Now a tourist attraction, history shows Florida as 'a place that people avoided': author
Hurricane Irma has caused massive evacuations across the state of Florida.
Michael Grunwald sees some irony in this. In his Politico magazine article, he writes, "It's worth remembering that Mother Nature never intended us to live here."
Related: A Requiem for Florida, the Paradise That Should Never Have Been
The Miami-based writer and author of The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida and the Politics of Paradise says history portrays early South Florida in the 19th century as an awful place.
South Florida was really America's final frontier ... a place that people avoided.- Michael Grunwald
Diaries and letters from U.S. army soldiers describe it, says Grunwald, "as this hideous, abominable, godforsaken wasteland."
"And they were mostly pretty mystified that their bosses in Washington thought it was worth fighting for Florida rather than just leaving it to the Indians and the mosquitoes," he tells The Current's Anna Maria Tremonti.
Now that Florida is a megalopolis with millions of annual tourists, Grunwald says people forget that history shows a different picture.
"South Florida was really America's final frontier ... a place that people avoided."
In 1880, when a million people already lived in Manhattan, Grunwald explains the entire population of South Florida was 257 white men.
What brought people to Florida eventually wasn't the social security or air conditioning, says Grunwald. It was water control.
"Before water control it was just too wet for agriculture and development, and it was too vulnerable to floods and storms."
Florida is a state that is incredibly developed, Grunwald points out.
"Half of the Everglades is gone. And the other half is kind of an ecological mess, and that's not going to change. Irma is not going to change that."
But in the winter, South Florida is a great place to be, argues Grunwald — "a lot nicer than Buffalo or Boston or Cleveland. And no offence — even Toronto in the winter."
"People are going to keep flocking to Florida. We're doing a slightly better job of putting them in slightly less vulnerable places, but it's an incredibly low-lying flood plain, and the thing about flood plains is that it's plains that they flood."
Listen to the full conversation near the top of this web post.
This segment was produced by The Current's Julian Uzielli and Donya Ziaee.