I have been going to Florida, especially South Florida for many, many years and yet it wasn’t until recently that I saw what it was supposed to look like. I always knew that there were a lot of exotic plants and animals in southern Florida everything from South American birds to Caribbean plants. Today the exotics are even worse- boas in the Everglades, Brazilian-pepper trees everywhere, Asian climbing ferns!- but I never realized how bad until my most recent visit to southern Florida.

I went out for a walk and found myself  walking down a back road with natural Florida on one side of the road and exotic-filled Florida on the other side. The sad thing was that natural, original Florida is a rarely seen environment and the exotic Florida is everywhere. And I mean everywhere. It is so common and ubiquitous that the exotic, unnatural Florida appears to be the way it has always been.

Take a look at the difference. Pretty striking, huh?