Chokoloskee, a Different Development Model — EATING FLORIDA

The tiny fishing settlement of Chokoloskee in southernmost part of Collier County has the distinction of sitting on an enormous shell mound built by pre-Columbian Native Americans. Today, almost every piece of land on the island is covered by shingle-sided homes ranging from small fairly large, mobile homes in every condition imaginable, and rental cottages. To be very charitable indeed, those structures appear to be on the more than slightly ratty, impermanent side. At heart, it’s a simple fishing village made up of vacation homes, week-end retreats, fishermen’s getaways, and retirement cottages ranging from an astounding high of $2.4 million to a mobile home listed at $45,000 (or a vacant lot priced at $35,000). Tacky at the very, very best. No more, no less.

Actually, even that low level development exceeds by far the maximum human extractive use a sensitive environment like the Ten Thousand Islands can tolerate and remain a functioning natural system. Remember to factor in the necessity for potable water and energy to be brought in and sanitary sewage and solid waste to be removed.

But in many ways Chokoloskee is a living window to the past, right up to the non-destructive ways in which the Everglades were used by Westerners for over 100 years before the onslaughts of developers like Barron Gift Collier Senior, who ripped a sizeable chunk out of southwestern Florida and died hungry and bitterly disappointed he hadn’t been able to rip up a hell of a lot more and eat wetlands to his heart’s content.

Chokoloskee, then and now a small island in the central part of the Ten Thousand Islands, began its human extractive life because of its environmental advantages. Those meager benefits proved critical for its first experience with human settlement. Hundreds of fringing islands in the broad Chokoloskee Bay sheltered it from all but the most severe storm action. The island was positioned at the mouth of the Turner River and only a narrow passage separated it from the mainland. It was also the slightest bit higher than surrounding islands.

Perhaps for those reasons, perhaps for others whose logic and symbolism are lost in the mist of time, the Ancient Ones who preceded the peoples we call Native Americans began dumping shells and other detritus on the island. Gradually the island grew in areal extent and height. In a strange, almost surreal sense, the ancient ones were “developing” Chokoloskee for use as a settlement and perhaps a religious or ceremonial center.

Development of land-water resources from a natural state to a human-altered state should not automatically be, by anyone’s definition, a heinous activity. Without development, cities and hence civilization would be impossible. Without development we wouldn’t have places dedicated to economic exchange or intellectual enrichment. Which means we wouldn’t have markets or universities. Therefore, as someone who has studied cities all his adult life and who dearly loves the excitement, gaiety, and intellectual stimulation found only in dense urban areas, I would never argue that development per se is bad or should be prohibited.

Having said that, the nature, scope, scale, and location of development are open to question. And above all its appropriateness in natural and human contexts. For me, appropriateness is the most critical element of all. It was entirely appropriate for the Ancient Ones to develop Chokoloskee Island. By making it slightly larger and slightly higher, the resulting effects on the surrounding environment were miniscule. But, through the later attempts of Hamilton Disston, Barron Gift Collier Senior, other developers yet to be identified, the Corps of Engineers, and the South Florida Water Management District to canalize and drain the majority of the Everglades/Big Cypress basin, the entire South Florida environments from Miami to Naples, Ft. Myers to West Palm Beach, and Lake Tohopekaliga to Cape Sable have been ravaged. That modern development has all but destroyed the area’s natural productivity for hundreds of years and perhaps for the entire history of human occupancy of the Earth.

Appropriate — inappropriate. Those concepts are not difficult to understand, even for chukleheaded civil engineers, water managers, and land developers.

In the early 1840s and 1850s the people we now call Seminoles, for lack of a better name, visited Chokoloskee. It was many centuries after the ancient ones disappeared and 200 years after European depredation and disease destroyed the Calusa. In their increasingly desperate effort to avoid being rounded up and herded against their collective will to Oklahoma, various groups of Seminoles used the island sporadically for farming and as a rest and recuperation base. Until ferreted out by Federal troops and killed, captured, or chased away under gunfire.

Shortly after the Seminoles were run off for the last time, Chokoloskee became a haven for Americans who wanted to live on the fringe of civilization, including fishermen, trappers, charcoal producers, rascals trying to evade the Law, and assorted adventurers who flitted in and out of the Ten Thousand Islands on a sporadic or semi-regular basis. Those comings and goings were typically by boat since Chokoloskee did not have a paved road until the present causeway was built from the mainland in 1956 as part of State Highway 29. Today, not much remains of old Chokoloskee except Charles S. (Ted) Smallwood’s store at the south end of Mamie Street, which was originally established in 1906.

Here’s a tidbit of information that may be of interest to some literary-minded Readers. The infamous Ed Watson was shot down like the dirty dog he was on the docks at Smallwood’s store on October 24, 1910. Accused by a number of his suspicious neighbors of either murder or complicity in several murders, Watson reacted as could be expected. He suddenly raised the shotgun he was carrying, pointed it at the crowd of his accusers, and pulled both triggers. But the storm-soaked shells he had purchased a few days previously at a bargain basement price failed to fire. When he dropped the shotgun and reached for the pistol holstered on his belt he was cut down by a hail of bullets fired by his justly nervous and pissed off neighbors.

Smallwood’s establishment operated continuously as a general store and post office until 1982. In 1992, it was reopened as a restored museum by the National Park Service. Today, Ted Smallwood’s store looks exactly like what it did nearly 100 plus years ago: a pioneer outpost built from scratch at the very edge of civilization. It’s a single-story Frame Vernacular structure, with board and batten siding, raised six feet above the land on wooden piles to escape high storm tides.

The Smallwood store and several dozen crummy-looking houses and trailers are about all that’s left of the old Chokoloskee community. They are fitting reminders of better days when the Ten Thousand Islands, Big Cypress, and the Everglades were regarded as renewable resources and not as capital to be eaten at the banquets of the Big Three powerbrokers and conscienceless politicians until they disappear forever.

Implications

In mid-June 2004, I read in the Ft. Myers News-Press that southwest Florida’s rural roots were being eaten at a rate of nearly 60 acres per day, which is an area about three-fourths as large as a mid-sized regional mall. According to data released in June 2004 by the 2002 U.S. Census of Agriculture, in the past five years Lee and Collier Counties lost more than 105,000 acres of farmland to development, which the reporter seemed to think was a critical loss. Now, would it surprise anyone to know that that farmland used to be either cypress wetlands or pine flatlands? But it shouldn’t surprise you perceptive Readers that the reporter who wrote the article never mentioned wetlands or sensitive environments in her article. Not once. She was only concerned about “lost” farmland. Oh yeah, those farms. The ones that used to be wetlands. The ones that used to be productive natural habitats. So much for “investigative” reporting.

If any of you, gentle Readers, philosophically take issue with my belief that the Federal government has a major role to play in the so-called State’s rights issues so beloved by political conservatives, I offer a piece of advice. Take a good look around the western Everglades/Big Cypress Basin in southern Collier County and see what Federal intervention has partially saved from the uncaring grasp of the State of Florida and the greedy, insatiable developers it so loves and nurtures, especially environmental predators like Barron Gift Collier Sr. and his progeny.

Today, absent Federal intervention, weak though it has been, all of the western Everglades/Big Cypress Basin would look exactly like Miami-Dade County and the Naples metropolitan area. The delicate natural environments would have been irrevocably compromised by well more than a century of collusion among greedy land owners and fat politicians who covered the gamut from feeble to appallingly corrupt, and callously indifferent State regulators whose job was limited to taking orders from corrupt legislators. But the kicker is unless things change drastically in Collier County, the development express that grew as Barron Gift Collier Senior’s terrible legacy will run over and destroy every single wetland in southwest Florida that is not owned and managed by the Federal government or preserved as State parkland. And that’s no exaggeration.