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John Prine’s classic song “Paradise” is about the devastating impact of stripmining for coal, where the top layers of soil are blasted off with dynamite or dug away with steam shovels to reach the coal seam below. The song is also about what happened to the area around the Green River in Kentucky because of strip mining. The song references the Peabody Coal Company and a town called Paradise in Muhlenberg County, KY, where the TVA operated a coal-fired electric generating station.

In a similar fashion, the natural Everglades ecosystem, which once covered Florida from Orlando all the way south to the Keys, has been decimated by the “progress of man”. As late as 1900 or so, few White men had ventured into the ‘Glades. But around that time, the efforts to transform this area began with plans to “drain the swamp”. The massive water control projects changed this area for ever and launched the spectacular postwar development of South Florida. The city I now call home, Plantation, once was Everglades wetlands (as was Pembroke Pines, Weston, Wellington, Miami Lakes and others). Only in recent years have we started to question whether the creation of this man-made “paradise” was worth the destruction of one of the most spectacular natural ones in the world.

The passing of John Prine last year (one of my favorite singer-songwriters); fishing, boating and camping in this area over the past 17 years; and recently reading “The Swamp, The Everglades, Florida , and the Politics of Paradise” by Michael Grunwald prompted me to write a revised version of Prine’s classic, “Paradise”.

Paradise (Lost) (With Apologies to John Prine)

When I was a child, my family would travel
Down to Southwest Florida where my parents were born
And there's a backwards old town that's often remembered
So many times that my memories are worn

And daddy, won't you take me back to Chokoloskee
Down by the Turner River where paradise lay?
Well, I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking
Mister Broward’s dredges have hauled it away

Well, sometimes we'd travel right down the Chatham River
To the abandoned old shell mound down by Watson’s mill
Where the air smelled like snakes and we'd shoot with our pistols
But empty pop bottles was all we would kill

And daddy won't you take me back to Chokoloskee
Down by the Turner River where paradise lay?
Well, I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking
Mister Broward’s dredges have hauled it away

Then the rail company came with the world's largest shovel
And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land
Well, they dug their canals 'til the land was forsaken
Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man

And daddy, won't you take me back to Chokoloskee
Down by the Turner River where paradise lay?
Well, I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking
Mister Broward’s dredges have hauled it away

When I die, let my ashes float down the Rogers River
Let my soul roll on up to the Flamingo dam
I'll be halfway to Heaven with paradise waitin'
Just five miles away from wherever I am

And daddy, won't you take me back to Chokoloskee
Down by the Turner River where paradise lay?
Well, I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking
Mister Broward’s dredges have hauled it away

 

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Very Nice Dave.  I love the Revised Version. Although I have not spent much time in up in Chokoloskee fishing, I am a long time ENP Rat. I do not imagine I could even calculate the number of hours I have spent in and around Whitewater Bay, The Rivers, and Florida Bay as a recreational fisherman. I guess so much that my son, now 30 is a Marine Biologist. I can say that over the past 40 years I have watched the changes ( Good to Bad and Now getting Better) in the wildlife and the Future right now is looking better. I do not think it will ever be as it was when my Grandfather used to drive his old truck down to Flamingo hoping the road did not wash out before it was time to drive back, But as of late, It Has Improved. 

  Thank You for being active in the Political and Environmental process and now the Artistic Process. My Prayer is that our generation can continue to help the process so something is left, or even Very Much Improved for my Grand Kids. 

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