Is the future drying up in Florida, too? by gimleteye

Read the New York Times Sunday Magazine cover story, "Is the Future drying up?" and turn the story only slightly to see the future of Florida.

In the West, water managers are planning and hoping to keep Western states from economic catastrophe due to long-term climate changes that are roiling the region now. Is it any different in the Southeast?

It is an amazement to witness sea change in the mainstream media about the effects of climate change. Only twenty years ago, environmentalists were derided as "Chicken Little's" for anticipating the effects of human impacts to the entire notion of sustainability.

In the Florida Keys, Big Sugar invested in the Wise Use Movement to stop efforts by government to protect the coral reef, fearing the influence such efforts might have on their domination of upstream water resources.

Today, even the right wing bloviators--once seen as dominating the political landscape--are drying up, too: their arguments withered.

A segment on 60 Minutes, also last night, examined the prevalence of mega-fires in the Western Rockies on the same day, also, that Malibu burned threatening Pepperdine University where Kenneth Starr, member of the conservative Federalist Society, is dean of the law school. You have to marvel at the thought of Ken Starr, who lead the impeachment of President Clinton and represents the conservative values that have fundamentally put Americans at odds with environmental protection, chased from his law office by the effects of global warming.

When asked about skeptics on global warming in relation to the changes in high altitude climates, the chief of the federal forest fire program said point-blank: among forest fighters on the front line, there are no more skeptics. They are witnessing the world change before their eyes: the average temperature in the Rocky Mountains has warmed so significantly that the forest ecosystems, which once retained sufficient moisture to inhibit massive fires, are now tinder-box dry-- giving rise to megafires in numbers that are not seen in the historical record of thousands of years.

In The Miami Herald today, there is an important report about the disappearance of threatened butterfly species in Miami and The Florida Keys: a kind of unparalleled change in just the past few years.

And as if anyone needs to hear it again: it's not just the American West. The Southeast is in the grip of an historic drought, too. We, in Miami-Dade County, are not feeling its full effects... but there is no question that we are also on the front line of drought as Lake Okeechobee dries up, too.

There are a couple of important points that the New York Times article makes, that are applicable to Florida: however much we are becoming accustomed to the idea of water re-use and recycling.

Some readers of this blog may wonder why we bear so much anger toward a single county commissioner: Natacha Seijas, of Hialeah. Miami-Dade County, under the influence of Commissioner Seijas, has the worst water re-use per capita in the state of Florida: all to make building and construction cheap. We are now playing catch-up in a multi-billion dollar effort to modernize water infrastructure before the supplies are further limited.

But back to the New York Times: one point that begins to shine through is that the entire plumbing system of the American West has to change: we can't afford to waste any more water, and that means changing building and energy codes in the home to accomodate a full line of composting technologies that are looked on, today, as a step backwards to the dark ages.

Well let me tell you: those dark ages are coming fast at America from another corner of the spectrum: energy consumption.

It is imperative for Florida and drought stricken regions to embark on an immediate and massive plan to decentralize the energy grid, and to put profits in the pockets of utilities by LOWERING production while still delivering needed services.

This is one piece of the puzzle that the New York Times writer does not address but should be noted: that the massive inputs of energy for de-salination and water cleansing may not be sustainable in the long-run either.

We are going to have to save the future by going back to the future. Only a few years ago, we thought that global warming would be an affliction for future generations. Scarily, it is starting to look like we are going to see changes much, much faster related to the climate than even scientists had predicted.

So far as I can tell, we lack the political leadership to adjust. But there is always next November