Things I heard in Florida

Like so many northerners of a certain age, I have parents who choose to spend their retirement in the swampy South. For nearly fifteen years, I’ve been visiting my dad in Estero, Florida, a quickly growing bedroom community north of Naples near the airport. The land of gated communities, strip malls, and Florida Man, I’ve seen some things down there.

The first time I visited, we saw two men standing in a ditch on the side of the highway, trying to shoot an alligator with a crossbow. (I wish I knew if they succeeded…) We’ve been to swamp buggy races and held three-foot baby gators in our hands. We even watched as the dog racing track was torn down after they found a mass grave for racing dogs.

But I’ve also watched the slow creep of climate change. I watched infrastructure be destroyed and red tide move in. I’ve heard many versions of: “oh, we can’t go to that beach anymore after the hurricane.” But during my latest visit, thronged by spring breakers and supporting my dad through his cancer treatment, I felt like climate was everywhere – even as it was drowned out by war and the din of national politics.

It’s not that I’m spared climate change in the North. We just got through a multiple-polar-vortex winter and the temperature is swinging between 70 and 20 on a daily basis. Our skies will probably once again clog with smoke from Canadian wildfires, and our summer highs in Chicago will quickly cross 100 on a daily basis. Still, something struck me about the climate in Florida this past visit.

“Smells like smoke,” I said to my dad, joining him on the lanai for breakfast. (A lanai, for the uninitiated, is a screened-in back yard that keeps out the bugs, which can include nine-foot mosquitos in the swamplands.)

“Oh, yeah. Everglades are burning from the drought.”

It was the most casual thing a person could say. Like he was reporting on highway construction or the stock market.

When it came to the weather more generally, this pattern repeated with everyone I spoke to. We even went to a spring training game for our beloved Detroit Tigers, where it was an unseasonably soul-melting 91 degrees.

“This is May weather,” I heard at least two dozen people say. Without fail, though, someone would mention “January” with great gratitude. In the middle of January, when the entire country was frozen solid, Florida saw 99-year lows and freezing temperatures. You may recall from the news that it was “iguana dropping” weather, when the little green guys got so chilly they simply dropped from the trees.

Another thing that struck me, visiting a ruby-red state where climate policy is officially banned, is just how wildly different our media environments are. Apparently, when one of my aunts stayed with my uncle recently, they even got into a shadow war, switching the TV repeatedly throughout the day between Fox News and CNN.

While Fox seems to be an especially bad actor (see the defamation case), I think anyone — looking at you, boomers — watching wall-to-wall, scrolling-chyron news coverage is hurting their brain. But even for the young, when I fail in my never-ending battle to avoid social media, it leaves me feeling anxious and depressed. Regardless of your political views, a cleaner media diet — think long-form articles, journalism, academics — will leave you closer to some kind of objective reality. (Hell, this Substack probably isn’t the best writing you’ve ever seen, but I’m sure not trying to put out disinformation!)

I can’t help but feel some grief at how obfuscating the American media system is. Climate simply isn’t a culture war issue in most other countries, and we’ve let the most crucial issue of our times become fodder for endless partisanship. While climate denial certainly seems more pernicious to me, climate misinformation on the left by way of doomerism doesn’t get us any closer to our policy objectives.

As I’ve written in the past, I try to make climate communication across party lines a priority in my life — especially seeing as how desperately we need bipartisanship to ensure climate laws endure between administrations. This visit was no exception, though I started with a slightly different tactic.

I simply asked my Republican relatives what they thought about the current administration. Answers ranged from the theological (Trump sent by heaven to save us) to the political (everything in this administration is an answer to the last one – the political adage that “turnabout is fair play”).

Still, despite all of us getting sick of so much winning, the mood didn’t seem particularly jubilant. One of my older family friends was delighted to finally get a European passport, sure he’ll need to flee the country the next time a Democrat is in charge (though I don’t think he’ll particularly enjoy left-leaning European politics). Everyone is sick of the tar pits. Everyone feels ill at ease in a nation so perpetually at its own throat.

And what of climate? I didn’t ask directly this visit, though it came up in a handful of these political conversations. Especially in the administrative tit-for-tat, one relative crowed about how wasteful Biden’s clean energy spending was. “We only power 2% of the country with clean energy anyway,” they said. This despite the fact that carbon-free energy is more like 20% and was 90% of capacity additions in 2025. More importantly, with electricity prices up 13% last year under the onslaught of new datacenters, clean energy will be a critical load resource.

Meanwhile, when talking about the war with Iran, this same relative was nervous about our nation’s drone supplies. When I mentioned that the EV industry might help our national security, since we currently have to source all drone batteries from China, they were floored. They’ve been drowned in a sea of content on the “green new scam,” when clean energy could be the thing to most help their pocket book this decade. Solar sure doesn’t travel through the Strait of Hormuz…

First and foremost, wear sunscreen. Woof. But more importantly, I had a great time visiting my relatives! Cutting people off because of political differences is absurd, and it won’t get us any closer to bridging the gap between our disparate tribal camps. If nothing else, I like to think my calm disposition and willingness to listen at least built up some trust I can lean on in the long-term. Someday I might have something actually useful to say on climate – particularly something my relatives can actually control, like calling their legislator when a bipartisan permitting bill finally arrives.

As a country, we’re still pretty far apart on things. We aren’t even living in the same universe most days media-wise. But I like to think we still have pretty similar hearts. Most people spend their time focused on family first and pocketbook issues second. Politics is a distant third or fourth. They (and I) like to go to baseball games and eat hot dogs even when it’s 90 degrees outside. I don’t know if that’s a climate solution, but remembering those facts might get us closer to one.

*Art by Winslow Homer, 1904, Red Shirt, Homosassa, Florida, courtesy National Gallery of Art

**Email header art by Karl Nilsson (sigvardnilsson on instagram), includes portions of Beck’s Castle Ruins by László Mednyánszky Denbigh Castle, W he ales by Edward Dayes & Paysage de la Grand Chartreuse attributed to Jean Lubin Vauzelle