Florida: Foul water, fouler politics
Earlier this year, the Florida legislature approved and Gov. Rick Scott signed a new water law that wiped out a longstanding January 2015 deadline that mandated a radical reduction in the torrents of pollutants that for decades have poured into Lake Okeechobee. It’s the largest body of water in the state and the health of the Everglades and Florida Bay hinge on the quality of its water.
The writing was on the wall in 2015 when the deadline came and went and after fifteen years the state was nowhere near meeting the standards laid down by the 2000 Lake Okeechobee Protection Act.
Lake Okeechobee is only one of Florida’s major waterways that remain severely polluted thanks to laws and policies adopted since Republicans won control of the legislature and the governor’s office nearly a generation ago. Even more troubling, short of a massive reversal in partisan fortunes, the quality of much of Florida’s water will get worse over the coming decades. The new water law virtually guarantees that outcome by moving back the deadline for the cleanup for at least twenty years.
How did we get into this deplorable situation? Recently, Flint, Michigan, became the tar baby of water pollution in the United States when its drinking water was found to be contaminated with lead, a substance that adversely affects human health and can stunt the mental development of exposed children. But Florida has the same toxic mix of money-fueled complicity between politicians and business and the defunding and understaffing of agencies charged with protecting the environment that caused the Flint debacle. Indeed, our homegrown toxic concoction has been gaining strength for nearly a generation, scoring success after success as Republicans gained total dominance in both Houses of the legislature and a lock on the governor’s office.
Backers of the latest and greatest assault on the quality of water in Florida claim there is a public policy rationale for the new law. Their arguments are laughable. Power—specifically the power of the toxic mix—is why this piece of legislation giving carte blanche to polluters for an indefinite period of time became law.
From the Miami Herald:
“With the backing of the same powerful business interests who previously stalled cleanup efforts the latest overhaul of state water quality policy—quickly signed by Gov. Rick Scott—simply deletes the deadline and sets another at least twenty years down the road. And the rules for enforcing the new plan remain uncertain, requiring another round of legislative approval.”
Among other adverse consequences, the water law of 2016 may deliver the kill-shot to the already wounded Everglades, the survival of which depends on a clean flow of water from Lake Okeechobee. It would be a world-class crime against the environment.
The opening lines in Marjorie Stoneman Douglas’ classic, “The Everglades: River of Grass,” read:
“There are no other Everglades in the world.
“They are, they have always been, one of the unique regions of the earth, remote, never wholly known. Nothing anywhere is like them…”
Florida’s politicians and its greediest business interests are not content to contribute to the extinction of a few species. They are willing to risk the extinction of a whole ecosystem for the sake of campaign contributions and a better profit margin.
To talk about a toxic mix is not an exercise in spinning out conspiracy theories. It is to coin an apt metaphor for an ugly reality.
From the Miami Herald: “The agriculture industry, power companies and farmers …have contributed $1.2 million in PAC money since March to Agriculture Secretary Adam Putnam, widely expected to make a run for governor in 2018. Caldwell’s PAC received just over $114,000 from the groups since 2014.”
Coincidences there are, despite what some people proclaim. This just isn’t one of them. A ten-fold increase in campaign contributions to the head of an agency that plays a huge role on the water issue is no more a coincidence than the head of North Korea always being overwhelmingly reelected.
Rick Scott is not the only business-friendly Republican governor to gut water pollution by the simple expedient of erasing a deadline. Jeb Bush did it in 2003 when he pushed back the deadline for reducing phosphorus contamination in the Everglades. That took chutzpah. But
Rick Scott is in a whole other class, chutzpah on steroids.
Like the snows of Kilimanjaro and the glaciers of South America, the Everglades may well have its days numbered. Some weekend soon, go there and experience it. Take your kids. There are no other Everglades. The one we have may not be there for very long.
