Introduction

Florida: Bellwether of the South

Thank you for opening this special issue of the Southeastern Geographer devoted to Florida. Geography has come a long way since the middle 20^th century when regional geography was in its heyday. Some might be tempted to think that this special issue marks an attempt to return to the dark ages of mind numbing early regional studies jammed with all manner of description about collections of places with little attempt to explain underlying processes. Although I must confess an affinity for contemporary place based and regional studies (as do many readers of the Southeastern Geographer) my purpose in putting this special issue together is manifold.

To begin with, Florida has nearly twice as many people as the next most heavily populated state in the Southeast Division of the Association of American Geographers (SEDAAG), yet geographic studies using Florida as a laboratory have been relatively sparse in the pages of the Southeastern Geographer over the past five years. Only 6 out of 82 articles published in this journal from 2004–2008 were based in Florida. Of course, many of the journal's articles over this time dealt with the entire South. Perhaps some of this lack of attention to Florida is due to what John Shelton Reed (2003) suggests is the fact that Florida is "south but not Southern." To be sure, much of peninsular Florida is not like the rest of the South; but this strikes me as all the more reason to give peninsular issues more attention. Much of central and southern Florida are quite different from the rest of the South, but in many ways, current human and physical phenomena in Florida represent what awaits much of the rest of the South as the Sunshine State loses its image of paradise on the cheap, and as an increasing number of northerners recognize that Florida is fast becoming little more than a snow-free version of where they already live.

Of course, regional studies in geography (outside this journal) are not yet dead even if responses to the call by John Fraser Hart (1982) have been somewhat under whelming. Yes, there is D.W. Meinig's masterful four volume Shaping of America series, the product of a regional historical geographer (1986; 1993; 1998; 2004). And there are several others, such as John Hudson (2006), Craig Colten (2005), Alexander Murphy (1999; 2006) and D. Gordon Bennett and Jeffrey Patton (2008)—among others—who remain deeply committed to regional geography. At the same time, there has been no shortage of discussion regarding the intellectual merits (and demerits) of regional studies both in geography and out (Oakes 1997; Agnew 1999; Paasi 2002; 2003; 2004; Wishart 2004; Lagendijk 2007; Pike 2007; Schlottmann 2008).

And what of Florida? To be sure, state level studies across the country have faded from fashion some time ago, but other academic disciplines seem not to have noticed. Scholars outside geography have produced many first rate synthetic volumes in which their disciplinary knowledge about the state has been made accessible to scholars and popular audiences alike. For example, although Ewel and Myers' (1990) Ecology of Florida is still widely used, Whitney et al. (2004) have added Priceless Florida in an effort to keep the unique ecology of Florida on the public's mind. Florida historians are similarly undeterred (Mormino 2005; Davis and Arsenault 2005; Gannon 2003; 2007). And so it goes for the geology of Florida (Randazzo and Jones 1997; Bryan, et al. 2008); the state's economy (Scoggins and Pierce 1995; Stronge 2008); as well as government and politics in Florida (Colburn 2007; Benton 2008).

Yet significant geographic analysis of Florida and its range of problems and issues in one volume remains elusive. To be fair, geographers such as Morton Winsberg have tackled large chunks of Florida (1995; 2003; 2007), and so have Edward Fernald and Elizabeth Purdum (1996; 1998). The articles in this volume certainly do not cover but a fraction of the phenomena that demand geographers' attention; but they do combine (in one volume) a discussion of several issues important to Florida—and probably the rest of the South as well, for...