The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2016

by Amy Stewart

  The region’s troubles start with its topography. Driving across South Florida is like driving across central Kansas, except that South Florida is greener and a whole lot lower. In Miami-Dade County, the average elevation is just 6 feet above sea level. The county’s highest point, aside from manmade structures, is only about 25 feet, and no one seems entirely sure where it is. (The humorist Dave Barry once set out to climb Miami-Dade’s tallest mountain, and ended up atop a local garbage dump nicknamed Mount Trashmore.) Broward County, which includes Fort Lauderdale, is equally flat and low, and Monroe County, which includes the Florida Keys, is even more so.

  But South Florida’s problems also run deeper. The whole region—indeed, most of the state—consists of limestone that was laid down over the millions of years Florida sat at the bottom of a shallow sea. The limestone is filled with holes, and the holes are, for the most part, filled with water. (Near the surface, this is generally fresh water, which has a lower density than salt water.)

  Until the 1880s, when the first channels were cut through the region by steam-powered dredges, South Florida was one continuous wetland—the Everglades. Early efforts to drain the area were only half successful; northerners lured by turn-of-the-century real-estate scams found the supposedly rich farmland they’d purchased was more suitable for swimming.

  “I have bought land by the acre, and I have bought land by the foot; but, by God, I have never before bought land by the gallon,” one arrival from Iowa complained.

  Even today, with the Everglades reduced to half its former size, water in the region is constantly being shunted around. The South Florida Water Management District, a state agency, claims that it operates the “world’s largest water control system,” which includes 2,300 miles of canals, 61 pump stations, and more than 2,000 “water control structures.” Floridians south of Orlando depend on this system to prevent their lawns from drowning and their front steps from becoming docks. (Basement flooding isn’t an issue in South Florida, because no one has a basement—the water table is too high.)

  When the system was designed—redesigned, really—in the 1950s, the water level in the canals could be maintained at least a foot and a half higher than the level of high tide. Thanks to this difference in elevation, water flowed off the land toward the sea. At the same time, there was enough fresh water pushing out to prevent salt water from pressing in. Owing in part to sea level rise, the gap has since been cut by about eight inches, and the region faces the discomfiting prospect that, during storms, it will be inundated not just along the coasts but also inland, by rainwater that has nowhere to go. Researchers at Florida Atlantic University have found that with just six more inches of sea level rise the district will lose almost half its flood-control capacity. Meanwhile, what’s known as the saltwater front is advancing. One city—Hallandale Beach, just north of Miami—has already had to close most of its drinking wells, because the water is too salty. Many other cities are worried that they will have to do the same.

  Jayantha Obeysekera is the Water Management District’s chief modeler, which means it’s his job to foresee South Florida’s future. One morning, I caught up with him at a flood-control structure known as S13, which sits on a canal known as C11, west of Fort Lauderdale.

  “We have a triple whammy,” he said. “One whammy is sea level rise. Another whammy is the water table comes up higher, too. And in this area the higher the water table, the less space you have to absorb storm water. The third whammy is if the rainfall extremes change, and become more extreme. There are other whammies probably that I haven’t mentioned. Someone said the other day, ‘The water comes from six sides in Florida.’”

  A month after the super blood moon, South Florida experienced another series of very high tides—“king tides,” as Miamians call them. This time, I went out to see the effects with Nicole Hernandez Hammer, an environmental-studies researcher who works for the Union of Concerned Scientists. Hammer had looked over elevation maps and decided that Shorecrest, about five miles north of downtown Miami, was a neighborhood where we were likely to find flooding. It was another hot, blue morning, and as we drove along, in Hammer’s Honda, at first it seemed that she’d miscalculated. Then, all of a sudden, we arrived at a major intersection that was submerged. We parked and made our way onto a side street, also submerged. We were standing in front of a low- slung apartment building, debating what to do next, when one of the residents came by.

  “I’ve been trying to figure out: Where is the water coming from?” he said. “It’ll be drying up and then it’ll be just like this again.” He had complained to the building’s superintendent. “I told him, ‘Something needs to be done about this water, man.’ He says he’ll try to do something.” A cable-repair truck trailing a large wake rolled by and then stalled out.

  The water on the street was so deep that it was, indeed, hard to tell where it was coming from. Hammer explained that it was emerging from the storm drains. Instead of funneling rainwater into the bay, as they were designed to do, the drains were directing water from the bay onto the streets. “The infrastructure we have is built for a world that doesn’t exist anymore,” she said.

  Neither of us was wearing boots, a fact that, as we picked our way along, we agreed we regretted. I couldn’t help recalling stories I’d heard about Miami’s antiquated sewer system, which leaks so much raw waste that it’s the subject of frequent lawsuits. (To settle a suit brought by the federal government, the county recently agreed to spend $1.6 billion to upgrade the system, though many question whether the planned repairs adequately account for sea level rise.) Across the soaked intersection, in front of a single-family home, a middle-aged man was unloading groceries from his car. He, too, told us he didn’t know where the water was coming from.

  “I heard on the news it’s because the moon turned red,” he said. “I don’t have that much detail about it.” During the past month, he added, “it’s happened very often.” (In an ominous development, Miami this past fall experienced several very high tides at times of the month when, astronomically speaking, it shouldn’t have.)

  “Honestly, sometimes, when I’m talking to people, I think, Oh, I wish I had taken more psychology courses,” Hammer told me. A lot of her job involves visiting low-lying neighborhoods like Shorecrest, helping people understand what they’re seeing. She shows them elevation maps and climate-change projections, and explains that the situation is only going to get worse. Often, Hammer said, she feels like a doctor: “You hear that they’re trying to teach these skills in medical schools, to encourage them to have a better bedside manner. I think I might try to get that kind of training, because it’s really hard to break bad news.”

  It was garbage-collection day, and in front of one house county-issued trash bins bobbed in a stretch of water streaked with oil. Two young women were surveying the scene from the driveway, as if from a pier.

  “It’s horrible,” one of them said to us. “Sometimes the water actually smells.” They were sisters, originally from Colombia. They wanted to sell the house, but, as the other sister observed, “No one’s going to want to buy it like this.”

  “I have called the City of Miami,” the first sister said. “And they said it’s just the moon. But I don’t think it’s the moon anymore.”

  After a couple of minutes, their mother came out. Hammer, who was born in Guatemala, began chatting with her in Spanish. “Oh,” I heard the mother exclaim. “Dios mío! El cambio climático!”

  Marco Rubio, Florida’s junior senator, who has been running third in Republican primary polls, grew up not far from Shorecrest, in West Miami, which sounds like it’s a neighborhood but is actually its own city. For several years, he served in Florida’s House of Representatives, and his district included Miami’s flood-vulnerable airport. Appearing this past spring on Face the Nation, Rubio was asked to explain a statement he had made about climate change. He offered the following: “What I said is, humans are not responsible for climate change in the way some of the
se people out there are trying to make us believe, for the following reason: I believe that climate is changing because there’s never been a moment where the climate is not changing.”

  Around the same time, it was revealed that aides to Florida’s governor, Rick Scott, also a Republican, had instructed state workers not to discuss climate change, or even to use the term. The Scott administration, according to the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting, also tried to ban talk of sea level rise; state employees were supposed to speak, instead, of “nuisance flooding.” Scott denied having imposed any such Orwellian restrictions, but I met several people who told me they’d bumped up against them. One was Hammer, who, a few years ago, worked on a report to the state about threats to Florida’s transportation system. She said that she was instructed to remove all climate-change references from it. “In some places, it was impossible,” she recalled. “Like when we talked about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has ‘climate change’ in the title.”

  Scientists who study climate change (and the reporters who cover them) often speculate about when the partisan debate on the issue will end. If Florida is a guide, the answer seems to be never. During September’s series of king tides, former vice president Al Gore spent a morning sloshing through the flooded streets of Miami Beach with Mayor Levine, a Democrat. I met up with Gore the following day, and he told me that the boots he’d worn had turned out to be too low; the water had poured in over the top.

  “When the governor of the state is a full-out climate denier, the irony is just excruciatingly painful,” Gore observed. He said that he thought Florida ought to “join with the Maldives and some of the small island states that are urging the world to adopt stronger restrictions on global-warming pollution.”

  Instead, the state is doing the opposite. In October Florida filed suit against the Environmental Protection Agency, seeking to block new rules aimed at limiting warming by reducing power-plant emissions. (Two dozen states are participating in the lawsuit.)

  “The level of disconnect from reality is pretty profound,” Jeff Goodell, a journalist who’s working on a book on the impacts of sea level rise, told me. “We’re sort of used to that in the climate world. But in Florida there are real consequences. The water is rising right now.”

  Meanwhile, people continue to flock to South Florida. Miami’s metropolitan area, which includes Fort Lauderdale, has been one of the fastest growing in the country; from 2013 to 2014, in absolute terms it added more residents than San Francisco and, proportionally speaking, it outdid Los Angeles and New York. Currently, in downtown Miami there are more than 25,000 new condominium units either proposed or under construction. Much of the boom is being financed by “flight capital” from countries like Argentina and Venezuela; something like half of recent home sales in Miami were paid for in cash.

  And just about everyone who can afford to buys near the water. Not long ago, Kenneth Griffin, a hedge fund billionaire, bought a penthouse in Miami Beach for $60 million, the highest amount ever paid for a single-family residence in Miami-Dade County (and $10 million more than the original asking price). The penthouse, in a new building called Faena House, offers eight bedrooms and a 70-foot rooftop pool. When I read about the sale, I plugged the building’s address into a handy program called the Sea Level Rise Toolbox, created by students and professors at Florida International University. According to the program, with a little more than one foot of rise the roads around the building will frequently flood. With two feet, most of the streets will be underwater, and with three it seems that, if Faena House is still habitable, it will be accessible only by boat.

  I asked everyone I met in South Florida who seemed at all concerned about sea level rise the same question: What could be done? More than a quarter of the Netherlands is below sea level and those areas are home to millions of people, so low-elevation living is certainly possible. But the geology of South Florida is peculiarly intractable. Building a dike on porous limestone is like putting a fence on top of a tunnel: it alters the route of travel, but not necessarily the amount.

  “You can’t build levees on the coast and stop the water” is the way Jayantha Obeysekera put it. “The water would just come underground.”

  Some people told me that they thought the only realistic response for South Florida was retreat.

  “I live opposite a park,” Philip Stoddard, the mayor of South Miami—also a city in its own right—told me. “And there’s a low area in it that fills up when it rains. I was out there this morning walking my dog, and I saw fish in it. Where the heck did the fish come from? They came from underground. We have fish that travel underground!

  “What that means is, there’s no keeping the water out,” he went on. “So ultimately this area has to depopulate. What I want to work toward is a slow and graceful depopulation, rather than a sudden and catastrophic one.”

  More often, I heard echoes of Mayor Levine’s Apple Watch line. Who knows what amazing breakthroughs the future will bring?

  “I think people are underestimating the incredible innovative imagination in the world of adaptive design,” Harvey Ruvin, the clerk of the courts of Miami-Dade County and the chairman of the county’s Sea Level Rise Task Force, said when I went to visit him in his office. A quote from Buckminster Fuller hung on the wall: “We are all passengers on Spaceship Earth.” Ruvin became friendly with Fuller in the 1960s, after reading about a plan Fuller had drawn up for a floating city in Tokyo Bay.

  “I keep telling people, ‘This is my patient,’” Bruce Mowry, Miami Beach’s city engineer, was saying. “I can’t lose my patient. If I don’t do anything, Miami Beach may not be here.” It was yet another day of bright-blue skies and “nuisance flooding,” and I was walking with Mowry through one of Miami Beach’s lowest neighborhoods, Sunset Harbour.

  If Miami Beach is on a gurney, then Mowry might be said to be thumping its chest. It’s his job to keep the city viable, and since no one has yet come up with a smart-watch-like breakthrough, he’s been forced to rely on more primitive means, like pumps and asphalt. We rounded a corner and came to a set of stairs, which led down to some restaurants and shops. Until recently, Mowry explained, the shops and the street had been at the same level. But the street had recently been raised. It was now almost a yard higher than the sidewalk.

  “I call this my five-step program,” he said. “What are the five steps?” He counted off the stairs as we descended: “One, two, three, four, five.” Some restaurants had set up tables at the bottom, next to what used to be a curb but now, with the elevation of the road, is a three-foot wall. Cars whizzed by at the diners’ eye level. I found the arrangement disconcerting, as if I’d suddenly shrunk. Mowry told me that some of the business owners, who had been unhappy when the street flooded, now were unhappy because they had no direct access to the road: “It’s, like, can you win?”

  Several nearby streets had also been raised, by about a foot. The elevated roadbeds were higher than the driveways, which now all sloped down. The parking lot of a car-rental agency sat in a kind of hollow.

  I asked about the limestone problem. “That is the one that scares us more than anything,” Mowry said. “New Orleans, the Netherlands—everybody understands putting in barriers, perimeter levees, pumps. Very few people understand: What do you do when the water’s coming up through the ground?

  “What I’d really like to do is pick the whole city up, spray on a membrane, and drop it back down,” he went on. I thought of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, where such fantastical engineering schemes are the norm.

  Mowry said he was intrigued by the possibility of finding some kind of resin that could be injected into the limestone. The resin would fill the holes, then set to form a seal. Or, he suggested, perhaps one day the city would require that builders, before constructing a house, lay a waterproof shield underneath it, the way a camper spreads a tarp under a tent. Or maybe some sort of clay could be pumped into the ground that would ooze out and fill the interst
ices.

  “Will it hold?” Mowry said of the clay. “I doubt it. But these are things we’re exploring.” It was hard to tell how seriously he took any of these ideas; even if one of them turned out to be workable, the effort required to, in effect, caulk the entire island seemed staggering. At one point, Mowry declared, “If we can put a man on the moon, then we can figure out a way to keep Miami Beach dry.” At another, he mused about the city’s reverting to “what it came from,” which was largely mangrove swamp: “I’m sure if we had poets, they’d be writing about the swallowing of Miami Beach by the sea.”

  We headed back toward Mowry’s office around the time of maximum high tide. The elevated streets were still dry, but on the way to City Hall we came to an unreconstructed stretch of road that was flooding. Evidently, this situation had been anticipated, because two mobile pumps, the size and shape of ice-cream trucks, were parked near the quickly expanding pool. Neither was operating. After making a couple of phone calls, Mowry decided that he would try to switch them on himself. As he fiddled with the controls, I realized that we were standing not far from the drowned palm tree I’d seen on my first day in Miami Beach, and that it was once again underwater.