Hurricane Irma, Marco Island, and wetlands protection

Marco Island in 1964 (left) and present day (Michael Coleman)
Slate recently published a piece by Henry Grabar, "The Lessons of Marco Island", on the Florida island that was savaged by Hurricane Irma last week and the legal history that enabled its development while protecting nearby wetlands. Some highlights:
Forty years ago, the consensus of the state and federal governments was that Marco Island should not have been built at all. The community was the setting for one of the biggest development controversies in the United States and nearly ruined one of Florida’s largest and most celebrated developers. In a region with a notorious building addiction, it became the site of the environmental movement’s greatest victory over the Florida growth machine. Ecological foresight halted millions of dollars in real estate development and all but ended an engineering technique that had turned the South Florida coast from swampland to resort.
*****
When brothers Robert, Elliott, and Frank Mackle discovered Marco in the early 1960s, half of its 10 square miles consisted of mangrove swamps. Home to just a few hundred people and an abandoned clam factory, it was the single largest undeveloped barrier island property in South Florida. 
*****
The plan called for 35,000 residential units, which would require displacing 18.2 million cubic yards of ground (more than 150,000 dump trucks’ worth), dredging the land into channels, and using the dredge to create development sites in the swamp. This method is common across South Florida; Cape Coral, a little to the north, is a good example. Still, at the time, Marco Island was the largest “finger-fill” waterfront housing project to ever come before the Army Corps of Engineers, Science reported in 1976.
Deltona's "finger-fill" development used dredging to transform swampland into canal-side residential plots
(Flip Schulke/US National Archives and Records Administration)
Read more »

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Digital library IV: Bartolus's Tractatus de fluminibus seu Tyberiadis

Image
After beginning the digital library of historical environmental law with works from the last few hundred years, we go back in time this week to the fourteenth century and the  Tractatus de fluminibus seu Tyberiadis  (1355,  1576 edition (source of the images in this post) here ) of the great medieval Italian jurist Bartolus of Saxoferrato. As Bartolus explained at the beginning of the work, he was inspired to write the book while on vacation near Perugia, despite his attempts to enjoy his vacation and stay away from legal scholarship: This river [Tiber]... circles that splendid mountain on which the city of Perugia is situated and while flowing a great distance through its district, the river itself is bordered by plains, hills and similar places. These places are also well inhabited, enhanced with many beautiful buildings and luscious orchards bearing lots of fruit. Thus, when I was resting from my lecturing and in order to relax, was travelling towards a certain villa situated near ...
Read more

The earliest boundary water treaty

Image
Figure 1:  Memorial cone of the Mesilim Treaty Thanks to Peter Sand for contributing this post! [Footnotes after the jump.] The Musée du Louvre in Paris holds tangible evidence of the world’s first known legal agreement on boundary water resources: viz., the Mesilim Treaty , concluded in the 25th century B.C. between the two Mesopotamian states of Lagash and Umma . The terms of the treaty have been preserved as cuneiform inscriptions on a limestone cone (figure 1) and a stele commemorating Lagash’s victorious battle enforcing the treaty.[1] Fragments of both artifacts were excavated in 1878-1912 by French archeologists on sites at Tellō ( Tall Lawh, Dhi Qar Governate in Southern Iraq), the ancient temple-city of Girsu, once the capital of Lagash.[2] The inscriptions, transcribed and translated into French, German, Italian and English,[3] turned out to match several other texts on corresponding archeological finds of the period. The key exhibit, the so-called ‘Stele of the Vultures’, d...
Read more

Before Trump

Image
Today's "This Day in Water History" has this: Judson Harmon, c. 1912 June 11, 1895: First day of tenure of Judson Harmon as U.S. Attorney General. “Harmon issued the most explicit statement of what became known as the American doctrine of absolute sovereignty, that “the rules, principles and precedents of international law impose no liability or obligation upon the United States,” in a case involving a claim by Mexico for damages from diverting the waters of the Rio Grande.” Or, as one source put it: “US Attorney General Judson Harmon tells Mexico that the US will ‘do whatever it pleases’ with water from the Rio Grande.” Commentary: Even for those days, this was a pretty amazing statement.
Read more