cat patrons of private hunting clubs where, for large fees, one may shoot
large, exotic animals. Both characters are avenging nemeses not only of the
publicly messy but of developers and their shady political enablers.^8
What is called development in South Florida includes also a well-drained
agriculture empire. Below Miami, around Homestead and Florida City,
down the eastern border of Everglades National Park, endless fields of vege-
tables and citrus stretch out between arrow-straight canals. Workers speak
en españoland live incolonias. Were the air not so humid, and were the
canals not carrying water away from rather than to the croplands, a visi-
tor might mistake this surreal scene for the Imperial Valley at the bottom
of California. More disorienting—is this another aspect of the ‘‘postmod-
ern’’?—on my road atlas this landscape is part of the Everglades, indicated
by not only a printed label but a cartographer’s symbol for wetlands. So, too,
is the rural countryside northwest of Miami, up to Lake Okeechobee. A drive
along U.S. Route from Miami’s suburban fringe reveals not grass, stand-
ing water, or alligators, however, but forty miles of continuous sugar plan-
tations. Then, from the western shore of the lake, down Florida Route ,
which shadows the dredged and locked Caloosahatchee River toward Fort
Myers, spread more miles and miles of orange groves—also in territory des-
ignated Everglades. All this inland agricultural gigantism, like the sprawl-
ing coastal built landscape, results from the twentieth century’s ingenious
engineering, armed with remarkable machines of war against nature. The
recent multibillion-dollar, multiyear plan to restore the Everglades’ natural
hydrology could be termed a profoundly postmodern dialogue: The latest
techno-genius engages older techno-genius in order to condemn techno-
genius, sort of. We must wait and see. As observed before, there is no such
thing as perfect restoration of historical landscapes, and the pressures of
migration and greed are never to be underestimated.^9
Now move a short distance inland, to the Atlantic and Gulf coastal plains,
to the piney woods of legend and fact, an enormous southern subregion
always rivaling Appalachia in rustic poverty. With a few notable exceptions,
little of this tidewater landscape was under cultivation before the Civil War.
Instead, entrepreneurs established naval stores industries, especially tur-
pentining, among towering stands of longleaf pines. Then came rolling de-
struction, as we have noticed, which began in North Carolina about
and then moved down through Georgia, into northern Florida, and across
into Texas’s big woods. Next came tobacco, sometimes peanut farming,
and, later, short-lived assembly plants. The young, able, and ambitious (or
desperate)—always at the forefront of migration—fled. The next big thing,