Florida Crock: Say 'Resiliency.' Don't Say 'Climate Change.'

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Florida Crock: Say ‘Resiliency.’ Don’t Say ‘Climate Change.’
by Pierre Tristam | January 30, 2023 - 6:46am

— from Flagler Live


Florida is crazy about resiliency. The word is everywhere, because hurricanes, rising seas, erosion, disappearing beaches and downtowns flooding on sunny days are everywhere. The elected need to look like they’re doing something about it. So here comes resiliency. It’s got toughness, machismo, lilt. The syllables surf off the tongue with just enough self-importance for a word coined in mid-17th century England that our right honorable Gov. DeSantis thinks it’ll power Florida through the catastrophes of the 21st. He’s plastering the word everywhere like wonder whitewash.

Except that resiliency in Florida is a crock. The state is throwing millions, soon to be billions, at the consequences of global warming. It’s not doing a damn thing about its part in causing global warming. Until then, the state is as good as complicit in its coastal communities’ destruction–maliciously so, because this isn’t mere negligence. It’s active, vindictive denialism. The language of climate change–like so much else in this administration–is censored from all DeSantis playbooks.

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Ironically, the word has often been used to describe the resiliency of ecosystems, of the Amazon forest, of oceans, or the ozone layer in the face of human destruction. Give nature a chance, help it along just a bit (as we somehow managed to do with the ozone layer), go easier on greenhouse emissions, and it’ll reward you tenfold. That’s natural resiliency.

Florida hijacked the word, branding it on precisely the human factors that exploit and damage nature and exacerbate warming: concrete, overdevelopment, rebuilding fatter and meaner along the shore and in flood plains, and of course contempt for anything that might help nature along. In Florida, you not only don’t say gay. You don’t say climate change.

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What are we doing in Florida? We’re policing the speech of teachers and professors. We’re banning books. We’re sanitizing history. We’re obsessing about drag queens. We have a governor more intent on turning the clock back to 1950 Florida than he is concerned about how close the ocean will be to our homes by 2050.

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http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/pierre-tristam/104888/florida-crock-say-resiliency-don-t-say-climate-change