In 1953, Carl Hiaasen was born in Plantation, Florida, a tiny suburb of Ft. Lauderdale at the westernmost edge of then-rural Broward County. By 1960, around the time he got his first typewriter, Plantation's population of 4,800 was roughly that of Ft. Lauderdale in 1922, when Hiaasen's grandfather moved down from North Dakota to eventually found the area's first law firm.

While Plantation remained safely fringed by Everglades and swamp, providing the perfect environment for an idyllic boyhood, Broward County's population of 84,000 had almost quadrupled by 1960. By 1960 as well, almost one-third of the state's entire population was concentrated in southeast Florida, which had grown in that same decade by over 113 percent.

In the years since, Florida has absorbed into its population approximately 300,000 people a year, for a relative growth rate almost triple that of the rest of the country. To accommodate the 700-1,000 new residents arriving daily, a minimum of 300 acres of green space must be paved, also daily, for subdivisions, streets, schools, and shopping malls. Added to that has been the considerable development required to house and entertain tourists, 41 million of them in 1990, the year before Native Tongue, Hiaasen's satirical novel about theme parks, was published.