everything one could need within a ten-minute stroll, protect natural areas like the beach and lake and make them community amenities, get people to park their cars and leave them idle for their entire stay.
Such concepts were reinforced after Rummell took a tour of Mississippi beach towns devastated by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita last year. Rummell was surprised to see newer gas stations and grocery stores relatively unscathed while the older homes and cottages got hammered. "It was apparent that the quality of construction makes an enormous difference," he says.
With more than 300,000 acres (1,214 square kilometers) in the coastal zone, a market capitalization of 4.5 billion dollars, and plenty of political clout, St. Joe can do what other developers only dream about. In one section of Gulf County, the company is moving 13 miles (21 kilometers) of U.S. Highway 98, which currently runs through Joe lands right along the Gulf, a few miles inland. The public gets a new flood-protected four-lane and the longest shoreside hike trail in the state, while St. Joe gets miles of secluded beachfront acreage. In Bay County, the company has donated 4,000 acres (16.2 square kilometers) to build a controversial regional airport to service its future homeowners, while setting aside almost 10,000 acres (40.5 square kilometers) as a conservation buffer zone around nearby West Bay, important habitat for migratory songbirds such as scarlet tanagers and Kentucky warblers.
Not everyone is thrilled with St. Joe's vision. Environmental groups recently won a temporary injunction against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for granting the company an unprecedented permit to develop nearly 50,000 acres (202 square kilometers) on the shores of three coastal bays that would destroy 1,500 acres (60.7 square kilometers) of wetlands, even though the company had promised to mitigate that loss by creating or enhancing more wetlands elsewhere.
"Wetlands are not widgets," says Melanie Shephardson, staff attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the groups that filed the suit. "They serve different functions. Just setting aside some acreage and buffers might sound good, but at the end of the day you have to make sure that these bays, with all their species diversity, are not going to be harmed."
The injunction, which halted some work on one of the company's developments, makes Rumrnell fume. "There are still people scared of growth," he says. "But it gets back to our vision of what the world is going to look like in thirty years. I want this part of Florida to be a better version of itself. It would be a shame if it got high-rised to death. I would declare success if ten years from now someone says this looks like it should be here. In the real estate world, that's hard to do."
In the aquatic world, that's hard to do too.
IV. THE SHELLFISH GUYS
In which a group of small-town locals, armed with good data, grant money, and a taste for clams, learns it takes a village to tackle runoff
It's a balmy day in January by New England standards—48 degrees (8.9 Celsius) air temperature, 38 degrees (3.3 Celsius) water temperature—as Greg Sawyer, a big, good-natured shellfish biologist for the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, and shellfish constable Carry Buckminster pull their Boston Whaler alongside a clammer's workboat for a chat. Tommy Caradimos, who has spent the past 20 of his 50 years as a commercial shell fisherman, rests his bull rake on the gunnel to show the rewards of an hour's worth of hard labor: a smattering of purplish gray clams ranging from biscuit-size chowders down to littlenecks.
"He's one of the hard core," Sawyer says, as he samples the waters of Wareham, Massachusetts. "He'll be out there five hours when it's 30 degrees (-1 degree Celsius) and blowing. You don't want to arm-wrestle these guys, trust me."
Any region that has five commercial sizes for a clam takes its shellfish seriously, and the Wareham area leads the pack. Unlike a brand-new development in Florida, here 54 miles (87 kilometers) of serpentine beaches along