Barging Through Sanity

The Cross Florida Barge Canal and other expressions of malevolent genius

This is how the Oklawaha River looked when Florida was a pristine wilderness. Promoters of The Cross Florida Barge Canal wanted it cleared, excavated, dredged and straightened for the benefit of commerce.

Every now and then somebody comes up with an idea so compelling that it charms the politicians into funding it. It doesn’t matter if the idea is palpably idiotic on its face, people still want whatever the idea promotes. I give you the Tower of Babel as an early example and the attempted Americanization of Iraq as one that is more recent, along with those numerous monumentally wasteful testaments to vanity that we call presidential “libraries”.

Libraries!

(If this a library I’m Stonewall Jackson)

But on a scale of one to ten, the Cross Florida Barge Canal has to come in, at the very least, at Nine and seven-eighths. The idea of crossing Florida through inland waterways was first raised in 1567 by the founder of Spanish St. Augustine, Pedro Menendez de Aviles and continued to infect dreamers, boosters and Congressional planners starting around 1829. Finally, after determining that it might help liberals grow fond of him, Richard Nixon put the final nail in its coffin in 1971. By then the damage already done was proof of the mindlessness of the whole project.

But in the process of failing, they ruined the beautiful Oklawaha River and much of the ecosystem along its shores.

Kayaking on what’s left of the the Oklawaha River. It is a wild and scenic place … a canopied channel through the wilderness with very clear water most of the year.

This wild river is what they dammed up to build a reservoir to serve the barge canal. It cut off the natural path of migration for a lot of the fish, permanently eliminating, for example, both the sturgeon and the striped bass. The native manatees now find it difficult to move up or down what’s left of the river.

The gentle Florida manatee.

Opposition grows

Fortunately, in 1969, a naturalist who opposed the barge canal entered the picture. Marjorie Harris Carr led a small group of scientists and activists who called themselves the Florida Defenders of the Environment. Marjorie ran the operation from her own kitchen with mimeograph machines and volunteers, producing an environmental study that revealed the barge canal's toll on the environment. They also sued, and convinced Reader's Digest to publish a piece called 'Rape on the Ocklawaha'.

Margorie Harris Carr.

The huge groundswell of protests which followed Marjorie’s efforts ultimately led to President Nixon’s desk where he signed the order halting further development of the canal in 1971.

Even though further construction of the canal was killed, it didn’t result in removing the dam. This thing still redirects much of the water from the Oklawaha to divide Florida ecosystems.

A powerful Florida State Senator named George Kirkpatrick successfully lobbied lawmakers to keep the dam in place. He said the reservoir behind it is good for bass fishing, thus benefiting the local beer, bait and tackle economy. It set off a long-running battle between Marjorie Carr and George Kirkpatrick, with the kayak crowd favoring Marjorie and the bass fishermen lining up behind Kirkpatrick.

The legislators named the dam after him.

For the record, this dam is 55 years old. It has a projected lifespan of 50 years. Halfway through the construction of the canal, which was originally intended for cargo ships, the engineers realized that the water would never be deep enough for ships so they began calling it a “barge” canal. So, if it was only about virtually useless barges then it was “all potatoes and no meat” in retrospect.

State Senator George Kirkpatrick.

So Why Not Barge Through the Atmosphere?

The glow of Earth’s atmosphere as seen from the Space Station. Sunlight “ignites” the sky above us making it appear blue due to the various wavelengths in light. But it’s all in the total blackness of space.

In 1974, the United Nations put on a World Food Conference in Rome, ostensibly to help starving, third-world nations but also to scare the hell out of everybody and enumerate ways to extract money from the United States. I was there, directing a documentary film and I interviewed on camera several well-known scientific attendees, each of whom warned of imminent global cooling and the immediate possibility of another ice age. They had studies. They had experience. They had reputations!

Could it be that this provided an “ah-ha” moment for smart globalists, who saw planetary hysteria as a quick means of getting rid of those pesky, middle-class capitalists? Just asking.

So Then Find a Better Threat

Then they figured out that since there was really no way to stop global cooling they had to find a ‘plan B’ to make the planetary hysteria happen. So they settled on global warming because then, yes, they would have some ready-made villains to deploy that would force compliance, the main one being carbon dioxide … a naturally occurring gas which is vital to life itself but which, if you simply rename it a “greenhouse” gas, has the advantage of being a perfect scapegoat for shutting down the greedy machinations of the pesky capitalists pigs everywhere except the capitalist pigs in China and the capitalist pigs in India.

This is what inspired planetary authority, Al Gore, to go worldwide getting rich by professing the end of just about everything if the human race, especially the human race which happens to be in the United States, didn’t get rid of carbon dioxide real soon. It all just burgeoned from there.

Today, global warming is called “climate change” in order to cover all bases in case anybody ever debunks the carbon dioxide scapegoat. But whatever it’s called, it remains the longed-for simple solution to the eternal class struggle and a thought requirement for wannabe revolutionaries and authoritarian planet fixers. Marx was just born too soon for his own good.

Comes Now Bill Gates Soaring to the Rescue

You may not believe it!