Creation of the Immokalee Landscape — EATING THE EVERGLADES

Travelers who take State Route 29 from the Tamiami Trail north toward Corkscrew Swamp  first drive through Copeland. That tiny settlement used to be an old lumber town but today is the headquarters of the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve. If those intrepid travelers continue north they might miss, if they blink too often, a string of micro-villages: Jerome, Deep Lake, Rock Island, and Miles City. Wide, oily patches on the road, each and every one without a great deal to recommend them. Other than those small settlements, cleared, open farms, ranch land, and pine plantations border the east side of the well-maintained two-lane highway for most of the journey. Most people are surprised to learn that all the land from the Tamiami Trail north to Immokalee was formerly cypress wetlands before forest clearing, drainage, grazing, agriculture, and fires destroyed the natural landscape.

Immokalee is high on my list of Florida places to talk about for a powerful reason. Like Marco Island, it represents the real-world nightmare that grew out of the vision of Hamilton Disston, Henry Flagler, Barron Gift Collier Senior, Ed Ball, and numerous other Florida developers. When people challenge me, demanding to know what’s wrong with establishing farms and ranches in the Everglades-Big Cypress Basin, I ask them if they’ve ever visited Immokalee. Typically, the answer is negative. So I tell them to visit and take a good look at the surrounding countryside along Route 29. When they drive into Immokalee, all they’ll see are planted pinelands and cleared land in ranches and farms. They won’t see many indications of a landscape that’s remotely natural. Most people who live, work, or travel through the surrounding area have little idea that it was and remains part of the Big Cypress Swamp.

The landscape around Immokalee was transformed from what was to what you see today through a series of steps that were sometimes discrete and separated in time and other times were intentionally sequential. Small-scale commercial harvesting of timber in what then was Lee County began in the latter part of the 19th Century and continued through the 1960s, growing in intensity and areal extent every year until it became a huge business. For decades, more than 150 railcars loaded with baldcypress logs were hauled out each month. Since each railcar held between 60,000 and 80,000 pounds, think about how many baldcypress trees had to be logged to fill an average of nearly 2,000 railcars each year. And then think about what that destruction had to do to what had been a natural landscape almost totally untouched by previous human use.

By about 1900, because of the extensive timber harvest and land clearing, cattle grazing had become the primary agricultural activity in that part of southwest Florida and continued as such for many decades. Pastures were created on freshly drained land from which the marketable baldcypress had been removed by ever increasing and ever profitable logging operations.

The completion of the Tamiami Trail-U.S. Route 41 and various drainage canals dug by order of Barron Gift Collier Senior in 1928 brought high-value commercial vegetable production, especially tomatoes, to the newly-named Collier County. Those agricultural operations were followed in the 1960s by citrus crops and pine plantations and, at various key locations, by human settlement. It was that gradual transformation of natural habitat to logged-over land to drained pastures to field crops to citrus trees and pine plantations and finally to urban/suburban real estate that in Barron Gift Senior’s eyes looked like a harvest of gold that kept on giving. And that’s the Immokalee Landscape.

Author’s Note: The same transformation of sensitive natural landscapes to highly altered states has occurred in throughout Florida. On November 21, 2004, an article written by Gregg Fields and Nathalie Gouillou in the Miami Herald detailed the rise of Homestead from the ashes of Hurricane Andrew. One specific sentence that caught my eye was: “Thousands of rooftops are sprouting from former agricultural fields.” And what were those fields in their previous life? The Everglades. Homestead was growing so fast in the 1990s and early 2000s that planners expected the City’s population, currently 33,000, to double in the next seven years. And all those new rooftops would be sprouting from where? From agricultural fields that were part of the Everglades and were drained and developed from 1915 through the 1920s by Henry M. Flagler’s Model Land Company. If you Readers have environmental consciences and deeply held concerns for our collective future you won’t forget that the lesson of the Immokalee Landscape applies throughout the Sunshine State and not just to southwest Florida.

But there’s more. Even though Barron Gift Collier Senior is long dead and buried, his legacy lives on in the form of various corporations and business enterprises that are actively involved in southwest Florida land development. It shouldn’t surprise perceptive Readers that several of the Collier business ventures own a considerable amount of land around Immokalee. Or that those firms are working hard to bring economic development to the area and therefore funnel more and larger profits into their pockets. Eating the Everglades has become a well-established Collier tradition. The genuinely big surprise is that Thomas Monaghan, founder of Domino's Pizza, former owner of the Detroit Tigers, and a very wealthy fellow indeed, is also involved in that process. As is Ave Maria University, the very first new Catholic university to be built in the United States for 40 years.

Monaghan, the University, and Barron Collier Companies have formed an unlikely but powerful joint venture to develop a large chunk of land (as large as 5,000 acres and maybe many times larger) five short miles south of Immokalee. Monaghan has given the University an enormous pile of money ($240 million to establish the University and another $300 million for an endowment program for the future) to get the project off the ground. Barron Collier Companies, recognizing an angel when it sees one (albeit a financial one in this case), immediately jumped on the bandwagon and donated 750 acres to the school. Naturally, it and allied Collier-family companies own most of the land around the University and expect to make a real killing by developing those properties for single-family homes and strip centers amidst golf courses on as many as 5,000 additional acres. Hey, no sense turning your nose up at a sweet deal, right? Even if the damned Papists are involved. (Author’s Note: Relax, Sister Mary Josepha. Born and reared Catholic, I attended and graduated Catholic schools from elementary through graduate school so don’t think I’m being more than just a tad sarcastic here.) And remember, we’re talking about rural southwest Florida, in the midst of Cracker heaven, where hard-shell Baptists are at the top of the religious pecking order and Catholics have been, well, tolerated at the very best, especially since most of the lowly Hispanic migrant farm workers are of that faith.

But, all kinds of things change when a 10,000 pound gorilla named Monaghan armed with hundreds of millions of dollars comes to the dance. Which is when tolerance suddenly becomes the magic word. You bet, podna. Say. How do they do that sign of the cross thing?

More critical changes are on the plate for the Immokalee area. In mid-June 2004 Governor Jeb Bush approved two special taxing districts that would directly affect the creation of Ave Maria University and its nearby town. Bush’s signature meant that Barron Collier Companies now has the power to build and maintain community services for Ave Maria University and the town that one day is expected to have an estimated 20,000 residents. That taxing district consists of about 10,000 acres. And Collier Enterprises can begin protecting land west of the Ave Maria District in an area that now will be known as the Big Cypress Stewardship District, which has slightly less than 22,000 acres. (Author’s Note: The Big Cypress Stewardship District? Did anyone miss the blatant hypocrisy of the name? Stewardship, indeed.) The two Districts are allowed to construct and maintain roadways, traffic signals, street lighting, bridges, sewage treatment systems, and even water-landscape plantings. They also are able to finance projects from revenue bonds and levy property taxes on residents within the Districts to pay for future growth and to provide public safety services. However, the Districts cannot exercise police power or planning and zoning, which remain in the hands of the County. That may give some people a sense of confidence but only if they close their eyes and pretend they’re not in southwestern Florida or in a county known as Collier. Named of course after none other than Barron Gift Collier Senior.

With Monaghan’s mega-millions and the various Collier companies land development expertise and political power behind it, the University expected that its first phase of 950 acres would be completed by 2006. Eventually the University and the adjacent town it is planning to build may have as many as 20,000 residents and occupy as many as 4,300 acres. Once completed, the town will also have 1,800-acres of parks and lakes as well as hotels and office and retail space. Not to mention hundreds of single-family homes ranging from $200,000 to $500,000 plus. Hey, it could easily happen. Right in the heart of the former agricultural fields that in a previous life had been Big Cypress wetlands.

Speaking of former wetlands, the University and the town are located at the edge of Camp Keais Strand, a critical flow-way connecting the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge and Big Cypress National Preserve in the south with the Corkscrew Regional Ecosystem Watershed project to the north. But the real beauty of the Immokalee Landscape and the genius of Barron Gift Senior is that its transformation from natural area to cultural landscape is so complete that if conservation groups try to raise the issue of environmental degradation, spokespersons for the joint venture can hold up their hands in righteous indignation and wide-eyed innocence and claim not to know anything about sensitive ecosystems. Hey, look around, Joe-Bob. All you see are cattle ranches, tomato farms, and pine plantations. Not wetlands. Man, what the hell’s wrong with them stupid-ass tree-huggers? What wetlands they looking at?

What indeed, is what the Corps of Engineers asked and, having found no adequate answer by its civil engineering and water management standards, issued all necessary permits in April 2005 to enable the project to move forward.

Implications

The Immokalee Landscape is what will happen to all of south Florida if environmentalists are tossed into the trash pile as irresponsible naysayers. What you see around Immokalee is the sterile humanscape that is waiting in the wings to replace what remains of the complex land-water nexus that is the Big Cypress and the western Everglades. Creating the Immokalee Landscape we have today required the complete transformation of a natural environment into a cultural artifact. What’s highly ironic is that all the ditching, drainage, and diking activities in the area to get rid of excess water have so lowered the groundwater table that farmers around Immokalee now are forced to irrigate their crops to obtain the requisite yields. So much for the ability of chuckleheaded civil engineers, water managers, and land developers to understand, much less control, that complex environment.

By the way, who do you suppose owns much of the agricultural and grazing lands around Immokalee? Go ahead, you’re allowed to take a wild-ass guess. The Immokalee Ranch Partnership, owned at least in part by the Barron Collier Company and Collier Enterprises, is a cow/calf operation on more than 70,000 acres located primarily in Collier County. And not too far away is Silver Strand Farms, with 5,000 acres producing tomatoes, bell peppers, cucumbers and sod, and Silver Strand Groves, with 15,000 acres that annually produce five million boxes of oranges. Barron Gift Collier Senior and his peculiar brand of environmental stewardship live on and on and on. A Gift that keeps on giving. You have to remember that that man had a great deal of respect for the land he and his companies managed. Right. Respect. And also remember how that word is spelled: P-R-O-F-I-T-S. Shades of Henry Flagler and Ed Ball.

For the moment, despite all the development that is waiting anxiously in the wings, Immokalee is still a rough frontier-type town populated largely by farm workers, ethnic and racial minorities, and rural poor. Home of the Immokalee Regional Raceway (a drag strip), it is best known today for cowboy bars where Tony Lama facials and body massages are common events on testosterone-heavy Saturday nights. If your fantasy life includes wanting to see a typical Florida farming-ranching town without frills or fancy extras, you can do it in Immokalee if you hurry. You can also have lunch, gas up the car, fill the coolers with ice, stretch your legs, and maybe attend church on Sunday if you are so inclined. But for all its rough, working-class charm, Immokalee is not on my list of places to live, work, or even visit for more than an hour or so. My suggestion is to take a long, hard look at the area that forms the Immokalee Landscape as you drive through. It’s Hamilton Disston’s, Ed Ball’s, and Barron Gift Collier Senior’s dreams of Florida come true. I hope it isn’t yours. Want my advice? Take a quick look, gas up and haul your sorry ass out of town.

Let’s end this chapter with a couple assumptions. First, assume that Barron Gift Senior hadn’t suffered the financial reversals of the real estate boom and bust 1920s and the hammer blows of the Great Depression. Second, assume he had proceeded with all his plans to tame the hostile wilderness infested by gators and snakes, which, of course, he respected a great deal. If those assumptions were fact instead of fiction, what today would most of Collier County and the Big Cypress Swamp look like? The answer is right in front of our eyes. The Immokalee Landscape and the Naples metropolitan area would stretch all the way across south Florida to merge with heavily urbanized Miami-Dade County. The natural systems we call the Big Cypress and the Everglades would be but faint memories enshrined perhaps in the names of office parks or another university in the State system, thanks to the fat-cat politicians whose election campaign chests have been filled for decades by their powerbroker buddies. And how appropriate would that be?