Theorizing Land-Cover and Land-Use Change: The Case of the Florida Everglades and Its Degradation

This paper possesses two related objectives. The first is to unite the bid-rent model of von Thünen and urban theorists with historical analysis in the interest of providing a theoretical approach to the comprehension of regional land-cover and land-use change. The second objective is to deploy the theoretical approach in an attempt to account for a specific change process, namely loss of wetlands in South Florida. Recently, the Annals of the Association of American Geographers published a paper addressing this issue (Meindl, Alderman, and Waylen 2002). Meindl, Alderman, and Waylen describe the impact of claims making on efforts to drain and sell land in South Florida during a critical period in the early 20th century. The present paper is put forward, in part, to provide additional context. In particular, we identify claims making and the development discourse it legitimated as part of a complex evolution in the region’s socionature, and the regimes governing land-cover and land-use change that led to wetlands reclamation. To explain these regime shifts, we criticize conventional bid-rent theory and develop a model integrating urban and agricultural land use whose structure is affected by development. We then deploy this model to the Everglades case, using historical narrative and remotely sensed land-cover data. We conclude the paper calling for integrated theoretical approaches in attempts to comprehend land-cover and land-use change and associated environmental problems.