Development in North-East Florida:

In 2010
LEFT


In 2060
RIGHT

We have been losing the Everglades to misguided development and urbanization.

With it we are losing -
- fresh water
- species,
polluting land and waters

Yes, Skye Isle, FL does look like this NOW - and other regions - as seen from the projections above - WILL look like that in the near future -

CLICK here for interactive Census 2010
population data

Florida
POPULATION
2010:

18,8 million

We have water, water, everywhere, but much of South Florida's per capita use is 50% above the national average, and we've lost half the wetlands that used to recharge our aquifers. Water shortages threaten to limit growth - Florida is astonishingly wasteful. Now the Orlando area is pushing to suck water out of rivers to its north, local utilities are jacking up water rates as much as 35%, and South Florida's water board may cap withdrawals from Everglades aquifers.
Florida's got to change the culture because the status quo is unsustainable. Back in 1995, a 42-member commission stocked with bankers, farmers and developers released a unanimous report declaring South Florida unsustainable, warning that the ecosystem's destruction was hurting people as well as panthers by lowering water tables, increasing flood risks, fueling gridlock and replacing paradise with "mind-numbing homogeneity, and a distinct lack of place."
"Even people who don't give a rat's ass about the panther will care when saltwater comes out of their faucets," says Florida novelist Carl Hiaasen. And that's why Democrats, Republicans, the sugar industry and environmentalists came together in 2000 to support a $12 billion plan to revive the Everglades, the largest ecosystem-restoration project in history, to also provide for a stable water supply.

Once called the South Golden Gate Estates (Collier County) , the acres of marshes, sloughs and estuarine habitat were destroyed decades ago (1960s) in a failed attempt to develop part of “the world’s largest subdivision.” The restoration activities, carried out by Harry Pepper and Associates of Jacksonville, FL, involve removing more than 227 miles of road, plugging 45 miles of canals, and installing 3 pump stations and spreader swales to aid in rehydration of the wetlands. Once completed, the Picayune Strand project will recreate natural water flows, historic water level conditions and ecological connectivity to the natural lands around it
(see the map).
This CERP project (a 50/50 partnership between the federal government and the State of Florida), overseen by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, was initiated in January 2010 and the restoration will revive 55,000 acres of wetland critical to western Florida ecosystem.

Project location
(mouse over for enlargement)

Review by Philip Langdon
New Urban News, December 2010
Book by Peter Calthorpe
Island Press, 2011, 152 pp., $49.50 hardcover

"I take it as a given that climate change is an imminent threat and potentially catastrophic," Peter Calthorpe declares in the first sentence of the first chapter of this short and direct book. "The science is now clear that we are day by day contributing to our own demise." To avoid a dismal fate, Calthorpe argues, we will have to realize something that many Americans have yet to understand: "Urbanism is the most cost-effective solution to climate change." Compact, walkable development, backed up by simple conservation technologies, "can have a major impact in reducing carbon emissions and energy demand." Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change is in many respects the summation of the themes that have driven this intense, Berkeley-based architect and planner for nearly 40 years. When I first met Calthorpe in the mid-1980s, he had already made a name for himself by creating buildings that combined energy-efficiency (including passive solar) with careful attention to family and neighborhood well-being. He went on to become an adept regional planner - working at tying the disparate parts of the American metropolis together in ways that would save land and forge a better transportation network - and to help get the Congress for New Urbanism off the ground. If anyone is qualified to tell Americans what to do about global warming and urban patterns, it is Calthorpe. I hadn't realized, until this book, just how daunting is the challenge posed by the combination of a hotter
climate and a tightening of conventional energy supplies

He predicts that sources of clean energy, though "relatively expensive," will be "available sometime soon."
Those, he says, will have to be teamed up with progress in two areas - lifestyle and conservation - that "are, in the end, our most cost effective and easily available tools." Declares Calthorpe: "Urbanism, along with a simple combination of transit and more efficient buildings and cars, can deliver much of our needed GHG reductions."
The virtue of urbanism
A chief virtue of urbanism, he avers, is that it "naturally tends toward a 'small is beautiful' philosophy." "Compact development does mean smaller yards, fewer cars, and less private space for some. On the other hand, it can dramatically reduce everyday costs and leave more time for family and community." Having recently produced a framework called "Vision California" for authorities in his state, Calthorpe has a wealth of California facts and figures at his command. A "more compact future" would save "an average of 3.4 million acre-feet of water per year - enough to fill the San Francisco Bay annually or to irrigate 5 million acres of farmland." He makes a far more efficient future sound not terribly unsettling. In California, the range of housing choices wouldn't change dramatically. "Specifically, while large single-family lots would decline from 40 percent of the total today to 30 percent in 2050, small-lot homes and bungalows would increase slightly and townhouses and townhomes would double to 25 percent. ...
Many would conclude that this would be a reasonable shift, one ultimately making the housing stock more diverse and affordable - not, as some would argue, the end of the American dream." Calthorpe is excellent at putting technological fixes - a specialty of the gadget-green crowd - into much-needed perspective.
Shifting all our driving to electric cars wouldn't be practical, he documents. In California alone, "it would take 50,000 acres of high-efficiency solar thermal plants, 130,000 acres of photovoltaic panels, or 860,000 acres of wind farms (nearly thirty times the land area of San Francisco) to power such a transportation system."