The material and symbolic role of the Everglades in U.S. national politics

This article demonstrates how the south Florida landscape, both material and symbolic, articulates with the political landscape of the state of Florida and the national state in ways that are mutually transforming. In doing so, the case study serves to make three contributions to political ecology. First, it points out the limitations of political ecologyʹs conceptualization of politics and argues for more attention to formal party politics at the national scale. Second, it suggests that political ecology analysis can be strengthened by a closer engagement with some of the central concerns of political geography. Third, it critiques the theoretical limitations of the concept of “regional discursive formations” in political ecology, arguing for a fuller incorporation of Harveyʹs ideas on the discursive construction of place. The article presents four vignettes that begin with the presidential election of 1928 and end with the 2004 campaign to consider how the regional discursive formation of the Everglades has played a role in formal politics at the national scale. It concludes by demonstrating how political and economic interests at multiple levels—local, regional state, national and international—have discursively constructed and materially configured the project of Everglades restoration, and how that project has played into party politics at the state and national levels.