Climate Crisis
We are just now grasping the enormity of the global climate crisis: its broad reach into our life-supportive ecosystems and ecologies, human health and economies. We can almost be forgiven for succumbing to a mind-numbing state of shock and fear for the future.
We had just begun to comprehend the Earth as a single living system, with its numberless interacting and interdependent life cycles when the impacts of a climate altered world also became evident. On a global scale far too little action has been taken to address this “Long Emergency.”
Since the mid-20th Century, the foundational science of climate change was established by those in academia, government and the petroleum industry. Over decades the science has evolved further and is now able to explain a multitude of impacts of the burning of fossil fuels: record ambient and marine heat, rise in intensity of hurricanes, increased number of and prolonged droughts, floods, rise in the number and intensity of fires, worldwide coral bleaching, melting of polar ice caps, rise in sea levels, ocean acidification, and more.
Yet, even with voluminous scientific data and more and more people experiencing terrifying climate-related events locally, the first response is: “I never thought it would happen here. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
That reaction is called the “Lucretius problem” *: the difficulty we have imagining a different reality than we’ve experienced previously.
It’s simply hard to accept that our climate has changed. And with it, our responsibility to do something about it.
Florida
Florida is considered to be the state most vulnerable to altered climate impacts in the U.S. Hurricanes come first to mind. Our coastal communities are said to be the “most hazardous hurricane zone found worldwide.”
In 2024 as Hurricane Milton approached land on Florida’s West Coast, on the East Coast in St. Lucie County, nine tornadoes spun up. The Spanish Lakes community was hit by an EF3 tornado, with 155 mph winds killing 6 people. It is rare for tropical tornadoes to achieve this kind of strength. No one was prepared. Homes were flattened. Survivors stated, “I’ve never seen anything like this. I prepared for a hurricane, hours away from reaching us, but not tornadoes.”
Florida has also experienced 3-month long fires destroying acreage on a California scale, sea level rise, consistent and pervasive flooding, like in Miami Beach, ambient heat waves of 115 degrees, marine heat waves that resulted in massive coral bleaching in the Keys, and more.
Coral Reefs
Climate change threatening more than 40% of the world's corals with extinction, conservation group says
Coral bleaching events were unknown half-a-century ago, now their frequency and scale compromise our shorelines and fisheries around the world. Certainly, pollution and human-altered landscapes have already weakened corals, but with climate change variables added in it’s simply too much for the coral to prevail.
A Desperate Push to Save Florida’s Coral: Get It Out of the Sea
Intensive efforts to restore coral without climate action, as marine biologist, Ken Nedimyer, of Reef Renewal Foundation in Florida, stresses, is “all but useless.”
“Oh my God, we’re in the apocalypse.” Bailey Thomasson of the Coral Restoration Fund
Florida Iconic Species Canaries in Coal Mine, Including Our Beloved Manatee
Corals and other iconic Florida species increasingly serve as canaries in the coal mine, alerting us to dangerous disruptions in their habitat and life cycles. The Key deer is struggling with sea level rise, for example. Our beloved manatees face a variety of threats, both directly and as a consequence of society’s reaction to increased climate threats.
Residents rescue a manatee stranded by the storm surge after Hurricane Charley swept through Florida in 2004.
Photo © Gary Coronado, Palm Beach Post/ZUMA Press
Florida Scrub Jay
The scrub jay protectors at Archbold Biological Station explain:
We’ve spent decades managing habitat for the Florida scrub jay, but there is one thing we can’t control and that is climate.
How climate change is impacting this iconic Florida bird species
The one-of-a-kind, spunky, highly intelligent endemic Florida scrub jay is covered under the Endangered Species Act, yet its numbers are plummeting. Not only must the jay deal with habitat loss or alteration from development, but now a longer and warmer breeding season brings additional perils.
The Conservation Alliance Responds
In January of 2019 the Conservation Alliance made a commitment to infuse the climate crisis issue into our advocacy efforts, and to educate our community. Our efforts to protect ecosystems and their species will be inadequate or even useless if we don’t factor it in.
Likewise, no aspect of human society will be untouched by the climate crisis.
Our goals are to educate and advocate, and, to focus on positive, innovative, ecologically sound solutions that give us hope. At the same time, we will examine strategic options of “Resiliency” and “Adaptation” for human communities that local municipalities could begin implementing.
There is much inspiration to find in individuals, groups and governments that have already taken the initiative, showing us how to meet the demands of our climate crisis era.
It is urgent that we become ecologically, climate, and resiliency literate. Only in this way can we demand policies that make a difference from our elected representatives. But sometimes the better strategy is to show them what has proven to work.
White City Park CASLC Kayak Trip, pictured are John Reed and Shari Anker. Photo by John Reed
The Range of Our Efforts to Date
St. Lucie Community Resilience Planning Workshop, June 26, 2019.
Initiated by the Conservation Alliance and co-hosted by the SLC Environmental Resource Department, this was a day-long seminar with County, city and municipal elected officials and staff. The well-attended presentations reported on examples of how cities and municipalities can make our human communities more resilient in the decades ahead. Colonel Alan Dodd’s (Retired, USACE) keynote speech entitled, “Prepared, Responsive, and Resilient” served as a guiding theme. The workshop was well attended by 115 participants; including 10 elected officials and/or their aides, 25 agency and non-profit staff and approximately 80 staff members from 4 jurisdictions. The county and municipalities applied collaboratively for and received a grant from the DEP that will assist a funding vulnerability assessment, the first step to planning.
Presentations by forward-thinking and acting municipalities in Florida demonstrated the positive results that can be obtained with acceptance of our new climate reality. We encourage viewing the presentations below:
Educating the Community: CASLC Events and Exhibits
Dr. Ken Lindeman, PhD.
Ken Lindemann, PhD., of Florida Institute of Technology, March 2020 presented on “Changing Climate, Changing Oceans: Impacts on Florida and Caribbean Fisheries.”
COVID-era drive in movies on creative sustainability: “2040: Join the Regeneration,” and “The Human Element: We are a Force of Nature.”
Randall Parkinson, PhD., P.G. Florida International University, presented on “Coastal Resiliency and Sea Level Rise.” 2024. Here’s the link to FIU’s Living Shoreline Site Suitability Assessment Tool for the Indian River Lagoon:
Other real-time and predictive maps are available below.
Blue Carbon exhibit tables at local environmental fairs in 2023/2024. (Note: Wildlife Conservation Society’s definition: Coastal and marine ecosystems such as mangrove forests and tidal marshes capture and store a huge amount of carbon. This is called Blue Carbon.”)
Beach erosion caused by hurricane Matthew hitting along the east coast of Florida, USA.
The Future
Without doubt, we’re in for tough times ahead. If we fail to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions into our atmosphere, erratic weather patterns will become even worse than at present, with worse consequences like ecosystem collapse, and the expansion of deserts, for example. As of 2024, with the hottest day on record, July 22, and the hottest year on record, in the hottest decade on record, we’ve crossed the 1.5° C warming threshold scientists had red-alarmed us about at the U.N. Climate Change conference in 2015.
It is hard to image living in a “long emergency,” but that is where we are.
According to a Florida Atlantic University survey in 2024, 90% of Floridians think that climate change is happening. Perhaps it’s already happened to them. It’s time to mobilize.
Life Finds a Way: Instruction and Inspiration
On This Side
In embracing a full acceptance of our new reality, an opportunity for a transformative vision of our future appears. On this side, innovation beckons. Along with common and urgent purpose we can cultivate solutions that do address the enormity of the task ahead of us, in both small and large ways.
On this side, we recognize the essential role of conservation, which enables intact living ecosystems to continue providing climate and ecological services, like carbon sequestration and habitat and species protection.
The global 30X30 Initiative to place in legal protective status 30% of land and 30% of our oceans by 2030 is a bold idea with which 190 countries have committed. The Nature Conservancy calls this plan the “biggest conservation commitment the world has ever seen” producing benefits for both the climate and biodiversity crises.
On this side, as a noted eco-theologian, Thomas Berry, has stated, life works through us, as us, to regenerate itself and ourselves.
On this side, we notice local, state, national, and international projects that pull us in the right direction. Internationally, the Earth Shot Prize, founded by Prince William of The U.K., gives annual awards to innovators from across the globe who model their own locally-based solutions in these 5 fields: Protect and Restore Nature, Revive Our Oceans, Build a Waste-Free World, and Fix our Climate.
The Nature of Nature
After the “apocalyptic conflagration” of the Fort McMurray, Canada fire in 2016, author John Valliant concludes in Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World* (2024) that it is to Nature that we must seek our answers.
Less than a month after one of the most violent fire events in the history of the continent, new shoots had burst through the scorched hardpan, nourished by the still-vital roots of those flayed and blackened trees. …
This is Revirescence. It is the nature of Nature to do this at every opportunity. … Earth’s capacity for revirescence is without parallel in the known universe.
Vaillant credits the 12th century nun, Hildegard of Bingen, a polymath, “fascinated with life itself” for introducing the concept of “Viriditas” as Earth’s standard operating procedure. It is
… the innate impulse in all living things to be healthy, whole, and regenerative. Viriditas not only makes life possible, but wonderful, holy and renewable.
On this side, we agree with Vaillant’s conclusion that:
devoting our energy to regeneration and renewal rather than combustion and consumption, is what Nature is modeling for us and inviting for us to do.
Thanks to our Founders, that is wholly within the Conservation Alliance’s mission.
*Vaillant’s award-wining book is highly recommended. He cites the Lucretius Problem used earlier.
More Resources
FIT’s Global Coastal Climate Adaptation Library (maintained by Dr. Ken Lindeman)
Florida Section of FIT’s Coastal Climate Adaptation Library
Florida DEP Resilient Coastlines Program