On July 29, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law a controversial bill prohibiting local governments from banning certain types of sunscreens. SB 172 responds to and reverses the City of Key West’s 2019 ban on the sale of sunscreens containing oxybenzone and octinoxate to protect its coral reef. The ban was set to take […]
By John R. Platt and Dipika Kadaba Florida manatees had another deadly year in 2019. An estimated 531 manatees died in Florida waters in the past 12 months. That’s a significant decrease from the number of deaths in 2018, when 824 manatees died, but it still represents a nearly 10 percent loss to their population […]
Burrowing owls, which make their homes in small holes in the ground, are having a rough time in Florida. That’s why Marco Island on the Gulf Coast passed a resolution to pay residents $250 to start an owl burrow in their front yard, as the Marco Eagle reported. The city council’s resolution earmarks ,000 a […]
An unusual weather report made waves this week as meteorologists warned residents of Florida to be aware of “raining iguanas.” Yes, you read that correctly. The Sunshine State experienced an unusual cold snap earlier this week as temperatures dipped into the 30s, virtually freezing the cold-blooded lizards in their tracks, forcing them to drop, fall […]
Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney made two controversial announcements about the 2020 Group of Seven (G7) summit: it will be hosted at one of President Donald Trump‘s golf resorts in Miami and it won’t feature any discussion of the climate crisis. “Climate change will not be on the agenda,” Mulvaney told reporters, […]
The red tide that plagued Florida for 15 months — killing marine life and causing respiratory problems for humans — is back, The Associated Press reported Saturday. Scientists from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Institute announced Friday that samples of water taken off the shore of Collier County turned up high concentrations of the […]
By Jayur Mehta, Tara Skipton Native North Americans first arrived in Florida approximately 14,550 years ago. Evidence for these stone-tool-wielding, megafauna-hunting peoples can be found at the bottom of numerous limestone freshwater sinkholes in Florida’s Panhandle and along the ancient shoreline of the Gulf of Mexico. Specialized archaeologists using scuba gear, remote sensing equipment or […]
Confronting the climate crisis is the No. 1 issue for 96 percent of Democratic voters, but it clocked only around seven minutes of airtime at the first Democratic Presidential debate Wednesday, Vox reported. The small amount of time spent on climate change, and the fact that the first climate-centered questions came an hour and 22 […]
First Fort Myers banned plastic straws. Now it banned Roundup, or glyphosate, the controversial herbicide recently blamed for causing cancer by several juries, the News Press reports. Like the plastic straw ban, the driving force behind the ban was the health of Fort Myers’ waterways and marine resources. “This effort has all been about water […]