Climate & Environment

If you dump more than 500 pounds of garbage around Florida, you could be charged with a felony. Florida is one of the few states with a felony litter law, and Miami-Dade Police officers are using it: In the past three years, 53 people have been arrested for dumping excessive amounts of trash wherever they feel like it.

After 12 senior citizens overheated and died last year in a sweltering Hollywood nursing home where Hurricane Irma knocked out the air conditioning, commissioners in Miami-Dade County agreed to look into installing generators in all of the county’s public housing developments. But now that officials have crunched the numbers, those improvements seem unlikely to ever happen.

From the beginning of June until early July, an algae bloom in Lake Okeechobee grew and grew until it covered 90 percent of the lake’s surface. Then the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers released water from the lake, letting the algae migrate to both coasts of Florida. The nasty, toxic…

Compared to wind farms and solar parks, nuclear power plants are, in general, extremely expensive to operate and terrible for their surrounding environments. Florida Power & Light’s Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station in Homestead certainly has not done good things for the local water supply. The power plant’s infamous canal system…

The Monday morning after Hurricane Irma made landfall, Valencia Gunder woke up feeling hopeless. Her house in Liberty City had flooded. Power was out across her neighborhood and would be for days. Though cell service was spotty, texts from her neighbors kept jolting her phone. Everyone was asking Gunder the same thing: “When is help coming?”

In 2012, Miami Beach became one of the first cities in the nation to enact a partial ban on plastic straws. Since then, the so-called straw wars have heated up: Seattle, Malibu, Santa Barbara, and Oakland recently passed ordinances banning their use, and New York City is mulling a similar move. Meanwhile, businesses such as Starbucks and Royal Caribbean have announced plans to ditch the plastic tubes.

Maybe you think you can live just fine in the postapocalyptic future that Americans are creating by pumping carbon emissions into the air. You’re OK with the dead trees, the flooded city streets, the extinct alligators. You’ll be cool living life in your windowless bunker and traveling across town in a series of air-conditioned tunnels…

El Portal calls itself a modern-day Garden of Eden. The tiny village boasts a canopy of oak trees, a portion of the Little River frequented by manatees, and an official designation as a bird sanctuary.  It’d be a fitting nickname, except for one thing: The rivers in Paradise probably weren’t…

This week, crews began work on an ambitious new beach renourishment project in Miami Beach, where Hurricane Irma washed away much of the shoreline. The $1.5 million emergency project, which involves trucking in 32,000 tons of sand from Central Florida, won’t be done until at least November. But…

Donna Kalil steers her forest-green 1998 Ford Expedition down a narrow path through the vast expanse of the Everglades. Leaning far outside the open window, she scans the tall grasses. On the roof, her best friend, Renee Yousefi, perches on a brightly lit platform modeled after a tuna tower and…

After the state of Florida expanded Interstate 95 in the ’90s, only a few feet separated America’s busiest highway from houses along NW Sixth Avenue in Miami-Dade County. Residents organized, and their protests seemed to work — in 2002, former Commissioner Barbara Carey-Shuler met with three of the homeowners, who…

Another day, another study warning Miamians they are living through the last few decades on Earth in which South Florida streets will remain dry most of the year. For all the bellyaching Miamians do about traffic, entrenched political corruption, or absurdly prohibitive housing prices, not a damn thing matters as…

Jason Gerrish gives no hint he feels any pressure. The March day is humid and slightly overcast, and more than 100 people are standing around in the woods of Moss Park in Orlando. Some in the crowd begin chanting, “Go, Jason, go,” and Gerrish’s anxious wife, Meadow, reminds him she’ll…

West of Miami is Big Cypress National Preserve, an expanse of prairie, bog, and hardwood forest that includes dwarf cypress trees. These rarely grow taller than 15 feet. They provide roosting sites for bluebirds, food for the cypress fox squirrel, and scratching posts for the Florida panther and black bear.

Every morning for the past 25 years, a flock of blue and gold macaws has flown into Daria Feinstein’s backyard in Coral Gables. They swoop between surrounding homes and over boats docked on the nearby canal to perch on Feinstein’s royal palms and poincianas or maybe have a bite to eat on the artificial nests she’s set up for them.

Sea turtle advocate Jennifer Rotker often walks the beach near her home in Surfside to pick up trash. Finding water bottles, soda caps, and abandoned cups are a regular occurrence, but one item that bugs her most is the plastic straw.

Six days before hurricane season even begins, we already have our first named storm of the year. And it will absolutely drench South Florida just in time for a three-day weekend. Subtropical Storm Alberto officially formed around 10 a.m. just off the Yucatán Peninsula in the northwestern Caribbean Sea, which means the system has picked up a noticeable rotation and kicked up winds topping 39 mph.

Arkup is a new design firm that specializes in solar-powered, sustainable, “luxury livable yachts,” or “arks.”

There’s already plenty of depression to go around in South Florida before this Memorial Day. Traffic is gonna be a ludicrous nightmare thanks to Miami Beach’s totally not-race-related crackdown on Urban Beach Week. The Marlins belong in the trash can, and the Dolphins will probably be even worse. And now, a tropical depression might just roll over the peninsula for the holiday weekend.

Logging into Twitter first thing in the morning in 2018 generally feels like diving headfirst into a flaming dumpster floating down a flooded roadway. Wage theft is legal now! Trump is treating the Constitution like a Russian prostitute! More than a week before hurricane season begins, a damn tropical storm might already be forming!