Future Here Now: when the binary fails
I’m currently in the Florida Keys visiting family, and every time I come here I’m struck anew with a kind of unsettling realization:
I grew up thinking that Land and Sea were two completely different things. Opposites, really. A Binary Choice. One or the other.
Not here.
Take a look at a map of the south end of Florida - one with some kind of indication of topography and water depth ideally. Most of us non-Floridians know that there’s a big swamp (the Everglades) near the south end of the peninsula.
What you don’t realize until you get here is that the swamp mostly continues to where the maps say that land ends. When you go there, it feels less like land ending and more like it sort of petering out.
Blending into the water of Florida Bay. And the bay itself is really just a somewhat deeper and saltier swamp. You can wade out more than a mile from shore in some places and never get your shirt wet.
The difference isn’t binary, it’s just a difference, a gradual and changing and complicated variance of the different elements — water, muck, sand, mangroves.
And this isn’t special to south Florida, of course. Deltas all over the world, from Louisiana to Bangladesh, show the same characteristics - and grapple with the consequences. In St. Bernard Parish, on the Mississippi Delta in Louisiana, a football field’s worth of visible materials subsides under the water every year.
Of course, Louisiana’s land loss is a largely manmade crisis, between a hundred years’ worth of dredging and damage and increasingly tumultuous weather thanks to climate change. And south Florida is experiencing its own gorgon’s knot of water-linked challenges, from contaminated water tables to erosion to subsidence and an explosion of invasive species.
I suspect that one of the root reasons why we have created so much damage in places like these is because of that false dichotomy that we learned: Land and Water Are Separate From Each Other. When northerners from places where terrain and geology make that division more clean came to places where one blends into the other, we assumed that the same ways we dug and piped and built in the other places would work the same way here, because those are things you do with Land. The fact that water lies so close under the surface, that that surface was so much more porous and spongy… and fragile… somehow didn’t compute. There are lots of potential reasons for that blind spot (and yes, greed certainly played a big role), but I think one that we overlook is one of the ones we have the most to learn from:
The dichotomy that we all believed, wasn’t a dichotomy at all. In places like these, it was a continuum.
We’re moving into an era of human history where we not only have to undo the damage of our forebears, but where we have to understand why their assumptions created so much damage in the first place. If we make the same assumptions — for example, that virtually anything in nature actually divides into neatly-demarcated categories, instead of blending through a continuum of alternatives…
We will have missed the real lesson. And missed the wonder of seeing all of the possibilities that fall between our inherited dichotomies.
When I worked in St. Bernard parish a few years ago, I met a couple of fantastic young entrepreneurs who had started a glass recycling business - but the use that they were most interested in wasn’t new bottles. They posited that pulverized glass (which is the same mineral as sand) could be used to reclaim some of the land that Louisiana has lost by enabling the establishment of the kinds of plants that capture the sediment that piles up to create land. Franziska’s excitement over muck gives me a big grin every time. And it might point to the power of a new way of thinking. Check it out!
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT8vFPpfA/