Need more land t-shirt

sometimes there's a sign that you're doing the right thing. Sometimes that sign is a t shirt.

The Grove, Lehigh Acres, FL

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Arborwood, Fort Myers, FL

I hate to think that jadedness has started to set in concerning this project of mine, but it has. I've seen countless acres of half developed land that'll probably sit in the state for the remainder of my lifetime, if not longer.




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Here's a typical thing I've seen countless times: A rancher owns land that he grazes his herd on. He sells the land to a developer, and then the market crashes. The developer, facing paying ass high taxes on residential land, rents the land to a "livestock management" company, who puts the minimum number of cattle on the land to retain the farm tax rate while the developer waits for the market to turn around.

At least the rancher made a pretty penny on the deal. The rest of us, not so much.

Lehigh Acres, Florida, Part II

I'm encouraged by what I've seen in Lehigh Acres, not by man's action toward the landscape, but the action of nature reclaiming the space. If you haven't read The World Without Us, I highly recommend it. In the book, Alan Weisman talks about places that have been abandoned by man, and now we can very carefully observe what it looks like when nature reclaims an area. This space around Lehigh Acres is, I think, another of of those spaces that could have been illustrated in the book. Cracks form in the asphalt, grass and weeds get the in crack, push them apart further, and the process repeats itself. Vines grow over the asphalt, hiding it from view and creating what looks like long stripes of fields while the grasses and weeds slowly crumble the asphalt. Ever slowly, the roads are being erased, regardless of what Google shows.

Maybe one day these roads will be gone, and this will go back to being forest.





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As we would expect, out of the way cul-de-sacs become dumping grounds.

Now here's something I never thought I would encounter: seemingly abandoned bee hives, the kind used to pollinate plants. Some of the are still populated by bees, but why are they there? They're no where near any groves or fields.

Even bees can't get a break. I guess the keeper thought this was enough of an out of the way place to leave the bees.