I guess these are going behind a paywall soon. No great loss, this is only the second one I've ever listened to and I've written off the NY Times as a legitimate source of news and information that serves the public interest. It's just a media outlet that serves its own interests.

Anyway, here's a brief podcast, about six minutes, from Florida resident and novelist Jeff VanderMeer, briefly recapping how we got here, and why he thinks "Florida is worth saving."

Florida is the third most populous state in the union. It's going to take a long time to depopulate it. So, whether it's "worth" saving or not, it's going to need a lot of federal help in the decades to come.

Florida is a slowly unfolding catastrophe, and I don't think the country has the resources to do anything other than "manage" it. It's never going to be a paradise. Parts of it will fare better than others, chiefly those with wealth.

It's already two states, one inhabited by the privileged and served by its permanently entrenched Republican government; and the other is inhabited by the ignored, the marginalized, disenfranchised and deliberately "othered."

It didn't have to be this way, but greed made it so.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:55 Wednesday, 16 October 2024