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The state has 1,300 miles of shoreline, 600 clear-water springs, 1,700 ravines and streams, and over 8,000 lakes. More than 3,000 native trees, shrubs, and flowering plants are native to Florida, many unique to our peninsula and also endangered due to development. Our 100 species of orchid (compared to Hawai’i’s three native orchids) and 150 fern species speak to the moist and subtropical climate across many parts of the state.3 Florida has more wetlands than any other conterminous state—11 million acres—including seepage wetlands, interior marshes, and interior swamp land. Prior to the 1800s, Florida had over 20 million acres of wetlands.

“the worst I’ve ever seen,” the head of one major Florida-based conservation group told me, referring to the predatory and anti-science environmental actions of our Republican-dominated state legislature.

Shown on maps as a slow curve up through South Florida, Central Florida, and into the North Florida Panhandle, the wildlife corridor offers a quixotic hope for the future. The ultimate goal is 17.7 million acres, with 9.6 million acres existing conservation land (some of it compromised by other uses, like ranching and silviculture) and 8.1 million “opportunity areas” for future conservation, including through the underfunded Florida Forever land acquisition program and the Rural & Family Lands Protection Program. The creation of the corridor also gives an overriding purpose, or story, to other environmental projects that feed into the corridor goal while emphasizing the importance of the 75 state parks, 32 state forests, and 171 springs that form part of the corridor.

If the idea behind the Wildlife Corridor represents a profound expression of a sustainable, biodiverse future, then the toll roads are the purest distillation of capitalist evil. Governor Ron DeSantis, the Florida legislature, and the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) seem determined to ram these roads through rural Florida—even as the people who live there, regardless of political affiliation, are united in fighting the roads and the destruction they will bring with them.

Most sensible urban planners will tell you that adding more highways to solve congestion just leads to more congestion. Environmental organizations and residents are quick to point out that existing roads are underused, meaning the toll roads represent a classic case of induced demand. Politicians who support them often have received substantial campaign contributions from the entities that stand to profit. 

lawmakers who “do not understand how they fit into nature or how nature works. Perhaps they just don’t care. Many hold the belief that there is no ‘value’ to nature. … If it isn’t ‘improved,’ it’s worthless. There is a lack of recognition of the ecosystem services that conserved lands can provide, therefore it is easy to claim that more conservation lands are not needed, or that they are too expensive.”

developers even bulldozed over critical migratory bird nesting areas, resulting in Sandhill Cranes dying on the nearby highways as they tried to protect their (flightless) young

The sense of bearing witness to the first, vigorous days of the creation of Mordor hung heavy in the air.

Just ramming such roads through farms, forest, and swamp destroys many hundreds of acres. But, worldwide, roads are often just a pretext for developers and others to come in and transform an area forever. This is why, for example, environmentalists and indigenous groups in Bolivia recently opposed a road through sensitive territory that would forever change the region.

the initial road construction creates potential flooding, erosion, and water quality issues. In addition, road builders don’t always follow proper environmental guidelines, resulting in pollution to the surrounding areas. If runoff containment is insufficient, heavy metals and other contaminants enter the soil.

The fencing of verges and median strips made of concrete barriers accelerates ecosystem fragmentation via isolation of populations.

Nationally, roadkill deaths add up to more than one million vertebrate animals per day.

An oligarchy, with its system of favoritism toward certain elites and special interests, deliberately fosters corruption as a function of its existence. It is often stacked against environmental causes in ways different from a decaying representative democracy. Combine the worst attributes of capitalism with oligarchy and in the future, Florida’s leaders may actually give developers and other special interests even more tools of suppression.

Street lights immediately create additional light pollution in formerly dark-sky rural areas. The now-favored white LEDs, while more energy friendly, are actually worse for nocturnal wildlife and insects because their glow disrupts life cycles, decreases reproduction, and thus further degrades ecosystems. According to a 2016 study, every year, the world loses another two percent of the Earth’s dark skies to light pollution.

larger-scale developments appear, often extending from the existing urban areas, but sometimes plunked down in the middle of nowhere, with the expectation of further infrastructure and services accreting around them. Creating these subdivisions and planned communities is the main goal for developers. This kind of development involves wholesale clearcutting similar to what’s done by ranchers in the Amazon for agriculture, up to 5,000 acres at a time wiped clean, including the topsoil: the complete slaughter and dismantling of a complex system. In its place will come thousands of overpriced, often poorly made houses

mining operations that follow the law have to protect the environment to a far greater extent than development projects

Any wildlife that manages to flee often perishes in new, unfamiliar environments. In place of the native organisms come lawns of useless sod propped up with chemical fertilizer and herbicide

Echoes of these same dysfunctional processes even infiltrate supposed “green” energy in the form of Southeastern forests destroyed to send fuel to biomass plants and efforts by utility companies to nix personal solar in favor of industrial solar farms that, not properly regulated, destroy habitat in a way similar to the worst kinds of development.

The damning thing is how invisible this ecocide feels to those of us who live here and care. The nature of clearcutting with soil removal leaves no evidence of the crime behind—just a void. The way in which much of the ultimate green-lighting for ecocide occurs at the local government level also makes much of it invisible, doomed to reside at best in regional news cycles, but often not even reported on there.

Gopher tortoises often suffer a horrific fate. If you have bought a house of a certain age, in the dry sand scrub that was once prime tortoise territory, chances are you live on top of the dead bodies of gopher tortoises—slaughtered outright or sealed alive in their burrows to suffocate or starve to death. Reports estimate more than 100,000 gopher tortoises have died this way. The true number may be twice that.

Just as with the palmettos, a keystone species, gopher tortoises support all sorts of other organisms, which use their burrows. What this means is that development wipes out entire ecosystems and kills a host of other animals when either of these species is extirpated.

legacy licenses to outright kill gopher tortoises have no end date, meaning some companies still can legally chop up live tortoises to build their subdivisions

It is widely accepted now that cutting down mangroves is foolhardy, however many decades it took for that lesson to be learned. But what we’re doing in other parts of Florida is exactly the same as cutting down mangroves. Combatting increasing heat, flooding, and erosion can be matters of life and death. When you remove mature live oak trees and pine trees that help mitigate these issues, you are creating a future disaster that was partially avoidable, even factoring in the climate crisis.

The story of how we got here includes concerted, planned actions by elites—including developers and parasitic politicians—but gross incompetence and stupidity as well

Under former governor Rick Scott and now DeSantis—who pays lip service to the wildlife corridor while undermining it with most of his policies—the stacking of regional water quality boards and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission with political appointees emboldened to make terrible decisions has become almost laughable. Last year, for example, Florida’s top wildlife official wanted to fill in a South Florida lagoon full of manatees to make a profit in real estate. 

it is not too extreme to recognize that DeSantis’ approach in Florida, including the enemies list, begins to at least feel like something approaching oligarchy, not representative democracy. A corresponding lack of government transparency, despite our Sunshine Law, protects developers and pro-development politicians while making it harder to report on environmental issues.

This initial phase kills and displaces wildlife, liquidates the important mature pines and live oaks,5destroys rare plants and trees, and allows extremely harmful invasive plant species a foothold

warning signs of intense ecocide

Create propaganda to support the idea that reckless development and new weakened environmental rules are actually progress and those who oppose it are extremists

despite so much that is good in our community, Tallahassee has become a cautionary tale of how even Florida cities that have managed to retain biodiversity and climate crisis resiliency can begin to squander it quickly. Elites and special interests similar to those that push the toll roads now enthusiastically push destructive development here. DeSantis’ oligarchy is expressed in the city’s government: a city manager less and less accountable to the public; a smug mayor who silences dissent; and the good ol’ boy nature of the local Chamber of Commerce leadership, which sees itself as a thought-leader while having done little or nothing to fight poverty in traditionally underserved Tallahassee communities —which are often the ones to suffer from lack of a healthy urban canopy

The mindset of an alien occupation is apparent in so many ways, especially through Blueprint, the run-away intergovernmental agency that spends our tax dollars on large-scale projects and infrastructure. Every plan that includes parks or landscaping tends to emerge from a sanitized view of the outdoors from the 1950s. (For example, a Market District park plan that was to emphasize shade trees and wilderness now features a giant tree-less lawn instead.)

The paper of record, the Tallahassee Democrat, has unfortunately become part of the problem. The Democrat, under the current Executive Editor William Hatfield, lacks a dedicated environmental reporter and rarely makes the link between quality of life and the quality of our environment. Stories about developers and new development are more or less press releases from the developers themselves, letting us know vital information such as the fact that one developer, Hadi Boulos, “cries” when he clearcuts properties, mourning the trees. The paper ran no story when the same developer tried to hike the price of new houses by thousands of dollars after homeowners had already signed contracts. 

The very Tallahassee-Leon County economic development agency the newspaper reports on spends thousands of dollars on advertisements in that publication. When confronted about sponsored articles by developers, the paper’s news director, Jim Rosica, had the audacity to write, in a Facebook comment, that these puff pieces “help support the vital journalism we provide every day.”

Our tourist brochure touts Tallahassee’s importance to migratory birds—boasting that “Here you can spot 372 of the 497 species of birds residing in or visiting Florida”—yet we have almost certainly doomed some migratory birds to localized die-offs because when they reach our area there isn’t enough food (seeds, berries, insects) because of habitat destruction. 

Systematic destruction and death came to the Fallschase property in April of 2021. The box turtles hibernating in their burrows would likely have been smothered or killed outright, along with the skinks and ring-necked snakes in the leaf debris. The frogs and the toads would also have had little chance to escape, nor would the flying squirrels, hibernating bats, or anything other than foxes, deer, coyotes, or bobcats. Migrating bird species known to frequent the site, some already nesting, would have had to leave rapidly, including the Hermit Thrush, Blue-headed Vireo, Yellow-billed Cuckoo, and Swallow-tailed Kite.The salamanders would not have had this luxury. Native plants and trees did not have that luxury.

all of these lives existed and had meaning. Box turtles, some as old as 50 years, would have had their own nuanced understanding of the world they moved through.  Did we have a right to kill them? Do we always have a right to kill them?

We have an urgent need for affordable housing that no amount of urban sprawl can provide and every day in my house on the edge of a ravine, I see the wasted opportunity. Instead of half-acre lots with houses built along the top of this ravine, we could have had the vision and imagination for high-density, affordable housing, while still leaving the trough of woodlands below intact. This is perhaps the most terrible truth about all of this maximized destruction: It wasn’t necessary. It wasn’t necessary, given even moderately good and sane urban planning.

the sloppy “wacky Florida Man” narrative invested in by so many journalists and pundits stings because it makes a joke out of what is deadly serious and becoming more so: A state that had been among the wildest outside of Alaska or Montana asks its citizens to passively watch as the nonhuman world is liquidated while we go on about our daily lives and others look on and say we deserve it as a “red” state. 

Worse, foundational ideas buried in a settler colonialism mindset, which previously brought us the slaughter of indigenous people amid “Manifest Destiny,” are still hardwired into our society and these ideas help support the destruction. Trump wanted to “drain the swamp,” Disney literally did, and Elon Musk now wants to do it again to build more of his Space X near Cape Canaveral, in a biodiversity and carbon sink hotspot.8

Florida’s leaders are engaged in acts many societies and cultures would deem evil. They have been given the green light to exploit the state in an extractive way similar to events unfolding in Brazil, Indonesia, and other places we think of undergoing deforestation while not always realizing our complicity and our own perilous condition.

The moral and ethical considerations of entire species being exterminated for the cause of untenable, unplanned, unaffordable development, or even just another Wal-Mart or a parking lot, are absent from most public narrative

When I was born, in 1968, the world had 50 percent more terrestrial wildlife than now. I was born into a world still alive and I will die in a world near death, brought to that condition by our own hand.

For years in America, unmarried, pregnant white women had been disciplined by being hidden in "homes for unwed mothers" and pressured to relinquish their newborns for adoption. Cloistered and closeted, most of these white women remained invisible, even as unwed-mother homes and adoption agencies wanted nothing to do with pregnant black women. Unmarried African Americans mostly kept their babies, and the families were highly visible.

Beginning in 1958, the Mississippi legislature started crafting legislation to discipline unwed mothers. One 1964 bill called for charging them with a felony, punishable by sterilization or three years in prison. The de facto targets were black women and their children

In 1957, at the height of Little Rock's school desegregation fight, Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus enacted a rule to remove families headed by unwed mothers from the welfare rolls. During the same period, Florida ceased to recognize common-law marriages, redefining them as "illicit relationships" and "illegal cohabitation." Florida and Tennessee defined households headed by unmarried mothers—again, disproportionately black women—as "unsuitable" and kicked the women and their kids off assistance.

Seven Southern states enacted laws along these lines.

in 1961, the federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare mandated that children could be removed from homes deemed "unsuitable"—including because of a mother's extramarital sex and cohabitation—if the mom refused to "rehabilitate." Not until 1968 did the Supreme Court forbid welfare bureaucrats from investigating poor parents' sex lives. In the meantime, the foster care system swelled with black and brown children.

While compulsory boarding school attendance for Native American children was abolished in the 1930s, Briggs notes that it was quickly replaced: White welfare workers were soon coming on to reservations to evaluate children's need for foster care. Particularly vulnerable to being taken were children whose mothers weren't married or whose caretakers were extended family, such as grandmothers. (Grandparents were considered too old to raise children.) Again, foster care numbers burgeoned. By the 1970s in North Dakota, Native Americans constituted only 2 percent of the state's population but half of the children in foster care.

One federal study found that a third of Native children were still in out-of-home care in the mid-1980s

Black children entered foster care at an alarming pace as crack charges put their parents in prison. Incarceration rates for women tripled in the 1980s, and four out of five black women in jail or prison had children living with them when they were arrested. Today 10 million American kids, including one in nine black children, have a parent who has been locked up.

Many of us remember the '80s and '90s press panic about "crack babies" with permanently destroyed brains. These babies' abnormal symptoms turned out to be short-lived and mostly due to other conditions related to their mothers' poverty. During the same period, fetal alcohol syndrome in newborns became a concern. It's a medically valid one, although maternal drinking's worst effects on babies are also tied to poverty. But rather than seeking to address the poverty, authorities arrest the pregnant mothers and take their older children. Native women are disproportionately prosecuted.

Then–Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said it best while explaining why she thought taking children from their parents on the border was OK. It was "no different," she explained, "than what we do every day in every part of the United States."

The word “racism” appears once. The phrase “white supremacy” or any of its variations does not appear in the entire guide. 

3. There’s a lot missing Florida’s white history mandate: While it is impossible to teach all of Black history, perhaps the most significant thing about Florida’s guidelines is the stuff that is intentionally left out. There is nothing about redlining and how its residual effects still shape the lives of African Americans. There are eight mentions of “race riots” but only three “massacres” and a single “lynching.” 

Florida’s Caucasian Race Theory mischaracterizes Black freedom fighters’ intentions by ascribing free white men’s values to a few cherry-picked Black individuals. The correct way to teach this would be to simply teach the facts. Approximately five thousand Black men fought for America in the Revolutionary War; more than 20,000 fought against America. Even the Black Loyalists in the American Revolution were not fighting to preserve the British empire. They were fighting for their freedom.

More than one benchmark requires students to learn about “Judeo-Christian values and Christianity’s impact on American society” and only lists Black Christian churches, even though scholars estimate that as many as 30 percent of enslaved Africans practiced Islam. The omission leaves students unaware that many of their religious traditions have roots in Africa and the Caribbean, including the ring shout, gospel music and four of the ten largest Christian denominations in the United States. 

AP African American Studies is banned in Florida, partly because it makes white people uncomfortable. Florida’s STOP WOKE Act prohibits classroom instruction that makes white people “feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress, because of actions, in which the individual played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race.” 

Like the legislation, the new curriculum standards are for white people. Everyone except white people believes that increased public attention to the history of racism is good for society. While 62% of Black people and 58% of Hispanics want schools to teach children about the ongoing effects of slavery and racism, most white people do not. How history is taught in schools has always given Black people anguish and psychological distress; white people are perfectly comfortable with Black people’s discomfort.