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The Florida History and Culture Series
Paving Paradise: Florida's Vanishing Wetlands and the Failure of No Net Loss
What is happening to Florida's "protected" wetlands? "This is an exhaustive, timely, and devastating account of the destruction of Florida's wetlands, and the disgraceful collusion of government at all levels. It's an important book that should be read by every voter, every taxpayer, every parent, every Floridian who cares about saving what's left of this precious place."--Carl Hiaasen "Pittman and Waite pulled the lid off federal and state wetlands regulation in Florida and peered deep into the cauldron of 'mitigation,' 'no net loss,' 'banking,' and the rest of the regulatory stew. For anyone interested in wetlands generally, and in Florida environmental issues in particular, this is an eye-opening, must-read book."--J. B. Ruhl Since 1990, every president has pledged to protect wetlands, and Florida possesses more than any state except Alaska. And yet, since that time Florida has lost more than 84,000 acres of wetlands that help replenish the water supply and protect against flooding. How and why the state’s wetlands are continuing to disappear is the subject of Paving Paradise. Journalists Craig Pittman and Matthew Waite spent nearly four years investigating the political expedience, corruption, and negligence on the part of federal and state agencies that led to a failure to enforce regulations on developers. They traveled throughout the state, interviewed hundreds of people, dug through thousands of documents, and analyzed satellite imagery to identify former wetlands that were now houses, stores, and parking lots. The result was an award-winning series, "Vanishing Wetlands," of more than twenty stories in the St. Petersburg Times, exposing the unseen environmental consequences of rampant sprawl. Expanding their work into book form in the tradition of Michael Grunwald's The Swamp, Pittman and Waite explain how wetland protection has become a taxpayer-funded program that creates the illusion of environmental protection while doing little to stem the tide of destruction.
- GenresNonfictionNature
376 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2009
13 people are currently reading
178 people want to read
About the author
Craig Pittman
11 books216 followersCraig Pittman is the author of seven books about Florida, including "Oh, Florida! How America's Weirdest State Influences the Rest of the Country," (2016) which became a New York Times bestseller, and "Cat Tale: The Wild, Weird Battle to Save the Florida Panther" (2020). His most recent book is "Welcome to Florida: True Tales from America's Most Interesting State" (2025). He writes a weekly column for the Florida Phoenix and also co-hosts the popular "Welcome to Florida" podcast. He is a native Floridian and graduated from Troy State University in Alabama, where his muckraking work for the student paper prompted an agitated dean to label him "the most destructive force on campus." Since then he has covered a variety of newspaper beats and quite a few natural disasters, including hurricanes, wildfires and the Florida Legislature. In 2020 he was named a Florida Literary Legend by the Florida Heritage Book Festival and in 2022 the national Sierra Club gave him its Rachel Carson Award. He lives in St. Petersburg, Fla., with his wife and two children.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
April 28, 2021
This was like reading a textbook, lots of statistics and technical information. I gave it five stars because the research was so complete, but I DNF, it was pretty boring. It did point out what a corrupt and backward state Florida is and the Army Corp of Engineers are a bunch of yahoos!
I love Craig Pittman but this one just put me to sleep.
I love Craig Pittman but this one just put me to sleep.
October 20, 2019
From reading this book I learned a new curse word: mitigation.
December 20, 2025
Craig Pittman and Matthew Waite are full of complaints. The authors of Paving Paradise: Florida’s Vanishing Wetlands and the Failure of No Net Loss show us a world of uncaring incompetence, malicious greed and the tragic results that inevitably follow from bad policy implemented by corrupt bureaucrats. These would-be Woodward and Bernsteins seem like sleuths on the trail of fraud and waste, turning up “backroom” deals, “toothless” regulators, “phony” mitigation banks, and so on. But it’s a world so full of name-calling and so utterly devoid of successes or even good faith efforts that it can’t help but call into question whether they are looking for the truth or just a sensational story.
The prologue to the book contains their thesis statement regarding the entire ‘no net loss of wetlands’ policy of the federal government: “It’s a huge scam”. Or, as they put it another, more delicate, way: “The result is a taxpayer funded program that creates the illusion of environmental protection while doing little to stem the destruction of precious natural resources.”
I guess if I didn’t know anything about mitigation requirements and mitigation banking I could be persuaded by the evidence they’ve gathered. These guys are serious journalists, and they’ve meticulously researched - and caricatured - every weakness, mistake and problem in the development and implementation of the wetlands related regulations under the Clean Water Act. And in fact, there are plenty of these to report on. No serious person who cares about the environment would argue that the US Army Corps has an unblemished record, or even that the Corps is necessarily the right branch of government to be regulating aquatic impacts.
As Pittman and Waite describe, it’s only a series of historical accidents having to do with control over navigation and ‘navigable waters’ dating back to 1899 that has the Corps so involved, along with the EPA, in the regulation of ‘fill’ placed in ‘waters of the United States’. But it’s clear that neither of the authors looked for examples of responsible development where the Corps did enforce the complex rules well, impacts were ‘avoided and minimized’ and both economy and ecology were well served. There are actually a lot of these.
In the interest of full disclosure, I’m in the mitigation banking business myself, as a partner in a firm that buys land, restores wetlands to a standard set by the rules of the Corps and the EPA, and sells ‘outsourced compliance’ credits to developers, transportation departments, and others. This means that I’m immediately in for the cartoon treatment by Pittman and Waite as a rapacious and money-grubbing exploiter of loopholes, but it also means I’ve spent hours poring over the public notices put out by the Corps – including the Jacksonville District in particular. These notices are up on the web for anyone to see, and include detailed analysis of the work proposed and the potential
impact – down to the 100th of an acre – for every single project that anyone wants to build.
The projects the Corps must review, provide permits for and require mitigation of include everything from major four lane highways to the extension of private boat docks. There are tens of thousands of individual regulatory actions required of the Corps every year, and they get some things wrong. It’s even possible that there are some truly incompetent or malevolent individuals working there among a host of colleagues trying to do the best they can. Or that they don’t have sufficient funding to do their job as well as they would like. But Pittman and Waite have no tolerance in any event. “We began to think of the Corps as a convoy of truckers driving across country with no map or compass,” they write. “They had no clue where they were going or where they had been. But they would never stop for directions. That might slow them down.”
The worst flaw of Paving Paradise, however, is not the obviously biased and one-dimensional approach that only finds what it looks for. It is the willful disregarding of genuinely significant improvements that have been made to the system of regulations under the Clean Water Act, and the alignment of incentives with environmental benefits that the practice of mitigation banking represents.
The individuals who work at the Corps and the EPA are obviously aware of the shortcomings of the past approaches to wetland regulation in Florida and elsewhere. The evidence is that they re-wrote the rules for ‘compensatory mitigation’ through an exhaustive multi-year process that involved detailed responses to over 12,000 public comments. Pittman and Waite somehow manage to make even this excellent example of rule making in public policy seem nefarious, but in any case the new rule – issued in May of 2008 – reflects state-of-the art knowledge of hydrology, hydrogeology, biology and watershed planning in what is arguably one of the most comprehensive and progressive environmental rules in existence.
Specifically, the new rule squarely addresses two of the biggest flaws in the structure of previous regulation of wetlands; the time lag between the date a permit is issued and the date when a mitigation project is finished called ‘temporal loss’, and reliance on too many small and isolated mitigation projects that met technical requirements, but failed to provide results that created enough ecological benefit within the watershed.
The original rules for mitigation emphasized ‘on site’ mitigation projects because the EPA and the Corps wanted mitigation to occur as close to projects as possible. Over time, however, it became clear that the result of this policy was a series of small mitigation parcels that often got surrounded by urban growth. The new rule gives clear priority to larger regional mitigation banks with greater ecological significance over these small ‘permitee responsible’ mitigation sites.
Mitigation banks also address the temporal loss issue, because they have to achieve clear ecological success criteria - like well established plantings of wetland species that can
only thrive if the flow of water is sufficient – before they are allowed to provide mitigation to others. It seems obvious, and it really is: if you can go and see that a bank has achieved specific success criteria with your own eyes, then you know that the mitigation it provides is legitimate.
Ironically, the new rule incorporates many of the suggestions Pittman and Waite make at the end of their 283 page diatribe. They call for better accounting rules, an emphasis on restoration over preservation, a ‘pay as you go’ system, and timelines for specific Corps actions during the permitting process, all of which are fundamental to the way the rule is written.
But they also call for an end to the approach of ‘no net loss’ of wetlands altogether with their fundamental suggestion being that we shouldn’t require any mitigation because we just shouldn’t allow any impacts to occur.
This is the heart of the problem, of course. Mitigation is certainly less preferable than just letting the natural world be, but as the United States population increases from its population of 300 million to 400 million just thirty or so years from now, we will in fact build more roads, schools and houses, and every one of these things will have some impact on the environment.
And the impacts don’t result just from building, of course, nor are they confined to wetlands. The entire scale and scope of the human economy has impacts on air quality, habitat for endangered species and simply open space for recreation and vistas that we love. But the ‘just say no’ answer that Pittman and Waite propose is really no answer at all. Now that we’ve had fifty years of experience with passing and implementing environmental laws, permitting has in fact reduced impacts greatly, and the majority of the remaining damage to natural systems is coming from the steady drip of business as usual rather than the drama of a Three Mile Island, the PCB’s in the Hudson or the loss of the California Condor or the Bald Eagle.
This is why the concept of mitigation doesn’t just make sense: it’s critical. Mitigation means the measurement of specific impacts and taking action to offset those impacts. It’s the basis of the successful programs that have reduced smog and acid rain, and the basis for allowing infill development to support greenbelts and watersheds in surrounding lands.
It’s also the way that we’re going to fund environmental improvements beyond the amounts that can be supplied by taxes, bond measures, and philanthropy. Hundreds of millions of dollars of private capital have been invested in meaningful conservation and restoration efforts, and this, despite what Paving Paradise would have you believe, is a very good thing. In order for more to be invested, there will need to be continued work on programs that provide incentive based on environmental performance, and to the extent we align incentives with the outcomes desired by public policy, we’ll get where we want to go much faster.
In a way, the criticisms that Pittman and Waite level at the world of wetlands regulation are obvious, and obviously correct. Good science, and ever better science, are needed to ensure that the ecological success criteria for mitigation are sufficient. Mitigation should occur in the same watershed as the impact. To the maximum extent possible, impacts should be mitigated with improvements to the same type of ecological system. Monitoring and maintenance are needed over time to ensure that projects supplying mitigation continue to work. No one disagrees, and as I’ve said, the new rule governing compensatory mitigation already reflects and supports these points, along with many others.
In the final analysis though, Paving Paradise won’t create change, because it amounts to a litany of problems and worst cases rather than a helpful or balanced look at an ongoing effort. No thoughtful observer or participant would say that there aren’t improvements to be made, but these authors don’t really have any suggestions. It turns out that Pittman and Waite are no Woodward and Bernstein, and this isn’t like Watergate. They dismiss mitigation as “a myth”, but the real illusion is a world where we can simply regulate our way out of impacts altogether. Here on earth people build and make things, and there are impacts that result. We can eliminate the most egregious impacts, but we should mitigate any that remain, and we need robust regulatory systems to help us do so.
It’s too bad the considerable effort and skill put into this project by Pittman and Waite aren’t part of the solution.
The prologue to the book contains their thesis statement regarding the entire ‘no net loss of wetlands’ policy of the federal government: “It’s a huge scam”. Or, as they put it another, more delicate, way: “The result is a taxpayer funded program that creates the illusion of environmental protection while doing little to stem the destruction of precious natural resources.”
I guess if I didn’t know anything about mitigation requirements and mitigation banking I could be persuaded by the evidence they’ve gathered. These guys are serious journalists, and they’ve meticulously researched - and caricatured - every weakness, mistake and problem in the development and implementation of the wetlands related regulations under the Clean Water Act. And in fact, there are plenty of these to report on. No serious person who cares about the environment would argue that the US Army Corps has an unblemished record, or even that the Corps is necessarily the right branch of government to be regulating aquatic impacts.
As Pittman and Waite describe, it’s only a series of historical accidents having to do with control over navigation and ‘navigable waters’ dating back to 1899 that has the Corps so involved, along with the EPA, in the regulation of ‘fill’ placed in ‘waters of the United States’. But it’s clear that neither of the authors looked for examples of responsible development where the Corps did enforce the complex rules well, impacts were ‘avoided and minimized’ and both economy and ecology were well served. There are actually a lot of these.
In the interest of full disclosure, I’m in the mitigation banking business myself, as a partner in a firm that buys land, restores wetlands to a standard set by the rules of the Corps and the EPA, and sells ‘outsourced compliance’ credits to developers, transportation departments, and others. This means that I’m immediately in for the cartoon treatment by Pittman and Waite as a rapacious and money-grubbing exploiter of loopholes, but it also means I’ve spent hours poring over the public notices put out by the Corps – including the Jacksonville District in particular. These notices are up on the web for anyone to see, and include detailed analysis of the work proposed and the potential
impact – down to the 100th of an acre – for every single project that anyone wants to build.
The projects the Corps must review, provide permits for and require mitigation of include everything from major four lane highways to the extension of private boat docks. There are tens of thousands of individual regulatory actions required of the Corps every year, and they get some things wrong. It’s even possible that there are some truly incompetent or malevolent individuals working there among a host of colleagues trying to do the best they can. Or that they don’t have sufficient funding to do their job as well as they would like. But Pittman and Waite have no tolerance in any event. “We began to think of the Corps as a convoy of truckers driving across country with no map or compass,” they write. “They had no clue where they were going or where they had been. But they would never stop for directions. That might slow them down.”
The worst flaw of Paving Paradise, however, is not the obviously biased and one-dimensional approach that only finds what it looks for. It is the willful disregarding of genuinely significant improvements that have been made to the system of regulations under the Clean Water Act, and the alignment of incentives with environmental benefits that the practice of mitigation banking represents.
The individuals who work at the Corps and the EPA are obviously aware of the shortcomings of the past approaches to wetland regulation in Florida and elsewhere. The evidence is that they re-wrote the rules for ‘compensatory mitigation’ through an exhaustive multi-year process that involved detailed responses to over 12,000 public comments. Pittman and Waite somehow manage to make even this excellent example of rule making in public policy seem nefarious, but in any case the new rule – issued in May of 2008 – reflects state-of-the art knowledge of hydrology, hydrogeology, biology and watershed planning in what is arguably one of the most comprehensive and progressive environmental rules in existence.
Specifically, the new rule squarely addresses two of the biggest flaws in the structure of previous regulation of wetlands; the time lag between the date a permit is issued and the date when a mitigation project is finished called ‘temporal loss’, and reliance on too many small and isolated mitigation projects that met technical requirements, but failed to provide results that created enough ecological benefit within the watershed.
The original rules for mitigation emphasized ‘on site’ mitigation projects because the EPA and the Corps wanted mitigation to occur as close to projects as possible. Over time, however, it became clear that the result of this policy was a series of small mitigation parcels that often got surrounded by urban growth. The new rule gives clear priority to larger regional mitigation banks with greater ecological significance over these small ‘permitee responsible’ mitigation sites.
Mitigation banks also address the temporal loss issue, because they have to achieve clear ecological success criteria - like well established plantings of wetland species that can
only thrive if the flow of water is sufficient – before they are allowed to provide mitigation to others. It seems obvious, and it really is: if you can go and see that a bank has achieved specific success criteria with your own eyes, then you know that the mitigation it provides is legitimate.
Ironically, the new rule incorporates many of the suggestions Pittman and Waite make at the end of their 283 page diatribe. They call for better accounting rules, an emphasis on restoration over preservation, a ‘pay as you go’ system, and timelines for specific Corps actions during the permitting process, all of which are fundamental to the way the rule is written.
But they also call for an end to the approach of ‘no net loss’ of wetlands altogether with their fundamental suggestion being that we shouldn’t require any mitigation because we just shouldn’t allow any impacts to occur.
This is the heart of the problem, of course. Mitigation is certainly less preferable than just letting the natural world be, but as the United States population increases from its population of 300 million to 400 million just thirty or so years from now, we will in fact build more roads, schools and houses, and every one of these things will have some impact on the environment.
And the impacts don’t result just from building, of course, nor are they confined to wetlands. The entire scale and scope of the human economy has impacts on air quality, habitat for endangered species and simply open space for recreation and vistas that we love. But the ‘just say no’ answer that Pittman and Waite propose is really no answer at all. Now that we’ve had fifty years of experience with passing and implementing environmental laws, permitting has in fact reduced impacts greatly, and the majority of the remaining damage to natural systems is coming from the steady drip of business as usual rather than the drama of a Three Mile Island, the PCB’s in the Hudson or the loss of the California Condor or the Bald Eagle.
This is why the concept of mitigation doesn’t just make sense: it’s critical. Mitigation means the measurement of specific impacts and taking action to offset those impacts. It’s the basis of the successful programs that have reduced smog and acid rain, and the basis for allowing infill development to support greenbelts and watersheds in surrounding lands.
It’s also the way that we’re going to fund environmental improvements beyond the amounts that can be supplied by taxes, bond measures, and philanthropy. Hundreds of millions of dollars of private capital have been invested in meaningful conservation and restoration efforts, and this, despite what Paving Paradise would have you believe, is a very good thing. In order for more to be invested, there will need to be continued work on programs that provide incentive based on environmental performance, and to the extent we align incentives with the outcomes desired by public policy, we’ll get where we want to go much faster.
In a way, the criticisms that Pittman and Waite level at the world of wetlands regulation are obvious, and obviously correct. Good science, and ever better science, are needed to ensure that the ecological success criteria for mitigation are sufficient. Mitigation should occur in the same watershed as the impact. To the maximum extent possible, impacts should be mitigated with improvements to the same type of ecological system. Monitoring and maintenance are needed over time to ensure that projects supplying mitigation continue to work. No one disagrees, and as I’ve said, the new rule governing compensatory mitigation already reflects and supports these points, along with many others.
In the final analysis though, Paving Paradise won’t create change, because it amounts to a litany of problems and worst cases rather than a helpful or balanced look at an ongoing effort. No thoughtful observer or participant would say that there aren’t improvements to be made, but these authors don’t really have any suggestions. It turns out that Pittman and Waite are no Woodward and Bernstein, and this isn’t like Watergate. They dismiss mitigation as “a myth”, but the real illusion is a world where we can simply regulate our way out of impacts altogether. Here on earth people build and make things, and there are impacts that result. We can eliminate the most egregious impacts, but we should mitigate any that remain, and we need robust regulatory systems to help us do so.
It’s too bad the considerable effort and skill put into this project by Pittman and Waite aren’t part of the solution.
March 9, 2013
This is a disturbing and detailed account of the devastation of Florida's natural resources. Just when I finished the book, I received a mailer advertising a new development in Apollo Beach. All I could think of was how many acres of wetland were destroyed for this travesty, never to be replaced. This book should be required reading for all of our legislators.
May 20, 2011
This book was good, but I think it could have been much shorter in length & the message still would have been clear. It was very interesting though.
Read
September 17, 2012Appalling.
August 4, 2020
Florida grows where the highway goes, and reporter and author Craig Pittman has been on the front lines of where development so often strangles the environment. Yet another pro-development governor tries to pave highlands, sawgrass and wetlands with a couple of unneeded and unwanted toll roads in 2019-2020. This is a primer for what's been lost in Florida, and what's at stake ahead. Whether you're a Florida Cracker, a semi-Floridian or newcomer, this book is for you.
March 7, 2024
This book was more upsetting than enjoyable. Not upsetting in the sense that the authors did a poor job but about how upsetting the topic they covered is. It’s more of a great piece of journalism unmasking horrible truths about the state and federal government bending at the knee for developers and completely destroying some of the rarest environments on the planet.
Excellent journalism by the authors. Keep up the great work.
Excellent journalism by the authors. Keep up the great work.
May 8, 2017
Good stuff, makes me mad.
January 21, 2012
Anyone who lives in Florida is impacted on a daily basis by the issue of real estate development. Growth and development is the engine that drives our state economy, and so all of us who derive our income from fellow Florida citizens enjoy the trickle down effects of growth and development. At the same time what attracted many of us to Florida are the very same natural resources put in jeapordy by unrestrained and rampant development. Rampant development destroys the precious wetlands that serve as a home for various species of flora and fauna, as well as functioning as a filter for drinking water and a flood control buffer. Therefore clearly a balance must be drawn that allows deveopment but also protects the wetlands from wholesale destruction. Thankfully, both state and federal laws regulate the permit process whereby developers obtain permission to destroy wetlands.
Sadly, the book reveals that the process is largely a sham. That the permit process is deeply and perhaps irretrievably broken becomes clear as the authors explore the regulations regarding permitting, as well as the issue of impact mitigation (trying to create or protect wetlands to offset the impact of damage to other wetlands). The authors cite specific examples from different areas of the state ranging from flooding issues in the panhandle to toxic river effluent in the St, Johns river in Jacksonville, to the dredging of canals in Clearwater.
Perhaps most sad is that this book is likely to have little impact on the way the state and developers do business. The Us Army Corps of engineers comes off particularly poorly in the book.'
The book is well written in a journalistic style that makes sense given the newspaper background of teh authors.
Sadly, the book reveals that the process is largely a sham. That the permit process is deeply and perhaps irretrievably broken becomes clear as the authors explore the regulations regarding permitting, as well as the issue of impact mitigation (trying to create or protect wetlands to offset the impact of damage to other wetlands). The authors cite specific examples from different areas of the state ranging from flooding issues in the panhandle to toxic river effluent in the St, Johns river in Jacksonville, to the dredging of canals in Clearwater.
Perhaps most sad is that this book is likely to have little impact on the way the state and developers do business. The Us Army Corps of engineers comes off particularly poorly in the book.'
The book is well written in a journalistic style that makes sense given the newspaper background of teh authors.
May 5, 2012
This book contained a lot of useful information. While I gotta say that compared to Michael Grunwald's "The Swamp" it was in some ways... even more boring. Don't get me wrong yet I gave it 3 stars for a reason, and that is... It made me think. I like thinking. I like books that are educational. I just often wish they were more... entertaining. What scares me, is my brain has been trying to coax me into reading it again... NOOO...
I know for giving a book three stars you'd think I would be more positive. However, I can't help if the book was a little info heavy and... well... tedious at times. HOWEVER, if you want a book that contains a lot of useful information about how screwed up our nations water management program in regards to wetlands. This is a pretty powerful book. It is kinda bleak though.
I know for giving a book three stars you'd think I would be more positive. However, I can't help if the book was a little info heavy and... well... tedious at times. HOWEVER, if you want a book that contains a lot of useful information about how screwed up our nations water management program in regards to wetlands. This is a pretty powerful book. It is kinda bleak though.
June 28, 2013
Overstating the short and long term harm from the destruction of wetlands is hard – perhaps impossible. Equally hard – but certainly impossible – is topping the masterful work of Craig Pittman and co-author Matthew Waite who let the facts tell the tragic and maddening story of Florida’s wetlands. Paving Paradise is a thoroughly researched yet completely accessible account for all readers of what wetlands are, why they matter, and how they are regulated. It brings to life national, state, and local wetlands policies and the people and agencies that have implemented, skirted, or tried to change those policies, for better and worse. Paving Paradise is soul-stirring stuff – hard to achieve in a book about wetlands, but Pittman and Waite pulled it off and performed a tremendous public service in the process.
March 31, 2011
The definitive book on the nation's wetlands protection laws and why they have fallen short. Won third place in the Rachel Carson Book Award contest sponsored by the Society of Environmental Journalists, and recommended by Carl Hiaasen: "This is an exhaustive, timely and devastating account of the destruction of Florida's wetlands, and the disgraceful collusion of government at all levels. It's an important book that should be read by every voter, every taxpayer, every parent, every Floridian who cares about saving what's left of this precious place." (Of course, I might be a little biased.)
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews