Jeff Bezos, welcome back to a very different Florida from the one you left

“To me, the single biggest (or at least one of the most significant) differences between 1986 and 2023 is our loss of faith, our lack of confidence that we can control growth, halt, or even slow down climate change, write books that will be read in libraries without public tribunals, and ensure our children will have. better lives than we did.”

Hey, maybe this is something you can help us with!

Howdy, neighbors!

Technically you won’t be living in Miami, the land of croquetas, la chancla, and indicted politicians.

News reports say you’ve bought two adjacent waterfront mansions on a manmade island known as Indian Creek Village. The island was created in the early 1900s using the bay bottom dredged up from Biscayne Bay.

Don’t be confused. Indian Creek Village is a far cry from the sprawling, sinkhole-plagued retirement mecca known as The Villages — and not just because the latter is full of golf carts flying color-coded loofahs.

Sometimes called “the Billionaires’ Bunker,” Indian Creek Village has only 41 platted waterfront residential home sites on its 294 acres.

Be sure to say hello to your new neighbors, who include double retiree Tom Brady, prominent courtroom figure Ivanka Trump, and stumbling corporate raider Carl Icahn. I bet they run a really classy Welcome Wagon!

But you should be aware that buying land anywhere on Florida’s coast, especially on an island, means you’ll soon have less of it.

The sea level, after all, keeps on rising. Some neighborhoods are stuck with water in their streets for weeks at a time. We’re such a flat state that the inundation, when it arrives, washes much further inland than it would elsewhere.

That’s especially bad when a rapidly intensifying hurricane shows up, something that happened in 2018, 2022, and 2023. Like rising sea levels, that’s another result of climate change heating up the ocean.

And yet we keep allowing conscienceless developers to build in these vulnerable areas, even offering the clueless buyers flood insurance financed by the taxpayers.

“We’re subsidizing people to live in unsafe areas where we know their homes will be destroyed,” Tschinkel said.

Next time a storm hits, you and your new neighbors may wind up sharing a lifeboat. That’s why you should befriend them now. When the ark embarks, you don’t want to be the unicorns left behind.

Meanwhile, despite its obvious ill effect on Florida, Florida’s politicians don’t seem to be at all interested in resisting climate change.

Scientists were warning Congress about the dangers of climate change when you left Florida in 1986. But our current chief executive and his immediate predecessor have made it clear that they don’t want to hear about it.

One has even cast it as an insidious attempt to curtail freedom.

“What I’ve found is, people when they start talking about things like global warming, they typically use that as a pretext to do a bunch of left-wing things that they would want to do anyways,” Gov. Ron “Awkwardness Is My Best Quality” DeSantis harrumphed during an appearance in Oldsmar in 2021. “We are not doing any left-wing stuff.”

But then, more recently, DeSantis at last acknowledged that climate change is real — and contended that the solution is to burn MORE fossil fuels, not less.

With twisted logic like that, he truly is a Florida man, isn’t he? All he needs is a tattoo, a machete, and maybe an outstanding warrant.

This is where you come in, Mr. B.

You announced in 2020 that you were committing $10 billion to the battle against the forces forcing us to endure a warmer world.

“Climate change is the biggest threat to our planet,” you wrote on Instagram at the time.

How about spending some of that $10 billion in your own (new) backyard?

Check your couch cushions

Only 11 million people lived in Florida back when you left. Our population has doubled since then.

We’re now the third most populous state in the nation. We have 22 million residents, plus 100 million annual visitors. And we’re all ramming into each other’s cars, arguing over whose dog pooped on whose lawn, and tossing alligators through drive-through windows.

What’s worse is that many of us use lots of fossil fuels for everything from driving our cars to blasting our air conditioning, even though we know this is what’s setting our world on fire.

We need to wean ourselves off of oil and gas the way you promised Amazon’s delivery drivers would.

Could you help us to install more electric vehicle charging stations all across the state? And make up for Florida’s embarrassing failure to apply for federal funding for solar panels for the poor? And commission architects and designers to create housing that’s more energy efficient and also able to withstand these more intense storms?

Sure you could! Heck, you could probably do all that with the money that’s fallen between your couch cushions.

I saw that your fiancé, former TV reporter Lauren Sanchez, announced last month that your Bezos Earth Fund would hand over $10 million to an organization that works to provide people with clean water and better sanitation.

Hey, we could use some of that here in Florida too!

You could fix or replace a lot of our leaky sewer systems that now fuel our toxic algae blooms killing off the all-important seagrass. You could foot the bill for a lot of people now on decrepit septic tanks to finally hook up to sewer lines.

I bet you could even pay to replace a lot of our nation-leading supply of lead pipes that now carry water to people’s homes, meanwhile making them sick.

You’re supposed to be moving here to keep a close eye on your Blue Origin rocket company up at Cape Canaveral. That’s right next door to the embattled Indian River Lagoon, which could sure use your help as well.

That’s where hundreds of manatees have died of starvation because of the loss of seagrass beds. Think what a difference your investment in the environmental health of the Indian River Lagoon would make to the salvation of this iconic species. Manatees need a new champion now that Jimmy Buffett is gone.

Tschinkel said that if she could talk to you, she’d say, “You’re a smart and imaginative man, so why don’t you figure out how we can finally clean up all of the nutrient pollution in our waterways? That’s our No. 1 problem now.”

In other words, instead of scattering your largesse around the rest of the world, why not spend a big chunk of change on improving your new home? See if you can make it like 1986 all over again.

Out of time?

Another of the old Florida hands I consulted about our many changes since 1986 was Allison DeFoor, now an Episcopal priest but once Gov. Jeb Bush’s “Everglades czar.” He recently became president of the North Florida Land Trust.

He recalled for me how, back in the mid-1980s, “I would fly across the state and look down and see all this green space and think, ‘We’ve still got time left. We’ve still got some space.’”

Now when he flies across Florida, he told me, “I look down and think, ‘We’re out of time.’”

Florida’s voters overwhelmingly supported buying lots of environmentally sensitive land to preserve it, DeFoor pointed out, “which the governor and Legislature have ignored.”

Whitfield had a similar observation. So much of the state’s essential natural areas are being overtaken by asphalt and rooftops, we need to save as much as possible.

Whitfield said if he ever had access to Bezos, “I’d tell him to buy the Florida Wildlife Corridor,” he said. “Or buy as much of that land as he could.”

There you have it, Mr. B. We’re happy to see you return to Florida, along with your big wallet. I hope you’ll spread some of your cash around in ways intended to return us to the more favorable environmental conditions of the past.

And while you’re at it, if you decide to finance the political campaigns of some candidates who’d be more environmentally minded like that Bob Graham fellow who was governor when you left, well, I’m not about to discourage you.

It’s too bad you can’t just order a bunch of them, like a bundle of machetes from a certain online retailer.