The Suburban Sprawl Conundrum

I struggle with my small yet colluding role in the plight of Florida's natural resources. After all, I did choose to move into a gated neighborhood which at one time was swampland. 

I watched a documentary recently called The End of Suburbia. In it the narrator says (my friend Jan said the same thing independently) that these far-flung, cookie-cutter neighborhoods are usually named after the very thing they displace. This would be true for quite a few places in Southwest Florida: Wildcat Run, Pelican Sound, Raptor Bay, Quail Creek, Olde Cypress, Grey Oaks, Bear's Paw, Rookery, and Eagle Lakes are just a few.  

The End of Suburbia is one of several compelling documentaries I've seen on suburban sprawl and peak oil. (The Long Emergency is a great book on the subject.) I think that no where is this a more interesting phenomenon than in South Florida where people have single-handedly ruined an entire, totally unique ecosystem (The Everglades). Then our family decides to up and move here and contribute our little part to this conundrum.

Ironically, hubby is a water/wastewater engineer. For him, Florida is nirvana: A place where water is the central theme of every State, County and Municipal discussion. Water is everyone's preoccupation in Florida; whether in consideration of its role as a source of fun or worry.

I sit in my family room and enjoy watching the egrets, wood storks, ibis and spoonbills sway on toothpick-size cypress tree branches and poke at fish in the swamp behind the house. A lone gray heron catches the biggest fish, bringing them one by one onto the grass to flip it around until it is dead or at least stunned enough for easy gulping. Today, a bald eagle came by and spent a couple hours watching all the activity from the canopy. A pair of red shouldered hawks swooped at it occasionally but the eagle was unmoved by their outbursts. Even when I would take the dogs out, the birds would merely ignore us; and if we got too close, they would fly en masse to the trees, the wood stork being the most ungainly in its quest to achieve liftoff.

Being as far from the city as we are, I also get to see various mammals and reptiles including the ubiquitous gators, armadillos, panthers, snakes and black bears. It is fascinating.

But it is also guilt-inducing. We are part of a system that has eaten up the land upon which so many of these animals depend. Yet, I love where I live. 

Personally, I believe that we are going to run out of oil before we have enough alternative energy sources to make the transition easy. Paradoxically, we picked a house that is quite far from the city where hubby works. Furthermore, his Toyota 4-Runner just screams, "Fill me!" 

From the point of view of resource allocation, our choice of house sucked up more than our fair share. 

I truly believe that we are causing so many problems with our suburban lifestyle; a lifestyle we happen to have chosen for ourselves. I can't offer any explanation for it and I can't offer any excuse. I can offer my children ideals towards which to strive and I can see all these ideals ruminating in their heads. It's a different generation and they are taking their call to environmental action very seriously.

I talk to my children about our choices and the alternatives available to us. I discuss options for the future and what we might do differently next time. There are so many things we never thought of when we moved here; things that seem so obvious now. 

I would like to think that if we had it to do over, we would pick an existing house in the city; I would like to think that we would choose a small vehicle for hubby to drive; and I would like to think that we would be more environmentally conscious in our use of precious resources. I know there are better choices to be made and we work hard to make sure our kids know about them too. 

But I sure do love watching those birds...