I live in a place (Willamette Valley of western Oregon) where everyone thinks we have water coming out the wazoo. I try to explain to people that when the environment and population are geared to 8,000 cfs in the Willamette River at a certain time of year, then a flow of 5,000 cfs, while liquid gold to someone in New Mexico or Nevada (or even eastern Oregon), is bad news here. It's all relative to a large degree.
So why Florida? What's the deal there? It's practically a tropical rain forest! I remember growing up on Long Island and hearing all the stories about unwitting New Yorkers being sold "Florida swampland" for their retirmeent home. But they do have water quantity and quality problems there, and a new book by Cynthia Barnett, Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S., exposes Florida's them.
I learned of the book from Robert Osborne's Watercrunch blog. Robert actually interviewed her and has posted it (click here). The interview will whet your appetite as it did mine, and the book is now on its way to me in the waterlogged Willamette Valley.
Cynthia describes how, starting about 150 years ago, developers started getting rid of water so they could, well, develop. Then they got rid of some more water. Now, a similar group of people - business leaders - realized that they got rid of too much water, so guess what? They can't develop and grow any longer!
Conservation has still not taken a firm hold in Florida, because the powerful agriculture and development lobbies are resistant, and the legislature is reluctant to push too hard. Sound familiar?
About the book (from her WWW site):
Florida’s parched swamps and sprawling subdivisions set the stage for a look at water crisis throughout the American East, from water-diversion threats in the Great Lakes to tapped-out freshwater aquifers along the Atlantic seaboard.
Part investigative journalism, part environmental history, Mirage shows how the eastern half of the nation – historically so wet that early settlers predicted it would never even need irrigation – has squandered so much of its abundant fresh water that it now faces shortages and conflicts once unique to the arid West.
Told through a colorful cast of characters including Walt Disney, Jeb Bush and Texas oilman Boone Pickens, Mirage ferries the reader through the key water-supply issues facing America and the globe: water wars, the politics of development, inequities in the price of water, the bottled-water industry, privatization, and new-water-supply schemes.
In the twentieth century, all Americans footed the bill for enormous dams and reservoirs that subsidized development in the bone-dry west. Barnett shows how in the twenty-first, U.S. taxpayers, whether they know it or not, are funding huge new waterworks such as desalination plants to quench the population shift underway to the nation’s Sunbelt.
From its calamitous opening scene of a sinkhole swallowing a house in Florida to its concluding meditation on the relationship between water and the American character, Mirage is a compelling and timely portrait of the use and abuse of freshwater in an era of rapidly vanishing natural resources.
This sounds like a must read book.
So what are you waiting for?
"We look forward to hearing your vision, so we can more better do our job. That's what I'm telling you." -- President George W. Bush, Gulfport, MS, 20 september 2005
Sen. Jeff Bingaman 
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