welcome to florida
If I was in charge for tourism for Florida, this is the photo I would put on a big billboard as a WELCOME TO FLORIDA sign as you drive in.
In case you can’t tell what’s going on here, this is a photo taken in the everglades where a python (non-indigenous) attempted to eat an alligator and blew up in the process.
According to several sources there are now 100,000 pythons running amuck in the everglades, or slithering amuck? Burmese pythons that can grow up to 20 feet long. They’re non indigenous and the reason why there are so many? Because of stupid people buying snakes the at the pet shop and then letting them go because they got too lazy to take care of their scaly monster friend. So now, in only a place as crazy as the glades, its giant scaly monster against giant scaly monster.
What’s even crazier is that the governemnent wants to hire a team of bounty hunters to go out into the glades (Goddess be with them) and hunt down these 100,000 pythons. Insane.
It sucks that 100,000 snakes are going to die, but the other side of it is that one tried to strangle a toddler last week. I mean, they’re literally trying to eat everything.
Our environmental policies in Florida are a disaster. They’ve drained the swamp to try and build land on top of it and re-navigated rivers to try and put them back years later to try and build on top of them again. People have introduced all kinds of species for all different bullshit justifications. For instance back in the early 20th century Burgeron, one of the main industrial developers for South Florida, flew over the glades dropping tons of melaleuca tree seeds because he thought that the trees would “dry up the swamp”. The thing is that the glades is actually a river, below sea level. You can’t really dry it up. Now we have all of these dead melaleuca forests because as soon as they figured out what they did, they went and killed them all with toxic chemicals of course.
I think our environmental policies are fucked up because of all of the snow birds and northerner assholes that come down here for only half the year. People have whored out this land so much to make it a prime vacation spot but all of those vacationers are no where to be found when its time to clean up after a hurricane. Lame.
Poor penis state.
July 15, 2009 at 12:47 pm
Ha! Environmental policies are fucked because we think we’re in control completely. We aren’t. We’re along for the ride. The failed policies are all about control rather than caretaking, and they exist up north, out west, and every other place there are humans.
July 15, 2009 at 1:04 pm
anon,
I don’t completely agree or disagree with you. But what I hate is when people use your logic to not to anything at all because “we’re so fucked and have no control anyways”. Its apathetic, its lazy and its just lame in general.
July 15, 2009 at 7:14 pm
Oh, no! I don’t mean we should do nothing. We certainly are caretakers of our own domains, and that requires work even if just to minimize our own impact. What I was complaining about is the swing from extreme to extreme in policies. Really, it wouldn’t take much effort at all if everyone would work on living just a little lighter.
Other good photos for Florida would include the bays that are solid green from algae blooms, the pavement where cypress stands once grew, etc. Yeah. Some bitterness here at seeing my childhood be killed. But it’s certainly not just Florida.
July 15, 2009 at 2:21 pm
kill the non-natives! I’m really surprised the gators aren’t doing a better job against the snakes.
July 16, 2009 at 2:39 am
I knew pretty much nothing about FL except that I had no interest in visiting it (and that Strawberry Girl was an awesome book in fourth grade) but I just read The Orchid Thief which did a pretty good job of describing a lot of the history & shit developers and other idiots have done in Florida, some of which you described. Pretty interesting, even if the author annoyed the piss out of me.