Ill Nature

by Joy Williams

  He always wanted to be heard. This can’t be existence, being stored. We’re both being stored!

  His previous lawyers had arranged for a psychiatric examination without his consent, an examination that concluded that he was fit to stand trial even though he was a “sickie,” or in more psychologically precise terms, a paranoid schizophrenic awash in delusions—the worst one being that technology is the vehicle by which people are destroying themselves and the world.

  What? It’s not true?

  Neverglades

  THAT THE EVERGLADES STILL EXISTS IS A COLLECTIVE ILLUsion shared by both those who care and those who don’t. People used to say that nothing like the Everglades existed anywhere else in the world, but it doesn’t exist in South Florida anymore either. The Park, which millions of people visit and perceive to be the Everglades, makes up only 20 percent of the historic Glades and is but a pretty, fading afterimage of a once astounding ecosystem, the remaining 80 percent of which—drained, diked, and poisoned—has vanished beneath cities, canals, vast water impoundment areas, sugarcane fields, and tomato farms. Ninety percent of the wading bird population has disappeared in fifty years, and gradually (quickly) “one of the rarest places on earth” (as it is so frequently described) located conveniently (unfortunately) one hour from Miami, has become a horror show of extirpated species. On land, a water park with no water; at sea, a sick marine estuary turning into a murky, hyper-saline, superheated lagoon.

  The Everglades watershed once began just south of Orlando with the Kissimmee River winding 103 miles to Lake Okeechobee. The lake, a vast but shallow depression then spilled the waters through seepage, springs, and overflow across and down the entire peninsula, eventually passing into Florida Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. After a hurricane in 1928 flooded land drained for agriculture and drowned more than a thousand migrant workers, the Army Corps of Engineers was directed to build a dike, a thirty-foot-high barrier that encircled the lake. A vast 700,000-acre area to the south—more than one-third of the Everglades watershed but no longer and never to be again the Everglades—became the Everglades Agricultural Area. East and south of the EAA (all planted in sugarcane, a simple crop with a simple preference—dry land). Vast portions of the Everglades (never to be again the Everglades) were turned into Water Conservation Areas, lifeless holding tanks compartmentalized by canals. “Excess” water was flushed out to sea.

  In 1961, the Army Corps of Engineers was directed to channelize the Kissimmee. (Kissimmee is said to mean “heaven’s gate” in the language of the Calusa Indian, Florida’s original and long-extinct Indian tribe. Since extremely little is known about the Calusa, this pretty notion is unlikely, though an inarguable fact is that the town of Kissimmee, a bawdy sprawl of billboards, flashing signs, motels, and dinner theaters, no longer marks the ecological beginnings of the mysterious Everglades, but is the gateway to the fantasy lands of Disney World.) It took ten years to transform the river (which wandered a mile east or west for every mile it flowed south) into a fifty-two-mile straight-edged canal two hundred feet wide and thirty feet deep. Forty-five thousand acres of wet-lands dried up, the wildlife vanished, and a slug of pollutants, mostly cow shit from the dairy farms that moved in after the ditch was dug, directly entered Lake Okeechobee, which was already gagging on nutrient overload from Big Sugar’s back-pumped used irrigation water. (It’s hard to believe the power and influence Sugar has, but think of the NRA with a sweet tooth.) Lake O. sat fat in the center of peninsula Florida like a nasty blood-swollen tick.

  By the ’70s, the elaborate plumbing system had been completed and was rapidly accomplishing its engineered purpose of sucking the Everglades dry. (The Corps even deliberately introduced an alien tree—the melaleuca. From Australia, a sort of vampirish member of the myrtle family, the melaleuca sucks up enormous amounts of water, grows fast and thickly, and because it flowers five times a year, spreads rampantly.) At this point, uncertainty arose as to the excellence of this idea. The Park (at the end of the pipe) was supposed to exist as a museum piece, not connected with the commerce of the real world, but the Everglades, which was the actual world of South Florida, had become so depleted of its original abundance and ecological function that it was no longer the Everglades at all. The gentle, natural, rain-driven sheet flow that once sustained it had been replaced by erratic pulses of water, which came in gorged polluted flushes, too much or too little, and always in the wrong season.

  The Everglades was lost, but it was still there and the notion took hold that with goodwill and a little tinkering it could be resurrected. To some degree. The public became increasingly educated about its intrinsic worth. For example, around this time a group of sixth-graders visiting the Park composed a poem that was rendered on a bronze plaque and erected at the Pay-Hay-Okee boardwalk overlook.

  Every time you go to a place

  That has those animals on its face,

  It makes you laugh and cheer

  Because it’s fun out here.

  We love you Everglades!

  We’ll help to save the place!

  Nice work, children! Lovely.

  The Everglades, no longer quite existing but still troublingly existent, was increasingly being deemed worthy of love, of being saved. Studies commenced. Debate ensued over water timing and quantity. (Concerns over water quality were tabled for later.) Officials were comfortable with the debate-and-study process, which went on pretty much for a generation. The Everglades could be fixed if only further studies could be conducted and as long as any conclusions and recommendations accommodated agricultural needs and rising population demands. In concert with the Everglades’ increasing degradation and diminishment, more and more acts were passed to protect it. At the same time Bob Graham, a two-term governor of the state and now a US senator, was establishing a task force called Save Our Everglades, he was also pushing for increased sugar subsidies. While water management was dribbling water into the starved Shark River Slough, heart of the Park, in an “experiment,” it was accelerating the dumping of hundreds of millions of gallons into the Atlantic because that was the way the plumbing system was set up. At the same time Congress enacted the Everglades National Park Protection and Expansion Act, authorizing the addition of 107,000 acres on the eastern side of the Park, the Corps of Engineers was proposing more canals to protect tomato interests nearby and provide drainage for two hundred homes in the area that the government was in the process of buying. At the same time Lake O. was being cleaned up because Sugar was no longer pumping dirty irrigation water into it, the Park was suffering because Sugar had redirected effluent there. At the same time the federal government was insisting that “natural hydrological conditions be restored” to the Everglades, Sugar was flushing two hundred tons of phosphorous into the wetlands each year, replacing the sawgrass “face” of the Glades with cattails and stinking organic ooze. At the same time the Kissimmee River was being considered eligible for restoration (the first step was restoring its name, which had been changed to the less evocative C-38), Florida Bay’s waters, once crystalline, were turning murky and opaque, a milky green, a pea green, even an uncanny phosphorescent green. Cape Sable, once known for its wild white empty shore, was becoming remarkable because it signifies the beginning of the Dead Zone, a spreading area of massive turtle grass die-off that has fueled an algae bloom in which marine life perishes or from which it flees. It was a death soup, like. Florida Bay—terminus of the Everglades.

  And still, throughout the 1980s, the appellations kept coming. The Everglades became a World Heritage Site, an International Biosphere Preserve, a Wetland of International Significance. The sicker it became, the more the perception was that its condition was being recognized and help was on the way. By the 1990s, the Everglades was—or was going to be—the test case for proving that the ecosystems of America could be protected. Bruce Babbitt, the secretary of the interior, flew over Florida Bay and was “appalled.” He vowed to make the Everglades his Number 1 priority, it was to be the keystone of
the Clinton administration’s environmental policy. Cooperation was necessary, of course, a comprehensive plan would be required, and coexistence among parties of radically different objectives would have to be encouraged. (Build those wildlife tunnels under the new four-lane highways and make those panthers use them!) After decades of chatter about the retooling, restoration, replication, reconstruction, and repair of the Everglades, something was at last about to happen. A Statement of Principles was issued. Success would be achieved by “an unprecedented new partnership, joining the Federal and State governments with the agricultural interests of South Florida”—in other words, the exact same alliance that had been suffocating the Everglades all along. The Everglades Forever Act was signed, capping the sugar industry’s clean-up costs, delaying water-quality standards, and limiting future efforts at restoring water flow to areas not employed by sugar. Still, defenders of the Everglades remained hopeful, for a final study was still to be done, the Corps’ restudy, which was expected to recommend drastic changes in water conservation and delivery. Yet even the most myopic and optimistic friend to the Everglades should have felt a twinge of concern when Alfonso Fanjul, Sugar’s billionaire, appeared in Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s report on President Clinton. The president interrupted his dalliance with Monica only once, to take a call from Fanjul. This was troubling, environmentally speaking, this implication of respectful, very respectful acquaintance with Fanjul but . . . but . . . eco-carers mustn’t be cynical—otherwise, they’d give up, they’d just stay in their nest and drown—so the phone call was put in . . . perspective.

  In the summer of ’99, just in time for the future, the Clinton administration presented the final Everglades restoration plan to Congress. It looked suspiciously like a massive water supply project for Florida development. The Everglades would still be at the mercy of cane and commerce; only 240 miles of the more than 1,800 miles of levees and canals will be removed, and though less water will be thrown to the sea, the murderous manmade cycles of drought and flood will remain in place. The final plan—costing $8 billion—the final solution locks in the ultimate nonsolution. And they couldn’t have done it without us, the children of all ages, naive and hopeful to the bone. Couldn’t have done it without our patience through the many many years, years that Sugar utilized by perfecting their lobbying powers and building an immense refinery on site, and that developers exploited with a paroxysm of blanket building on both coasts. All those years. . . . Looking back on it, we might just as well have brought a gallon of water with us when we visited the Park and dumped it on the ground.

  We love you Everglades!

  We’ll help to save the place!

  Chumps.

  Florida

  FLORIDA HAS LONG BEEN CONSIDERED A PLAYGROUND, A location set for vast theme parks, a sunny eccentricity, a beach. She was by no means America’s last frontier, but still in the 1880s, the major part of the state was unexplored wilderness, wetlands and swamps, immense piney flatwoods, live oak and cypress forests, twisting rivers and impenetrable mangrove mazes, with everywhere strange creatures, giant reptiles and great flocks of resplendent and remarkable birds. Key West, the tiny coral island more than one hundred miles off the tip of peninsular Florida was then improbably the largest, wealthiest, and most sophisticated city of this vast and improbable state. Miami and Palm Beach did not exist. Florida’s natural wonders—her fishes and reefs and palmy beaches—seemed extraordinarily exotic. She was simply unlike anywhere else, and after she was tamed and drained, entrepreneurs could make her appear to be any number of things. Florida could be anywhere and serve the fantasies of anyone. She could become the repository for any number of crafted and imaginary histories, a wealth of simulated habitats and instant tropical gardens. She could be the African veld, the Mediterranean, Venice, and despite hurricanes, frosts, and mosquitoes so plentiful it was said that a person could come up with a quart of them in a pint jar, she was fashioned into all these contrivances and more.

  The ordinary citizen flocked to Florida because he was sure that he would be entertained, amused. The invention of Florida resulted in the invention of modern tourism. Florida became both outlandish and quaint with her alligator wrestling and lion farms, her mermaid shows and parrot jungles. Everything from coconuts to cypress knees to coral became a souvenir. The very sunshine was employed as a huckster, as well as that most fragrant of scents, the orange blossom. The flamingo, an extravagantly vivid bird that scarcely looks real (which is not to say that it doesn’t look exactly like a flamingo) became the very image of a colorfully extravagant state (even though it is a native of the Caribbean and not a Florida bird at all). Everything in Florida was perceived to be, and marketed as being, curious. Grapefruits were very curious. As were the banyan trees. There were fossilized sharks’ teeth on the beach. There were pelicans. Everything seemed prehistoric and slightly preposterous.

  Florida is a show, an entire state dedicated to the vacation principle. And as Florida becomes more and more what she has become, a state attuned to growth, on autocatalytic open throttle, the pace quickens to promote “hidden” Florida. On the west coast near Cedar Key, counties less developed are referred to in tourist development literature as “Mother Nature’s Theme Park.” “Real” Florida becomes a packaged experience. In the Keys, visitors pay to swim with dolphins, the theory being that you will appreciate the mammal more because of it. The dolphin has evolved from being just another animal entertainer to being the supreme educational showman of the natural world. (The manatee, a dear and improbable creature and, next to the panther, the most endangered in the state, has too modest and retiring a personality to be employed professionally in an “interactive” capacity. The rank roadside zoos of Florida—Mother Nature’s Creatures on Parade, once a tourism staple—have mostly gone or been transmogrified into a format presented on a somewhat different plane—the wildlife rehabilitation center. Here the tourist (why there were 40 million of you just last year) or the resident (why there are 15 million of us in place just now) can view unlucky but still engaging wildlife in an airy natural setting, and know they are being kept viable by the most determined volunteer help available. Increasingly popular with the kids and the caring, wildlife rehabilitation centers have even become a plus tourist-wise, their broken guests educational totems that remind us of the impact our sheer numbers have on their world, of the difficulties, even improbability, of sharing Florida with them. Even the broken and maimed can be viewed positively in sunny, entertaining Florida.

  The Case against Babies

  BABIES, BABIES, BABIES. THERE’S A PLAGUE OF BABIES. TOO many rabbits or elephants or mustangs or swans brings out the myxomatosis, the culling guns, the sterility drugs, the scientific brigade of egg smashers. Other species can “strain their environments” or “overrun their range” or clash with their human “neighbors,” but human babies are always welcome at life’s banquet. Welcome, Welcome, Welcome—Live Long and Consume! You can’t draw the line when it comes to babies because . . . where are you going to draw the line? Consider having none or one and be sure to stop after two, the organization Zero Population Growth suggests politely. Can barely hear them what with all the babies squalling. Hundreds of them popping out every minute. Earth’s human population has more than tripled in the last century. Ninety-seven million of them each year. While legions of other biological life forms go extinct (or, in the creepy phrase of ecologists, “wink out”), human life bustles self-importantly on. Those babies just keep coming! They’ve gone way beyond being “God’s gift”; they’ve become entitlements. Everyone’s having babies, even women who can’t have babies, particularly women who can’t have babies—they’re the ones who sweep fashionably along the corridors of consumerism with their double-wide strollers, stuffed with twins and triplets. (Women push those things with the effrontery of someone piloting a bulldozer, which strollers uncannily bring to mind.) When you see twins or triplets, do you think, aw or ooh or that’s sort of cool, that’s unusual, or
do you think, That woman dropped a wad on in-vitro fertilization, twenty-five, thirty thousand dollars, at least. . . .

  The human race hardly needs to be more fertile, but fertility clinics are booming, making millionaires of the hot-shot fertility doctors who serve anxious gottahavababy women, techno-shamans who have become the most important aspect of the baby process, giving women what they want: BABIES. (It used to be a mystery what women wanted, but no more . . . Nietzsche was right. . . .) Ironically—though it is far from being the only irony in this baby craze—women think of themselves as being successful, personally fulfilled when they have a baby, even if it takes a battery of men in white smocks and lots of hormones and drugs and needles and dishes and mixing and inserting and implanting to make it so. Having a baby means individual completion for a woman. What do boys have to do to be men? Sleep with a woman. Kill something. Yes, killing anything large-ish in the animal kingdom, or even another man, appropriate in times of war, has ushered many a lad into manhood. But what’s a woman to do? She gets to want to have a baby.

  While much effort has been expended in third world countries educating women into a range of options that does not limit their role merely to bearing children, well-off, educated, and indulgent American women are clamoring for babies, babies, BABIES to complete their status. They’ve had it all, and now they want a baby. And women over thirty-five want them NOW. They’re the ones who opt for the aggressive fertility route; they’re impatient; they’re sick of being laissez-faire about this. Sex seems such a laborious way to go about it. At this point they don’t want to endure all that intercourse over and over and maybe get no baby. What a waste of time! And time’s awasting. A life with no child would be a life perfecting hedonism, a forty-something infertile woman said, now the proud owner of pricey twins. Even women who have the grace to submit to fate can sound wistful. It’s not so much that I wish that I had children now, a travel writer said, but that I wish I had had them. I hate to fail at anything. Women are supposed to wish and want and not fail.