commercial development unveiled before them. It was a kind of sad ritual: A new housing development would come up for a vote, and an earnest member of the county’s planning-and-zoning staff would warn about the development’s impact on the quality of the schools, on the phlegmatic pace of rush-hour traffic, on the erosion of beaches. Almost always, the pleas were ignored; the economy of modern Florida is a kind of Ponzi scheme, where tomorrow’s growth pays for today’s needs, and real estate is the largest employer. It was a confidence game, and the commissioners were only too happy to go along.
Once, following the approval of a housing development on an especially sensitive stretch of land near the Everglades, the Herald ran a story titled “The End of Nature.” Some of the commissioners called to protest the story, but the headline made no difference; the development rose anyway. Florida’s current governor, Rick Scott, is an apostle of the game: Scott has prohibited state environmental officials from using the terms “climate change,” “global warming,’’ or “sustainability” in their official communications.
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Very little development, miles and miles and miles of pine woods on one side of A1A, beautiful white sand dune beaches on the other. Clean lagoons in between with the occasional alligator, but you could catch dozens of crabs to take home for Mom to make dinner with, and gather a bucket full of wild blackberries for a cobbler.
Lots of visits to aircraft carriers in Mayport as my Dad was a Navy flier who stayed in the Reserve after WW2.
In 1960 we moved to Chicago, which totally rocked my little beach boy world, but what a great place that was too, maybe the most important discovery of my life was MODEL RAILROADS IN PEOPLE'S BASEMENTS! 
A hobby which has lasted me a lifetime.
There's bugs and gators and storms! oh my
Cities tear down single houses to build apartment buildings and condo to increase their tax base.
Some years back I was present at a council meeting and some people were complaining about removal of beautiful trees. They purchased their homes to enjoy the trees, but it was decided to convert a two lane road to a four lane major road and the tress had to go.
It does not matter whether you are at a major metropolis or a mid town cities; at the coast or in the Midwest. Government planners see empty space and they cannot wait to pave over it to generate more tax revenue.
I wonder whether this happens also in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming or the Dakotas..
