Opinion: Old Florida is falling to the developers

In Sunshine State, John Sayles' witty, bitter new movie about the rape of old Florida, three smart-mouth Yankee retirees on the Atlantic coast negotiate nine-irons and sand traps while philosophizing on the state as Paradise Sold.

Florida was nothing, one old boy says, nothing but a place of swamps and alligators, "populated by white people who ate catfish." Then, hallelujah, the developers came and gave us the condo, the strip mall, the gated community and that highest triumph of Middle-Class Man over Wilderness, the golf course -- "Nature on a LEASH."

Soon the whole state will be on a leash. Florida is rapidly becoming one big, green, chemically fed golf course with space reserved for McMansions, fast food alleys and eight-laned expressways so you never have to get stuck behind some Cracker's old raggedy truck on your way to the beach. From St. Petersburg to Cross City will be a brown-aired conurbation, with subdivisions named after the trees cleared, the lake polluted or the animals driven out in order to build it there. From Tallahassee to Pensacola, the forests will be cut down and the beaches cut off for the benefit of people who can afford to live in pastel fabrications called WindMark, WaterColor and SummerCamp.

The leash is starting to look like a noose.

I am one of those catfish-eating white people. My ancestors came down in Andrew Jackson's bloody wake around 1825. My father's people homesteaded in the swamps of Wakulla County. My mother's people farmed in the hills of Washington County. I guess you could call them developers -- in a sense. They logged the piney woods, they cleared oaks and hickory to plant cotton. They made a living off their land. So you might say I'm hypocritical in wishing that the St. Joe Co., the people who mean to develop 1-million acres of what they insist on calling "Florida's Great Northwest," would go away and wreck someplace else. But I'll embrace my hypocrisy. The Other Florida, as Gloria Jahoda famously called it, has a value far beyond the subdivisions and vacation houses and retirement villages and, God knows, the golf courses St. Joe dangles before the poor folks of the Panhandle as if they were the answer to a prayer. Not in my backyard. Not in yours, either.

The land our house in Tallahassee sits on used to be a pecan farm. Before that, it was part of Col. Robert Butler's Sea Island cotton fields. Before that, it was an Apalachee camp, just about a mile from the sacred mounds on Lake Jackson. It's now worth a fair amount of money to somebody who would like to build a couple of "plantation estates" or one of those ant-hill apartment complexes. It's worth more to us as a couple of green pastures, a hundred old trees and the kind of quiet that used to characterize all of North Florida. We don't want to make a killing off beauty and history.

Obviously, we're lousy capitalists, the kind of Panhandle people soon to be excommunicated from the Church of St. Joe.

The Other Florida is losing the battle with the behemoth of development. St. Joe will redraw the map with bulldozers, the promise of "maximizing economic opportunity" in hardscrabble Panhandle counties, and taxpayer money. You will be paying half the $47-million it will cost to move Highway 98 so that St. Joe can have more gulf-front property for its WindMark community. You will be paying 80 percent of the cost of Panama City's new airport, which St. Joe wants built on 4,000 acres of woods and wetlands it owns and has been leasing to the state as a wildlife management area.

Despite the current outrage over corporate greed and the pious noises politicians make about it, you will be subsidizing one of the wealthiest developers in Florida. This is what your state government calls "progress."

St. Joe's minions and fellow travelers proclaim -- with a straight face -- that their colonization of the Panhandle will benefit the people who used to make a living shrimping or farming or working in St. Joe's now-defunct paper mill. Alfred Cook, the imperially titled executive director of Florida's Great Northwest, recently wrote in a Tallahassee Democrat column that the developer's real goal is to ensure that "all the people in every town and hamlet enjoy prosperity." Well, maybe if groundskeeping at one of the golf courses or waitressing at one of the chi-chi seafood restaurants or running the cash register at a beach boutique counts as prosperity.

This so-called Florida's Great Northwest outfit styles itself a "forward-thinking group of business, academic and economic leaders." It is closely associated with St. Joe -- as well as Florida State University, the University of West Florida, Sprint, various energy companies and various banks. I don't see a lot of environmental groups listed on their Web site.

St. Joe claims they want to preserve the "character" of the places it bulldozes. But obviously all these little red-necky towns would be so much nicer with more Range Rover dealerships, faux Seaside houses, sushi places and marinas where regular citizens like you and me can park our yachts. Cook tries to convince the catfish-eaters of North Florida that their home must be "branded" so as to better express its "magic." You "brand" something to sell it. And I've seen how St. Joe "brands" the land. They took the old plantations of Verdura and Southwood, 9,000-odd acres of monumental live oaks and magnolias in Leon County, and made SouthWood, an alleged example of the "new urbanism." It's all nostalgic houses and "greens" and the earnest pretense that "folks" will sit on their front porches and shoot the breeze. North Florida's own Mayberry.

But the place is as fake and inorganic and historyless as Disney World. And no wonder: Peter Rummell, St. Joe's chairman, used to run Disney's wonderful world of real estate. He uses expressions like "regional place-making." It's as if he sees the Other Florida as a tabula rasa, a blank slate waiting for some almighty developer to come and declare, "Let there be townhomes!"

And to think we all thought we already lived in a real place, a beautiful place that should be valued in terms far more important than money.

Toward the end of Sunshine State, the golfers discuss how species are going extinct right and left and how Florida will one day return to the sea from whence it came. One golfer, disgusted with the depressing intricacies of weather and global warming, snarls, "Nature is overrated." Then the other one comes back with, "But we'll miss it when it's gone."

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

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