Ditch of Dreams: The Cross Florida Barge Canal and the Struggle for Florida's Future (review)

Arguments over the desirability of grand public works projects can reveal much about a society's competing values, aspirations, and priorities. In their meticulous history of a repeatedly proposed—but never completed—navigational shortcut between the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean, Steven Noll and David Tegeder explore the political tensions that guided Florida's development from the time of European settlement to the present day. The Spanish first envisioned a channel dissecting the Florida peninsula in the sixteenth century and, two centuries later, the British actually recommended construction. By the early nineteenth century, boosters began petitioning the federal government to build a ship canal across northern Florida, but efforts to secure funding remained unfulfilled until the 1930s, when the waterway entered the New Deal portfolio.

Although the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers acquired and cleared land and commenced construction, the dubious economic justification, tepid political support, and strong opposition caused the Roosevelt administration to abandon the project. During World War II, the canal's proponents renewed their campaign, adding national defense as a justification (noting that cargo ships rounding Florida were particularly vulnerable to German submarine attacks), to no avail. Waterway advocates continued their lobbying throughout the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy administrations, ultimately securing, with President Johnson's backing and congressional approval, appropriated construction funds in 1964. The redesigned project called for a far shallower watercourse—a barge canal as opposed to a sea-level ship canal capable of accommodating ocean-going vessels—running about 182 miles, through five locks, with a twelve-foot navigation channel fed with water from three newly constructed reservoirs. Even with this reduction in size, the proposed project was massive, eclipsing the Panama Canal in the amount of earth to be excavated. The reconfigured waterway may have gained the support it needed to lurch forward, but changes in the nation's social climate were unfavorable for such an enterprise. As the authors explain, "Previous opposition to the canal either centered on its wasting of taxpayer money or its assumed destruction of the Florida Aquifer by allowing salt water to intrude into the freshwater supply so necessary for both human consumption and agriculture" (p. 145). Even though engineers had addressed these concerns in their revised design, waterway advocates had not anticipated the environmental movement, the shift in American attitudes, and the impact of newly enacted regulations.

The debates of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s had generally ignored the canal's effect "on the beauty of natural Florida, especially the relatively pristine Ocklawaha River" (p. 146). Enter Marjorie Harris Carr. Trained as a biologist, married to famed zoologist Archie Carr, and with close ties to the University of Florida science faculty, Marjorie Carr proved to be an astute, formidable opponent of the project. She was instrumental in the formation and operation of the Florida Defenders of the Environment, which joined forces with the Environmental Defense Fund in 1969 to challenge the waterway in court. As the Cross-Florida Barge Canal attracted national attention, it came to exemplify the environmental short sightedness of the government's large water resources development projects.

Ditch of Dreams provides great insight into the political maturation of environmentalism and citizen advocacy, as well as the relevance of public perceptions. The canal increasingly seemed like a relic of an earlier age. "In a world of jetports, interstate highways, and a burgeoning trucking industry," Noll and Tegeder explain, "a cross-state canal seemed incapable of meeting the demands of a modern economy" planned around tourism and services. "Images of lumbering barges and grimy industrial parks violated the vision of a subtropical paradise imagined by northern migrants" (p. 180).

The National Environmental Policy Act, enacted on January 1, 1970, proved critical in concentrating opposition to the canal, and the Florida Defenders of the Environment and Environmental Defense Fund made effective use of...