Week ending September 20, 2026
A new mini documentary about faith leader and member of the Miccosukee, Betty Osceola was screened this week and filled me with hope. It was beautiful and meaningful and I wish you were there! I got distracted and I'm sending this out later than I wanted to but here we go!
“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington DC in February of 1968.
Table of Contents
Finite
Disappointment
The End of South Beach?
The truth of the matter is that South Beach has come to be what non-locals think is Miami (it is not) and a place locals mostly avoid, because of all the tourists. That said, South Beach as we know it with its iconic Art Deco District, was saved from turning into a few mega resorts and condos, by local activists in the 1980s and 1990s.
Tallahassee, which has been beholden to developers, often developers from outside of the state for over a century, may have finally found a way to destroy South Beach through a law called The Live Local Act combined with a law passed in 2024 supposedly designed to help flood prone areas. That law is called The Resiliency and Safe Structures Act.
Do you realize how much of South Florida is a flood prone area? If you live here, you do. It rained yesterday. The busy throughway of Bird Road was completely flooded thanks to rain. Not a big storm. Not a day of rain. A few hours of rain caused water to cover the entirety of Bird Road near SW 102nd Sunday.
Ask me how I know.
When you take the Resiliency and Safe Structures Act, which allows flood prone buildings to be demolished despite historic marker designation, and the Live Local Act, which allows developers to ignore local ordinances and build a building as tall as the tallest one within a certain distance and you get a four story tall historic South Beach Art Deco hotel being demolished and replaced with a 38 story condo building.
Is this story interesting? Infuriating? Then please read this outstanding piece about it by Daniel Rivero and Joshua Ceballos at WLRN:
Daniel Rivero and Joshua Ceballos
Florida
Gonna Florida
The headlines practically wrote themselves. "Florida men cling to tree for their lives in alligator habitat," was the headline in daily gossip page The Daily Beast. "Boaters trapped in alligator habitat desperately cling to tree limb while awaiting rescue," People Magazine breathlessly reported.
The habitat of the alligator is water located in the Southwest United States. Live near water in New Orleans? That's an alligator habitat. Atlanta, Georgia? Alligator habitat. Orlando, Florida? Alligator habitat.
The reality is is these Florida men, who were probably just trying to get out of the water because one can drown in water. In the state where getting struck and killed by lightning is far more likely than getting so much as sniffed by an alligator, they were probably in more danger from the daily thunderstorms this time of year than the alligators large enough to bother them–gators that can and often do go months without eating because they are large ectotherms and that's what large ectotherms do due to their metabolism being very different from endotherms.
To put it bluntly, in Florida seven people in a typical year die from lightning strikes while only a few dozen people have been killed by alligators in the last 70 years in Florida.
Historic
Interlude
September 19, 1964 Miami, Florida "Aquatic Lassie" took to the small screen 62 years ago this week. Filmed in part in Miami's Seaquarium, the show was popular but died a quick death after the studio demanded changes to the format and the showrunner refused.
And that's the only really happy thing about the story–unless you're a billionaire.
Kathy, one of the dolphins who played Flipper in the show, "ended up in a tiny tank after she retired from the show, becoming so depressed and sick that she forced herself to stop breathing and drowned, according to her longtime trainer Ric O'Barry," reads a The U.S. Sun story in 2021.
Flipper's home in some scenes in the show, Miami's Seaquarium, closed last year after 70 years of operation after "Miami-Dade County terminated the park’s lease and issued an eviction notice, citing a “long and troubling history” of animal welfare violations," per the Miami New Times' Alex DeLuca.
In 2024 Richard Luscombe of The Guardian reported that "Almost all of the Seaquarium’s wounds are self-inflicted, a succession of failures in veterinary care of its dolphins, manatees, sea turtles and other animals, poor maintenance of facilities, and chronic understaffing, documented in successive scathing inspection reports by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA)."
WLRN's outstanding environmental reporter (who happens to also be daughter-in-law to the legendary novelist Carl Hiaasen) Jenny Staletovich reported in July that the current plan for the facility that PETA helped bring down is a home for mega yachts.
As Staletovich reports, "The complicated plan that also includes a fuel depot has raised dozens of questions with Florida Department of Environmental Protection regulators, who responded with a six-page list."
Regarding mega yachts, Fortune's Jessica Nix and Bloomberg report, "The planet-warming pollution caused by luxury vessels that benefit the very few has led lifestyle social scientist Gregory Salle to dub them a form of “ecocide” and “conspicuous seclusion” in his new book, Superyachts: Luxury, Tranquility and Ecocide."
So PETA went gangbusters to close Seaquarium over rampant animal abuse only to see the site turned into a safe harbor, literally, for vessels that have been dubbed "a form of ecocide."
Nothing happy about this story.
WLRN's Outstanding Environmental Reporter Reflects on the Big One 100 years ago
Infinite
Hope
On Sunday I had the privilege of viewing Alligator Altar, a four minute video of Betty Osceola–a Miccosukee tribal leader and educator–praying for the land. It was a magnificent event and I hope the video becomes available soon to share. It is a beautiful prayer and documentary.
Leslie Ramos
Bear
The History Hound Finds
If Bear weren't terrified of everything ...
He'd be like all my previous dogs, which would do exactly what this good boy did.
Thor Benson
Heather Cox Richardson
Guardian staff reporter
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