Redland, the Wades and the armies of compassion, Part 1 ... by gimleteye

After more than two decades as activists and volunteers for Redland, Pat and John Wade are moving away. The following is a summation of their story; and a meditation on the nature of volunteerism in defense of one's community at a time when suburban sprawl triumphed throughout Florida. Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all!


On the subject of volunteerism, American presidents are always front and center. But to what effect, what purpose and what end?

Within the universe of volunteerism, there is a segment that does not fit the frame of helpfulness spurring presidents’ speechwriters to fire up tired canards: this form of democracy has to do with defending democracy from predators.

These are not volunteers blessed by a thousand points of light or featured on newsmaker programs or clips that offer dollops of hopefulness about the capacity of Americans to contribute. Recognizing volunteers who defend democracy from predators gets complicated, when those predators are powerful, wealthy campaign contributors; in some cases the same entrusted with fiduciary responsibility for the nation’s financial institutions.

Former President Bill Clinton, in his final month in office, saluted volunteers; “In America, we are fortunate to have a long and distinguished history of giving and volunteering. Last year in our country, more than half of all adults volunteered their time on behalf of a nonprofit organization. Millions of Americans lend their hearts and hands to faith-based efforts and local, national, and international charitable organizations; hundreds of thousands have served as catalysts for change in the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps. Their efforts build on our nation's enduring traditions of meeting our challenges not through big government or as isolated individuals, but as members of a true community, with all of us working together.”

George W. Bush recently put his own touch on volunteerism in the Rose Garden, highlighting citizens who aided the victims of hurricanes and war. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/09/20080908-6.html
“I appreciate the fact that those here represent the hundreds of thousands of our citizens who answered the call to love a neighbor like we'd like to be loved ourselves. I appreciate the fact that you and others lift up souls, one person at a time. You strengthen the foundation of our democracy, which is the engagement of our people.”

However muddled the last part of it, the president’s notion of ‘one love’ or “true community” is Norman Rockwell volunteerism; the hail-fellow-well-met of Shriner’s events, of men in funny hats driving in circles on miniature scooters, of corporations encouraging employees to run for cancer, or diabetes, or AIDS, nailing planks for habitats, or helping The United Way by the mile or raising money for the soccer team.

These are all good, but volunteerism has other shapes. When volunteerism conflicts with corporations that insulate the powerful, it is shunned and, worse, persecuted.

Here is a case and point from Page 1 of The New York Times: “The Reckoning: White House Philosophy Stoked Mortgage Bonfire” (December 21, 2008). According to The New York Times, in the waning days of his administration, President Bush is confounded that he leaves the nation in the worst economic crisis since the Depression.

“This administration made decisions that allowed the free market to operate as a barroom brawl instead of a prize fight,” said L. William Seidman, who advised Republican presidents and led the savings and loan bailout in the 1990s. “To make the market work well, you have to have a lot of rules.” But Mr. Bush populated the financial system’s alphabet soup of oversight agencies with people who, like him, wanted fewer rules, not more.”

If President Bush and President Clinton had listened more closely to the criticism from volunteers fighting to protect their quality of life and environment, the nation might have been spared the deep loss and misery that prevails today. These volunteers have been unrecognized at the base layer of democracy, where fighting forms of unsustainable economic growth—primarily connected to suburban sprawl—are mostly ignored.

For presidents and skeptics, let me put the prevailing condition of democracy in a simple, stark context; an image that doesn’t need teasing from economic studies, or accounts of asset bubbles in Holland in the 17th century, or of data that may have been incompletely provided to former Fed Chief Alan Greenspan and august members of its regional governing boards, their presidents, and staff.

The image will be familiar to every citizen who has tried to influence a zoning decision at the local level of government to protect a river, a stream, or the rural character of their community: a medieval drawbridge spanning a moat protecting the castle from outsiders.

The castle is government. Behind its walls are legislators. On the far side of the moat are civic activists, community organizers and volunteers. With their backs to the castle, a legion of lobbyists, big engineering firms, and special interests otherwise engaged in converting farmland to suburbia at scale.

The drawbridge is operated by a winch driven by a system of gears that allow small exertion to produce big work. The heavy drawbridge goes up to allow the free transit of commerce and industry that conforms to gigantism; ie. rock mining, electric utilities, water pipe infrastructure, wastewater disposal, highway construction, wetlands “mitigation”. It goes down to block dissenters, critics, and volunteers armed with common sense.

But the central feature of this metaphor is the system of gears that hauls the drawbridge up and down; it is the same set of gear ratios—built to appropriate scale—for the White House, Congress, for state legislatures and local county commissions.

The cogs on the big wheel are the greed and hubris of Wall Street; making billions while losing trillions through synthetic, derivative debt spun from the thin air of business school and math departments and embraced by executive suites in America’s largest financial and industrial corporations.

The big cogs mesh with cogs on the smaller wheels; from Congress to local zoning councils and the predetermined outcomes hashed out by lobbyists in backrooms at long lunches or dinners before pubic hearings.

Our representative volunteer, standing at the other side of the drawbridge, at the far side of the castle, would have no idea that mortgage backed securities provided energy for that platted subdivision they opposed, that collateral debt obligations prepared one thousand acres of farmland for profit better than any fertilizer, or that credit default swaps helped underwrite political campaigns of county commissioners who turned their backs on people or, as in Miami, play the race card to defile the reputation of volunteers.

They would understand the network of enablers of an economic status quo who have limited knowledge, interest, or understanding of Wall Street finance. To the contrary, their presence depends on not seeing anything beyond the banner and the flags waving in the breeze, advertising housing subdivisions behind stucco walls fronting highways and turnpikes.

The big wheel turns by the energy and confidence in the free market to do better than government in protecting the interests of people. It keeps turning on the principle that private corporations can self-regulate and judge risk better than government—risk, for instance, to the quality of our air and water or equally to the probability of financial default.

This big gear connects down to the little gears at the level where builders and developers push platted subdivisions through zoning councils that conformed—not with what the market wants, as advertised with Hummers and SUVs in colorful full-page ads —but with what Wall Street could finance in bundles.

So far, the misdirection and abrogation of fiduciary responsibility for the nation’s economy is confined to stories by economics writers, about players in executive suites who stand for the mighty fallen. But the more revealing story is replicated ten thousand times and in ten thousand places: the base level of government where development rules conflict with common sense and the interest of ordinary people in development at scale to neighborhoods.

If you had been curious about volunteers who illuminate that story in Florida, where the housing boom originated as a political whirlwind, in Homestead or Florida City or Redland where it manifested as the subprime crisis, if you had drawn a circle around the southeast quadrant of Florida’s most populous county and inquired at any point in the last twenty years of volunteerism in protection of farmland lost to suburban sprawl, if you had done any of these things, you would have met the Wades.

Pat and John Wade are a former university professor and former utility engineer who, after retirement, dedicated time and energy tending a small shaded nursery—15,000 plants in six inch containers rotated among ornamentals—and to civic engagement; in particular, to protect Redland from suburban sprawl.

The place they spent twenty years defending is called Redland: the final farmland in Miami-Dade County. Redland comprises approximately 63 square miles and is named for its potholes of red clay in porous oolite limerock. Its primary feature is its flatness, virtually at sea level, stretching from the Everglades to the west straight across the Florida peninsula.

These two features: flat and at sea level, make farming possible only through the extensive flood control system of South Florida. Think of a pan and water poured at one edge; the gradual tilt of the Florida peninsula, downward to Florida Bay only a few miles from Redland, spills water and accounts for the single most important demand of large-scale farmers: flood control.

Redland is bordered on the west by Everglades National Park, whose natural feature is millions of acres of wetlands, to the north by the sprawling suburbs of Kendall, to the south, by municipalities hungry for development, Homestead and Florida City, and to the east, by the final stretch of US Route 1, its strip malls, auto dealerships, restaurants and bars as it heads to the Florida Keys.

What makes Redland special is the pressure of nearby population. More than 2 million people live in the county that includes Redland. Redland is also in the increasingly fragmented area of unincorporated Miami-Dade County. These areas are not served by municipal governments like the city of Miami or a few dozen smaller, other cities; but by a county commission that represents unincorporated areas and the needs of their population.

The main difference between Kendall to the north and Redland is the Urban Development Boundary: Kendall is inside the UDB, most of the Redland is outside. Within the UDB, suburban sprawl proliferates like a weed.

Outside the UDB, sprawl is prohibited by rules and regulations, enacted by prior county commissions and incorporated in state law. So long as sprawl generated fat millions for land speculators, farmland outside the UDB—in Redland, for example—was ground zero for the battle that manifested to convert farmland to platted subdivisions as quickly, efficiently, and brutally as Wall Street financing would allow.

As the last rural enclave, its empty acres were gold to land speculators during the housing boom who only had to influence a local zoning council and county commission. The single acre the Wades own hardly compares to the thousands of acres in row crops that supply industrial quality produce to the nation’s supermarket chains whose owners had rather gambled with production homebuilders than bet on farming to sustain their generations.

Redland is an outpost at the corner of the state’s most populous county, at the edge where Florida’s east coast meets the Everglades, in the southeast corner of the United States. In other words, a corner of the envelope, an eddy in a current, the kind of place unlikely to make front page news barring an exceptional event—a two headed cow, a python swallowing an alligator.

The Wades sat right in the middle of the deep divide in the farming community of Redland; between large-scale farmers whose interests were represented by the Dade County Farm Bureau and smaller tropical fruit and nursery growers like the Wades.

For the last two decades much of the Wades civic engagement has been focused on stopping the advancement of infrastructure that otherwise provides the legal basis and rationale for moving more developments into farmland now outside the county’s urban service boundary. Although they were long-time members of the local civic association, called the Redland Citizen Association, for the most part their work as been as individual volunteers; finding the neighborhood nursery whose owners had made a deal to convert to a Publix Supermarket and jumping in to object.

This is an important point: in key respects, environmental organizations – formally incorporated as charitable organizations—cannot contain the ambitions of civic activists like the Wades. There are many reasons, and Florida is instructive on a key point: as a conservative, red state with a weak minority (Democratic) party, for twenty years the leadership of the environmental movement has been torn by rivalries, in part the result of a divide and conquer strategy that confers status and rank to compromise and to the benefits of cozying to corporate donors. To get along, go along.

The second reason has to do with the IRS code governing charitable organizations through which political activity is sharply conscribed. Corporations can pursue their goals and objectives, often as marketing expenses in the legislature—for example—but charitable environmental organizations funded through tax-deductible contributions from individual donors or foundations,rarely support their work in legislative halls with political action on the ground, where rewards and penalties might otherwise be administered through elections.

As a result, environmental organizations the gain access to the inner sanctums of political authority, smile in the photo-ops while their ankles are bound. As a result, environmental organizations are not always reliable partners or able to influence public opinion or politics, except in one way: litigation. Due process and the law is the one place where environmental groups, constituted as charitable organizations, can wage war on polluters and dodgers and schemers. The court of law is the one place where the influence of lobbyists dissolves. But even here there is an important qualification that is central to the Wades’ story; where judges are appointed by the governor, as in the case of state courts, or through political processes, activists learn that the playing field is still tilted away from the public interest.

The result is telling: for twenty years, the Wades left a record of deep involvement in their community, to defend their community from unsustainable development. They could not be easily pushed off their interest in protecting Redland, where the last remaining agriculture would need re-zoning for houses, industrial and commercial, in order to fulfill the dreams of land speculators to become new feeder suburbs between Kendall and the Florida Keys.

During this time, the Wades were individually named plaintiffs in nearly a dozen court actions, sometimes alone but often with co-plaintiffs or intervenors; against the siting of sprawl, against the widening of an important road, and in support of state growth management laws. Sometimes environmental organizations joined them, but often they spent out of their own pockets; relying not on associations or groups, but on their own determination.

To prove out the tenets of democracy that government in American is of the people and for the people, the Wades learned zoning codes, regulations and dove into voluminous government files available to the public, to prove their points: spending hours that their opponents charged clients hundreds of dollars per hour to do; to buttress their arguments with data and fact. They understood how the system was gamed to protect corporations and they were willing to engage it.

At first, Pat and John Wade occupied themselves and their causes with arguing for the value of agriculture, the weakness of growth management rules and enforcement, the necessity of protecting the agricultural component of a tourism-based, pass through economy, of watersheds and wetlands to the one metric that counts at County Hall: politics.

Their story as volunteers is instructive for anyone who wants to get at the heart of America’s economic emergency. Our newspapers are filled with stories and statistics, demographics and econometric models outlining the crisis.

Far better, if the mainstream press had reported the struggle of volunteers like the Wades. If politicians and economists had paid attention to the grievances piling up from people trying to stop suburban sprawl from turning their neighborhoods, regions, and environment toxic well before—decades before—and followed those grievances to the source, it might have been possible to forestall and prevent the worst economic crisis since the Depression.

(This ends the first part ... your comments and corrections are welcome. Stayed tuned for the second part, tomorrow.)