Last month, sign-waving demonstrators massed in front of Tropical Park to try to dissuade customers from buying tickets to Christmas mainstay Santa’s Enchanted Forest. Their complaint? The live tigers and other animals used in shows at the theme park, which activists claimed are mistreated. “These animals are forced to live…
To quote our favorite Christmas movie Batman Returns, mistletoe can be deadly if you eat it, but a kiss can be even deadlier if you mean it. Especially if that kiss is from an invasive insect known as the Kissing Bug. The Center For Disease Control reports that the insect,…
It’s the happiest time of the year — except for the animals at Santa’s Enchanted Forest. At least that’s what a group of animal activists planning a protest against the venerable holiday theme park says. They believe Santa’s Enchanted Forest, which bills itself as the “world’s largest holiday theme park,”…
To designer Isaac Stein, there’s no reason to be scared of the rising seas in South Florida. Instead, the encroaching water should be embraced as part of the next phase in Miami Beach’s evolution. In fact, Stein has proposed one of the most creative solutions yet to save South Beach…
After 65 years of shoveling snow in Iowa, Frank Poma was tired. “You get rid of it,” he says, “and then it keeps coming back.” So about five years ago, Poma and his wife Cindi bought an RV and headed for Knight’s Key RV Resort and Marina, an unpretentious, 24-acre…
There have been may a classic battle fought in Florida. Cassius Clay (later known as Muhammad Ali) vs Sonny Liston in 1964. The battles of the Miami Hurricanes and Florida State Seminoles in the early ’90s. The Rock vs John Cena at WrestleMania XXVIII. But perhaps no face-off was quite as…
As any veteran Miamian will quickly remind you, November is still very much part of hurricane season. Still, by now South Florida is usually starting to bask in regular 70-degree highs and calm seas. But not this year. As a record-shattering heat wave cooks Florida for a second straight week,…
Sea level rise shouldn’t be a controversial subject in a state subcommittee tasked with talking about Everglades restoration and water management. That’s exactly why two state representatives from South Florida began asking a Tallahassee bureaucrat earlier this week about climate change’s impact on the state’s projects. But this is Florida,…
If you’re a Miamian and you still don’t care about the threat that global warming poses to the very continued existence of our city perhaps there’s another way we could get yo care. Turns out a new study co-authored by researches from Tulane, UC-Santa Barbara, and the University of Central…
In recent months, Miami-Dade mayor Carlos Gimenez has been facing mounting pressure from environmentalists to do more to prepare the county for the inevitable sea level rise. So far, Gimenez has listened. In September, he passed an almost $500,000-year budget to tackle sea level rise and a chief resiliency officer…
For decades the Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, the Coconut Grove estate built as a “dreamlike vision in the midst of the jungle on the shores of Biscayne Bay,” according to the museum website, has served as one of Miami’s most iconic landmarks — a lush, leafy symbol of the wealth…
At approximately 9 a.m. Saturday, Edgewater residents woke up to the roaring boom of another building demolition to make way for a much taller, luxury residential tower. It’s unclear what precautions were taken to notify residents (it’s believed that those living in the surrounding buildings were handed letters) but the…
Shark programs hit the sweet spot for ocean-side research universities – weighty enough with scientific import to justify the eyeballs of the hardcore scientific community, gnarly enough to reel in the interest of your plain ol’ Discovery Chanel fiends. For almost a decade, the University of Miami has been one…
At 7:30 in the evening, Terri Frana noticed two black bears gallop through the backyard of her 10-year-old, $725,000 house in Lake Mary, just north of Orlando. Frana, a 44-year-old banker with brown bangs and a kind face, was used to seeing the beasts around her woodsy neighborhood, but she…
James Murley might have the most depressing and difficult job in the county. As chief resiliency officer, the 69-year-old government planner has to make sure that Miami literally doesn’t go under. It’s not going to be easy, with scores of scientists repeatedly finding that sea levels are climbing and a…
Yes, Florida does have bears — black bears, the kind that rarely bother humans other than rifling through trash cans for food. That’s reason enough, apparently, for the state of Florida to authorize a new bear hunt in the state, with permits already issues for hundreds of hunters to track…
Unless you’re a GOP presidential candidate, you’ve probably accepted the facts by now: The global climate is changing. The seas are rising. And at some point, low-lying Miami-Dade County is going to do the whole Atlantis thing. The latest evidence came yesterday, with a new study that found that even…
Miami will be threatened by rising sea levels over the next few centuries. On that there’s pretty much scientific consensus. The only question is exactly how much. Well, a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America predicts that our…
Since he entered office in January, Florida Republican Congressman Carlos Curbelo has made headlines for his progressive stance on environmental issues. Representing Florida’s 26th Congressional District, which stretches from Miami to Key West, he touts clean energy, and has split from much of his party in advocating for steps to…
There’s no better real estate in Miami than the 30 acres of downtown waterfront space just south of the Pérez Art Museum Miami. But in its current iteration, the rectangular block known as Museum Park is pretty much a waste — an exposed, feature-less patch of shrubby grass that’s great…
Have you walked outside lately? Like, anytime in the last four months? Miami’s been pretty damned hot. In fact, a University of Miami scientist says, it’s been the hottest year to date in recorded history. Brian McNoldy, a senior research associate at the Rosenstiel School (and a passionate meteorologist: “I just…
Any guess where Florida’s largest flock of sheep lives? Quite possibly right in the middle of Miami Beach, inside a nondescript Mt. Sinai research building just off the Julia Tuttle Causeway. Unlike their rural cousins, these fluffy animals, more than 100 of them, aren’t kept for wool or left alone…
