A federal judge Tuesday cleared the way for a developer to bulldoze 88 acres of critically endangered Miami pine rocklands. One of the last shreds of an ecosystem that does not exist anywhere else on Earth will soon become an apartment complex with a Chili’s, LA Fitness, and Walmart attached.
Last December, a platoon of bulldozers descended upon one of the last stretches of endangered pine rocklands in America and flattened the area to build apartments, a Chili’s, an LA Fitness, and a Walmart on the critically threatened area. The tractors would have done even more damage had a group of South Florida environmentalists not filed an emergency lawsuit and obtained a restraining order to halt construction.
Miamians get nearly all of their drinking water from the Biscayne Aquifer, a clean source of natural H2O that stretches underground from the southern tip of the state north to Palm Beach County. This being Florida, developers, utility companies, and scammers of all stripes are constantly devising new and…
Only one road lets cars enter and exit Florida International University’s Biscayne Bay Campus. The Arch Creek East Environmental Preserve pens in the rest of the area’s western border — and sometimes creates a traffic bottleneck that backs up through the campus.
In his 15 years with the Florida East Coast Railway (FERC), Natale Sacco performed many jobs. From 1986 to 2001, he fueled and maintained trains at the Hialeah yard and along the railway from Miami to Jacksonville, working as a switchman, engineer, conductor, hostler, and trainman.
As Hurricane Irma barreled toward Florida last summer, some workers faced an impossible decision: follow evacuation orders and risk being fired, or stay in the path of what officials were calling a storm of catastrophic, never-before-seen proportions.
The president of the United States this week proposed drowning wide swaths of the American landscape, and it barely made front-page news. The White House’s 2019 budget request proposes cutting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s climate-research initiatives by 37 percent — from $158 million in 2017 to only $93 million in 2019.
When Miami Beach residents found out the county was spraying a pesticide banned in the European Union to kill mosquitoes carrying the Zika virus, they were furious. Dozens marched to city hall with signs reading, “What are you really killing?” and “Naled does more harm than good.” Some demonstrators wore…
In February 2016, a tipster reported a septic truck driver for dumping liquid waste next to a Kmart off Biscayne Boulevard. Sure enough, when county investigators set up surveillance in the parking lot, they quickly spotted the driver pumping waste directly into a drainage manhole.
Environmentalists and health advocates say the proposed rule change would be devastating for Floridians, especially children and people who eat a lot of seafood. Yesterday, Miami-Dade’s government operations committee unanimously voted in favor of having the county join a lawsuit challenging the proposed rule, which has not yet gone into effect.
Miamians take pride in being able to shrug off levels of summer heat that border on nuclear radiation. We regularly debate which windshield sun-shades work best to keep our cars from baking while parked outdoors in July. It’s not uncommon to see people jogging in 90-plus degree heat as if…
We are wimps. After all that whining about the hottest year on record, cold weather arrived this morning and everybody went crazy. Iguanas will fall out of trees, the Miami Herald predicted. Plants will die. Tourists will head elsewhere. Well, there is something to this. Yesterday, cold rain turned to snow…
The highlight of the Museum of Ice Cream — the absurdly popular, made-for-Instagram installation that opened last month in Miami Beach — is the pool filled waist-deep with millions of rainbow-colored plastic sprinkles. It’s the stuff of social media dreams. But the sprinkles are turning into a real-life problem for the Beach, where city staff have gone as far as fining the organizers for creating an “environmental hazard.”
Bad sign: Twenty seventeen tied for the hottest year in Miami history, according to National Weather Service data. The mean average temperature for the year ticked up to 79.1 degrees Fahrenheit.
Before Miami Beach was the city of Miami Beach, pioneer John S. Collins planted a row of Australian pine trees along the barrier island to shield his avocado and mango groves from the wind. More than 100 years later, those pines are still standing — a remarkable feat, considering the average lifespan is 40 to 50 years.
Life in 2017 means grappling with the knowledge that manmade climate change is, at most, a few decades away from flooding Miami. Wedged between a threatened Everglades and a warming Atlantic Ocean and jeopardized by rising seas, salty water tables, and strengthening hurricanes, the Magic City is at the center of environmental news that’s impossible to ignore.
You would be forgiven if you assumed New Times was a staunchly anti-mosquito news outlet, what with all the stories its reporters have written about battling tropical diseases such as Zika, chikungunya, and dengue. But as of today, New Times is now ardently pro-mosquito: According to Yale researchers, a group of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes somehow migrated all the way to Washington, D.C., and has been biting residents “near Capitol Hill” for the past six years.
For more than a year, Gwendolyn West’s canal-front home in North Miami has been, in the words of her attorney, “literally under attack” by gushing rivers of raw sewage.
Mention the cooling canals at Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station around a local environmentalist, and you’ll likely get to watch that activist’s face turn all shades of red and purple. Florida Power & Light owns the plant in South Miami-Dade, and evidence strongly suggests FPL has known for decades that the plant’s canals were leaking saltwater into the Biscayne Aquifer, Miami’s largest source of drinking water.
If you’ve been delaying your visit to Miami’s Vizcaya Museum & Gardens, the Ernest Hemingway house in Key West, or the 18th-century Cathedral Basilica of St. Augustine, now is the time to make arrangements. The same goes for scientists: If you’re planning, say, a study of the indigenous civilizations that lived in the Everglades thousands of years before Europeans arrived, start digging tomorrow.
Since white people moved to Florida, the Everglades has been under almost relentless assault. After being drained and developed, polluted with fertilizers, and overrun by invasive species, it’s no secret that today the vast wetland is on life support.
Nearly three months ago, Hurricane Irma destroyed thousands of boats in marinas as it spun through the Sunshine State. Workers have spent weeks towing the vessels to shore and clearing out the debris, but hundreds of boats remain smashed and sunken in coastal waterways. And now marine scientists warn that the decaying wreckage could harm delicate local ecosystems.
