Sunshine State Weirdness, With a Solid Dose of Environment

 

BookShelf: Sunshine State Weirdness, With a Solid Dose of Environment

“Welcome to Florida: True Tales from America’s Most Interesting State”
By Craig Pittman
University Press of Florida, $28

Reviewed by Tom Henry

Now that fall’s here, it won’t be long before temperatures drop and Florida becomes more attractive to many people from other states seeking refuge from the cold again.

I experienced that heavy influx of seasonal tourism during the six years I wrote for the old Tampa Tribune. I was there long enough to learn there’s a “real” Florida many people never come to love and appreciate, and I’m not just talking about tourists.

I’m talking about the skill of seeing the story behind the story with a sense of curiosity, love and affection, with equal parts whimsy and wonderment.

Real Florida is almost like a secret society. Native Floridian Craig Pittman captures it well with his latest book, “Welcome to Florida: True Tales from America’s Most Interesting State.”

A mistake going into this book would be to think of it as light summer reading, though Pittman’s writing is breezy, tempered only by his intensive research, obvious love of history (and irony) and an urge to offer the well-rounded perspective of someone as comfortable on the back roads as in the heart of a big city.

It’s a collection of columns he’s written since leaving the Tampa Bay (formerly St. Petersburg) Times, where he worked for 30 years (Pittman now writes for Florida Phoenix).

But it’s more than a greatest hits collection of columns. It’s the latest book Pittman has written about Florida being a … well … weird place, at least weirder than a lot of people, even full-time residents, realize.

 

Resilience as ‘a magic incantation’

Weirdness is a niche Pittman has tapped into before, as evidenced by the titles of two of his earlier books, “Oh Florida! How America’s Weirdest State Influences the Rest of the Country” and “The State You’re In: Florida Men, Florida Women, and Other Wildlife.”

In “Welcome to Florida,” readers get stories about anyone from crime writers to politicians to developers. One of his more intriguing and in-depth columns pertains to a group of former CIA agents incorporating their own island community.

A lot of Pittman’s writing throughout his career has dealt with Florida’s myriad and complex environmental issues, which means there’s a lot for environmental writers to learn from his insight and observations.

In trying to explain the state’s conservative politics and its pushback on climate change, Pittman writes this: “Despite the obvious peril from rising seas, nobody in charge in Florida seems fired up about combating climate change right now. Instead, they talk about ‘resilience’ as if it were some magical incantation and not a euphemism for spending millions of taxpayer dollars to fix problems that developers caused.”

 

Along the way, Pittman writes about

anything from paper mills and golf

courses to oil and plastic pollution.

 

Along the way, Pittman writes about anything from paper mills and golf courses to oil and plastic pollution, as well as gopher tortoises, Florida panthers, black bears, whales, a hippo named Lucifer and Key deer.

He has a fitting tribute to the late singer Jimmy Buffett and his role in creating one of Florida’s largest environmental groups, Save the Manatees, including deep background on how Buffett and a former U.S. senator and Florida governor, Bob Graham, formed an unlikely alliance to help protect the lovable sea cows.

 

A knack for storytelling

One of the more amusing anecdotes Pittman mentions a couple of times is a 2016 event in which a man tossed an alligator through a Wendy’s drive-thru window.

Lest that be considered a fluke for weirdness, he also writes about a pet iguana named Smog who was kidnapped from a smoke shop and the theft of 13 Argentine tegus from a reptile-breeding facility.

Pittman demonstrates a fascination for weird crime, weird politics and weird human behavior. But at the root of it all is his knack for storytelling through a tone not found in conventional newswriting and not one easy to master, even for writers given the literary elbow room that columns provide.

Readers might be surprised to learn his columns aren’t all one-liners, either. He demonstrates investigative reporting skills in many places.

 

This book isn’t entirely

about the environment, but

it includes a hefty dose of it.

 

This book isn’t entirely about the environment, but it includes a hefty dose of it. He refers to June 1, the annual start of hurricane season, as “Mother Nature’s annual reminder that Florida is trying to kill us.”

His tongue-in-cheek observation gets back to how Florida pulls in outsiders, from tourists to transients to the continued mass migration of retirees and others who “keep flocking here like lemmings, trying to fill up every last green spot on the map.”

“Can you blame Florida for this hostility toward humans, considering all of the awful things we’ve done to the state?” Pittman asks. “Our manatees are starving, our waterways are struggling with toxic algae, and human-caused pollution is at the root of both.”

Tom Henry is SEJournal’s BookShelf editor and a former board member for the Society of Environmental Journalists who created The (Toledo) Blade’s environment beat in 1993. His last review was of “The Heat and the Fury: On the Frontlines of Climate Violence.”

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* From the weekly news magazine SEJournal Online, Vol. 10, No. 33. Content from each new issue of SEJournal Online is available to the public via the SEJournal Online main page. Subscribe to the e-newsletter here. And see past issues of the SEJournal archived here.