Florida is Dying
Florida is Dying
These days, it’s just one big, angry hospice
Note: This is a substack article, too long for email. I recommend you click the title or "View entire message" and read it on the web. Thanks!
Step out of the thriving Miami metro area, and you’ll discover a dying state. Even in the Miami area, where water temps are around 100 degrees Fahrenheit, things are getting dicey.
Floridians are getting hit with unaffordable or non-existent home insurance policies. They’re getting hit with record ocean water temperatures, massive toxic algae blooms, and vastly accelerated HOA fees. They’re even getting hit with leprosy.
Wait. Leprosy? Yup, today, Florida Man is a leper. As a recent story from the Pensacola News Journal reports:
Rising evidence is pointing to the possibility that leprosy has become endemic in the southeastern U.S. with Florida being named among the top reported states.
Florida is really taking this Old Testament stuff seriously.
The news story continues by saying:
The report concludes that a growing body of evidence suggests central Florida may represent an endemic location for leprosy…
There’s no end in sight because Florida residents have chosen to be governed by a crackpot who is deflecting attention away from his state’s many problems by whining about who’s on the girls’ swim teams.
It’s no mere deflection, though. By attacking the LGBTQ+ community, Governor Ron DeSantis is scaring off businesses and normal people. He is in the middle of a major legal brawl with one of the state’s biggest employers, The Walt Disney Company, over LGBTQ+ rights.
He also wants to rewrite history by promoting the absurdity that slavery did Blacks a favor by providing them a skill set, despite the fact that slaves already had skill sets that many of their white oppressors didn’t.
Slaves were blacksmiths and carpenters and seamstresses who built bridges, built Monticello, and weaved the textiles that slave owners wore. Slaves didn’t learn these skills from their prison wardens. They learned them from each other.
But DeSantis wants to sanitize the accomplishments of Black people and permanently embed ignorance across his state. And just for kicks, wanted to become President so that he could “Make America Florida.” Yes, that was really his campaign slogan.
If it sounds like a threat, it’s because it was.
Saunas, hot water, and hungry sharks
Scientists are also pointing to new discoveries that suggest that sharks consider boiled humans a delicacy, which is perfect given the recent ocean temperatures around southern Florida. Okay, I made the first part of that sentence up, but it is true that the water is getting hot enough there to make for an uncomfortable swim.
A recent Guardian headline shouted this out:
Florida ocean records ‘unprecedented’ temperatures similar to a hot tub
The accompanying story describes water temperatures in the Florida Keys at 101.19 degrees Fahrenheit in July 2023. Normal water temperatures range between 73 and 88 degrees, according to the article, which quoted the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Conservatives, I suppose, will be quick to point out that it was all because of El Niño, but the previous highest known temperature in any of the world’s ocean waters is 99.7 degrees in the Persian Gulf between 2016–20. The difference is that the Persian Gulf isn’t even an ocean. It’s a big saltwater inlet connected to the ocean.
This means that the waters around the Florida Keys, which are considerably more exposed to ocean currents than the waters measured in the Persian Gulf study (which were mostly around Kuwait Bay), were warmer than the Persian Gulf at its hottest point in 2020.
This year, the water temperatures have been closer to normal, but still hovering around the 90-degree mark for much of the summer.
There are extreme consequences to this besides sharks discovering the joys of dining on par-cooked humans. Kuwait Bay suffered fish kills directly related to the heat, according to this report:
Several fish kill incidents were reported also at the northern edge of the Gulf along Shatt Al Arab stretch in Iraq. The species found dead during the incident varied considerably, unlike those found in the frequent summer incidents.
You can think of overheated ocean water in the same way you think of a wildfire. Every part of the ocean’s ecosystem is affected. Seagrass, kelp, smaller fish, coral, and other essential food sources disappear, often replaced by useless swaths of algae blooms and jellyfish.
Swimming and frolicking at the beach was already becoming a challenge with a growing red tide problem and massive beachfront algae growth. Now, if you want to make a trip to Florida for a nice beachside swim, you need to do your research unless your thing is getting stung by swarms of jellyfish and swimming in toxic waste.
The Everglades are dying
The Everglades, too, are succumbing to massive algae blooms. The Center for Biological Diversity can probably explain this better than me:
Today the Everglades is half the size it was 100 years ago.
I guess I could have managed that.
But they’ve got some specifics I’d like you to see:
Much of what remains of the historic Everglades is heavily polluted by phosphorous, nitrogen and mercury from urban and agricultural sprawl. The lake in particular has been besieged by nutrient pollution for decades, causing unprecedented blooms of toxic algae.
The Lake they’re referring to is Lake Okeechobee, which, at 730 square miles, is the second largest freshwater lake exclusively within U.S. borders.
The lake is the beating heart of the Everglades, but it’s barely beating. Floridians have been happily toxifying the lake for decades. It’s especially susceptible to pollution because it’s an extremely shallow lake, with an average depth of nine feet.
Fun fact. “Okeechobee” comes from the Hitchiti-Mikasuki dialect of the First Settler Muskogean language family. As of 2014, according to Wikipedia, this language was “spoken by around 290 people in southern Florida.”
So, yeah. Those folks are all pretty much gone.
First, Floridians (and their fellow Americans) drove the people who lived around Lake Okeechobee out of their lands. Then they destroyed their lake.
The process began a long time ago, much of it at the behest of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which, according to the Center for Biological Diversity…
…flushes the nutrients and toxic algae down to the estuaries, where they worsen red tide. The Corps’ discharges of polluted water into the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie rivers from Lake Okeechobee are killing countless marine species and crippling local economies.
Ron DeSantis, of course, is not sitting idly by:
In 2021 Florida regulators and Gov. Ron DeSantis authorized the discharge of hundreds of millions of gallons of wastewater from the Piney Point phosphogypsum stack into Tampa Bay. The Piney Point gypstack is a mountain of toxic waste, topped by an impoundment of hundreds of millions of gallons of process wastewater, stormwater and dredged spoil from Port Manatee. The discharge fueled a deadly red tide that killed dozens of Florida manatees.
The red circles in the map below reveal the extent of red tide that is causing damage to wildlife. It all comes from pollution associated with Lake Okeechobee.
Miami is not being spared
Remember how I implied at the beginning of the article that Miami was maybe, sort of, getting spared?
Oops. Sorry.
Let me introduce you to Biscayne Bay, which is a shallow, lagoon-like bay that likes to flood the heart of Miami with filthy, polluted water during storm surges. It, too, is incredibly shallow, ranging in depth from six to thirteen feet on average.
The Miami Herald reports what happened in 2021:
In the month before a massive fish kill in Biscayne Bay last year, an astounding amount of water flowed out of Miami’s Little River, one of the county’s most polluted waterways. The volume of water — fouled with not just floating trash but high concentrations of chemicals and waste — was three times higher than in any month in more than three decades.
The event triggered such a massive fish kill that the stench even managed to overwhelm politicians, who pledged to do something about it. Studies are now being done. Exciting times for wildlife lovers and human survivors.
Solutions won’t be as easy as establishing studies. More from the Herald:
“What we have seen with the Little River over time is a consistent loading of pollution that’s producing an ecological collapse in that part of the bay,” said Pamela Sweeney, manager of the restoration and enhancement section at the county’s Division of Environmental Resources Management.
Much of the pollution is caused by failing septic systems, a problem that is endemic to Florida. You can’t really stop humans from pooping, and Florida’s political leaders aren’t exactly keen on infrastructure, so it’s not hard to imagine the problem worsening. If a hurricane hits, everyone in the Miami area will need to discover the joys of oxygen masks and pungent cologne.
It doesn’t help that the people in Miami appear to be a bit slovenly:
A thick crust of discarded milk cartons, soda bottles, Styrofoam takeout containers, plastic cafecito cups and construction debris regularly blankets areas around trash booms along the river. Sometimes the pile of trash captured by a boom placed just before a dam north of Northeast 82nd Street is so heavy that a crane has to be used to collect stuff like sofas, doors, mattresses and pallets.
Come on, people, there’s a reason we all have trash dumpsters.
If you enjoy reading about fecal matter in rivers that serve urban areas, you can read more about Miami’s miserable water conditions here:
The Little River's polluted flow fuels Biscayne Bay troubles. Scientists taking a deeper look
Lax regulations and industrial farming
Time Magazine is blunt about the cause of Florida’s accelerating environmental decline:
Ruinous policy in Florida affects 11 million acres of wetlands, thousands of lakes, more than 1,300 miles of coastline, and hundreds of freshwater springs. From rock pine to salt marsh, from sandhill scrub to lush semi-tropical ravines and dozens of other unique ecosystems — the point lost on DeSantis and the Republican legislature is that these are not tourist sights housed in an amusement park, but vital parts of the actual world that humans occupy and need to thrive, perhaps even to survive.
The magazine provides a big catalog of horrible environmental policy decisions that affect a lot more than just Florida. DeSantis is America’s very own Bolsonaro, overseeing the environmental destruction of his state in a way that affects the rest of us.
The longer story is below, but here’s one small example: Almost at the same time DeSantis had the audacity to call himself the Theodore Roosevelt of Florida, he pushed for a major highway extension through Miami-Dade County wetlands.
Florida's Environmental Failure Is a Warning Sign for the U.S.
The Sierra Club has given DeSantis a hard-earned F on environmental policy. DeSantis’s thinking is so malignant that he even turned down millions of dollars in federal dollars that could have been used to clean up his desperately polluted state. How much did he turn down? $346 million.
The reason? He doesn’t want to be accused of taking Biden money, according to the Florida-based local news organization that reports on happenings in the Florida capital, The Capitolist:
Politically, the move sets DeSantis up to declare that he’s refusing to accept any more federal money from the Biden Administration…
…DeSantis’s vetoes of line items 1463A and 1463B, both federal block grants that required no expenditures from the state’s own budget, went largely unnoticed in the days immediately after the budget signing ceremony.
Line item 1463A, a $24 million grant, would have been channeled to Florida under the title “Grants And Aids To Local Governments And Non-state Entities.” The money relied solely on funding from the federal Infrastructure Investment And Jobs Act Funding and would have cost Florida nothing. The intended use for the funds was to upgrade rural wastewater motors and improve the efficiency pumping infrastructure in smaller counties across the state.
The red meat of DeSantis's malfeasance, though, lies in his line-item veto of item 1463B, which was a $5 million grant through Biden’s Federal Inflation Reduction Act.
No big deal, right? Politicians are just sort of that way.
Here’s the problem. By rejecting the grant, which was designed to establish planning and accountability processes in order for a state to qualify for future cash grants that can help Florida clean up its mess and make capital improvements to its climate infrastructure, DeSantis killed any chance of getting two larger block grants. These two block grants are each worth $173 million. That’s $346 million Florida could have received free and clear. At no cost to its taxpayers.
It’s reasonable to ask if DeSantis is insane.
A Florida corruption pandemic led by its own governor amidst an insurance disaster for citizens
It gets worse. Insurance companies are leaving the state. It’s now becoming incredibly difficult to find homeowner insurance anywhere in Florida because so many insurance companies have stopped writing policies there.
Those who can get policies have a much harder time paying for them because the costs are skyrocketing. Under DeSantis alone, the average home insurance premiums have risen from $1,988 to $4,231 per year. Rates are expected to jump another 40% this year:
Florida Homeowners Will Likely Continue to Face Challenging Property Insurance Market in 2023
One homeowner is quoted as saying his premium in Broward County rose from $4,951 a year to $10,136. Experts are saying this is not unusual.
While rates are shooting up, the DeSantis campaign is sucking in money from the insurance industry almost faster than they can spit it his way.
According to the Intercept:
The governor’s committee and the Friends of Ron DeSantis PAC raked in $3.9 million from the insurance industry since its formation in 2018.
Friends indeed.
Desantis’s Florida State Guard and Election “Crimes” agency deployments are a mess
In another diversionary tactic, DeSantis, because he’s a new-breed MAGA Republican, has of course decided to ride the election train that takes all right-wing politicians to a mysterious land filled with election fraud.
It is a land only they know about. There has been no major election fraud attempted in the United States in decades if you don’t include whatever the Orange Puffaroon in Mar-a-Lago was up to.
DeSantis, ever the vigilant one, established an entire agency called the Office of Election Crimes and Security to deal with the imagined threat.
The problem is nobody wants to work for it.
According to a report by Tampa Bay’s ABC affiliate WFTS, only three of 15 positions had been filled by January 2024.
This is not a bad thing. Most people outside of DeSantis’ circle think it is really designed to continue his effort to suppress the Black vote.
DeSantis has also tried to activate a State Guard to, in theory, respond to catastrophes. Instead, it appears to have turned into a militarized facsimile of DeSantis, if this report from the New York Times is accurate:
But the deployment this spring has been mired in internal turmoil, with some recruits complaining that what was supposed to be a civilian disaster response organization had become heavily militarized, requiring volunteers to participate in marching drills and military-style training sessions on weapons and hand-to-hand combat.
I guess that’s not a facsimile of DeSantis. I can’t imagine him in hand-to-hand combat with anyone, not even an injured Musk.
Luckily (?), DeSantis’s bid for the presidency failed
Yeesh. What a choice Republicans stuck themselves with. But Ron DeSantis will not become the next President of the United States. All he managed to accomplish during his hapless campaign against America’s Con Man in Chief was spread awareness of his buffoonery.
But what happens in Florida still matters. Its dying environment has broad implications for all of us. And it matters to the millions of people in Florida who voted against him, and are struggling as a result of his policies.
Thanks for reading, and have a happy Monday!