Hurricane Irma, Marco Island, and wetlands protection

Marco Island in 1964 (left) and present day (Michael Coleman)
Slate recently published a piece by Henry Grabar, "The Lessons of Marco Island", on the Florida island that was savaged by Hurricane Irma last week and the legal history that enabled its development while protecting nearby wetlands. Some highlights:
Forty years ago, the consensus of the state and federal governments was that Marco Island should not have been built at all. The community was the setting for one of the biggest development controversies in the United States and nearly ruined one of Florida’s largest and most celebrated developers. In a region with a notorious building addiction, it became the site of the environmental movement’s greatest victory over the Florida growth machine. Ecological foresight halted millions of dollars in real estate development and all but ended an engineering technique that had turned the South Florida coast from swampland to resort.
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When brothers Robert, Elliott, and Frank Mackle discovered Marco in the early 1960s, half of its 10 square miles consisted of mangrove swamps. Home to just a few hundred people and an abandoned clam factory, it was the single largest undeveloped barrier island property in South Florida. 
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The plan called for 35,000 residential units, which would require displacing 18.2 million cubic yards of ground (more than 150,000 dump trucks’ worth), dredging the land into channels, and using the dredge to create development sites in the swamp. This method is common across South Florida; Cape Coral, a little to the north, is a good example. Still, at the time, Marco Island was the largest “finger-fill” waterfront housing project to ever come before the Army Corps of Engineers, Science reported in 1976.
Deltona's "finger-fill" development used dredging to transform swampland into canal-side residential plots
(Flip Schulke/US National Archives and Records Administration)
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