This past weekend I flew to Birmingham Alabama for my son’s first junior slalom kayak completion. Sam is a good kayaker; he has paddled since he was a toddler. I am canoeist. The main difference is that a kayaker’s paddle has two blades and a canoeist only has one. It’s much easier to paddle with two blades then one, but I suffered too many horse falls as a kid and my shoulders are not stable enough to use two blades. So, I paddle a canoe.
I have lived along the same stretch of Miami Beach for the last twenty years. Over the last several months there have been several spotting’s of salt water crocodiles in places where I never saw or heard them before—Fisher Island, Bay Point, South Pointe…
Every other June, the center of the world’s aviation industry shifts to Paris for a commercial air show that is the de rigueur sales event for Boeing, Airbus and other giants in the jet industry. Now Miami-Dade County wants to bring some of that business to the Everglades. On an isolated county airport surrounded by the Big Cypress National Preserve, local officials see the future home of the Miami International Aerospace Show. The high-flying expo could launch as early as January 2017 as the largest show of its kind in the Americas, giving Miami a chance to tout its homegrown aviation sector to industry heavyweights.
Yogi Berra once said that, “The future ain’t what it used to be.” His words could serve as yet another warning for the residents of today’s Florida, a state that finds itself in the eye of the storm on climate change. It’s customary on the first day of the half-year-long hurricane season to issue a reminder about preparing for what a well-known book (and movie of the same name) once called The Mean Season. Long-time Floridians know they have to be ready, and that now is the time to prepare.
Environmentalists say they are not giving up the battle to secure land south of Lake Okeechobee for Everglades restoration. They’re just changing tracts. With lawmakers scheduled to meet Monday for the start of a 20-day special session, several of the state’s most influential conservation groups on Wednesday renewed calls to buy land needed to store water and move it to the thirsty southern Everglades. They also want lawmakers to order the South Florida Water Management District to set a schedule for designing and building a reservoir.
While retrenching abroad, the Obama Administration remains committed to expanding Washington’s footprint at home. Behold the Environmental Protection Agency’s rewrite Wednesday of the Clean Water Act that extends federal jurisdiction over tens of millions of acres of private land. The Clean Water Act limits the federal government to regulating the “navigable waters of the United States” like the Colorado River or Lake Michigan. In 1986 the EPA expanded that definition to seize jurisdiction over tributaries and adjacent wetlands.