Word: controled
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Florida was once a swampy rural backwater, the poorest and emptiest state in the South. But in the 20th century, air-conditioning, bug spray and the miracle of water control helped transform it into a migration destination for the restless masses of Brooklyn and Cleveland, Havana and Port-au-Prince. Florida developed its own ventricle at the heart of the American Dream - not only as an affordable playground and comfortable retirement home with no income tax but also as a state of escape and opportunity, a Magic Kingdom for tourists, a Fountain of Youth for seniors, a Cape Canaveral...
...Army engineers eventually made the dream come true by imprisoning Lake O behind a giant dike, subduing the Everglades with 2,000 miles of levees and canals, seizing control of nearly every raindrop that fell in southern Florida. Their all-out war on natural water flow made the bottom half of the state safe for an unrestrained building frenzy that began after World War II and basically continued until Juan Puig bought his billiard table. Florida now has 18 million residents, most of them south of Orlando. Such progress had a price. Half the Everglades is gone. The rest...
...leaking so badly that water managers routinely dump billions of precious gallons out of the lake to avoid a 1928-style calamity, ravaging estuaries and draining the region's water supply. This spring the lake fell so low that 40,000 acres of its exposed bottom burned out of control, along with 40,000 acres of the perennially parched Everglades National Park...
...against E. coli and botulism), while phthalates are found in children's toys as well as vinyl shower curtains. And those chemicals can get inside us through the food, water and bits of dust we consume or even by being absorbed through our skin. Indeed, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 92% of Americans age 6 or older test positive for BPA--a sign of just how common the chemical is in our plastic universe...
Just across the mountain range, the tiny town of Belmont prides itself on being beyond government control. It was a mining boomtown in its heyday, filled with Cornish and Chinese and Germans and Italians. The main street of the town, now home to just seven households, winds up a steep grade past a row of crumbling stone buildings. One of the buildings had been the local whorehouse. In the basement of another building, local legend goes, two men--union organizers--were hauled out from a mine they were hiding in and lynched. All that history is falling in on itself...