1The history of Florida is punctuated with a mystique–which none of the states of the union may need, but which a few have nevertheless invoked and transmitted. In this respect Florida differs from, say, New Hampshire, or Missouri, or South Dakota. To be sure, such states have their virtues, but none has the mythic status that Florida projects. It claims to be a kind of hologram of paradise, a place where the most ancient memories of our species are somehow reinvented in the form of modern fantasies (Arsenault, 2019, p. 10). In that sense, no state has been more authentically American. “In the beginning all the world was America,” John Locke philosophized in his Second Treatise of Government (1689); and less than a century later, exultant colonists bent on revolution claimed the power to revitalize human experience itself. The new nation was primed to write a “whole [new] chapter in the history of man,” Thomas Jefferson exulted (Locke, 1980, p. 29; Jefferson, 1975, p. 484). “We have it in our power,” Thomas Paine added in 1776, “to begin the world all over again” (2009, p. 53). Were that power properly deployed, a sequel to Eden might be found in the new United States. No part of it (except California) promoted itself more ardently or successfully as a successor to Eden than Florida. It can be considered “a state of mind” as much as it is a “state of being” (Derr, 1989, p. 13; O’Sullivan and Land, 1991, pp. 11-13).
2The mystique of Florida has therefore drawn tourists. They have come for the purpose of pleasure; and other travelers have subscribed to an agenda–such as business–that is more varied. The distinction is easily blurred, but tourists should be considered travelers who buy commodified experiences. Tourism often entails predictable and standardized itineraries, and in that sense has been historically less adventurous than travel. The split between travel and tourism emerged in the early nineteenth century, and whether the difference remains tenable is debatable (Revels, 2011, p. 6; Macintosh, 2019, pp. 4-5, 6, 7, 11, 12). What is inarguable, however, is the appeal of Florida. The official tourism marketing corporation called Visit Florida, “a public/private partnership” that Governor Lawton Chiles created in 1996, estimates that 118 million domestic visitors came to the state in 2018, along with 3.5 million Canadians and 10.8 million other foreign visitors. Such statistics, if reliable, are staggering. The mystique with which culture framed nature drew the crowds. But then the crowds made nature less sublime and less viable. Such is the argument of this essay, which synthesizes literary evidence, economic data and press reports to show the role of Florida in the history of tourism as well as the impact of tourism upon a state that once promised proximity to nature. This essay therefore reinforces the tendency of environmental historians to blur at least some of the lines between humanity and its habitat. If civilization and landscape are not “mutually exclusive” (Schama, 1995, p. 14), the history of Florida–especially over the course of the last hundred years or so–shows how entwined they are.
3Evidence of the idyllic impact that Florida historically registered upon visitors is easy to cite. For instance, the journalist Edward King toured the defeated South in 1873 for Scribner’s Monthly. Spending his first night in Jacksonville, he found the milieu “slumberous, voluptuous... Here beauty peeps from every door-yard. Mere existence is a pleasure... Through orange-groves and grand oaks thickly bordering the broad avenues gleams the wide current of the St. Johns River,” he exulted. Yet King also envisioned prospects of economic development there. He thus already signaled a counter-myth, in which the intrusion of capitalism or an industrial machine disrupts the garden (1972, pp. 380-81; O’Sullivan and Land, 1991, pp. 144-48; Rowe, 1978, pp. xi, xiii-xiv). Although joie de vivre was not something that the Puritans and their descendants extolled, even Harriet Beecher Stowe managed to distance herself from that heritage when she strolled along the St. Johns River. She wrote in 1872 that “life itself is a pleasure when the sun shines warm, and I sit and dream and am happy and never want to go back north.” The rhapsodic reaction of no other visitor shows more effectively the power of Florida, because happiness was hardly the goal that her religious faith fostered (Rowe, 1992, p. 5). The cultural shift therefore needs to be made explicit. The awareness that hedonism might replace moral duty as the purpose of life, that traditional codes of conduct might yield to the definition of a state as a playground, anticipated the state’s winking advertisement of the 1960s: “The rules are different here.” Unobstructed desire, which Christianity was historically designed to stigmatize, gave way to a late-twentieth-century enticement like “Florida. When you want it bad, we got it good” (Mormino, 2005, pp. 120-21).
4With its natural sites and natural springs, postbellum Florida was soon open for business. Bucolic marvels like Sunken Gardens, Cypress Gardens and Weeki Wachee became tourist attractions; and Silver Springs became the state’s most celebrated and promoted natural wonder. There tourists could hop onto a glass-bottom boat, an unusual vessel that enabled passengers to see sixty-feet down into the pure depths of Silver Springs. Among the nineteenth-century Americans who seized this opportunity were Mrs. Stowe, Ulysses S. Grant and Thomas A. Edison. In the era of Jim Crow, black tourists could board glass-bottom boats downriver, at Paradise Park. It was Florida’s only roadside attraction pitched specifically to African-Americans (Mormino, 2005, pp. 86-90; Revels, 2011, pp. 20, 36-37; Vickers and Wilson-Graham, 2015, p. 11). By law and by custom, commitment to white supremacy made Florida recognizably Southern, of course; and only closed societies like Mississippi, for example, permitted the racist record of Florida to escape full scrutiny. Of the eleven states of the former Confederacy, Florida had the lowest percentage of African-Americans, and was also the only one, as the journalist John Gunther awkwardly noted, to have “an Indian problem” (1947, p. 655). In 1940 no Southern state had fewer residents—not even Arkansas. Little more than six decades later, however, Florida jumped ahead of New York as the third most populous state, which suggests an increasing friction with the usual meaning of “the Southern way of life.” It was historically agrarian, and its hamlets were inextricable from its farms and plantations. But no Southern state is currently more urban than Florida, where tourism easily outranks the economic importance of agriculture.
5Boosting numerical growth has been the industry that now dominates the state’s economy. Indeed, more tourists visit Florida than any state, other than the nation’s largest, California. How did the allure of Florida get so powerfully emitted?
6Historian Tracy J. Revels, the author of a scholarly study of Florida tourism, has listed four conditions for success: “a population with adequate funds and time for travel, reliable transportation, comfortable and safe destinations, and a body of images and descriptions designed to excite the imagination and lure patrons” (2011, p. 104). The wealthy fit her first category. From the beginning, in the late nineteenth century, they were the only kind of tourists who came to Florida. They hunted, fished and sailed; they played golf; they socialized among themselves during those wish-you-were-here winters. And why not? The state could boast of a tranquil beauty that featured glistening beaches. None of the lower 48 states enjoys a longer seaboard, so that seawater is never more than sixty miles away from any spot on this peninsula (Whitfield, 1993, p. 416). Railroads were constructed to bring the rich to the state, with the tracks going to and going through St. Augustine, Tampa and Miami. Hotels were built to let the leisure class luxuriate in the comfort to which they were accustomed in Newport and on the Riviera. If the characteristic manmade structure of Florida could be identified, the architectural choice would not be a cathedral or a church, not an office building or a mansion, not a tower or a skyscraper, but a hotel (Cox, 2011, pp. 137-38; Rothchild, 1985, p. 57). Catering to Northeastern elites, St. Augustine’s lavish Ponce de Leon Hotel started a trend that included the Vinoy Park Hotel in St. Petersburg.
7But a playground restricted to the privileged could not be permanently assigned to Florida. The ethos of democracy encourages the many to hope to emulate the few, and the Roaring Twenties marked the takeoff for the tourism of the masses. “For a significant proportion of the American populace,” historian Cindy S. Aron concluded, vacations became “an important component of an acceptable standard of living” (Aron, 1999, p. 244). Roads complemented trains; and Henry Ford enabled the common folk—Americans of limited means and plebeian tastes—to go on the move for pleasure. In Florida another populist, three-time Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, hawked real estate investment. The masses to whom Ford and Bryan appealed lacked the leisure to “winter” for an entire season in Florida. Their vacations were necessarily brief. Yet the Model T and the land craze (which the Marx Brothers mocked in The Cocoanuts in 1929) sparked the invasion of ordinary or “Tin Can” visitors. By 1925 about 2.5 million of them were arriving annually, and many tourists would decide to stay. Miami ballooned from 5,471 in 1910, to 29,571 in 1920, and to 110,637 in 1930. In the decade of the 1920s, no metropolitan area in the nation grew faster than Miami; Tampa-St. Petersburg came in sixth (Revels, 2011, pp. 2, 68; Cox, 2011, pp. 139, 146-48; Rugh, 2008, p. 3; Tindall, 1965, pp. 76-83, 109-11). Other visitors would soon stampede to Florida in greater hordes.
8And why not? Contrast its winter season to the Northern and Midwestern cities—not only because of their sometimes bitter cold but also because residents wake up in the dark and return from the day’s work after sundown. St. Petersburg therefore contrived an easy job—a public relations director—and became the first community in the state to make such an attempt to live up to the billing of a “Sunshine City” (Arsenault, 1988, pp. 145, 186, 203, 261-62). St. Petersburg had no manufacturing base, but long attracted honeymooners as well as the very aged. That peculiar demographic pairing led to the jibe that St. Petersburg attracted “the newly wed and the nearly dead” (Revels, 2011, p. 73; Mormino, 2005, p. 79; Rothchild, 1985, p. 52). How poorly some startup marriages eventually fared can be gauged from Ring Lardner’s bleak short story, “The Golden Honeymoon” (1922), set in St. Petersburg. Black tourists took their chances too. By the 1930s, The Negro Motorist Green Book became an indispensable guide in alerting African-Americans to accessible hotels, restaurants and gas stations. Barely three decades later, the interstate highway system would enable black motorists to feel safer. Had they still been forced to wind their way through Florida’s backroads, such strangers would have been dangerously conspicuous. By then the state was becoming less parochial, however. Facing Latin America, Miami welcomed more foreign visitors to its airport than any other besides New York’s Kennedy (formerly Idlewild) (Seiler, 2006, pp. 1110-11; Derr, 1989, p. 338; Gunther, 1947, p. 729). Postwar affluence, advances in travel such as the jet plane and above all the widespread use of air-conditioning became crucial to the allure of Florida.
9The decades immediately after the Second World War marked what one historian called “the golden era of family vacations.” Typically, these vacations were paid, thanks to the power that the New Deal had bestowed on the labor movement. The maps and atlases of the American Automobile Association and of Rand McNally taught geography to children and made road trips easier. So did the burgeoning numbers of motels that soon became the favored form of roadside lodging. Such vacations provided families with a sense of cohesiveness and of enjoyment that could be shared. Many veterans who had been stationed in Florida during the war loved the state so much that they relocated there with their families (Rugh, 2008, pp. 1, 10-12, 17, 35, 43, 45).
10To visit Florida became so accessible and so fashionable that the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the New York Times, Russell Baker, made fun of such tourists. In a story datelined Ormond Beach, Baker invoked the satiric tradition of Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad (1869) by reporting that “the first thing people do when they plan a Florida vacation is buy a lot of pink and yellow clothing. Everybody then puts on these funny clothes, gets into the car and drives past nine hundred miles of billboards advertising monkeys and beer... It is very hot,” Baker reminded his readers. “The children snarl at each other... Eventually they arrive at... a gigantic shopping center... It is just like home, except that the houses are painted lavender and orange to match the customer’s clothing.” He noticed that “the vacationer feels terrible about being pale. Pale skin marks him as a tourist, and the worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist. And so, for three or four days, he broils himself mercilessly in the sun... hoping he will become inconspicuous enough to have a wonderful time,” which Baker suspected “isn’t easy.” By the mid-twentieth century, he already suspected trouble in paradise. “There is a lot to be said for fun and comfort,” he wrote in a bittersweet conclusion from Daytona Beach. “But total fun and total comfort wind up being total bores, and in the process, pleasure is lost” (1965, pp. 68-70, 71).
11Some tourists could afford luxury hotels on Miami Beach like the Fontainebleau and the Eden Roc. Many other visitors ended up staying in seedy motels, of which a fictional example is described in the Miami writer Carl Hiassen’s Tourist Season (1986): “The Flamingo Isles was not a classic Miami Beach motel. There was nothing charming about the color (silt) or the architecture (Early Texaco). At this motel there were not striped canvas awnings, no wizened retirees chirping in the lobby, no lawn chairs lined up on the front porch, no front porch whatsoever. Basically, the Flamingo Isles was a dive for pimps... and hookers. Rooms costs ten dollars an hour, fifteen with porno cassettes” (pp. 30-31). Such settings suggested a devotion to tackiness, if not to downright ugliness, and inspired recourse to derogatory Yiddish terms like shlock and dreck to label the knickknacks commonly for sale in Florida. They have ranged from the shellacked blowfish and plaster flamingoes to the pirate heads carved from coconuts and the pelicans made from seashells (Gopnik, 2013, p. 105; Revels, 2011, p. 118; Rothchild, 1985, pp. 2-5). The democratization of travel and the achievement of prosperity cannot be entirely separated from the widespread evidence of tastelessness.
12By the second half of the twentieth century, nature was increasingly yielding to culture–and its dominion could easily turn sinister. Here the memoir of journalist Edna Buchanan may be symptomatic. Coming from New Jersey in 1961, Buchanan was stunned when she first saw Miami Beach, “all pink, radiant, and bathed in sunlight.” She was thrilled to discover that “everything is exaggerated” in such scenery, “the clouds, the colors too bright to be real [and] the heat.” She got used to “drifting clouds [that] glow golden at sunset and rosy at dawn” (1987, pp. 31, 43). But Buchanan also realized that local violence was exaggerated too, and she became a crime reporter for the Miami Herald. Her stories showed how terrifyingly far Miami-Dade County would stray from Revels’ definition of “safe destinations” for tourists. The crime wave that hit Miami in 1993-94 brought Buchanan’s shocking reporting to national attention. For example, ten foreign tourists were murdered; and the number of visitors from abroad, especially from Britain and Germany, fell by a fifth. To lessen vulnerability to theft, kidnapping and homicide, rental car companies removed the distinctive license plates that marked the automobiles as rented (Revels, 2011, p. 140). Foreigners were presumably safer when traveling incognito. Not all the local rustics on the west coast of the state adhered to the welcoming messages from the Chamber of Commerce. A columnist for the St. Petersburg Times once spotted a more menacing sign than conventional advisories against trespassing: “My dogs can make it to the fence in three seconds. Can you?” (Klinkenberg, 2008, p. 8; Mormino, 2005, p. 121).
13Although not every longtime resident was hospitable, the trajectory of the vacationers choosing Florida as their destination is astonishing. Their number increased from 4.5 million in 1950 to over 9 million by the end of the decade. The number doubled again in 1967. In 1971, when the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World opened, Florida attracted 23 million tourists (Revels, 2011, pp. 102-3; Arsenault, 1984, pp. 597-628; Mormino, 2005, pp. 95, 96). Their spending habits raised the income of the local inhabitants, but the blessings must be classified as mixed. Take what happened on the day after Thanksgiving, in 1971, when about 56,000 tourists tried to get into the Magic Kingdom. Backing up traffic for ten miles, they made the apocalyptic traffic jam that famously opens Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967) seem prophetic. Though Disney World is justifiably celebrated for its efficiency in crowd control, the park had to shut down its ticket window early that November afternoon. Yet such harrowing episodes posed no deterrent to Florida’s tourists. Their numbers swelled to more than 70 million in 2000 (Revels, 2011, p. 126; Mormino, 2005, p. 115), and six years later 83.9 million visitors swarmed into Florida–so many that an exasperated Carl Hiassen fantasized confining them solely to “Disney property until their vacation money runs out” (Hiassen, 2001, p. 20; Revels, 2011, pp. 142, 149).
14Of course, the mass appeal of Florida needs a context. In January 1944, when Franklin D. Roosevelt listed “leisure” along with adequate shelter and the elimination of hunger among his proposed Second Bill of Rights, he could not have foreseen how devoted posterity would be in exercising the option of tourism. Vacationing in the developed world has become the third largest family expense, right after food and housing (Elsworth, 1991, p. F4). No country has been pulling its weight more fully than France–the planet’s most popular destination, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization. Nor has any museum ever attracted more visitors than the Louvre, which set a record of 10.2 million art lovers in 2018. In that year, throughout the world, visitors who stayed at least one night in a foreign country reached 1.4 billion. In the United States, however, recent fears of a “Trump slump” roiled the international travel industry, which supports 15.7 million jobs and generates $2.5 trillion in economic output. Nearly 80 million foreigners visited the US in 2018. That was a record high. But the American share of the international travel market skidded 13.7 percent from 2015, to the lowest level since 2006. Had the 2015 level remained steady, the US would have welcomed 14 million more international visitors, a magnitude that would have generated enough demand to employ 120,000 more Americans (Nayeri, 2019, p. C1; Mzezewa, 2019, p. TR2). The scale of these missed economic opportunities is poignant.
15Tsunamis of tourists nevertheless continued to pour into Florida. Over 5 million foreign visitors per year still flock to the theme parks around Orlando, and they have shifted tourism away from south Florida. So dependent is central Florida upon tourism that one in twenty workers in the Metro Orlando area earns a paycheck from Disney World; and the Universal Studios theme park hires as many Florida employees as does Walmart (the largest private employer in the world). Absent significant manufacturing in the state, a whopping four in five jobs there are credited—directly or indirectly—to the service industry. It provides food, lodging and entertainment for tourists and other travelers in a state where most governmental revenue comes from sales and hotel taxes. Florida does not impose an income tax, a policy that encourages many tourists to become residents. Only Nevada tops Florida in the proportion of the population born outside the state. But the boost that Florida gets in the census count does not bring a commensurate increase in state revenue to match social needs. Dependence on tourism also affects the labor market adversely. As liberal economists never tire of declaring, the US has suffered less from a lack of jobs than from a paucity of good jobs; and employment in Florida’s service industry tends to be low-skill and low-status (Revels, 2011, pp. 3, 126, 132-33, 151; Mormino, 2005, pp. 114, 181). The pay is so low that very many employees cannot afford to live near where they work. The infrastructure that keeps Disney World humming so smoothly, for instance, is subterranean. That is where many of its employees toil, deprived of the sunlight that draws Disney World’s “guests” to Florida. Shorn of glamour, such jobs are intended to make the influx of vacationers as frictionless an operation as possible, and to keep these eager out-of-state visitors coming.
16Yet a glum paradox is embedded in the recent history of Florida. “I spent thirty years of my life trying to get people to move down there,” a former mayor of Orlando, Carl T. Langford, has recalled. “And then they all did” (Painton, 1991, p. 58). He was neither the first nor the last person to learn that in dreams begin responsibilities, and that neither action nor inaction can avoid repercussions. Promises also entail problems. They have included environmental degradation, traffic congestion, gridlock on expressways like the Palmetto and the Sawgrass, as well as the sort of sprawl that can seem almost indigenous to Florida. The structure of services and amenities, as well as the infrastructure, is bound to buckle under the weight of so many people. The underground aquifers are already so depleted that even during the rainy season lawn-watering restrictions have been imposed. This melancholy decline in the quality of life is bound to affect the impressions and experiences of tourists too. The fate of Florida thus exemplifies what economists call “induced demand.” It is defined as an increase in availability (such as more highway lanes and larger parking lots), which instigates an increase in consumption, which worsens traffic congestion. When Langford, the longtime booster, decided to retire, he moved to North Carolina (Grunwald, 2004b, pp. 28-29; Mormino, 2005, pp. 28-29), making the conclusion inescapable: ballyhoo has its downside. Some of its consequences can be tabulated here.
17The balance between nature and artifice has become disrupted, risking the prospect of dystopia. The Army Corps of Engineers, with its can-do motto of “Essayons” (let us try), has indeed been trying very hard to worsen that imbalance, journalist Michael Grunwald charged. The Corps has energetically put on coasts “environmentally damaging seawalls [and] artificial dunes,” and installed “levees and canals and pumps” into the eastern Everglades in particular, so that it “was converted into wall-to-wall sprawl” (Grunwald, 2004b, p. 27; Burleigh, 2020, pp. TR1, 4-5). And now “the financial and environmental bill for a century of runaway growth and exploitation is coming due,” Grunwald added. “The elaborate water-management scheme that made southern Florida habitable has been stretched beyond capacity, yo-yoing between brutal droughts and floods, converting the Everglades into a tinderbox and a sewer, ravaging the beaches, bays, lakes and reefs that made the region so alluring in the first place.” Mercury has contaminated fish, and algal blooms have clouded the bays of south Florida. The depleted marine life, the leaching landfill sites, the “awful traffic,” as well as “red tides that have made it tough for sunbathers to breathe at the beach,” have been among the effects of Florida’s relentless overdevelopment (Grunwald, 2004a, p. 26, and 2008, pp. 28, 29, 30; Davis and Arsenault, 2005, p. 6). Grunwald should know; he lives in Miami-Dade County. Below Tallahassee, the glass-bottom boats at Wakulla Springs barely run, because tannic acid from the state capital polluted waters that were once so pristine that tourists could see straight down for 120 feet. What remains is what Revels calls “a murky brown stew” (2011, p. 150). The new term for this phenomenon, in which too many visitors bear down on an unsustainable infrastructure, is “over-tourism” (Nayeri, 2019, p. C1).
18The most notorious instance is undoubtedly Venice, a city that in recent years has been subjected to considerable flooding. It is not an entirely natural catastrophe, but is instead due to what the Venetian literary scholar Shaul Bassi has called an “indiscriminate tampering with an ecosystem nurtured by Venice for centuries, the impact of the cruise ships, excavations of the lagoon and the rapacious investment in tourism.” Admittedly profitable for residents, over-tourism has threatened to supersede all other aspects of civic life there. Far too many earthlings have explored the singularity of Venice and have been wearing the T-shirts to prove it (2019, p. A23). But if Venice goes under and becomes uninhabitable, the durability of the fake Piazza San Marco near Orlando will offer little consolation. The ecological peril to a fragile and unique city like Venice, Italy has been widely publicized. The danger posed to Venice, Florida and vicinity is less known but is surely worthy of concern as well.
19Any student of “over-tourism” need look no further than Walt Disney World. Covering 43 square miles, which is twice the size of Manhattan, this theme park has become the planet’s biggest tourist attraction. The Florida legislature expedited this achievement in bestowing on Disney’s so-called Reedy Creek Improvement District what amounts to its own government. Endowed with extraordinary political and legal authority, Walt Disney World has written its own building codes, formed its own fire department and even granted itself the power to tax. “They could build a nuclear plant out there,” an Orlando City Commissioner grumbled, “and there’d be nothing we could do about it.” Such sovereignty has even provoked comparisons with the Vatican (Mormino, 2005, p. 104; Painton, 1991, p. 54), however slight the danger of either of these tiny states going nuclear. The shadow that the Magic Kingdom and EPCOT (the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) casts is nevertheless formidable. Marine craft afloat in Walt Disney World are so numerous that soon after the opening of the theme park, its flotilla constituted the ninth largest navy on the planet. Great Britain, once the greatest naval power in history, must currently reconcile itself to the reduced status of luring fewer tourists than Disney World does (Elsworth, 1991, p. F4).
20Orlando can be now reached by direct flights from cities as distant as Rio and Frankfurt. Prior to the pandemic, the 2,558-square-mile metropolitan area of Orlando boasted the largest concentration of hotel rooms (76,300) in the nation, as well as the highest occupancy rate (79%). Orlando became second in the nation in the number of conventions that the city hosts, and also in the number of attendees at those conventions (Painton, 1991, p. 52; Mormino, 2005, pp. 116, 117; Whitfield, 1993, p. 431). Because Disney World inspired the installation of other theme parks, such as Sea World and Universal Studios, Metropolitan Orlando became, by the final decade of the twentieth century, the fastest growing region in the US; and Disney World was welcoming approximately thirty million “guests” per year. Unsurprisingly, the hospitality industry had not fully braced itself for such an impact. Take late December 1986, for example. All motel rooms were then reported to be reserved and occupied on I-95 between Richmond and Savannah; and on December 29, an attendance record was set when 148,500 visitors clamored to get inside Disney World. This recreational colossus bypassed and then extinguished the tourist sites that offered to Mrs. Stowe the splendors of natural springs (Revels, 2011, pp. 127, 132-33; Mormino, 2005, pp. 106, 108).
21Such spectacular success demands an explanation. For most customers, Walt Disney World seems to deliver. Its dream world is predictable and formulaic. Its atmosphere is antiseptic and courteous. It provides wholesome, banal entertainment. Nor should the superb safety record of Walt Disney World be ignored, especially when contrasted with a water park in Vernon, New Jersey, called Action Park. There so many patrons left with chipped teeth, bruised knees and concussions that attorneys nicknamed it Class Action Park. So many patrons ended up with broken bones that physicians in local hospitals nicknamed it Traction Park. Within one two-year period (1984-85), there were 26 head injuries—indeed, so many that Action Park bought the town of Vernon new ambulances. Between 1978, when the park opened, and 1996, when it closed, six deaths were reported–by drowning and by electrocution. A test dummy was sent on a ride that was about to open and came out of the tunnel missing its head. After this decapitation, the son of the owner demonstrated his confidence in the safety of the ride by inaugurating it and managed to come through the tunnel intact. As a precaution he protected himself by wearing hockey equipment. Disney helped put such amusement parks out of business (Barron, 2019, p. A18).
22Not all of the guests have been satisfied, however. EPCOT Center, which opened in 1982, “has accomplished something I didn’t think possible in today’s world,” the satirist P. J. O’Rourke observed. “They have created a land of make-believe that’s worse than regular life. Unvarnished reality would be preferable,” he wrote in a deliriously dyspeptic book entitled Holidays in Hell. He was evidently taken for a ride. Journalist Mark Derr, based in Miami Beach, has complained that “the attractions” around Orlando “offer little of Florida, and no one seems to care.” To compare Orlando to its famous nearby theme park is to corroborate the claim of the sociologist Jean Baudrillard that “the city and the park are looking more like each other every day” (O’Rourke, 1988, pp. 184-85; Whitfield, 1993, p. 431; Mormino, 2005, p. 104). This common objection to tourism echoed what the historian Daniel J. Boorstin and the critic (and novelist) Umberto Eco formulated too. Such tourist sites risk calling reality itself into question. What Eco called “hyper-reality,” he argued, distorts actuality, and has represented a standard criticism of such theme parks ever since Boorstin’s broader condemnation of the mediated “pseudo-events” that can make modern experience so disorienting. In The Image (1962), he offered nature as a counterpoint to culture, or at least to the sort of culture that permeates so much of the texture of ordinary life through the ubiquity of media (Boorstin, 1962, pp. 4-5, 11; Whitfield, 1995, pp. 211-21). He was only partly right, however, because the relation to nature is also interactive.
23In 1962, ecological consciousness barely existed; and sensitivity to the devastation of the natural environment was not common. Scientists were not yet warning of the penetration of the ozone layer. The bill now needs to be paid. The American preference for artifice over actuality (as Boorstin argued), as well as the reckless despoliation of the landscape, has now caused nature to retaliate.
24The destruction of so many mangrove forests has made the west coast of Florida especially subject to flooding. According to one 2015 study, the Tampa-St. Petersburg metropolitan area ranks first in urban America in vulnerability to storm surges. Fort Myers is fifth, and Sarasota ranks seventh (Davis, 2017, p. 521). In Florida hurricanes have long incurred a fear as vivid as it is warranted; they have been lethal. But climate change has expanded the season from June to November. In 2004, one of the four major hurricanes that hit the state shut down the theme parks around Orlando for three days. Such hurricanes are likely to become more frequent, more powerful and more destructive. The southeastern part of the nation annually gets more rain than any other section, and the hurricanes bring more than danger. One resident of central Florida has defined the hurricane season in terms of “the humidity that frizzes your hair. It’s the lizard that crawls inside your coffee mug.” The air is “sticky.” To walk outside may not mean to encounter exquisite beauty but palmetto bugs instead, as well as “hills of fire ants and heaps of molehills.” Central Florida, she added, is where “the sky cracks open and floods the roads” (Davis, 2017, p. 338; Revels, 2011, p. 145-46; Arnett, 2019, pp. C1, C4). Nature has struck back by heightening the dangers of flooding and sinkholes, which is why Craig Pittman, an environmental reporter for the Tampa Bay Times, warned tourists: “Watch where you step.” But “because of the hurricanes,” he added, “always keep an eye on the skies.” They are not entirely friendly. Though some like it hot, the piercing of the ozone layer has made ominous a term like “Sunbelt.” The yearning to become much less pale that once intrigued Russell Baker now looks foolish, an invitation to risk skin cancer rather than signal robust health (Mervosh, 2019, p. A17). Compared to the icy winter of the Northeast, fierce hurricanes and oppressive heat do not automatically favor Florida.
25The promoters of Florida had presented nature as mostly benign and hospitable. They showed the state to be primarily pastoral and irenic, a revived Garden of Eden. According to Genesis 3:1, only a single serpent could make trouble. But Florida seems less of a paradise than in the untamed nineteenth century. A bull shark got close enough to the shore of the Panhandle to bite off the arm of a swimmer who was training for a triathlon, while another attack near Destin proved lethal for a teenage girl. In central Florida wild hogs can grow to four hundred pounds. At least 72 species of mosquitoes have been found in the state; and in the summer, park rangers in the Everglades must often be outfitted with special clothing, including head nets. Tourists have reason to be apprehensive. They need to be advised that some creatures unmentioned in the Bible have found a home in Florida, thanks mainly to smugglers of exotic animals. Feckless monitoring at the Port of Miami led the Department of Justice to estimate that only the trade in drugs exceed the profits that can be derived from the importation of invasive species. They include Cuban tree frogs that are big enough to have gobbled native-born frogs, as well as the water hyacinth, the Asian walking catfish and the African tree snail (Bilger, 2009, p. 85).
26Among the least charming of such creatures is the Burmese python, which began to appear in the Everglades in 1995. These reptiles were probably released by a pet shop, or by a breeder or by an owner confronted with the challenge to having to provide a diet of mice, rats and rabbits. Burmese pythons can grow to a length over twenty feet, can weigh two hundred pounds and can live for more than twenty-five years. According to the account in the National Geographic, a group of tourists walking not far from the main entrance to the Everglades in 2003 watched a Burmese python fight a full-grown alligator to the death. That pythons are not venomous is hardly reassuring, because “their upper jaws are fitted with a quadruple row of sharp, inward-curving teeth, their lower jaws with a double row.” Their teeth can hold onto prey until the Burmese pythons “can coil their body around it.” They can swallow leopards and six-foot alligators. Almost as much as tourists, Burmese pythons seem pleased to visit Florida, and have been found as far west as Tallahassee and as far north as Jacksonville. These reptiles are also believed to be growing more numerous. Along a canal, or in a secluded park, children who are smaller than either leopards or gators should be especially careful (Bilger, 2009, pp. 82, 83, 85, 86, 97). No invasive species is more frightening or resilient or ferocious than the Burmese python.
27A close second, however, is an African lizard called the Nile monitor. It can grow up to seven feet in length. Its powerful legs enable an adult monitor to outrun a human being. This vicious creature has tapered jaws that are like daggers, and it is not picky about what it eats–which is basically whatever can fit inside its mouth. And whatever does not meet that test can be torn apart, from limb to limb. In the wild the Nile monitor can “hunt on land or in the water, climbing trees [and] digging up burrows,” according to science writer Burkhard Bilger. “Monitors often hunt in packs.” A biologist from the University of Tampa added that “they’re very aware, very intelligent.” Their disposition is quite disagreeable; and though they generally leave human beings alone, they attack if cornered. By now Florida may be harboring thousands of them. Because some have been spotted west of Fort Myers, at euphonious Cape Coral, the encounter between humanity and nature may be particularly fraught there. Cape Coral is the largest city between Miami and Tampa. “At the millennium,” historian Jack E. Davis noted, “Cape Coral was the fastest growing US city with a population of 100,000 or more.” The four hundred miles of canals in this planned community were intended to give homeowners some property next to water. Instead, the swamp—and, along with it, the Nile monitor—has come to them (Bilger, 2009, p. 89; Davis, 2017, p. 409), a reckoning that they could hardly have anticipated or sought.
28The Burmese python and the Nile monitor are among the more than two hundred non-native species of wildlife estimated to be living outside of captivity in south Florida. In 1992 Hurricane Andrew set loose animals that had been confined to the Miami Zoo. They included baboons, orangutans and capybaras, which are rats that grow to the size of hogs. Many fled into the Everglades National Park. Though its 1.5 million acres exhibit less diversity than the Amazon, the mixture of both tropical and temperate species makes this huge section of south Florida unique. Hence southern crocodiles splash around next to northern alligators; and some plants are so weird that they are carnivorous (Goodnough, 2004, pp. 1, 21; Bilger, 2009, p. 82).
29Most famous is the official state reptile, the native alligator. Somewhere between a million and a half and perhaps two million gators inhabit the state. But drought has reduced their natural habitat, forcing them to move toward places where Floridians have built swimming pools, canals and ponds. The incessant commitment to commercial and residential growth and the extension of agriculture into wetlands have limited the terrain that the gators once considered their own, resulting in a dramatic increase in fatal attacks against household pets and sometimes against humans. Alligators have become so aggressive that over sixteen thousand calls a year are placed at the state’s hot line, reporting nuisances and threats, often in backyards (Lemonick, 2006, pp. 48-49; Grunwald, 2004b, pp. 28-29; Bilger, 2009, p. 88). Consider the iguanas as well. The National Weather Service in Miami advised visitors as well as residents in south Florida to watch the skies again, because at night iguanas climb to treetops to rest. But these lizards, which are not native to the state, cannot maintain their grip when the temperature dips low; and they drop to the ground. Many can recover and slink away when it gets warmer. But tourists have been warned that they might not appreciate having a five-foot lizard land on them (Ortiz and Zraick, 2020, p. A26). Even when compared to the rats in the subways of New York City, the alligators on the lawn and the iguanas in the skies make Florida less enchanting.
30No wonder then that contemporary Florida fiction is so attuned to ecology. The exploitation of the land has produced a body of work in which “ambition, appetite and absence of memory,” according to one critic’s summation, “lay waste to a once exquisitely delicate environment of wetlands and beaches.” For instance, the protagonists in Hiaasen’s novels “dislike nature. Whether they are predatory developers, corrupt politicians, greedy sugar barons, sleazy corporate lobbyists,” they barely notice the environment, unless they imagine how “to drain it, pave it, dredge it, and otherwise exploit it... They bulldoze mangrove swamps and hardwood hammocks into gated communities and strip malls” (Gopnik, 2013, p. 104; Grunwald, 2004a, p. 33). The urgency of the problem of imbalance did not happen to concern the Nobel laureates in literature who lived in the state—Ernest Hemingway on Key West, Isaac Bashevis Singer on Miami Beach. But if present ecological trends continue unabated, a refuge for retirees like Singer’s Oceanside community will be entirely underwater in three decades. When Groucho Marx was auctioning off Miami real estate in The Cocoanuts, he promised the suckers that “you can have any kind of home you want. You can even get stucco. Oh, can you get stuck-o!” The cynical joke from this 1920s Florida boom stemmed from the phony plots of land that were sold “by the gallon.” But nature will have the last laugh, and it will be grim.
31Perhaps none of these alarming troubles lack equivalents elsewhere. But such portents seem to loom larger because of the shadow they cast on the mystique, because Florida has exercised such imaginative power over so many human beings. Too many visitors have come to the state; too many have stayed. Yet as historians Jack E. Davis and Raymond Arsenault observed in 2005, with some consternation, “Florida tourism has received very little scholarly attention in general, and the environmental implications of thirty to fifty million annual visitors have all but been ignored.” That is why Florida should be identified as a test-site of whether an erstwhile ideal of paradise can be squared with growth. Florida is where assumptions about economic and demographic growth have defied the fragility of the environment, where the relentless assault of the American way of life may have reached its limits. Has the remorselessness of “progress” therefore become the nemesis of wellbeing? Certainly, the installation of the machine in the garden has constituted one way of thinking about American history in general, but that injection applies especially to a state where prosperity depends so heavily on tourism. When John Muir, a founder of the Sierra Club and the instigator of the conservation movement in the US, arrived in Florida in 1867, he acknowledged the “thorny plants” and the “venomous beasts” that he saw around him. But Muir also revered nature for its powers of rejuvenating humanity, and he objected to the utter subjugation of the environment to social and economic desires (Davis and Arsenault, 2005, p. 19; Davis, 2017, pp. 243-44). The current troubles that Florida faces hint at the timeliness of Muir’s warning. How commerce can be reconciled with conservation, how over-tourism can somehow be accommodated to the natural order is the challenge that the history of Florida presents. It is a disconsolate reminder of the Fall that is integral to the myth of Eden.
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