There’s a modern question that emerges when a massive storm makes its way towards a highly populated area: Is this the right moment to talk about climate change? Let’s settle that debate with a simple answer: Yes. It’s the right time to discuss climate change and how we’re going to adapt to it because we’re witnessing, firsthand, what could be the new normal. And because, for the most part, we completely ignore the threats posed by climate change when there isn’t a big storm approaching. Miami Mayor Mayor Tomás Regalado agrees: “This is the time to talk about climate change … This is a truly, truly poster child for what is to come.” Climate change is simply going factor into our future decisions about where and how we live. Here’s The New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins (who grew up in Florida) with an Elegy for the Sunshine State: “The joke among us was that every housing development in Florida was named to memorialize the ecosystem it replaced: Crystal Cove, Mahogany Bay, The Bluffs. For about a year, I lived in an apartment complex, paved from end to end, called “In the Pines.”
It’s useful to remember this now, as Hurricane Irma lays waste to much of Florida: the destruction of the state has been unfolding for decades, and, for the most part, it wasn’t done by nature. It was done by us.”

+ “In the 20th century, Florida declared war on its common enemy, vowing to subdue Mother Nature, eventually making vast swaths of floodplains safe for the president to build golf courses and Vanilla Ice to flip houses and my kids to grow up in the sunshine. Water control — even more than air conditioning or bug spray or Social Security — enabled the spectacular growth of South Florida. It’s a pretty awesome place to live, now that so much of its swamp has been drained … But Mother Nature still gets her say.” Michael Grunwald in Politico: Florida, the Paradise That Should Never Have Been.