Posts Tagged ‘Florida’
“Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself”*…
Jodi Picoult‘s books are being pulled off of Florida school library shelves; she explains why we should care…
In the past six months, my books have been banned dozens of times in dozens of school districts. As sad as it seems, I was getting used to the emails from PEN America’s Jonathan Friedman telling me that yet again, my novel was under attack. But this week, something truly egregious happened. In Martin Country School District, 92 books were pulled from the school library shelves. Twenty of them were mine.
The 92 books fell into three categories: those with mature content, those written by BIPOC authors, and those written by LGBTQ authors. My books were removed because they were, according to the sole parent who made the challenge, “adult romance that should not be on school shelves.” It is worth noting I do not write adult romance. The majority of the books that were targeted do not even have a kiss in them. What they do have, however, are issues like racism, abortion rights, gun control, gay rights, and other topics that encourage kids to think for themselves.
When I read through the list of the 20 novels of mine that were pulled from the Martin County School District bookshelves, one surprised me the most. The Storyteller is a novel about the Holocaust. It chronicles the growth of anti-Semitism and fascism in Nazi Germany. There was a strange irony that a parent wanted this particular book removed, because it felt a bit like history repeating itself…
Florida has passed very broadly worded laws that limit what books can and cannot be in schools. Teachers who do not obey face penalties. Every book in a school must be reviewed by a media specialist and schools are told to “err on the side of caution.”
Some activists and parents have taken these laws as free reign to remove whatever books they personally do not deem acceptable. Some districts take the books off shelves “pending review”— but months and years go by without a review, and the books remain locked away. The outcome has been empty shelves in Florida classrooms and school libraries, where teachers and media specialists don’t only ban books that have been challenged but, in fear of future retribution, also remove other books that might result in punitive measures. The result? Students don’t have access to certain titles.
…
Many of my writer friends whose books have been challenged hear the same refrain: “Kids can just get those books somewhere else!” Unfortunately, not every kid has access to a public library or transportation to get there; for many, a school or classroom library is their only resource. We also hear: “Oh, that’s just gonna drive up sales!” Trust me, none of us want that. What we want is for kids to be able to read what they want to read, instead of being told what they should read. We want the great majority of folks in communities who support the freedom to read to be just as loud as those select few who are making so much noise against it.
In the brilliant words of Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop, books create windows through which kids can escape and mirrors in which they can find themselves. We want you to stand in solidarity with us, the writers who create these books. Because we’ve seen, historically, what the next chapter looks like when we don’t speak out against book challenges… and that story does not end well…
Eminently worth reading in full: “What Florida Doesn’t Want You to Know About Its Book Bans,” from @jodipicoult in @thedailybeast.
* Potter Stewart (Supreme Court Justice, 1958-81)
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As we encourage curiosity, we might spare a thought for a man with some personal experience of censorship, Jan Němec; he died on this date in 2016. A filmmaker, he was the the “enfant terrible of the Czech New Wave.”
His best known work is A Report on the Party and the Guests (1966), about a group of friends on a picnic who are invited to a bizarre banquet by a charismatic sadist, who eventually bullies most of them into blind conformity and brutality while those who resist are hunted down. It was not a hit with Czech authorities, who had it banned. (Antonín Novotný, the president, was said to “climb the walls” on viewing it and Němec’s arrest for subversion was considered.)
He was in the middle of shooting a documentary about the Prague Spring for a US producer when the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia occurred. He smuggled his footage of invasion to Vienna, where it was broadcast on Austrian television. He re-edited the footage released the documentary Oratorio for Prague. It received standing ovations at the New York Film Festival in the fall of 1968. Němec’s footage would eventually be used by countless international news organizations as stock footage of the invasion; and Philip Kaufman’s film adaptation of The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988) also used footage from the film (on which Němec served as an advisor).
Němec was given a warning by the government that “… if he came back, they would find some legal excuse to throw him in jail.” From 1974 to 1989, he lived in Germany, Paris, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United States. He stayed in the U.S. for twelve years. Unable to work in traditional cinema, he was a pioneer in using video cameras to record weddings (documenting, for example, the nuptials of the Swedish royal family).
After the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia in 1989, he returned to his native country, where he made several films, including Code Name Ruby (1997) and Late Night Talks with Mother (2000), which won the Golden Leopard at Locarno.
“Round and round they went with their snakes, snakily”*…
Florida…
Burmese pythons are too good at what they do — they’re nearly undetectable to both humans and their prey, they barely need to move and when they do they’re deadly. On top of that, they have lots of babies.
As a result, according to an ambitious new paper produced by the U.S. Geological Survey, their population has exploded in only 20 years from a few snakes at the southern tip of Everglades National Park to an invasion that envelops the southern third of Florida…
The success of these snakes, which are native to Southeast Asia, and came here via the exotic pet trade, has been a cataclysmic failure for South Florida ecosystems and “represent one of the most intractable invasive-species management issues across the globe,” said the paper…
When biologists open the invasive snakes up, it’s like rifling through a Florida field guide. All told, they’ve found 76 prey species inside the snakes. That includes lots of birds, such as vultures, crows, ducks, herons, roseate spoonbills and threatened wood storks; small mammals such as the endangered Key Largo woodrat and Key Largo cotton mouse, marsh rabbits, armadillos, possums, raccoons, otters and domestic cats, and larger prey including domestic goats, white-tailed deer, wild hogs and alligators….
How much damage have they done? Guzy points out that before 2000, researchers could frequently spot mammals in Everglades National Park. But from 2003 to 2011, the frequency of mammal observations [raccoons, opossums, bobcats, rabbits, gray foxes, and white-tailed deer] declined by 85% to 100%. Outside the python’s range, those species were more common.
Snakes on a plain: “Python invasion has exploded out of the Everglades and into nearly all of southern Florida,” from @SunSentinel.
* Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
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As we tread carefully, we might recall that it was on this date in 2006 that New Line Cinema ordered five days of additional shooting on what had been a minor film in their 2006 line-up, Pacific Air Flight 121 (principal photography had wrapped in September 2005). While re-shoots normally imply problems with a film, the producers opted to add new scenes to the film to change the MPAA rating from PG-13 to R and bring it in line with growing fan expectations… expectations that had been raised when (at star Samuel L. Jackson’s insistence) the film’s title had reverted to its original working form: Snakes on a Plane.
More than 450 snakes were used for filming to represent 30 different species of snakes, including a 19-foot (5.8 m) Burmese python named Kitty.
“On any given day… 5% of Americans will consume a fresh orange, 21% will consume orange juice.”*…
How concentrated and ready-to-pour orange juice– originally a dumping ground for extra oranges– conquered the morning menu…
The staid carton of orange juice has long sat next to tea and coffee at the breakfast table. It’s bright, but somewhat boring, and bears the dubious halo of being something good for you. Few of us give it much thought, other than to recall its oft-trumpeted Vitamin C content.
But processed orange juice as a daily drink, you might be surprised to learn, is a relatively recent arrival. Its present status as a global phenomenon is the creation of 20th-Century marketers, dealing with a whole lot of oranges and nowhere to put them…
“How orange juice took over the breakfast table,” from @BBC_Future. [TotH to friend MK.]
* USDA
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As we get sweet, we might recall that it was on this date in 1821 that Spain formally transferred sovereignty over the territory we now know as Florida– the center of the orange juice industry– to the United States. (Spain had, of course, traded Florida to England [for Cuba] in 1763, but had regained it as a product of the Treaty of Versailles in 1783.)
“The Florida in my novels is not as seedy as the real Florida. It’s hard to stay ahead of the curve.”*…
Jeff VanderMeer is a master of teasing out the weird in the service of critiquing our relationship with nature; his novels– e.g., Annihilation, Hummingbird Salamander— are entertaining, illuminating cautionary tales. In a recent essay, he turned his attention to his native Florida…
About the size of Greece, Florida is the jewel in the crown of the amazingly biodiverse Atlantic Coastal Plain. The state has 1,300 miles of shoreline, 600 clear-water springs, 1,700 ravines and streams, and over 8,000 lakes. More than 3,000 native trees, shrubs, and flowering plants are native to Florida, many unique to our peninsula and also endangered due to development. Our 100 species of orchid (compared to Hawai’i’s three native orchids) and 150 fern species speak to the moist and subtropical climate across many parts of the state. Florida has more wetlands than any other conterminous state—11 million acres—including seepage wetlands, interior marshes, and interior swamp land. Prior to the 1800s, Florida had over 20 million acres of wetlands.
As Jen Lomberk of Matanzas Riverkeeper describes it, Florida’s aquifer is unique because it is “so inextricably connected both underground and to surface waters. Florida’s limestone geology means that pollutants can readily move through groundwater and from groundwater to surface water (and vice versa).” In a sense, the very water we drink in Florida lays bare the connections between the often-invisible systems that sustain life on Earth and reveals both the strength of these systems and their vulnerability.
[But Floridians aren’t stewarding these unique resources…]
Most of this harm has been inflicted in the service of unlimited and poorly planned growth, sparked by greed and short-term profit. This murder of the natural world has accelerated in the last decade to depths unheard of. The process has been deliberate, often systemic, and conducted from on-high to down-low, with special interests flooding the state with dark money, given to both state and local politicians in support of projects that bear no relationship to best management of natural resources. These projects typically reinforce income inequality and divert attention and money away from traditionally disadvantaged communities.
Consider this: several football fields-worth of forest and other valuable habitat is cleared per day in Florida, with 26 percent of our canopy cut down in the past twenty years. According to one study, an average of 25 percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from deforestation worldwide.
The ecocide happening here is comparable for our size to the destruction of the Amazon, but much less remarked upon. Few of the perpetrators understand how they hurt the quality of life for people living in Florida and hamstring any possibility of climate crisis resiliency. Prodevelopment flacks like to pull out the estimates of the millions who will continue to flock to Florida by 2030 or 2040 to justify rampant development. Even some Florida economists ignore the effects of the climate crisis in their projects for 2049, expecting continued economic growth. but these estimates are just a grim joke, and some of those regurgitating them know that. By 2050, the world likely will be grappling with the fallout from 1.5- to 2-degree temperature rise and it’s unlikely people will be flocking to a state quickly dissolving around all of its edges…
An accelerating race to destroy Florida’s wilderness shows what we value and previews our collective future during the climate crisis: “The Annihilation of Florida: An Overlooked National Tragedy,” from @jeffvandermeer in @curaffairs. Eminently worth reading in full.
* “The Florida in my novels is not as seedy as the real Florida. It’s hard to stay ahead of the curve. Every time I write a scene that I think is the sickest thing I have ever dreamed up, it is surpassed by something that happens in real life.” – VanderMeer’s fellow Floridian Carl Hiaasen
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As we contemplate consequences, we might recall that it was on this date in 1626 that Peter Minuit, the new director of “New Netherland” for the Dutch West India Company, in what we now know as Manhattan, “purchased” the island from the the Canarsee tribe of Native Americans for a parcel of goods worth 60 guilders: roughly $24 dollars at the time, now roughly $1,000.
In the event, Native Americans in the area were unfamiliar with the European notions and definitions of ownership rights. As they understood it, water, air and land could not be traded. So scholars are convinced that both parties probably went home with totally different interpretations of the sales agreement. In any case, the Carnarsees were happy to take payment in any meaningful amount pertaining to land that was mostly controlled by their rivals, the Weckquaesgeeks.
1626 letter from Pieter Schaghen (a colleague of Minuit) reporting the purchase of Manhattan for 60 guilders [source]
“Wade tried to imagine Florida before the advent of man, but couldn’t. The landscape seemed too thoroughly colonized”*…
The state of Florida, in the United States, is bordered to the south, east, and west by the Atlantic Ocean, with a coastline of over two thousand kilometers in length, and is characterized by extensive areas of lakes, rivers, and ponds. Land booms during the early and mid-20th century resulted in the development of new communities and the expansion of low-density suburbia across many parts of the state, which frequently incorporated the abundant water resources, sometimes failing in their efforts.
Land-use trends throughout the state’s history have been directly influenced by the natural resources, geomorphology, and climate that exist within the state. Since 1900, Florida has seen substantial changes in land-use patterns and land cover due to significant increases in population and tourism, coincident with new development, facilitated by new railroads and highways, and inspired by an aggressive marketing campaign for new residents and visitors to come to the state…
By observing aerial images of these locations, it is possible to notice the different ways in which the urban layouts, lakes, and canals were developed and incorporated into the territorial planning of each city. Variables such as land use, the possibility of carrying out aquatic activities (such as fishing, swimming, and navigation), and the integration with other nearby navigable canals have shaped these water bodies alongside the land distribution, resulting in sinuous and winding patterns.
However, water resource management has not always been successful. Before the development of the area where the city of Cape Coral is located, in the southwest of the state, water was widely distributed on the surface and in shallow aquifers. According to Hubert Stroud, professor of geography at Arkansas State University, these resources degraded as soon as the Cape Coral developers began subdivision operations. According to Stroud, the layout, design, and construction techniques were particularly devastating for the water resources. Instead of using phased development, the area was dredged, filled, and segmented long before it was occupied. The resulting gridiron pattern of roads is interrupted by occasional sinuous canals…
Florida is a state marked by a large number of water resources, whether on the coast or inland, on the surface or underground, and many cities and communities have considered them to be key elements in urban planning, exploring their most diverse potentials. The alliance between planned cities and water resources in Florida not only reveals the curious patterns of roads and canals, seen in aerial photographs, but also the complex relationship between water and land in the context of the city, showing that water is more than just a resource for landscaping or aesthetics, it is a fundamental element in urban infrastructure…
A history of Florida’s love affair with the water (with lots of mesmerizing aerial photos): “Urban Planning and Water Bodies: Florida’s Aquatic Land Cover.”
* Douglas Coupland, All Families are Psychotic
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As we try to bend nature to our will, we might recall that it was on this date in 2005 that the “I’m Going to Disney World” commercial featuring a player (usually the MVP) on the winning team, did not air at the end of the Superbowl telecast.
The commercial has aired after every Super Bowl since 1987, except for one. In 2005, the commercial did not air, though the reason for the absence is still unclear. The NFL was still reeling from Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction in 2004, and may have been leery of any advertising relying on spontaneity. Disney may have also felt that the campaign was losing its effectiveness after 19 years.
source
In any case, it returned the following year and (largely) runs still… it did not run in 2016, at Superbowl LX, but Peyton Manning went to Disneyland to celebrate anyway.
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