Yea, so here's the tl;dr history in the article:

1. The author, who actually cribbed from wikipedia, gets the willies when he sees shallow water infested with tens of thousands of perfectly happy alligators. All he thinks is that amazing commerce will happen when he kills all the kind gators, flushes the state, and runs away before the next time it rains.

2. Everyone throughout history has wanted to Drain The Swamp. Every one of those amazing historical people has seemed perfectly reasonable and without a doubt was an incredibly towering bastion of science who wanted to drain the Everglades. Too bad they were all incompetent.

3. Please leave Florida Man and Gator Lake alone. They separate the Gulf of America on the West from the Sea of Florida on the East.

*Gulf of Mexico