A miserable sight:
Let us now skip forwards a few days, to when my professional obligations were complete. I had a half day to drive
the short distance to Tallahassee, so with several hours on my hands I selected a meandering, lazy route through
obscure regions of Florida.
The drive was nice and scenic, but the villages I passed through were crushingly poor, with few resources and plenty of
dilapidated houses and closed stores. The main economy was based in transforming the biologically rich swamps and marshes
into monotonous, depressing paper plantations, as you see here.
After being cleared, the habitat is planted out with
a pine monoculture--see the relict cypress swamp in the background? Sigh. This
practice is easy to damn, but it is harder to propose an alternative economic model.
That night I checked into my cheap motel in Tallahassee and had dinner with Jim Miller.
Jim is the famous (well, in the world of carnivorous plants) videographer who has been filming carnivorous plants in the wild
in the USA for the last couple of decades.
By the way, I can't complain about the tasty Mexican dinner that Jim treated me to. But apparently in Tallahassee they have no
idea of what chiles rellenos really are.
