June 30, 2013
What's interesting about this article is that Goodell does an amazing job tracking the economic and urban infrastructural efforts to preserve Miami in the face of rising waters. He makes it clear that this isn't some pie-in-the-sky problem — or something to be debated in Congress. It's a problem that's as concrete as preparing for the next earthquake in California or the next round of tornadoes in the midwest.
(Link from i09)
Even more than Silicon Valley, Miami embodies the central technological myth of our time – that nature can not only be tamed but made irrelevant. Miami was a mosquito-and-crocodile-filled swampland for thousands of years, virtually uninhabited until the late 1800s. Then developers arrived, canals were dug, swamps were drained, and a city emerged that was unlike any other place on the planet, an edge-of-the-world, air-conditioned dreamland of sunshine and beaches and drugs and money; Jan Nijman, the former director of the Urban Studies Program at the University of Miami, called 20th-century Miami "a citadel of fantastical consumption." Floods would come and go and hurricanes might blow through, but the city would survive, if only because no one could imagine a force more powerful than human ingenuity. That defiance of nature – the sense that the rules don't apply here – gave the city its great energy. But it is also what will cause its demise.
Today's Photo:
It's so hot.
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