A dark and sleazy history has led to the destruction of large areas of coastal Florida and the Everglades. James Bovard in a post in USA Today provides a short history of the environmental and social impacts of the sugar industry:
In 1816, Congress imposed high tariffs on sugar imports in part to prop up the value of slaves in Louisiana. In the 1890s, Congress abolished and then re-imposed the sugar tariff, spurring a boom-bust in Cuba that helped drag the U.S. into the Spanish-American War.
The article notes that Florida does not have a natural climate for sugar production, farmers have to compensate by saturating the land with fertilizer. As nearly 500,000 acres of the Everglades were converted from slow-moving crystal-clear water teeming with life to a dead zone of poisoned water, sugar fields, phosphorous and fertilizer that has ravaged the fragile ecosystem of central and south Florida.
In 2014, the citizens of Florida passed Amendment 1 that designated billions of dollars to conservation efforts. The Water and Land Conservation Amendment required that, for the next 20 years, 33 percent of the proceeds from real estate documentary-stamp taxes go for land acquisition. For 2016, the share of the real-estate tax is projected to bring in more than $740 million. The measure was overwhelmingly approved by 75 percent of voters. In a stunning rebuke to the will of the Florida citizen, Republican Governor Rick Scott and his GOP teabagging legislature have used the proceeds for such things as salaries, benefits, insurance costs and vehicle purchases.
The scuzzy water that’s wrecking this year’s tourist season comes courtesy of Big Sugar and other agricultural operators around Lake Okeechobee, which sits in the state’s sparsely populated center roughly between Palm Beach on the east coast and Fort Myers on the west coast. It’s America’s second biggest freshwater lake in the lower 48, and thanks to ridiculously permissive policies, it’s become a private dumping ground for mega-agricultural operations. These corporations pump the public’s water from the lake to irrigate their fields, then send the water; polluted with fertilizer and other farm chemicals, back into Lake Okeechobee.
This lucky Manatee sips drops of fresh water from a drain coming out of the new FPL Manatee Lagoon which is located in Riviara Beach, FL. Manatee's are another casualty of the poisoned waters flowing out of Lake Okeechobee.In January of 2016, Florida experienced record rainfall during what is usually the dry season. American News reports:
Waste from numerous cattle farms as well as the State’s booming sugar cane industry plus all the fertilizers and other chemicals already polluting the body of stagnant water and the result is disastrous. After the State experienced it’s wettest January since 1932, State Officials began to worry that the Lake’s aging dike system wouldn’t be able to handle the ever increasing amount of polluted water headed it’s way this year. So State officials devised a cartoon-esque plan to divert this “toilet water”, which is estimated flow at the ungodly rate of some 70,000 gallons per second, through two major Floridian rivers; the St. Lucie river and the Caloosahatchee River – each waterway flowing to a different coastline. The result of this hair brained scheme will inevitably cost Floridians Millions of dollars in tourism money, which is unfortunately the State’s bread and butter.
The dark, polluted water is not only killing off marine life, it is turning away tourists, fisherman and even everyday beach goers. To think that simply diverting the polluted water to Florida’s marshland also known as the Florida Everglades, where it would be cleansed of toxins along the way is fitting of a State whose economy is primarily based on tourism money generated from the fans of an animated rodent.
Earth Justice continues about the discharge in the Everglades:
Feeling the pressure, Gov. Rick Scott asked the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to break from its usual practices and drain Lake Okeechobee south into the Everglades instead of out to the coasts, and the Corps complied. As you can imagine, that approach is certainly raising serious questions. Remember, American taxpayers are paying billions to clean up the Everglades, and the federal government sued Florida decades ago for failing to keep agriculture’s polluted runoff out of Everglades National Park.
In a February post, the AP reported that Governor Rick Scott says that President Obama is to blame for the Lake Okeechobee discharge. He stated that the federal government failed to pay for repairs to the dyke around the lake. The always classy Rick Scott blames the black president for his own egregious environmental policies.