Florida Tourism, Florida Greening

By Herb Hiller

When Florida first rose in the public imagination after the Civil War, it was a place of unfathomable wilderness, of untamed swamp and bayou, of limitless vistas. Springs bubbled up fresh water from the bottoms of salty bays. Brilliantly hued birds evoked Eden, so numerous in flight that they darkened the sky.
Florida was a place of myriad everglades. Everywhere shallow water pooled upon endless prairie, inching across sawgrass and cypress sloughs, near the coasts forming languid streams that braided their way to the sea. Panthers lazed on oak limbs. Black bears foraged in palmettos.
Vacationers in those times boarded paddle-wheeelers in Jacksonville and sailed up the St. Johns River, sometimes continuing as far as Lake Poinsett before transferring to wagon for the last four overland miles to Rockledge, a sportsman's resort on the Indian River in today's Brevard County.
In an age of American expansion, nature was ripe for conquest. Throughout Florida, land was drained for cattle and crops and wildlife was hunted toward extinction. Conservation arose only slowly, for a long time limited to the protection of birds with showy plumage. Tourism, which helped lift the state from bankruptcy following Reconstruction, developed Florida's economy. Ever since, tourism has fueled the state's population growth.
Today, Florida raises more than $300 million a year in bed taxes collected almost exclusively from tourists for use in attracting more tourists. Some quarter million of those visitors return each year to settle, along with immigrants from abroad, most drawn not only by good winter weather but also by the absence of state income and inheritance taxes and by exemption of the first $25,000 of homestead property value. Backed by state policy, by tourist slogans and by retirement brochures, the deck is stacked for developers, who see only endless suburban edge ready for paving more Paradise Acres.
Yet the 16 million people already living here are newly affecting state priorities. They strongly support the acquisition of valuable undeveloped lands for conservation by voting to tax themselves at state and county levels almost every time they face this issue. Increasingly they call for urban growth boundaries and newly demand control of amending the comprehensive land use management plans meant to govern how each county accommodates growth.
Equally important, more and more Floridians are moving to the state's coastal cities, turning yesteryear's seasonal downtowns into vibrant year-round residential hubs marked by exceptional cultural facilities, preserving close-in historic districts and creating a network of trails to get them from downtowns onto the conservation lands and the renewing small towns that mark so much of inland Florida.
Maybe most hopeful, earlier this year Visit Florida, the state tourist promotion agency, unveiled a new multi-year campaign aimed at directing visitors to these re-emerging downtowns and small towns. Although the marketers take their cue from public demand instead of from any intrinsic commitment to conservation, the effect is almost the same. That prospect has quickly aligned state conservation groups with the new campaign because it also helps make downtown more residentially compelling vis a vis the suburbs. In this way, tourism and conservation together are helping counter suburban sprawl.
What remains now is for the not-for-profits - the Audubons, the Wildlife Federations and others - to reach these new urban tourists about their hiking and birding activities and their field trips of all kinds to further diversify Florida vacationing. The growing demand for events such as the Space Coast Birding & Wildlife Festival and its documented economic benefits seems likely to spur new efforts by tourism promoters to link with providers of nature, heritage and cultural experiences to better satisfy what increasing numbers of visitors seek from Florida.
Tourism, which has long troubled the state with out-of-control growth, may now help reverse that impact by recognizing the economic justification for preserving the assets that keep Florida special.

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Herb Hiller is author of Highway A1A; Florida At the Edge, scheduled for publication in spring 2005 by University Press of Florida.

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