Stay the Fuck out of Florida! We're Closed!
If you haven’t heard yet, Florida is closed. We can not accommodate any more people!
Florida’s real estate is sinking, literally! The most recent sinkhole took place in the karst county of Pasco in the ironically named Land ‘o Lakes community. The sinkhole began right across the street from a neighbor whose backyard is adjacent to a man made canal. In this video the ground becomes as fluid as a lake as a house sinks into the ground. The hole grew much bigger than it shows in this video stretching all the way across the street into the forward neighbor's yard, threatening other houses and devouring part of the neighbors house as well. If this thing keeps growing the community will have one more lake to add to its number.
Sure you might look at a map and say there is plenty of room for more families to relocate to Florida, but you would be very wrong. To thrive people need more than the space created by destroying animal habitats and filling in wetlands. Most importantly they need potable water, which Florida now has a fearful shortage of, and I’ll tell you why! Bottled water, cows, golf courses, and mass manufactured communities.
Background:
Only 2.5% of Earth’s water is freshwater, and 99% of that is in glaciers and Icebergs. That leaves 0.025% of the Earth’s water accessible to us. Much of that comes in the form of collected precipitation stored in lakes, mountain tops, or in groundwater. Most of Florida’s is stored in underground limestone caverns called aquifers. Think of them as underground rivers. In some places they actually spring up from the ground in lakes called “springs” and flow out into magical crystal clear rivers.
As recently as the early 1900s almost no one wanted to live in Florida. There was water everywhere! On the ground, under the ground, and in the air, you couldn’t escape the wetness. In fact, if Hell was filled with water but was still just as hot, you would have Florida. It was a wild natural landscape with nothing but swamps, predators and bugs. Somehow indigenous people managed to tolerate Florida’s natural conditions for over 12,000 years, but it wasn’t a place white folks wanted to settle, save Tarzan and Jane.
However today it’s quite a different story! Swampland has been drained to make room for communities, and golf courses. The water under the ground (called ground water) has been used up to irrigate the green grass essential for disguising the natural environment that people move here for, into the unnatural manicured utopia it has become. And for a time, it was paradise. However the growth of agriculture, development, and bottling companies have been overtaxing Florida’s water reserves for decades.
The current governor Rick Scott continues to grant companies like Nestly carte blanche to pump the groundwater rightly belonging to his voters, for just the price of a permit (A few hundred bucks). To a company pumping out 500,000 gallons a day that is basically free. The people of Florida do not benefit one iota from this deal, yet they suffer all the costs. It’s probably safe to assume that Nestly and other bottlers are paying someone in Tallahassee for this privilege. Back in 2009 then governor Charlie Crist proposed charging bottlers by the gallon, however with corrupt Skeletor stunt double Rick Scott in office, that dream went down the drain.
Florida has a lot of cows, because people love their beef. We eat way too much of it and it has a devastating environmental impact. The old term “Florida Cracker” comes from the cattle driving days when cattle farmers would use whips to drive their cattle. Today the Beef industry is still a huge part of Florida agriculture. The problem is that cattle uses up 3 times the water as oranges. Surprised? It costs a lot to raise a cow, and they eat a lot of vegetation. In fact, filling your belly with beef costs 3 times the amount of vegetation as stuffing yourself with salad. That is very taxing to our water resources.
Developers love old people. Not just the old people that come here for the thriving funeral and healthcare industries but the ones that love to golf and live in golfing communities. They love to knock down trees, fill in wetlands and put useless grass everywhere! The problem is that when you knock down trees and fill in wetlands you destroy the land’s ability to hold onto water. Instead of evaporating and continuing the water cycle, the water is runoff into the ocean and you end up with a lot less rain. Compound that with all the water needed to keep that grass green, and you have an extremely un-green situation!
Developers design these neighborhoods with no concern for the future of the community. They don’t care that the water resources are already overtaxed beyond the hope of a sustainable future. They get as many people to move to a new Utopia with names like “Avalon” and “Hunter’s Green”, which in reality are drained swamplands now prone to sinkholes. They build an abundance of cheap but nice looking houses that don’t last the test of time, but who cares because neither do old people. It’s the next generation of homeowners that has to repipe, replace roofs, walls and floors, and fill in sink holes. Ten years later while your house is literally in a hole, the developers have packed up shop and are retired on their own private island.
If you were thinking about coming here to florida for anything longer than a vacation, please reconsider. Though we would love to have you, we really wouldn't. Instead stay where you are and enjoy a nice cold bottle of water courtesy of Florida’s parched citizens.
References for this article:
Book - Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S.
https://fcit.usf.edu/florida/lessons/water/water.htm