That swampland in Florida just got swamped

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Hurricane Ian devastated parts of southwest Florida, with Gov. Ron DeSantis labeling the damage as "indescribable." At least 100 deaths have been reported.

While some see catastrophic hurricanes as an act of nature — blaming bad luck for the damage — scientists cite climate change for the rise in "super hurricanes" of at least Category 4 or higher reaching U.S. shores.

But another factor also played into the havoc wreaked by Ian: the unique development of southwest Florida over the past century, which was driven by the idea that humans could control nature through brute force of engineering. This belief has left people and property more vulnerable, with fewer natural buffers to help reduce hurricanes' impacts.

The area of Cape Coral, in Lee County, home to Fort Myers — one of the places hardest hit by Ian — was initially coastal marshland and wetland. Under the Swamp Land Act of 1850, the U.S. government nominally granted Florida access to more than 20 million acres of roughly charted wetlands — far more than any other state.

As in other places, like California's Bay-Delta Area and the Mississippi Delta, reclamation of wetlands was encouraged and supported, giving a green light to whatever productive enterprises could be launched to tame the soggy wilderness.

Even so, coastal southwest Florida remained largely inaccessible to transportation and basically undeveloped into the 1950s.

But this infrastructure set in motion the idea that the region's vast landscapes could be reconfigured into lucrative, planned, Levittown-style subdivisions. Housing demand was high among veterans, retirees and middle-class workers who now had cash, due to the vaunted GI Bill — which subsidized education and homebuying for a rising, predominantly white middle class.

Warm waterfront dreams awaited.

Baltimore-based visionary land developers Leonard and Julius "Jack" Rosen soon sprang into action. In 1957 they formed an investment firm and purchased the land they would later name Cape Coral from private owners for $678,000 with the goal of building a coastal city. They founded the Gulf American Corporation (GAC) and got to work facilitating the migration of homeowners to Florida.

Commentators have emphasized the slick marketing ploys and installment-type sales structure that successfully sold the dream of Cape Coral. The remaking of the landscape was equally important.

In the Rosens' eyes, ubiquitous marshes and tidewater at sea level were no longer problems but opportunities. And in an era that celebrated landscape transformation, experts were available to do the work. For example, Thomas Weber, who oversaw the engineering of Cape Coral, had gained experience with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on major development projects in Brazil. He used explosives to blast coral shelves and cleared entire tidal mangrove forests with large earth-moving tractors. Within five years, 168 miles of canals graced the landscape.

The GAC marketed their invented city as a "waterfront wonderland." Advertising campaigns were relentless, and business boomed. While building on wetlands wasn't new, the scale of the project was unprecedented.

Conservation and environmental regulation eventually hampered some of the Rosens' ambitions for further expansion in the region, but the local damage in Cape Coral was complete. The GAC had managed to accrue 589,738.

The ensuing decades made it all too clear that the hasty "improvement" of the landscape was part dream and part lie. Poor planning led to flooding, ongoing challenges meeting water demand, trouble maintaining basic infrastructure and sprawl.

Across Florida, the land drainage, dredging and development that preceded migration to wetland areas indelibly changed the landscape — and fueled a population explosion. Between 1936 and 1995, the state's population increased from 1.7 to 14.1 million. That period witnessed a sixfold increase in urban land use and a 50% reduction of wetland areas.

On par with state population growth projections, Lee County is projected to increase about 25% in the next two decades. The pressure to continue transforming wetlands therefore remains strong.

And there's no guarantee that future development will adequately consider the risks of destroying wetlands. Fraught political battles to guide this development are ongoing in Florida, marked by efforts to minimize federal authority and grant the state greater autonomy to manage permitting and regulate development in flood plains.

Nor is this pattern of "coastal capitalism" unique to Florida. South Carolina, which felt Ian's second landfall, now faces significant damage from storm surge inundation. Lawmakers and regulators in neighboring North Carolina have not taken sea level rise seriously, and have instead contested established science to advance pro-growth land use policies.

Driven by revenue needs, governments want to develop land and attract lucrative businesses. Those with capital will find the places and opportunities, as well as the easiest regulatory paths, to make a profit. Yet, as in southwest Florida, this logic sells the dream of development while devaluing natural environments.

Now, caught between coastal capitalism and climate change, these developments lack functioning marsh ecosystems that can mitigate the impacts of coastal storms. Intact wetlands provide protection from the storm surge and flooding that make hurricanes so disastrous. Property damage from hurricanes is dramatically increasing — nowhere more so than in Florida.