The humans in power in Florida have converted the state to a fetid, in fact fecal swamp of dying vegetation, animals and coral, with built structures decaying and washing away, while the inhabitants regress to increasingly primitive states of violence and want. It is a remarkable Small Case Study of the decline of civilization.
Every week one sees prominent news articles featuring a single element of the Floridadammerung: Lake Okeechobee, overcome by an algal bloom, stinks. Manatees are dying. Rotting seaweed is washing in. Ocean water is 100 degrees. The coral is dead. The streets are flooding. Accompanying coverage is of the social consequences: home insurers are pulling out of the state. People are sustaining damage to their homes for the second and third times in a few years and may not be able to rebuild.
Note that there are three different, somewhat independent themes here, though the end result--Florida is finished-- converges. There are global climate change elements beyond the control of the powers-that-be in the state (the warming of the seawater, the flotilla of dead seaweed). Then there are destructive projects which are more directly under local control (Lake Okeechobee). These both are caused by the same operation, at the world and local level: Late Capitalism, which directly drove both the planet-wide use of fossil fuels and local decisions about overgrowth which saturated the lake with algae-growing shit. But a third strand which is almost completely independent of the other two is particularly fascinating in a repellent way: the state is now doing everything it can, via Governor DeSantis, to destroy its own economy, end tourism, drive needed capital and human resources away, exile the most intelligent and thoughtful portion of the population, end universities and libraries within the state. The turn to suicidal reaction is not an intuitive next step in human decline, and in fact there is a lack of models in history. The last Emperors of the Roman empire were incompetent and weak, but not a single one ever claimed that the invading Germans or Huns were merely imaginary. Not one.
The ony connection between Late Capitalism and suicidal reaction is that denial of Late Capitalism's effects-- of climate change-- is one of the cornerstones of the latter. But that doesn't even begin to start to commence to explain DeSantis' showboating as he beats up Disney, guts universities, criminalizes librarians' daily work, and convinces Democrats, gay and trans people, African Americans and Jews never to visit his state. Those are all anti-Capitalist initiatives, evidences of an additional human irrationality which is very hard to explain. Late Capitalism and Reaction, either independent of the other, would be sufficient to finish Florida. To have two flights to self destruction coinciding is really unique.
Not long ago, I was ready to advocate that people boycott Florida, but we are past that point. You boycott a place for moral reasons that you would otherwise be happy to visit-- where you would, by definition, feel secure. I am planning never to visit Florida again (I have likely been there twenty times, including living in Sanibel eighteen months in the 2000's) because I don't feel safe there-- and why vacation in a fetid swamp??
I think Texas will be the next state visibly to disentegrate under the joint pressures of climate change and delusional reaction.
In the Ethical Spectacle Mission Statement in 1995, I included as item #1: "Stating the obvious if no-one else has". Florida is finished.