SIX MILE BEND, FLORIDA—The crop duster whined overhead, banking hard and swooping for another pass over the field. My impulse was to duck and cover, but it would have been a useless gesture. This was cane country: flat fields, straight canals, uncurving roads, all smothered with an eerie leaden haze. The only human being I’d seen in the area had been sporting a shabby plastic suit.

Cane country stretches for miles and miles, spreading across the Florida peninsula to the south of Lake Okeechobee from east to west, pierced by settlements with sugar factories: Clewiston, Belle Glade, South Bay. Occasionally, the green is broken by a rectangular parcel of a phosphate mine―a lunar landscape of bleached rock forms and strangely-colored pools, where rock dust hangs in the air. Closer to the eastern and western fringes, there are also occasional rectangular parcels of “Signature Collections”―million-dollar homes that boast elaborate fortress-like walls. The luxury homes are pressed up against the rock mines and cane fields in a bizarre patchwork of human intervention, which has blanketed the whole peninsula. You can walk down a road and have a coral pink fortress on your left side; a rock mine or cane field on your right.

This accidental quilt was pieced together only very recently. Much of this cane country was “reclaimed” from the Everglades by the sugar growers and the US Army Corps of Engineers in the 1940s, who built the system of levees and canals that allowed the cane to be planted. Before that, the ecosystem was part of a “river of grass”—a unique bioregion that allowed water to flow between Lake Okeechobee south to the Florida Bay. The Everglades have since been reduced in size by more than half, and the national park that still exists is but a remnant of the actual swamp.

Southern Florida now bears a landscape entirely transformed by the human hand: a situation which can be noted from the air, intellectually comprehended from an article or book, but only realized from the ground. If you live in a city, you live in a landscape shaped by the human hand―but it still has life and humanity vibrating within it. Crossing cane country, you traverse a landscape that has been entirely transformed with little regard to anything besides cultivating this white powder for profit, and the impact on the psyche is similar to the impact on the eye: flat and rectangular, chemical, silent. You become a dot on a grid as you traverse the still parcels, accompanied by no sounds but the drone of mosquitoes and crop dusters, wishing you had a plastic suit.

Remarkably, this scene is set to change. At the end of June, Florida governor Charlie Crist unveiled plans to buy the corporation US Sugar for environmental conservation, an act he deemed “as monumental as our nation’s first national park.” The plan will allow Florida to acquire 187,000 acres of land south of Lake Okeechobee, as well as the assets of US Sugar, for a price tag of $1.75 billion (see map from the New York Times). This unprecedented deal will be the largest land purchase in Florida’s history.

Viewed through one lens, the deal looks a little shady: critics have accused the state government using taxpayer dollars to buyout an ailing corporation. The US sugar industry has been hit hard by globalization, and even with the enormous subsidies it receives, it is not a healthy industry. Getting bought out at a good price by the state looked like an appetizing deal to US sugar officials. Shocked and skeptical local residents point out that the $9,000 an acre the state is paying is steep, compared to the price valuations of other local farmlands.

Pricing, however, is a matter of value―and viewed through a lens which employs a different set of values, this looks like a stellar deal. Basically, the remnants of the Everglades are a parched marsh. If this deal goes through, and other corporations like Florida Crystals agree to land-swaps, the north-south flow of water from the lake to the Glades could be restored. (This could also help slake the thirst of the brand-new residents of all those million-dollar homes.) The value of creating that corridor is immense, immeasurable; one can’t easily put a price on it.

This deal is monumental, in my view, since it serves as a signpost to our changing values. It’s a monument to the progress we’ve made, but also an indication of where we could be headed. If we were on a straight road, this might be the six-mile bend: we are beginning to value land not for what it can produce right now, as a patchwork of rectangles, but for the role it can play in the future as part of an integrated whole bioregion.

The deal is also monumental, because it acknowledges that human intervention in the landscape is not always ideal. “I also want to thank God,” Governor Crist announced, explaining that “we’re trying to restore what he planned a long time ago.” For my part, I would also like to thank God that high-profile Christians are finally linking their religious ethos with the environment. One irate local on the Palm Beach Post website commented, “indirectly ten’s [sic] of thousands of lives are now shattered, all in the namesake of what; animals and vegetation?” Hopefully, Crist can set an example in validating the worth of the natural environment by name-dropping God. At least, he is illustrating that human meddling in the landscape has its dangers: his comment shows the long-sacred idea of Progress being dismantled and reconsidered.

Finally, this deal illustrates a monumental shift in that it demonstrates long-term thinking instead of short-term rhetoric. It was a brave manoeuvre, because Crist faces legions of upset locals who must grapple with the idea of their towns existing sans US Sugar. The company is, in effect, their lives; they claim that their towns will be ghost towns.

Perhaps, but to the outside observer, these towns are already impoverished ghost towns. Clewiston is notable for its Wal-Mart and little else. Belle Glade, despite its rusty welcome sign, is happening by comparison: it swells with West Indian migrants living in shantytown conditions, reggaeton suffusing litter-filled streets.

From where I sit in Toronto today, with my haze-filled memories of cane country, it is easy for me to write off these towns as bad sequences from a strange American dream. But people actually conduct lives there; lives that this plan will shake up. They are not thinking about the long-term water planning of their bioregion; they are thinking about feeding their kids. And they are not just locals, they are constituents.

I risk the “liberal” mistake of typifying south Florida residents, I know. But I believe that each soul in cane country has the imagination to think of how their lives might go on without US Sugar. As one spelling-challenged poster on the Palm Beach Post site comments: “After being empolyed for 9 years @ the Bryant Mill,Thank you U.S.S.C. For openning my eyes to something better.There is Life after Big Sugar.Just NEED to know where to look.Thanks to them I went to collage to learn a TRADE.HVAC becaues its HOTTTT!!!!!”

Here’s an even bolder idea than what Crist is already proposing: how about going a step further and offer some kind of employment or training program for the workers there? We could offer economic and ecologic restoration at the same time; maybe even get the workers involved directly in restoring the land they already intimately know. In doing so, we could help heal the antipathy that the general American people have towards “tree-hugger” efforts.

At this early stage, it is hard to know if the US Sugar deal is a case of government doing what it’s supposed to do (acting in benefit of the people and the environment)—or if it’s a case of the government acting for the benefit of a large corporation. Perhaps, it can be both at once. I’m going to silence my inner cynic, who is skeptical about market solutions to environmental problems, for the time being—and hope that this deal follows up on its promise.

Tags: environment, Florida, US politics, walrus interns

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Posted on Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 at 1:48 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.