Key Marco: A Tale of Mindless Destruction -- EATING FLORIDA

All too many people look at whatever landscape is in front of them and have little curiosity about why it appears the way it does or how it got to be like that. Many of us are likely to think most of the Midwest was always deforested. Or that the land now constituting most of the Miami-Dade metropolitan area was always relatively dry. We have little appreciation of the role of human agency in shaping our landscapes and how we see the “natural” world.

The following materials are a short primer in human agency. They are meant for Readers who are curious about what all central and southern Florida not controlled by the Federal government will look like if sharp-eyed developers, their pet politicians, and ineffectual State and Federal regulators get their way. The destruction of Key Marco is a metaphor for what is in store for the rest of the State if existing conditions and trends prevail.

Key Marco is the largest island in the archipelago known as the Ten Thousand Islands. As recently as the early 1960s, Key Marco was south Florida’s crown jewel, a masterpiece of habitats singing a multi-voiced chorus of natural splendor and astounding cultural resources with minimal modern development. Human presence weighed lightly on the landscape in the small fishing villages of Old Marco, Caxambas, and Goodland.

The area surrounding Key Marco is part of what geologists call the South Florida Terraced Coastal Lowland, an area characterized by an interconnected land-water complex of streams, estuaries, bays, lagoons, low-lying islands, mangrove swamps, salt water marshes, and wetlands of incredible diversity. The elevated wave-built terraces on Key Marco and other nearby islands, quite the surprise in abysmally flat south Florida, are a result of the ocean’s periodic rising and falling in response to glacial fluctuations. For nearly 6,000 years, the chain of barrier islands, extending from just north of Tampa Bay to Cape Sable, protected the coast from severe storms that pounded Florida’s southwest coastline with regularity.

Those islands and their gracefully terraced shorelines, among which are the remarkable sand dunes on Key Marco, at least one of which rises over 50 feet in elevation, marking the highest natural height above mean sea level in southwest Florida, are a result of two interrelated geomorphic processes. The first consists of the relatively recent landward transport of both clastic (broken rock fragments) and organic sediments previously discharged by rivers associated with the Tampa Bay and Charlotte Harbor estuaries. The second process is the erosion and consequent deposition of indigenous marine materials (shell fragments and other organic detritus) related to waves working the coastal margins. Combine the effects of those processes and you get south Florida barrier islands, specifically the Ten Thousand Islands.

Key Marco and adjacent areas were settled by several waves of peoples, beginning sometime around 4,700 BCE, when Archaic hunting and gathering groups lived on elevated dune ridges surrounding Barfield Bay and on the nearby Horr's Island. About 500 BCE, a critical transition occurred when, for reasons lost in the fog of time, that society turned from its previous emphasis on terrestrial resources and began exploiting marine life. As a result, settlement patterns shifted as new villages became established at water’s edge. Much later, nearly 250 years before the first European contact, the Calusa spread across the Glades and onto Key Marco as part of their domination of southern Florida. Until a combination of warfare and disease, both of which were Spanish versions of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, wiped them off the face of the Earth. Forever.

The first trained archaeologist to excavate Key Marco was Frank H. Cushing, who arrived in 1896. Several carved wooden objects that were obviously very old had been unearthed in 1895 by William Collier while digging in his garden. Collier , one of the first permanent white settlers on the island, immediately recognized them as Native American artifacts and notified several friends in the East, who contacted the well-known Cushing. As a result of a spectacularly successful dig on the island in 1896, Cushing concluded that the peoples living at Key Marco were what he called Pile Dwellers, building platforms on wooden piles driven into the sand and muck.

Author’s Note: Analysis by later investigators indicated that the Calusa in Key Marco lived on mounds or shell middens rather than piles. However, later archaeological investigations in 1964 and 1995 discovered several large houses that had used piles in their construction. Either way, Key Marco had been a major permanent settlement, established and used by a people known as the Muspa, who after 1,300 BCE became associated with and perhaps absorbed by the Calusa.

Cushing’s illustrated monograph on the Key Marco site on Florida’s Gulf Coast was first published more than 100 years ago. His report detailed Florida archaeological discoveries that have never since been duplicated. At one time work at the site was considered among the most important excavations in the world. Until as late as 1970 it was considered the most advanced archaeological investigation anywhere in the United States. Cushing, a researcher of great stature in the burgeoning disciplines of anthropology and social science, was the first professional American archaeologist to interpret artifacts and archeology from a cross-cultural ethnographic perspective and was the first to use the term chiefdom to characterize one of the primary organizational elements in prehistoric aboriginal culture, a term that wasn’t reintroduced to the literature until the 1970s. Equally amazing for that time, Cushing attempted to explain the emergence of the Calusa’s sociopolitical complexity based on the ruins and artifacts that he had excavated, another idea well in advance of its eventual acceptance by the academic archaeological community.

What Cushing found at the Key Marco site was a veritable treasure trove of marine and terrestrial artifacts and also structural evidence of a major Calusa ceremonial center. His research demonstrated that the site had been physically separated from the ocean by a massive human-built sea wall constructed behind a mangrove coast that protected the interior settlement from raging storm surges. Cushing also located numerous drainage canals leading from the coastline to the interior and elevated ceremonial areas constructed on shell mounds (which he had interpreted as piles).

His discovery of an abundance of usually perishable materials that consisted of both marine and terrestrial artifacts established Key Marco as an archaeological site unique in the history of Florida and the American Southeast. Actually, the spectacular Calusa artifacts have no counterparts in prehistoric objects found anywhere in North America. The numerous hooks, harpoons, netting, weights, and floats combined with nearly ubiquitous fish bones indicated a flourishing fishing economy. But, shell hoes and other agricultural implements pointed to at least relatively sophisticated use of terrestrial resources for food production.

Although the numerous shell implements (dippers, spoons, decorative pendants, beads, picks, hammers, chisels, awls, etc.) were remarkable in their variety, Cushing’s major discoveries served to demonstrate that carved wooden tools and objects used in daily life were also common in Key Marco. The incredible array of wooden artifacts Cushing found included trays, cups and bowls, mortars and pestles, ear buttons, plaques and tablets painted with realistic animal representations, carved amulets featuring fish and dolphin motif, adz handles, war clubs, and shark toothed knives.

Of the three-dimensional wooden artifacts, perhaps the most intriguing is a group of fourteen carved and painted masks and figureheads that were found by Cushing in pairs and that merged or transposed animal characteristics on human features. Two carved wood artifacts stand out in that collection. The first is an elegantly carved mask featuring the head of a deer with remarkable lupine attributes, including a wide open mouth in a threat display of large, sharp teeth. The mask was probably designed to be worn at ceremonial functions. Perhaps the most famous of Cushing’s discoveries was a small, strikingly beautiful, half-feline half-human figure posed kneeling that is known as the Key Marco Cat. Today, as sophisticated as we modernists think we are, its elegance and grace literally steal your breath away. It was a find of incredible significance. From the sand and muck he also recovered wooden carvings of indigenous animals: woodpeckers, turtles, wolves, deer, alligators, and pelicans. All rendered in a realistic style.

Subsequent digs proved unsuccessful in locating other artifacts. Today the site of the Calusa village center has been destroyed by extensive construction and urban development around the village of Old Marco. No further investigations are possible owing to the indefensible failure of the State of Florida to protect the site from urban encroachment, development, and eventual destruction. The State twirled its thumbs and stared vacantly into space while developers ripped apart what was Florida’s most important archaeological site for yet another residential subdivision and commercial area.

For interested Readers, the approximate location of Cushing’s dig, which he named the Court of the Pile Dwellers, is in the northern section of the island today known as Old Marco Village. The site is located at the southern end of Vernon Place bordering the cul-de-sac, on lots #7, #8, and #9 (as counted on the west side of the Place from its intersection with Palm Street).

For over 4,500 years, Key Marco had remained practically untouched in terms of human development. Even the early American settlers on the island were primarily fishermen or traders supplying smaller settlements in the Ten Thousand Islands; their occupancy altered the land in ways inconsequential. Their modest landscape changes were confined to limited areas settled by the William Collier and George Cuthbert families at Old Marco, the James Madison Barfield family in Caxambas on Barfield Bay, and the Pettitts on Goodland Bay. Then came Barron Gift Collier Senior, a visionary whose eyes only beheld opportunities to make ever more millions and moved, where else, to southwest Florida. He swooped down and bought the greater majority of Key Marco in 1922 and the possibility of change loomed large.

But, owing to the severe financial climate created by the Great Depression, little of import happened on Key Marco for many decades. Barron Gift Collier Senior died in New York on March 13, 1939, at the age of 66, a disappointed man even though at the time of his death he was Florida’s largest landowner. All land and no money must have been his final bitter lament. Then, in the 1960s, the cash-strapped Collier family sold 20,000 acres on and around Key Marco to the Mackle brothers’ Deltona Corporation, one of south Florida’s largest land developers. Not long after that $7 million sale, the Key was transformed from a sleepy, minimally developed fishing community into the modern-day Marco Island, a water recreation-oriented residential resort and retirement community. That “planned” community offered a subdivision heaven of single-family homes, golf courses, and finger canals to provide pleasure boating access to the surrounding Gulf of Mexico from what had been landlocked parcels.

One small difficulty surfaced as the plans were being prepared. To transform plans into saleable lots, Deltona had to totally trash the existing environment and replace it with a sterile human crudscape. No problem. Not with the corporation’s heavy-duty political contacts and the added clout of the Collier family greasing the way. The developer slithered up to Collier County officials and easily obtained the required zoning and building permits. Next, Deltona approached the State and was handed without hesitation all the dredge and fill permits they desired. Big surprise there. All Deltona had to do was turn over title of a few small, low-lying, undevelopable islands to the State as wildlife sanctuaries. A total of 4,000 acres out of 20,000. That might sound like a lot until you take a good look at those properties. In one fell swoop, Deltona got rid of all the tidal-influenced, seasonally flooded, mosquito-infested islands that would have been extraordinarily difficult or impossible to develop for the right to build higher densities on the choice pieces. Can you spell sweet deal? You bet.

Truth time. The State of Florida didn’t give a wood rat’s ass about a lousy 2,000 or 3,000 acres of premier and biologically productive red mangrove swamp forest and thousands of acres of bay bottoms that would have to bite the development bullet if Deltona got its way. And why would it care? The State had been granting developers the rights to destroy every single natural system in Florida well before that time without blinking an eye or giving negative environmental consequences a single thought. That was, ho-hum, business as usual.

So, with Collier County and the State firmly behind them, what possibly could stop the Mackle brothers from ripping up and raping practically all the Island’s natural habitats and replacing them with paved roads, finger canals, retail strip centers like thousands of others, golf courses, and one terminally boring and architecturally worthless residential subdivision after another? Surely, as a State and a nation we are in absolutely desperate need of more of those exceedingly rare commodities. And, of course, so many sensitive natural environments can be found from coast to coast that they simply cry out to be replaced by one cash-generating retail center or subdivision after the other. Hey, Joe-Bob, in the U.S. property rights be King. Especially if you donate money to the right political campaigns and know the right people in Tallahassee, grease being an essential ingredient in the land development business.

Then again, the relatively substantiveless concept of sensitive natural environment, especially to powerbrokers and their pet pols, fades immediately from the picture when it comes to flint-eyed financial reality. More houses mean more profits in developers’ pockets, a situation that translates into more donations to the election campaigns of fat-cat politicians. And certainly that's the most important consideration in Florida where big business has held the collective testicles of the State Legislature in its ruthless grip from the get-go. A good question is why would anyone want to save Key Marco's complex ecosystems, including shallow bays, miles of uncluttered and undeveloped beaches, the highest natural dune ridges in the State, highly productive estuarine environments, superbly healthy mangrove forests that were vital nurseries for many dozens of species of sport fish and crustaceans, not to mention the unmatched Calusa archaeological sites. Why indeed?

The truth is reality dealt cards from a stacked deck and the ecosystems collectively known as Key Marco and the Ten Thousand Islands were never in the game. Start them bulldozers, boys. Rip out those damned mangroves so the new homeowners have unobstructed views of the water as they kick back on their screened-in porches and attach their margarita and daiquiri IVs.

The Deltona Corporation never hesitated. It rolled up its sleeves and turned that fancy master plan into phased construction projects. Within several years more than 50 percent of what had been Key Marco was developed into the meretricious reality of strip centers, hotels-resorts, and subdivisions of vacation and retirement homes marketed as Marco Island. Fertile and productive ecosystems be damned. Shallow bay bottoms, marine grass beds, and mud flats were dredged and pumped on shore to form new land. Remember, creation of new land equals piles of money in the developer’s pocket. Mangrove forests were literally ripped from the land-water margins. Priceless and irreplaceable wildlife habitat was destroyed without a thought. Finger canals were dug to increase the value of property that had previously been landlocked so the soon to be happy homeowners would have motorboat access to the bays. It didn't matter that many of those canals would ferment in the summer because their gradients were too low and the water too shallow, meaning they couldn't flush naturally before the Sun cooked the organic material into a noxious stew that stunk to high Heaven. Bet your sweet ass that awkward fact wasn't highlighted in the fancy sales brochures. No sir.

All in all, it was typical Florida oceanfront/bayfront residential development. No worse and one hell of a lot better than dozens of similar crappy residential developments anyone could point to in the nearby communities of Naples, Ft. Myers, and the eternally butt-ugly Cape Coral. So, what's the beef you might ask. What Deltona created was a just another Florida retirement-vacation home subdivision project. As was written previously, ho-hum, business in Florida as usual. As Billy-Ray loves to remind me: "Hey, bud, landowners got every legal right to develop their property any way they damned well please."

But several groups of environmental activists in Collier County were understandably appalled by the Deltona Corporation’s intent to develop even more subdivisions in close proximity to natural systems of extraordinary beauty and irreplaceable environmental value. The specific biological treasure the activists were determined to protect was the nearby Rookery Bay (they knew Key Marco was already burnt toast twisting in the wind). Instead of the all too common and ineffectual weeping, wailing, and hand-wringing so characteristic of environmental groups of that time, the angry environmentalists started pounding on the newly formed U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, demanding that they do their jobs and enforce provisions of the National Environmental Protection Act and Section 404 of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act.

That's when the totally unforeseeable and almost unthinkable happened. Surprise of surprises, in 1971 the Corps, without doubt deathly afraid of being dragged into the national spotlight by their then chief nemesis, the President’s Council of Environmental Quality, and correctly identified as the environmental vandal it has always been, issued a stop order. Deltona was forced to cease all development activities until the Corporation applied for and was granted the Federal dredge and fill permits that had previously been conveniently overlooked. Or thought not to apply to their Marco Island construction projects. Isn't it always better to be blissfully ignorant of the law than knowingly culpable?

Months earlier Deltona had requested permits to dredge over eighteen million cubic yards of underwater materials (better start thinking total bay bottom destruction), build 70 additional miles of canals, and destroy 2,200 acres of mangrove forest in order to construct 5,700 more single-family houses in its next construction phase. With the stop order, those permits, plus others, hung in the balance. After a very bitter and protracted public battle between Deltona and environmentalists, the Corps refused to issue the required permits.

The Deltona Corporation had no choice but to fold its tents and move on to other areas to create unique subdivisions the likes of which had never seen before on the face of the Earth. Sure, and like my friend Billy-Ray, don't we all believe in the absolute right of property owners to develop their land as they see fit without interference from the state? No matter what beautiful, unique, and sensitive environment gets ripped and raped in the process. Property rights do be King in the good, ol' U.S. of A.

One stunningly clear but not fond memory of my first visit to Marco Island in 1977 won’t seem to stay pushed back in the corners of my mind so I'll share it with you. As a university professor teaching a course that combined land use and environmental planning, I had taken a group of students to a construction site near Smokehouse Bay in the northern part of the Island. We had driven into the site on a rough sand-gravel track that is now paved and identified on maps as Tigertail Court.

It was a beautiful morning in early June, a few minutes before 7:00 AM. Most of the construction crew was gathered in some sort of meeting in front of the project manager’s trailer and paid no attention as we climbed out of our cars and wandered around the site. After a few minutes we came to a bayshore area where a group of undisturbed red mangroves (Rhizophora mangle for the botanically inclined) stood a few feet out in the water. Their characteristic reddish arched prop roots gave the mangrove a very distinctive appearance that can be recognized even by botanical neophytes like me. The trees were adjacent to a patch of heavily disturbed sandy ground that had recently been completely denuded of landside vegetation. The scars appeared painfully fresh, as though the trees and bushes had been ripped from the earth only the day before, which, we later learned, was exactly what had happened.

In a hushed tone a sharp-eyed student called our collective attention to a bald eagle perched high in a nearby baldcypress. Larger and far bulkier than I had imagined, it sat without moving, its eyes glaring intently at the water, not at us, as it searched for breakfast. We all froze, speaking in soft whispers since we were standing much closer to the eagle than I would have believed possible. It was a spellbinding, magical moment.

Suddenly the morning's serenity was shredded by a ferocious explosion as a nearby bulldozer roared into action. The eagle turned and stared dyspeptically in our direction for the briefest moment, then lifted off, heading for some unknown and obviously more peaceful vantage point. It took a few minutes before we were able to catch our breaths and articulate individual and shared feelings about the sharp disconnect between urban development and indigenous wildlife. It was a distressing but, at the same time, unforgettable moment in the revealed meaning of modern life.

Another reflection. Today there sits on my desk, not more than a foot away as I type at my computer, a treasured artifact retrieved from Marco Island those thirty years ago. It's an old seashell, a Busycon contrarium according to one of my marine scientist friends, or a left-handed whelk in everyday language (also known as a lightning whelk). Thousands are found on beaches throughout southern Florida every year. What makes this one so special? It is a Native American artifact. Some unknown Calusa took a rock and knocked a hole in the wide, upper body of the shell, into which she stuck a branch an inch or so thick and created a rudimentary hoe for digging in the sandy soil. Handling it now, I feel an ineffable connection to that unknowable person. This simple implement is even more treasured since I retrieved it from a rubbish pile at a home construction site on a vegetated Calusa mound in the Indian Hills neighborhood of what had been the old fishing village of Caxambas, where it was waiting for the trash man to haul it away.

Remember the old saw? One man's trash is another's treasure. And so it is with islands, only what had become one corporation's profit center might have functioned as an environmental and cultural preserve of world-class significance, providing any number of insights into Florida's complex past for many thousands of visitors each year. But in the great scheme of life it was not meant to be. Thanks to hard-eyed men like Barron Gift Collier Senior and the Mackle brothers, the incredible treasure that had been Key Marco was bastardized into the profanity of Marco Island.

More than ten years ago, on our way to catch a plane in Miami, my wife and I stopped in Marco. I was unable to resist the lure of revisiting old memories and re-opening old wounds. I spent so much time wandering around, cursing developers and the State of Florida, that my patient and long-suffering partner suggested we stay overnight on the Island instead of driving to Miami. Initially, and quite indignantly, I refused on the grounds that staying there would somehow sanction the desecration of Key Marco. But in the end I was persuaded by her calm rationality. We were both too tired to drive so stayed the night at a large, well-known (but unnamed to protect the guilty) Beach Hotel and Resort.

While unpacking I ordered cold refreshments to be brought to our room. A little toddy for our weary bodies. While waiting for the drinks I gazed down at the swimming pool, to check out the water quality, to be sure. We were seven stories up and almost directly overlooked the pool area. I noticed some sort of animal activity high in one of the palm trees at the edge of the concrete sunning deck. Thinking it to be a bird's nest, I retrieved my well-worn but reliable binoculars from a carry-on and focused on the tree top. Low and behold, it was a nest of rats. Yes, rats. I'm not exaggerating. Nesting right there in the palm tree no more than 30 feet from the pool. I was delighted. In spite of all human attempts to wipe out every creature within miles, the one animal that managed to survive, and to thrive judging from the number of pups I counted, was the common roof rat, which is of course an exotic in southern Florida, another juicy irony.

When I called the hotel manager to share this pleasant piece of news, he was singularly unimpressed, either with my sincerity or my powers of observation. I couldn't tell which. He flat out refused to believe my tale and was only a half-tone away from outright rudeness. Until I suggested that a call to the Rodent Control Division of the Collier County Health Department might take care of what could prove to be an infestation dangerous to the health and safety of his guests. I told him I would be more than happy to meet the County's Health Department personnel at the pool the next morning and point out the tree in which the nest was located. He declined my gracious offer of assistance and instead sent the Stoli and tonics to our room at no charge and promised to remove the nest from the tree. So, now when I think of the development of Marco Island I remember the rats in paradise, two-legged and four-legged. Somehow, the memory feels refreshingly appropriate.

Implications

Although some environmentalists regarded the Corps's action on Key Marco in stopping the continued destruction as a major victory, most believed it was hollow and meaningless. Myself included. By that time most of the damage had been done. More than 60 percent of the Key had been developed rather than Deltona Corporation's desired 96 percent (not counting the 4,000 acres proposed to be set aside as a "nature" preserve). If you travel to Marco Island today, most of it looks exactly like dozens of similar residential oceanfront, vacation-home destinations throughout the State. And, your friend Elrod might ask, "Why all the fuss over one relatively insignificant island? So what if it was developed? Ain't no big deal, eh? Besides, don't people need nice places to play golf and retire in comfort and drink themselves into oblivion?"

To provide an intelligent response to the question about Key Marco's development, we need to establish a few rudimentary facts, especially how many similar residential vacation/resort developments are in Florida today. Surely, we could count many hundreds if not many thousands. But how many large barrier islands in Florida have widely varying elevations; sensitive marine, estuarine, and upland habitats; and priceless, world-class cultural resources like Key Marco? A precious few have one or two very weak similarities but absolutely none come close to the same combination of world-class features that characterized Key Marco. No comparable island existed anywhere in the Sunshine State or in the entire United States. That fact is absolutely beyond debate. Key Marco was a truly unique natural and cultural environment in all the United States. One of a kind. Irreplaceable. Pristine. Breathtaking. And that’s exactly what the fuss was about and what was lost forever. To developers intent on creating more subdivisions and strip centers and state regulators who, frankly, didn't give a shit about pristine and irreplaceable natural or cultural environments. Profit is KING in our land of the blind, indifferent, and greedy.

A question with far greater implications is how difficult would it have been for the State of Florida to step up and preserve that unique island for posterity? Obviously, given the hard reality of history, that task was far too difficult, much too expensive, and pregnant with political risk. You must remember the fundamental rule of Florida realpolitik: mangroves, sub-tropical barrier islands, wetlands, sensitive ecosystems, and archaeological sites once inhabited by dead Calusa do not vote. And, far more importantly, they do not contribute to politicians' campaign chests at election time. So, who speaks for them? Almost no one with political clout, if you must have the truth. And those who do speak are usually dismissed out of hand as simple-minded (meaning deranged or stupid beyond belief) tree-huggers or off the wall enviro-radicals who deep down think that we should all be happy living without fossil fuel consumption in a new Stone Age.

In the struggle to preserve something of Florida's truly unique natural and cultural environments for the public, the State of Florida and its regulatory agencies proved monumentally incompetent and callously indifferent. And Federal agencies with jurisdiction stepped up to the plate far too late, and then only with the greatest reluctance and precious little appetite to make a difference. What happened was the applied definition of too little, too late. The development of one-of-a-kind Key Marco into the run of the mill subdivision community today known as Marco Island is a low-water mark even in the bleak history of environmental stewardship by the State of Florida.

The sad truth is, if conditions do not change dramatically, what happened to Key Marco is an excellent guide to the future of the Green Swamp, Big Cypress, the those sections of the Everglades that are not incorporated into the National Park, and the State's remaining quasi-natural environments. Because America is all about putting money into political campaigns so that the politicians elected will be easily controlled and manipulated for the benefit of their contributors. Period. Anyone who thinks that either the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which has been a tool of Congress since its inception, or the U.S. EPA will step up to do their legislated jobs are naive or delusional. Congress, as currently constituted, is deep in the pockets of the large campaign contributors so nothing that is close to environmentally friendly has a chance in Hell of becoming law. That is the hard reality in which we now live. Get used to it.