Source: Sink or Swim: Miami’s Perilous Future Facing Climate Change – EcoWatch
By Tara Lohan
With its white-sand beaches and glittery high-rises, Miami is still a vacation hotspot. But lapping at those shores is another reality. The city is also a “possible future Atlantis, and a metonymic stand-in for how the rest of the developed world might fail — or succeed — in the climate-changed future,” wrote Miami journalist Mario Alejandro Ariza in his forthcoming book, Disposable City: Miami’s Future on the Shores of Climate Catastrophe.
This may not be news to some. The city’s plight has been the subject of investigative reporting and even viral news stories after an octopus showed up in a parking garage following an especially high tide.
But Ariza takes a much deeper, more personal dive into the slowly unfolding disaster. Along the way he finds that the central question is whether South Florida — home to 6.5 million people — can equitably withstand what’s coming. To do so it will need to reckon with its past sins. “Miami is a damn beautiful city, and it rests on a sodden foundation of merciless racial and environmental exploitation,” he wrote.
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