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. (more…)