A Concrete Experience

The California coastal mountains were uniformly brown and bone-dry when I boarded a plane bound for Florida. This was my first trip, my first exploration for a new home. I watched my first Atlantic sunrise the next morning as the plane approached the Jacksonville airport.

I also watched the ground and what I saw amazed me. Water. Lakes, rivers, and streams dotted the inland countryside. Green. All the landscape around the water was a deep, rich green. It looked wonderful to me.

Soon I was sitting outside in the fresh, cool morning, enfolded in the Florida humidity, and marveling at the green grass and the palm trees and the strange plants that looked like green swords sticking up every which way. Then I noticed something else. The power poles seemed to be made out of concrete.

My friend arrived and we drove into the central part of north Florida along broad, clean concrete highways cut through forests of tall green pines. Once again I was struck by the vibrant colors and all the waterways we crossed and, once again, by the huge concrete towers that carried the high-voltage power lines across the countryside.

The city, our destination, appeared to have been built right into the forest. Mature oaks and pines stood over mile after mile of homes in attractive subdivisions. Parked in the driveway at last, I got out and looked around at the picturesque park-like scene and then I noticed something else. The homes were all made out of concrete.

After living in California for thirty-five years, I had forgotten that people used brick and mortar and concrete-block for residential construction, because in California such houses would fall down. Florida is not threatened by big destructive earthquakes, however, only rare little tremblers, so these construction materials are safe to use. Moreover, the Florida homeowner can solve the serious problems of wood-eating insects and wood-rot in a humid climate by building with concrete. It makes good sense.

Concrete is also economical in Florida. The entire peninsula, once a seabed, is made out of limestone and sand, the chief ingredients of concrete. With the raw materials under foot and with the advantages of the product obvious to anyone who thinks about it, concrete is the choice building material in Florida. Maybe that’s why the environmentalists want to put a stop to it.

I discovered the touchiness of this subject almost immediately. While driving around the county one afternoon, I came across a chain-link fence and a tall sandbank covered with grass that stretched for a half-mile or so along the road. Behind the bank rose new buildings and pristine smokestacks, but the place appeared to be abandoned. Miles from any town or even a noticeable habitation, I wondered what it could be? Asking about it later, I was briskly informed that it was a new cement plant, production halted by court order pending another environmental review. Curious, I discovered that a nearby city had approved this plant to boost its local economy in one of the poorest rural areas in Florida. Environmentalists in an adjacent city objected on the usual grounds of air pollution, water pollution, noise, and road maintenance expense to the taxpayer; that is, anything to keep the business in court and out of operation.

To enliven any table talk around here, all I have to do is ask about limestone mines or cement plants. It’s like bringing up the redwoods in California. The response is the same. The analogy is also very close. Redwood trees grow naturally and very well in certain California environments, the coastal valley fog regions. Redwood lumber is both rot resistant and insect resistant, which makes it ideal for constructing earthquake resistant wood-frame houses. Most of the coastal redwoods were cut during the Nineteenth Century and used for houses in the San Francisco Bay area. They grew back. Today these dense forests are off-limits to the lumber industry and redwood is very expensive indeed in California. Concrete in Florida could be going the way of the redwoods.

Relatively cheap concrete products require two industrial operations, limestone mining and cement manufacturing. Moving concrete products requires roads and trucks. Environmentalists can easily attack production along any of these lines.

Since Florida is made out of limestone, mining it is an open-pit operation that takes up space and leaves holes in the ground. It’s basically a matter of blasting the rock about once a month, digging it out, and then processing it. Environmentalists claim that the blasting is hard on local nerves and that it could disrupt the natural flow of water through the underground caverns. These caverns are otherwise well known for spontaneously collapsing and leaving big holes in the ground. The sinkholes are a reality, the diversion of water flow underground is a fantasy. Whether the blasting causes schizophrenia in local people, dogs, cats, raccoons, or manatees is never explicitly addressed.

Cement plants are supposedly the prime source of air and water pollution from dust, noise pollution from the noise, and traffic pollution from all the trucks coming and going. Not being deliberately stupid by any means, the people who own and operate these plants do not try to build them in urban centers, but tend to build them out in the middle of nowhere. True, there might be a river or lake or stream within three miles of the plant, that would not be remarkable in Florida, but three miles is still three miles, and people design these plants to pollute nothing outside of their own perimeter. Environmentalists ignore these small facts and focus on rust-belt models built up in their imaginations of what it might have been like a century ago.

The environmentalists I’ve met here in Florida also decry urban expansion. Down with the new subdivisions! It makes me worry about them. They speak these denunciations from inside a concrete house built within an old subdivision. Obvious contradictions aside, they evidently have made some kind of progress on their own terms. The new concrete plant sits idle and the new subdivisions are mostly wood-framed houses built on concrete perimeter foundations, the standard in California. Walls and roofs are a composite of wood chips and glue under the siding and shingles, guaranteed to rot out before any mortgage is paid off, although it will stand up in an earthquake. So what have the environmentalists accomplished here? I don’t know, but hey, with this kind of logic, maybe I could sell concrete houses in California! I think I’d better call the Sierra Club in the morning.

August 16, 2001

Robert Klassen [send him mail] is a medical technician and writer. Here's his web site.

Back to LewRockwell.com Home Page