Remember when Donald Trump reportedly suggested that we nuke hurricanes in order to stop them hitting the United States? That idea was obviously ludicrous and got rightly ridiculed. Ultimately, however, Trump’s ideas weren’t much more absurd than the accepted status quo in the US – which is to build large amounts of housing on land vulnerable to natural disasters. Fantasies of nuking hurricanes are ultimately just as ridiculous as fantasies that millions of people can move on to paved-over swampland in the most hurricane-ravaged state in the US without disaster striking.
I’m talking about Florida, of course. In 1960, about five million people lived in the Sunshine State. Now, that number is about 22 million. During the past few decades, Florida has seen a construction and population boom, with millions of people occupying land that is wholly unsuitable for settling on. “The story of Florida is the story of development happening at times and places where it probably shouldn’t,” a member of Florida Conservation Voters, a non-profit organisation that focuses on environmental issues, recently told Politico.
