The New Republic

I hear it's been a brutal winter. I hate to gloat, but I missed
winter this year. I moved from Washington, D.C., to Miami Beach in
late fall, and it has been sunny and 75 degrees just about every
day since. Still, I think I can speak for my fellow Floridians when
I say the frigid weather our northern friends must endure is never
far from our thoughts. Just this morning, for example, I was
sitting by my building's pool reading a book about--well, I don't
remember exactly what it was about--when I happened to notice two
nearby sunbathers who, I must report, were neither unattractive nor
fully attired. And I couldn't help but think: Those young ladies
would be quite cold if they were in Washington.But they're not. They're living with me! Or at least we're all
living in the same 36-story apartment building. Again, I hate to
gloat, but it's one of those sexy South Beach buildings, full of
impossibly thin, model-type women with dogs the size of gerbils and
impossibly buff, model-type guys with, yeah, dogs the size of
gerbils. Its motto, according to the real estate solicitations one
of my neighbors keeps junk-mailing me, is: "Beautiful Residence.
Gorgeous People. Adorable Pets." I told my mom the day I moved here
(which was just a few days after Jennifer Lopez rented out our
entire gym for a private workout) that I was the ugliest resident
in the whole building. She said no, impossible, her handsome little
boy could never be the ugliest anything. Then she came to visit,
and, within a few hours, I overheard her giggling into her cell
phone: "It's true! He's the ugliest one in his whole building!"
This place can be tough on selfesteem. It's also a tough place to
get work done, which has been a problem, because I'm supposed to be
writing a book about--well, I don't remember exactly what it's
about.

On the other hand, it's unbelievably nice here. Have I mentioned
that it's sunny and 75 degrees just about every day? I've always
lived on the Delta Shuttle axis, and I never thought I cared that
much about weather, but it turns out that I do. I hate to gloat,
but--oh, who am I kidding? I love to gloat! I've got Hotenfreude! I
get to wear shorts every day here and watch the sun set over
Biscayne Bay every night. I've gotten less grumpy and less Type A.
Before I moved down here--it's only for a year, unless I can
convince my employers at The Washington Post to move the paper to
Florida--my friends warned that I'd miss all the smart people that
surrounded me in Washington and New York and Boston. And I suppose
it's true that South Beach is a bit more Scarface and Birdcage than
"Masterpiece Theatre" or Annie Hall. But, if all those people up
north are so damned smart, how come they're not living where it's
sunny and 75 degrees every day?

I realize, of course, that other people have recognized South
Florida's charms: Millions of tourists with those globs of suntan
lotion on their ears; millions of retirees with that unmistakable
leathery skin. And there are the millions of immigrants from Cuba,
Haiti, Brooklyn, and Cleveland who come to South Florida to work in
its only two real industries, tourism and real estate
development--both of which depend, of course, on still more people
coming to South Florida. (There's agriculture, too, but these days
it's usually just a temporary use for land that's about to be sold
for real estate development.) A little more than a century ago,
South Florida was a blank spot on the map, uninhabited and
virtually unknown. Now it's almost built out, except for what's
left of the Everglades.

Wait, now I remember: My book is supposed to be a history of the
Everglades, a kind of morality play about man's relationship with
nature. Americans used to see the Everglades as a worthless
pestilential swamp, "suitable only for the haunt of noxious vermin,
or the resort of pestilent reptiles" as one 1848 account put it,
and they were desperate to drain it into a profitable paradise for
people. But now that half the Everglades is gone and the other half
is dying, Americans see it as a precious natural treasure and are
spending billions of dollars to try to restore it with the most
ambitious environmental project in the history of the planet. I was
going to make the point that South Florida is now inhospitable not
only to the vermin, reptiles, and other wildlife that used to
thrive in the Everglades, it has become unsustainable for human
beings, too. The schools and hospitals are overcrowded. The traffic
is unbearable. The water shortages are so acute that developers are
trying to raid the rivers of North Florida. The economy is a Ponzi
scheme, where everyone sells houses or lays tile or finances
mortgages or does some other kind of work that requires attracting
an endless parade of additional house-sellers and tile- layers and
so on. In other words, life in paradise has started to suck.

But now that I'm here, I've recognized a slight problem with my
argument: Life in paradise doesn't actually suck. Life in paradise
is 75 degrees and sunny. Sure, growth for the sake of growth is the
ideology of the cancer cell, and South Florida has become the
poster region for runaway sprawl, with most residents living in
suburban subdivisions that are much less cool (but no less
expensive) than my urban skyscraper. But it's still really, really
nice here. I had this blindingly obvious epiphany at the
groundbreaking for the $8 billion Everglades restoration project,
which was held on one of those perfect South Florida days with a
brilliant sun, a clear sky, and a sea breeze that makes you happy
to be alive. I remember telling Jeb Bush's Everglades czar that,
even if he paved over the entire Everglades, people would keep
moving to South Florida. In retrospect, I probably should have kept
that thought to myself.

Look, South Florida is a deeply troubled place. Miami is the
nation's poorest city. Broward County is almost literally full. An
invasive fern called lygodium is spreading through the Everglades
like the Blob. And it's hard not to be sickened by the region's
money-talks, growth-first, I've-got-mine political culture. But,
unless the sun stops shining on South Florida, I'm clearly going to
have to start refining the argument of my book. I find that such
work is best done poolside.

By Michael Grunwald

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