It has been claimed that a person cannot outrun an alligator. You wouldn't think that to look at an alligator, but I for one will trust the experts. Seems that a gator will lie around gathering its strength and then, when the time is right, leap at whatever it considers to be a threat, or dinner, or both.

Another thing we human Floridians can't outrun is a bulldozer. These days bulldozers seem to be even more numerous than alligators. And while a gator will grab a bird or a poodle and retire satisfied to the local swamp, that bulldozer will keep advancing as long as there is an acre to devour.

When smooth-talking developers come to town with plans to "optimize" or "revitalize" someone's bargain-priced neighborhood, Florida locals typically do a fair job of seeing through the smoke and around the mirrors. Practically every hometown conservationist has been called a NIMBY (an acronym for "not in my backyard"). It's a smug gated-community disparagement of working-class environmental grievances.

Actually, perhaps we're not being NIMBY enough. We campaign to protect ourselves, and our neighbors, and maybe a nearby river we like to visit, but when we hear about the very same destruction happening way across Florida, we do little to help fellow Floridians against a common threat. We're being divided and conquered by colonizing condominiums.

Instead of just shaking our heads in sympathy, let's proudly take the NIMBY sentiment and elevate it to a statewide philosophy. We could call ourselves NITS: people who will stand up and say, "Not in this state!" (We might also call ourselves GNATS ["grown 'nough across this state"], but it's a bit of an acronymic stretch.)

Most of the problems Floridians face locally are similar from the Perdido to Key Largo. Overpopulation, urban sprawl, pollution and habitat destruction affect us all. It's natural that we should work together, pooling our resources of protest. Think of it as a sort of unionization to collectively bargain for less, not more.

In Florida, if you live downstream or down-aquifer from anything nasty, you're probably in trouble. If you live in a quiet, rural backwater between two distant cities, they'll want to build a superhighway right across your little arcadia really soon. They'll even insist that it's for your benefit.

Florida's spiraling growth is also a freedom issue. The more people we try to cram onto this glorified sandbar, the more regulation we all have to suffer. We simply can't do the things with 22 million people that were fine with only 5 million or 10 million.

In Florida you can own all the guns and ammunition you could possibly want, and then some. Trouble is, there's increasingly nowhere safe or even legal  to take one's groaning truckload of firearms for a good rat-a-tat-tat. You're always too close to a highway or a subdivision.

Or try going to the beach. Good luck finding a place to park, and any public access. Houses and high-rises crowd every inch. And beware property owners who, thanks to a recent vague law, think they own the beach out to the far edge of the continental shelf.

So, if you learn about something destructive at the other end of the state, don't just be glad it's not here. Folks who have had enough of being developed until they feel like strangers in their own state need to support each other all across Florida.

Let developers and politicians know that they don't just have to overcome a handful of local yokels when they want to level a forest or fill in a swamp. 

Type like mad, get on the phone, make a sign and travel to Tallahassee and march back and forth. Raise a stink about it.

Vote for candidates who will wage political war on all those who would destroy Florida for their own profit. Of course, there aren't many such candidates in either party, so you may have to run yourself. Be prepared to be called an enemy of Florida.

Even though they're good in themselves, let's not just be POD ("preserve our downtown") people, or NIMRODs ("not in my region or district"). Let's really get in the hair of our environmental tormenters by being NITS. 

Michael Stephens lives in Gainesville.