Now suppose I go to Florida but decide never to utter the word \u201cmosquitos.\u201d Will that make the little buggers go away?<\/p>\n
Or suppose I refuse to say \u201ccockroaches.\u201d Does that mean they would never infest my apartment or condo?<\/p>\n
Finally, let us imagine that, on my trip to Florida, I never say the word \u201csunburn\u201d? Would that make it possible for me to sit on the beach all day, unprotected, without suffering the consequences?<\/p>\n
If those propositions sound absurd, then consider the moronic dictum of Florida Gov. Rick Scott<\/span><\/a>, who apparently has decreed that state employees are not to use the words \u201cclimate change.\u201d Presto. Problem solved! Climate change ceases to exist, all the science to the contrary be damned (for instance, the most recent National Climate Assessment<\/a>).<\/p>\n The state of Florida, however, has a long and impressive history of dealing effectively and forthrightly with issues related to hazards. Not perfect, by any means, but far more impressive than most neighboring states. Florida provided significant guidance to its communities on planning for hazard mitigation, and then subsequently for developing plans for post-disaster recovery. It is the only state that enacted a requirement for coastal jurisdictions to develop such plans before disasters, called Post-Disaster Redevelopment Plans<\/span><\/a> (PDRP), although Gov. Scott rescinded the mandate. Even so, the state still has encouraged local jurisdictions to adopt such plans. And before Scott became governor, the Florida Department of Community Affairs (now the Department of Economic Opportunity) produced guidance<\/span><\/a> on the preparation of PDRPs. In addition, Florida issued an addendum to the PDRP guidance<\/span><\/a> to address the threat of sea-level rise resulting from climate change.<\/p>\n Simply put, Florida has been much more proactive than most other states because Florida faces much bigger problems with coastal storms and flooding because of its peninsular geography. What the state has done has not only made a difference, but in many cases provided a model for others. In our new report from the American Planning Association<\/span><\/a> on post-disaster recovery planning<\/span><\/a>, we have cited it extensively, as has the Federal Emergency Management Agency<\/span><\/a> (FEMA) in other guidance. But now the forward movement seems to have been slammed into reverse gear.<\/p>\n This is a shame, in part because, in my experience, Florida has enjoyed the ability in recent decades to attract high-quality public servants in the fields of environmental quality, urban planning, and emergency management. I have known many of these people, and they were top-notch under both Democratic and Republican administrations. One of them, Craig Fugate<\/span><\/a>, is now leading FEMA. There is a problem, however, with retaining such people: You have to provide a rewarding work environment in which you are honoring, not insulting, the intelligence they bring to their jobs. Once you cross that line with measures such as the censorship of terms like \u201cclimate change,\u201d the most likely result over time is a brain drain. Smart people have other places to go and better options for their careers than to be told what to think and what they can say. On the other hand, if, as has been alleged about much of the far right, the real goal is to cripple effective government and make it appear more incompetent than it needs to be in order to support an agenda that advocates a reduced government role, you may wish to foment the frustration with government that may result. I suspect, however, that the majority of American taxpayers, like me, would rather get the best public servants\u00a0their taxes can buy, and one way to do that is to respect their insights into the problems they are trying to help us all solve. Scott\u2019s response instead is to dismiss the issue from the public agenda.<\/p>\n The problem with trying to do that, especially in a dynamic state like Florida, is that he cannot hope to control the public debate in this way. He does not, for instance, control what can be said by officials in local government, including environmental engineers, planners, emergency managers, coastal resource managers, and others who must face problems like sea-level rise<\/span><\/a> whether or not state employees are allowed to use certain words. Nor will it stop university personnel, including a wide variety of scientists, from discussing the issue. In fact, some, like David Hastings<\/span><\/a>, a marine science professor at Eckerd College<\/span><\/a> in St. Petersburg, are describing the tactic as \u201cOrwellian,\u201d according to World Environment News<\/span><\/a>. Sara Gutterman, of GreenBuilder<\/span><\/a>, referred to it as \u201cNorth Korean style censorship.\u201d Even Newsmax<\/span><\/a> notes, \u201cThe Florida policy is reminiscent of a 2012 law passed by lawmakers in North Carolina that prohibits the state from basing coastal policies on scientific predictions regarding sea level rise.\u201d The article goes on to note that the Florida Department of Environmental Protection<\/span><\/a> is charged with trying to combat the impacts of a problem that it is no longer allowed to name.<\/p>\n Enough local officials have been concerned about climate change in some parts of Florida to form a four-county Southeast Florida Climate Change Compact<\/span><\/a> in which they have agreed to pool resources and jointly tackle the issues posed to several of the state\u2019s most vulnerable counties. Those concerns extend naturally\u00a0to the impacts of hurricanes, whose destructive impact can be magnified over time by eroding shorelines and rising seas. Having heard county executives and others from Miami-Dade<\/span><\/a> and Palm Beach<\/span><\/a> counties, in particular, discuss these issues, there is no way that I can foresee their backing down, in the face of the real land-use and coastal protection dilemmas they face, from confronting the reality of climate change. But they clearly must do it without state support, although for now at least they certainly can expect moral and\u00a0tactical\u00a0support from the federal government.<\/p>\n We can only hope that this wave of unreality in states like North Carolina and Florida is ultimately short-lived. The science is far too advanced for this silliness to continue, no matter how much political red meat it provides in certain circles. The only way to create resilient communities is to openly confront, debate, and discuss the truth, and that cannot be accomplished by banning words from public discussion, a tactic worthy of certain dictatorial regimes where democracy is less well developed than it should be in the world\u2019s most powerful nation. Some policies,\u00a0in fact,\u00a0deserve to be treated with scorn precisely because they undercut the robust public discussion that supports both resilience and democratic government. This is one of them.<\/p>\n Jim Schwab<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Now suppose I go to Florida but decide never to utter the word \u201cmosquitos.\u201d Will that make the little buggers go away? Or suppose I refuse to say \u201ccockroaches.\u201d Does that mean they would never infest my apartment or condo? Finally, let us imagine that, on my trip to Florida, I never say the word […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[179,81,178,36,222,180,50],"tags":[281,24,181,45,280,282,8,119,279],"class_list":["post-306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-climate-2","category-disaster-2","category-government","category-political-philosophy","category-resilience-2","category-science","category-urban-planning","tag-censorship","tag-climate","tag-coastal","tag-disaster","tag-environmental-protection","tag-florida","tag-hurricane","tag-resilience","tag-sea-level-rise"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=306"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":307,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306\/revisions\/307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}