TIME:Florida Water Crisis

We have water, water, everywhere, but much of South Florida's per capita use is 50% above the national average, and we've lost half the wetlands that used to recharge our aquifers. So water shortages threaten to limit growth in a way that wetlands regulations or bad headlines never could. "Florida is astonishingly wasteful," says Cynthia Barnett, author of Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S. Now the Orlando area is pushing to suck water out of rivers to its north, local utilities are jacking up water rates as much as 35%, and South Florida's water board may cap withdrawals from Everglades aquifers. "The idea of water shortages down here never occurred to anyone," says environmentalist Shannon Estenoz, a Crist appointee to the board. "But we've got to change the culture because the status quo is unsustainable."

It's not just gator-huggers who say that. Back in 1995, a 42-member commission stocked with bankers, farmers and developers released a unanimous report declaring South Florida unsustainable, warning that the ecosystem's destruction was hurting people as well as panthers by lowering water tables, increasing flood risks, fueling gridlock and replacing paradise with "mind-numbing homogeneity, and a distinct lack of place." In the words of the novelist and columnist Carl Hiaasen, the bard of Florida's decline, "You don't have to be a wacko enviro to want your kids to be able to swim in a lake or maybe see an animal that isn't in a cage or a seaquarium. And even people who don't give a rat's ass about the panther will care when saltwater comes out of their faucets."