1.  Florida scrub jay: Threatened, politically controversial and possibly the first snowbird

By James Call, Tallahassee Democrat

Why we recommend it: If you have ever hiked in the stunning, endangered scrub of Florida’s central highlands, you may have had a chance to lay your eyes (or binoculars) upon the Florida scrub jay, a unique bird endemic to that habitat. As much as the Florida scrub jay has been isolated through increasing fragmentation of its habitat, it has also been unwittingly pitted in ongoing political conflicts. Over the decades, conservation efforts to protect and recognize this threatened species have been derailed by gun and property rights. In this informative and entertaining piece that reads almost like a Carl Hiassen novel, James Call holds a magnifying glass to the ecological and surprisingly political history of “Florida’s first snowbird.”

The Florida scrub jay is like a lot of Floridians; the bold bird with a bright sky-blue head and grey underbelly is descended from tourists who never left, and seemingly just wanders into political controversies. 

2.  The Gullah/Geechee people hold their ground

By Glenda Simmons-Jenkins, National Wildlife Magazine

Why we recommend it: Coastal development and climate change threaten the Gullah/Geechee, who are increasingly pinched between rising seas and the creep of golf courses and luxury high-rises. But this piece by Glenda Simmons-Jenkins, Florida Gullah/Geechee representative and The Marjorie contributing writer, portrays a people determined not only to survive, but to also thrive. From North Carolina to Florida, the Gullah/Geechee Nation is standing fast, using an unusual combination of legal strategy, strategic partnerships, and ancestral traditions to protect their cultural heritage and steward their land.

“Hey, Mama! It’s been a minute!” she called, walking toward the Atlantic Ocean, arms outstretched. [Parthenia] Myers giggled in the chilly sea breeze. “Oh, it’s so beautiful out here,” she said. “This is what you get when the land is not abused. You can feel the healing in the air.”

3.  Did FAU study find ‘flesh-eating bacteria’ in Sargassum seaweed? No, contrary to reports

By Katie Delk, TC Palm

Why we recommend it: In October, news outlets spread blatant misinformation across the world wide web when some reporters incorrectly interpreted a Florida Atlantic University study to mean that flesh-eating bacteria were found in sargassum, a type of seaweed that is increasingly washing ashore on the state’s east-coast beaches. Katie Delk’s smart fact-checking takedown of the rumor and subsequent hysteria serves as an admirable example of the role of responsible science journalism. In a succinct question-and-answer style explainer, Delk breaks the study down to its most basic facts with brief explanations of where sargassum comes from, the type of bacteria that was incorrectly reported, the disease associated with the bacteria, and why the fear-mongering term “flesh-eating bacteria” was inaccurate all along. In a world where misinformation has become more common, we depend on sharp-eyed reporters like Delk to set facts apart from the frenzy.

“It’s just crazy how we went from the title of our paper, ‘possible pathogens in the open ocean’ to ‘massive flesh-eating blob.’ That’s not what we were saying at all,” said Tracy Mincer, lead author of the Florida Atlantic University study released May 3. “It just became this clickbait, and everybody started trying to hype it up.”

4. Florida’s environmental failures are a warning for the rest of the U.S.

By Jeff VanderMeer, Time

Why we recommend it: Just as there is so much to love about Florida, there is also so much to learn from it. In this commentary, Jeff VanderMeer outlines the far-reaching  consequences of decades of environmental mismanagement in the state. Backed up by facts and illuminated by snark, VanderMeer walks readers through practices and policies that have not only shaped Florida, but also determined its precarious future. Ending on a hopeful note, VanderMeer reassures readers that “a better future for Florida isn’t rocket science.”

Florida is a bellwether for the rest of the nation; the surge water rise that besets Miami today will, soon enough, beset states ranging from California to New York. The state, of necessity, should be a leader in U.S. climate resiliency. But rather than acknowledge a crisis and build out a holistic approach to climate change, Florida, led by Governor Ron DeSantis, denies the urgency and applies a hodge-podge of contradictory initiatives designed for short-term applause. 

But a better future for Florida isn’t rocket science. It just requires wise governance that leads with actual science and best practices, while halting desecration of the state’s wild places.

The dismantling of wetlands is in a sense the dismantling of Florida itself.

5. The struggle for food sovereignty in Immokalee, Florida

By Julia Knoerr, Civil Eats

Why we recommend it: Food sovereignty, the environment, and social justice are always interlinked, and reporter Julia Knoerr highlights the stark irony of the high rate of food insecurity in food-rich Immokalee, Florida’s tomato capitol. The agricultural region depends on thousands of migrant farmworkers who come from across Latin America to sustain the industry, which is frequently at the center of workers’ rights campaigns. Knoerr shares how a community facing so many multifaceted challenges navigates survival and resilience through mutual aid and community ties.

Immokalee is known as the tomato capital of the United States, yet 28 percent of the town’s 24,500 residents—the majority migrant farmworkers from Central America, Mexico, and Haiti—live below the federal poverty line and without easy access to healthy foods. This poverty rate is more than double the statewide average, and it’s compounded by higher-than-average food prices, a housing crisis, and minimal public transportation options.

6. Florida workers got sick after Deepwater Horizon oil spill. They want BP to pay.

By Christopher O’Donnell and Max Chesnes, Tampa Bay Times

Why we recommend it: More than 13 years after the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, many of the local residents who helped clean up the spill are still waiting to be compensated for their lives being upended. Christopher O’Donnell and Max Chesnes make sure those stories are not forgotten by detailing the ongoing medical, economic, legal, and emotional turmoil that cleanup workers face. They outline how BP continues to defer responsibility for these impacts by aggressively contesting new lawsuits and how that resistance compounds the challenges that come from proving workers’ illnesses are connected to exposure that happened over a decade ago. “I have to prove causation, that the poison on the beach is what poisoned our clients,” said one attorney representing about 150 cleanup workers. “And we can’t do that.”

“BP went out and hired the indigent, and the underrepresented, and they took advantage of those local populations,”  said Dylan Boigris, a partner at Downs Law Group in Miami, which represents 50 Florida cleanup workers. “They sent them out there to clean up their oil, and they’ve discarded them.”

7. Bright lit place

By Jenny Staletovich, WLRN

Why we recommend it: This new podcast series from WLRN News and the NPR network tells the story of how people directly involved in the push to restore the Everglades — and those directly affected by it — understand and make sense of those tradeoffs: Is restoration too big to fail or too small to succeed? In an era of hard choices borne of environmental crises, the Everglades is perhaps the iconic American example of how difficult it is to strike the right balance. From immersive, aqueous sounds of the marsh to the voices of those who experience the wonder of the Everglades on a daily basis and who seek to protect it — this series offers an intimate and insightful glimpse into this complex conservation effort. 

There are a million different ways that we are failing this test. But as I got deeper into the swamp and deeper into my obsession, I really started to see this as a moral test. A test of our ability to step back. To not always perceive human greed first. To do things that are uncomfortable for future generations.

8. Where has Florida’s seagrass gone, and can we bring it back?

By Bill Kearney, Sun Sentinel

Why we recommend it: In this special report, the first in a two-part series, Bill Kearney unpacks the complex and tragic story of Florida’s vanishing seagrass, the foundation for the once-rich biodiversity of the state’s major estuaries. Nutrient pollution, rising temperatures, and rapid coastal development are driving seagrass declines, which have led to manatee deaths and decreases in the sportfish that have made the state a global fishing hotspot. But Florida’s fishing guides and scientists are fighting back.

“I was inconsolable,” recalls [Capt. Benny] Blanco. “I was just completely blown away that everything that I loved was literally dying in front of my eyes. I thought [the seagrass] would be there forever, because it was inside a national park.”

9. In the Florida Everglades, a greenhouse gas emissions hotspot

By Amy Green, Inside Climate News

Why we recommend it: It’s no secret that for centuries, Florida’s waterways have been drained and diverted to make way for farms, flood protection, and development. But, in this story, Amy Green brings to light growing evidence that sapping the Everglades has also positioned it as a global emissions hotspot. This is because underneath the water lies carbon-rich soil called peat. When covered by water, peat is an important carbon sink, but when exposed, it emits powerful greenhouse gasses. This story illustrates how the Everglades is a unique player in the battle against climate change.

The scope of the emissions would place the region among the top 100 greenhouse gas polluters in the U.S., in a league with the likes of Nebraska Public Power District (7.6 million metric tons) and East Kentucky Power Cooperative (7.3 million metric tons), which are 82nd and 83rd on the list, said Steve Davis, chief science officer at the Everglades Foundation.

10. The root of Miami

By Ashira Morris, Islandia Journal

Why we recommend it: Florida’s environments are changing rapidly. Sometimes, it’s helpful to take a pause and look back on our state’s fascinating history the way Ashira Morris documents the near-extinction of the coontie plant and its lesser known role as a staple crop for Miami’s pre-colonial native societies. In a brief essay that’s both breezy and informative, Morris recounts recipes, colonialism, and a long-gone industry that once centered this forgotten starch root. The surprising twist? “The return of the coontie hasn’t led to a resurgence of people eating it. But it has meant a resurgence of atala hairstreak butterfly,” Morris writes. “The species nearly went extinct in Florida, since the only food its larva eats is coontie, which allows them to become poisonous like the root. The fate of the butterfly and plant are intertwined, and as more people have put coontie in their yards, the atala has made a comeback.”

When white settlers made Miami their home in the 19th century, the Seminole taught the newcomers about the local flour. Early pioneer families saw the industrial potential, and coontie mills sprung up at locations including Arch Creek and on Biscayne Bay. 

For a time, people enjoyed coontie puddings and breads and cakes. In 1912, members of the First Presbyterian Church Miami compiled The Florida Tropical Cookbook, full of recipes from the state’s homestead pioneer wives for how to use the local produce, including coontie. It was published on what, in retrospect, is the edge of a shared sensory memory, a time when people reading it knew the sweet, vanilla-like taste of coontie. 

In their lifetime, it went from a common food item to culinary extinction.

11. Florida used unpaid prison labor to prepare for Hurricane Idalia

By McKenna Schueler, Orlando Weekly

Why we recommend it: “Got a sandbag? Thank an inmate!” – This was the message from the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office in a Facebook post the day before Hurricane Idalia reached Florida in late August. Labor from incarcerated people is commonly used by counties across the state to prepare for, and cleanup after, natural disasters such as hurricanes and wildfires. Most of that labor is unpaid and is often justified as skills training or a method to keep incarcerated people from returning to jail after they have been released, but there is little data to support either of those claims. Meanwhile, state agencies receive massive cost savings from the practice. In 2019, one Gulf County commissioner claimed, “There’s no way we can take care of our facilities, our roads, our ditches, if we didn’t have inmate labor.” McKenna Schueler lays out this issue, nodding to previous investigations that have detailed similar practices, in this timely article.

But, it’s true that this arrangement in the corrections system allows for savings on labor costs. Florida’s minimum wage is $11 per hour, compared to $0 for the majority of prison work (a small fraction of prison jobs in Florida pay between 20 cents and 95 cents per hour, according to data collected from the ACLU).

These cost savings are not lost on the state Department of Corrections, which maintains contracts with local and state government agencies, including the Department of Transportation.

As of 2019, the Florida Department of Corrections valued incarcerated laborers working on state “community work squads” and road crews at $147.5 million over a five-year period, according to the Florida Times-Union, which clarified that the real value is “likely double or triple that estimate.”

12. Florida’s vanishing sparrows

By Dexter Filkins, The New Yorker

Why we recommend it: In south central Florida, scientists are advancing efforts to restore populations of the Florida grasshopper sparrow, now considered to be the most endangered bird in the continental U.S. But it’s not an easy task, and in a landscape that has come to be dominated by strip malls and urban sprawl, the Avon Park Air Force Range is a last refuge for species like the grasshopper sparrow, who are on the brink of extinction. This coverage from The New Yorker underscores the biodiversity crisis tied to Florida’s development boom while shining a light on the urgency with which researchers are working to minimize the harm. Are these noble efforts enough to stave off the accelerating decline of so many of our ecological processes and irreplaceable species?

The challenge is less in breeding sufficient numbers than in finding space for them; some ninety per cent of the bird’s historic habitat is gone…But the scientists who are working to help the grasshopper sparrow refuse to give up. Tringali, the biologist, told me, “It’s really easy to do nothing. We are not done. We have a long way to go.”

13. Florida has become a zoo. A literal zoo.

By Benji Jones, Vox

Why we recommend it: In a Vox series exploring the Sunshine State’s role in American culture, dubbed “The United States of Florida,” biodiversity reporter Benji Jones takes us on a safari of Florida’s nonnative wildlife. Parking-lot monkeys, chameleons, Nile monitor lizards, and the state’s more famous culprits—cane toads, Burmese pythons, and Cuban tree frogs among them—all feature in this exploration of how and why Florida offers a prolific home for dozens of nonnative and invasive species. In a state overrun with exotics, Jones searches for an answer to a perplexing question: What do we do with them? Jones’ photo-filled feature beautifully encapsulates the dichotomy of Florida’s invasive species conundrum.

Florida, like any spot on Earth, will never return to some historic version of itself. Over hundreds of years, humans have irreversibly transformed the environment. We’ve razed natural habitats and created new ones. It’s no surprise that in this new ecosystem, there are new species; we’ve literally created novel ecological niches for them to occupy. But the question still stands: What do we do with all of them?

One idea is to simply embrace nonnative species. From a somewhat fringe perspective, nonnative species actually increase the state’s biodiversity, a common measure of ecological health. As far as scientists know, exotics have yet to drive any native species extinct; they only increase the total number of species in Florida ecosystems, according to Ty Park, the owner of Iguanaland, a reptile zoo and breeding facility near Sarasota.

“The world has changed,” Park said. “We have to live with that.”

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Cover image by Jason Matthew Walker