What Jeb and George are doing to Florida

Rejoice, citizens of the Sunshine State: Florida is saved. Our waters will remain as pellucid as a summer sky; our sandy beaches will remain as white as Britney Spears' teeth. Our governor and our president have agreed to pay three oil companies and the rich folks who own Collier County to pack up the heavy equipment and go away. Newspapers are casting garlands. Audubon Society types are rolling over and purring. Let us crown Jeb Bush with native Florida laurels (Kalmia hirsuta) as the Environment Governor.

Nature is, of course, above politics.

Now if you buy that, go on back to sleep. For the rest of you, here's what's really going on. Jeb and George Bush recently cut a $235-million deal with taxpayer money that will neutralize a number of natural gas and oil drilling sites in the Gulf of Mexico and near the Everglades. There are now nine fewer active leases off the northern gulf coast and less of a chance that we'll have to scrub bubbling crude off herons and panthers in the Big Cypress Swamp. This is a good thing, and you should be grateful.

This is also a political thing, and you should be suspicious. Let's not forget that George W. Bush would stick a derrick in the White House Rose Garden if he thought he'd find black gold under the Madame Isaac Pereires. He is not offering to retire leases off the coast of California. He still wants to drill in the Alaskan wilderness.

The Bush Fraternity is clearly hoping this happy story (Chevron can't hurt the porpoises now!) will harvest green votes. But what about the cement plant on the Ichetucknee, the one that was supposed to be clean as a limestone spring and as unobtrusive as a water lily? It has gotten bigger and filthier while your back was turned. What about the legislative raids on Preservation 2000, the fund set up to buy unspoiled lands for parks and wilderness areas? Republican oligarchs pirated $75-million from P2000 in 2001, then swore piously that it was just this once, a fiscal emergency, and they'd never ever do it again. At least until this year when they tried to loot $100-million from the P2000 Debt Service Reserve Fund and the Florida Forever Trust.

The governor, wisely both for Florida and for his chances with swing voters, just vetoed the Legislature's $100-million conservation swipe. If he hadn't, he'd look like a wolfish developer in ecological sheep's clothing. Of course, without that venal $262-million corporate tax break the governor was so keen on getting passed, we might not be in yearly danger of mortgaging our environmental future. Citizens who buy bonds to help acquire vulnerable beaches and forests are going to be madder than an army of wet hens if every session brings a choice between protecting natural Florida and keeping the big boys of Associated Industries (coincidentally, mega-GOP contributors) fat and happy.

The high-profile restoration of pillaged P2000 funds, plus the congratulatory whoop-de-doo over the drilling leases, is smart politics on Jeb Bush's part. It might even obscure reports of that cancerous growth on the Ichetucknee River. Two years ago, in the teeth of all common sense and ecological decency, the Department of Environmental Protection approved the building of a cement plant near Ichetucknee Springs State Park. Jeb Bush and DEP Secretary David Struhs trumpeted the alleged state-of-the-art pollution controls and concessions they won from Suwannee American Cement, as if a facility that burns tires and coal and releases 3,000 tons of pollutants into the air every year would somehow enhance the elemental beauty of Suwannee County.

Now we know (thanks to Times reporter Julie Hauserman) just how nasty this place might become. DEP discovered in March that the cement plant's air quality monitors, which were supposed to check the atmosphere around the place, didn't even work. And Suwannee American dug a pond two feet deeper than the state permitted, opening up sinkholes which could allow ground water to become contaminated. Now we also find that Suwannee American has permission to expand its 100 acre limestone mine to an 800 acre limestone mine. Appalled? Disgusted? You had your chance to complain: notice of the proposed expansion was posted -- in the Suwannee Democrat, a twice-weekly paper with a circulation of 5,300.

Now that the dirt is in the street (or in the river), Bush and Struhs have ordered a delay in the plant's operating permit, saying they are shocked! shocked! that the parent company Anderson Columbia -- one of Florida's worst polluters -- has been stinking up the state. Struhs blames Florida's lax mining regulations, bleating that he tried to get the Legislature to pass tougher regulations but couldn't. He didn't try very hard, though, and the governor didn't exactly get in there and push for some kind of law that would keep major polluters off our last wild and beautiful places.

Maybe it's just another coincidence, but Anderson Columbia has given Okeechobee-sized contributions to the Republican Party. To be fair, they've given to the Democrats, too. But that was back when Democrats mattered in Florida government.

So why don't we ask this question: How much is it worth to us to stop ruining every beautiful place we have? What would you pay to have kept Captiva unspoiled? What about the Ichetucknee and the Oklawaha and the Wakulla? Or do we just give up, pollute it all, pave it all, and let the whole state look like Orlando?

Diane Roberts, a former Times editorial writer, is a professor of English at the University of Alabama.

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