Florida's disappearing wetlands
Craig Pittman got a call in 2001 from a professor who said that Florida’s wetlands are disappearing. But it took a new editor and two years before he got to start reporting.
In 2003, the Florida native and long-time environmental reporter said his new editor responded “Florida’s selling swampland. Holy cow, that’s a story.”
Then Pittman met Matt Waite, and the two began work on an award-winning series for The St. Petersburg Times about the “no net loss” policy on wetlands, which means for each acre of wetland destroyed, that many acres of wetland should be restored.
They uncovered that Florida’s credit system of wetlands isn’t monitored and is often abused for profit.
The wealth of information discovered in investigating that series progressed into a book titled “Paving Paradise,” which became available for publication this month.
Pittman and Waite are on tour promoting their new book this month, and they stopped in Gainesville, Fla., on Wednesday night to participate in a lecture and discussion on Florida’s water and wetland problems.
Neither journalist had ever written a book before. The idea came once again from a friend and professor. The transition didn’t involve too much more research.
“We left so much reporting on the cutting room floor,” Pittman said.
By researching the history of wetlands in Florida, adding in the personalities of people involved and including much more of the reporting done, a book that told the whole of a story came out more than two years after the news series was completed.
The series provoked reaction from a group of locals, who stormed the zoning board and waved the newspaper stories above their heads. The people wanted to stop rezoning that hurt Florida’s wetlands.
A reaction possibly came from the corps, which denied four permits to destroy wetlands after the story’s publication, said Waite. Though, Pittman added that the court eventually reversed those decisions.
“It’s tough to expect a newspaper story to have any effect on that size of a business,” Waite said, referencing the $38 billion Florida construction industry.