We Drained It Once
The men who told us the Everglades was just swamp are back. They’ve brought lawyers.
The Great Southern Whites had moved on, and tarpon season was coming to a close. I poled my Hell's Bay across a slicked-out Homosassa flat. My client, an editor from Garden & Gun, standing on the bow, twelve weight fly rod in hand, facing me now instead of the fish. Eight hours and not one of them decided to make a mistake. They were laid up in the green water like sunken logs that breathe, and they didn't mind us a bit. They just wouldn't eat. The heat sat on us like a wet coat, and there was no wind, no breath of it.
The coast behind us ran on forever. No condos, no seawalls, just mangrove and limestone and the kind of light you can't sell because nobody's figured out how to put a meter on it. Out ahead, between us and the run home, a single black cloud was building across the whole horizon, wall to wall. We both knew it would have us before we made the dock, and part of me wanted it to. Sitting ducks. Nowhere to go but through it. The other guides had turned in hours ago. I pointed out a large group of Tarpon rolling on the horizon, but without words, decided we would just watch. We had the whole bay to ourselves, and it was quiet — the kind of quiet that gets loud, that rings in your ears and dares you to break it. He said it without taking his eyes off the fish,
“How could anyone want to fuck this up.”
It wasn’t a question. We both already knew the answer. Somebody always finds a reason. A good one, on paper. With a feasibility study and a jobs number and a man in a clean shirt who’s never had plough mud dry on his forearms explaining why the thing in front of you was never really worth anything to begin with. They’ll do it, and they’ll do it without ever once standing where we were standing and looking at what they’re about to kill straight in the eye.
That was years ago. Back when artificial intelligence was something only P.K.D. and Asimov muttered about. A paranoid whisper, not a line item in a county budget.
Here’s the part most people have already forgotten, if they ever knew it.
We already did this. The whole state used to be water. The Everglades ran clear from Okeechobee to the bay, and a hundred years ago men just like the ones in the clean shirts stood up and called it swamp. Wasted land. They said draining it was progress. They said it was inevitable. They said the only sensible thing was to stop whining and figure out how to do it responsibly. A governor named Napoleon Bonaparte Broward ran on it and won. We liked him so much, we named a county after him.
So they drained it. Dug the canals, ran the dredges, sold the lots. Progress.
And it broke the aquifer that every one of us drinks from. Salt water crept into the wells. The bay started dying. The fish you and I chase got pushed into the last clean corners. We are right now, today, spending north of twenty billion dollars trying to un-ring that bell, to put back a fraction of the water those visionary bastards drained, because it turns out the swamp was the thing keeping us alive the whole time.
Inevitable. Responsible. Progress. We have heard every word of this sermon before. We are still paying for the last one.
Now they want to do it again, except this time they don’t even need the land. They need the water and the power.
The hyperscalers are coming south because Virginia’s full. A single one of these data centers can drink five million gallons a day to keep its machines from cooking. Pulled out of the same wounded aquifer we’re spending a fortune trying to nurse back. The state signed a bill this spring to make sure your power bill doesn’t go up to pay for it. Good. Real considerate. They’ll protect your wallet. Read it close and you’ll see what it doesn’t protect: the water. The actual water. The thing the Everglades makes and the thing you can’t make more of.
So we close the circle. We drained the swamp for progress, broke the water, spent twenty billion trying to fix it, and now we’re going to pour what’s left into a windowless building so a server farm in another time zone can answer somebody’s email faster.
And there will be a “Floridian” who tells you this is fine.
He’ll say it’s progress. He’ll say it’s inevitable. He’ll say we should just regulate it and get our piece while the getting’s good. He’ll talk about the tax base.
I want to be clear about this man, because I’d rather not be misunderstood. He is not one of us. He has no graves in this ground. He is not teaching a kid to set a hook or read a tide chart or sit still in a duck blind in the cold dark and call this place home. He doesn’t have anything here he’s planning to hand down. He’s a tenant. He lives on Florida the way mold lives on bread. And when he tells you the destruction of the only home you’ve got is inevitable, what he means is that he gave up something you never will, and he’d like company in the surrender.
Don’t give it to him.
There is nothing inevitable about a swamp. We proved that once already, the hard way, with a dredge. The water doesn’t belong to the man in the clean shirt and it doesn’t belong to a server. It belongs to the kid who’s going to stand on the bow of a Hell’s Bay someday with his line stripped and ready, looking at a coast that runs on forever… if there’s any of it left to look at.
We drained it once.
Not again