When I called my mother to check in ahead of Hurricane Milton’s landfall last year, I wasn’t surprised to find her out to dinner in Crystal River, a coastal city near my parents’ home in Citrus County. Dismissing my concerns, she promised me she would contact her neighbours. She had no plans to leave despite the approaching danger. “We are above sea level anyway,” she said. “Nowhere near the surge.” For anyone glued to satellite images of the “unprecedented” boundary-pushing storm churning toward Tampa, this posture might seem reckless. But for my mother, and for many Floridians, Milton was just another storm in a season that comes and goes. It didn’t matter that Hurricane Helene, equally unprecedented, had torn through Big Bend only weeks earlier, damaging the homes of family and friends as far south as St. Pete Beach and Safety Harbor before moving north to flood unsuspecting mountain towns in Appalachia. My family stayed then; they weren’t leaving for Milton. “Where would we even go with the dogs?” my mother asked.

In Florida, risk is embedded in everyday life, where it defines and reorganizes assumptions, symbolic gestures and rituals. We tape or board up windows to avoid shattering glass. We buy gallons of water and fill bathtubs “just in case” the taps stop running or the water is contaminated. We top up gas tanks in anticipation of evacuation orders, but we’d never go unless forced to. These acts of preparation reinforce a communal ethos, where we drink beers outside and chat with neighbours about long lines and squall lines and empty shelves one season after another. But we don’t leave—not by choice, and not for a storm.

Florida’s particular relationship with risk has been embedded over time, built up through exposure to increasingly destructive storms. This embedded risk is why throughout the 1980s and 1990s Publix grocery stores printed maps on their paper bags for storm tracking. Before the digital age really took hold, local news stations would provide updates and coordinates you could plot on the side of the bag, which in our house was dutifully unfolded on the kitchen table during hurricane season. While insurance companies and local newspapers like the Miami Herald have provided storm trackers since the 1950s, Publix continues to serve as both a de facto information hub and a cultural indicator of Florida’s embedded risk—not unlike Waffle House, another Southern institution.^[1] Through these crude indicators or through dots on a map connected by lines, meticulously recorded by people with no intention of leaving, embedded risk manifests in compulsory repetition—in tracking, in preparation, and in the compulsion to stay.

In one of his most controversial contributions to the study of the mind, Freud tells us that “the aim of all life is death.” We are driven, he writes, by an internal logic of instinct to return to nothing—a death drive that contradicts what we think of as our desire to survive. Indeed, throughout my Gulf coastal childhood, even the deadliest storms were met with my mother’s charming and self-assured “this ain’t our first rodeo,” before unreal winds ripped up our baby pines and torrential rains flooded our street. My brother and I would stay awake until morning in pillow forts, excited by the chaos, tucked away from the windows as branches pounded the roof, our neighbours having a hurricane party. The compulsion to stay is less about weighing costs and gambling with loss, and more a kind of inertia that goes beyond calculation to something instinctive: a drive to wait out the storm year after year.

At the same time, insurance markets shudder at storms like Milton, and investors hold their breath as industry reports calculate predicted losses coldly and precisely, ready to panic buy or dump assets. Like those Floridians who stay in the path of danger, insurers and reinsurers also wait out a storm—not to endure it, but to facilitate a profit. Here is where risk meets and shapes Florida’s political economy: markets require hurricane seasons to justify the existence of insurance; people need insurance to protect their compulsion to stay.

A friend recently gave a talk on military technology and the geopolitics of risk that rather poetically framed precision as “a hole in the ground.”^[2] Just because a weapon is precise doesn’t mean it is accurate, or any less destructive. On the contrary: for finance, “precision” instrumentalizes a myth of efficiency to mask how harm is redistributed. Insurance markets operate based on the obfuscation of on-the-ground risks and real material losses. By quantifying precise values, they calibrate rather than eliminate risk. To markets, precision is a price, the equilibrium where insurers commodify acceptable risk and externalize the rest, reducing lives to variables. For people, precision is the difference between everything and nothing—between life-as-usual and ruin in floodwater. In this way, precision serves capital above all else, season after season, storm after storm. 

These twin poles—carefully refined actuarial violence against lived experience—are the antipodes of embedded risk, where repetition and duration circle the gap between the desire to live and the drive to stay in a dangerous situation. Those who experience Florida’s storms and those who seek to benefit from them exist in a dialectical relationship, creating a broader political and economic tension characterized by the crude abstraction of financial valuations. Lived experience is reduced to calculated probabilities, claims, and premiums, and insurers benefit from pricing risk while those in real peril are both invested in security and estranged from the urgency of survival. The Floridian death drive emerges here as the amalgam of fraught histories and possible futures. It braces against new uncertainties, unprecedented risks, and disturbing reactionary politics to keep roots firmly in the ground.

Unprecedented Futures

We hear the word “unprecedented” with such frequency now that it is beginning to lose its power of persuasion. Before Helene and then Milton in Florida, there was unprecedented Tropical Storm Hilary on the Mexico/California border, which caused devastating floods in Baja California and throughout low-desert communities in the US southwest. Then unprecedented Hurricane Otis decimated Acapulco after increasing in speed and intensity so quickly it was “missed” by probability models. Anthropogenic climate change lurks behind these storms, generating ever more severe threats. Rising temperatures are also at least partially responsible for the steady increase in wildfire frequency and intensity, driving unprecedented catastrophic burning, like the Eaton and Pacific Palisades fires that consumed whole neighbourhoods in Los Angeles earlier this year. The risks from climate change will soon exceed our ability to accurately predict them. With climate risks outstripping predictability, some “traditional” insurance is rendered untenable in places like Florida and California—even with reinsurance to underwrite some of the risk—and companies pull out after big storms.^[3]

Extreme events are often described as “long tail” events: on the bell curve of normal probability, these are the data points that fall at the tail ends, representing probabilities that are both catastrophic and, ostensibly, very unlikely. Climate change is altering this calculus. To meet the challenges of pricing otherwise uninsurable “long tail” events, finance has gradually evolved the “catastrophe bond” or “cat bond”. These are insurance-linked securities that shift risk to investors on global markets rather than concentrating them in traditional insurance firms. On the investor side, cat bonds are instruments for making lucrative bets, not unlike gambling in a casino—except with the odds structured in their favour, it’s the player, not the house, who most often wins. The buyers of catastrophe bonds (hedge funds, pension funds and reinsurers, for example) provide the funding that pays out for reconstruction after certain disaster events. But it is these investors who receive a payout in the case of any smaller, less damaging or costly events, and a return plus interest if there is no event at all by the end of the bond period.

Like markets and militaries, these kinds of instruments weaponize precision, fine-tuning models not to aid but to exclude. Many use parametric or “index” triggers that only pay out for reconstruction if a storm meets strict intensity and location criteria set by models. While this binary approach has always been used in pricing certain kinds of insurance, it became a renewed point of tension when Hurricane Beryl “flattened” entire island communities in Grenada in 2024, and in response, the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility wasn’t triggered for any payout at all. As Beryl made clear, a payout is not a promise, and “basis” risk—the gap between modelled triggers and actual losses—means that these instruments will always structurally favour investors over communities.

While cat bonds have been rightly criticised for offering a form of extractive speculation on disaster risk that largely protects markets over people, insurance-linked securities markets are taking on more losses as places like Florida are repeatedly faced with incalculable risks, defying historical precedent. Florida’s hurricane risk is managed through multiple financial instruments, including cat bonds, parametric index insurance, state-backed residual market mechanisms (Citizens Property Insurance, for example), private property insurance, and a range of reinsurance agreements. As Hurricane Milton gathered strength and intensity, the insurance-linked securities industry reported that cat bond investors faced multiple trigger events owing to the combined damage from massive back-to-back storms and the scope of coverage.

Indeed, when Milton’s damage projections predicted likely payouts from many of these insurance instruments, investors dumped billions of dollars in cat bond assets issued through FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), which were intended to reinsure the programme. Milton alone was predicted to produce at least $20 billion in insurance market losses. In response, many investors simply bailed, leaving the NFIP and other insurers to absorb devastating impacts, all while the state was still reeling from a season that would produce 14 named storms.

These “losses” to the market are calculated based on climate-related risks that are measured and made investable. Any actual storm’s cost will fall either above or below that expectation. However, for Floridians experiencing the impacts of 180 mph or higher winds, life-threatening storm surges and flash flooding, any actual losses are immediate and deeply felt. While the financial implications of climate risk are abstracted into data-driven investment opportunities, its real-life consequences manifest as political, economic, and personal tensions—between the probability of crisis and the mundane stuff of everyday life. Growing up with hurricane seasons, that tension becomes a part of you. It’s never been a question of if something will happen, but how bad it will be.

Fuelled by ever-warming waters, Hurricane Milton twice intensified to a Category 5 hurricane before reaching a heavily populated stretch of beach along the coast of Sarasota as a Category 3 storm. Its rapid intensification ensured that government and disaster management officials across Florida were on high alert, while still grappling with the earlier devastation to the Tampa Bay Area wrought by Helene. Over 5 million residents across fifteen counties were ordered to evacuate, and frantic last minute attempts to flee ground traffic to a standstill on gridlocked highways.

Again, many Floridians won’t leave until these orders come. Even then, some have to be “dragged away”, to use my stepdad’s typical cold-dead-hands language, a colourful way of speaking about anything from real estate to guns to unalienable rights for conservative Florida men. Friends of mine report checking in on parents and relatives in Sarasota after Milton hit only to find them casually sifting through the strewn palm fronds and debris, walking through their neighbourhoods and taking in the damage, fine and unfazed. When I called my mother again, she, a 70-year-old woman, was moving a mess of fallen oak branches into a pile in the yard by herself. “Oh, we’re fine, the house is fine, everyone’s fine.” I asked her if she’d heard news reports about the man who’d been killed nearby while he was driving through the storm. She hadn’t heard. But the sun was out, she said, and they’d be heading out to dinner soon.

Embedded Risks

In Florida, where in high-risk zones flood insurance is a requirement for accessing mortgages, this compulsive repetition—to track, to prepare, to stay—has been constructed over decades of speculative property investment, which invites private capital and reinsurance instruments to buttress state-backed mechanisms impaired by increasing exposure. Unaffordable housing and racial segregation only exacerbate existing risk, while ongoing speculation in highly desirable, if highly vulnerable, coastal areas continues to attract new residents and investment, all of which must be insured and reinsured.

Still, in places like Florida, rates of private insurance take-up are generally low, compounded by rising premiums. This is made worse as, with the growing and spreading risk of flooding, and outdated or miscalculated public risk data, many properties remain outside of the federal government’s officially designated flood zones despite now falling within at-risk locations. We see the effects of this in the data: only 21 per cent of homes affected by Helene were covered by flood insurance, while for Milton that figure was just 23 per cent. Across the US, private insurance companies are withdrawing from high-risk regions and raising premiums as exposures become uninsurable by traditional means. This leaves states to become “insurers of last resort”.

Meanwhile, the scientific expertise of the public agencies integral to tracking and mapping climate risk and modelling weather is being dismantled, by both Florida and Washington. Florida's leadership has upended disaster response and climate policy in the state already stretched thin by decades of politicized budget battles. The real onslaught began with former Governor Rick Scott's pushback on use of the phrase "climate change" in state documents, but has accelerated under Governor Ron DeSantis, who last year signed legislation eliminating climate action mandates while quietly approving billions in beach “nourishment” projects that protect expensive coastal properties.

Now under the unravelling constitutional crisis incited by Trump’s return to the White House, those federal services doing the work of prediction and tracking are being pulled apart in parallel. Under the instruction of the Department of Government Efficiency, cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, have produced massive staff reductions, alongside shuttered research facilities and terminated leases. With most of the world’s weather data built on top of NOAA’s public monitoring and forecasting networks, these cuts threaten to degrade the prediction capacities we currently have. From hurricane modelling to fisheries monitoring stations, whole areas of research face dissolution precisely as climate volatility demands ever more critical attention to forecasting. These are not mere bureaucratic adjustments, but the deliberate erosion of capacity to address a mounting crisis. With the gutting of NOAA, the already strained National Weather Service will lose crucial access to information on developing storms. 

Back in Florida, DeSantis has quickly picked up the baton from the federal government. In late February, he issued an executive order creating a state-level department of government efficiency, which he has already used to terrorize university professors who teach on climate change or “DEI” (diversity, equity and inclusion) across the state with letters threatening their jobs. In March, the Trump administration came for FEMA, claiming that millions of dollars meant for Americans had gone to support “illegals” after major disasters. Although direct payments to communities have continued for now, a policy freeze blocked billions in grants to local governments and nonprofits, creating bureaucratic gridlock with life-threatening consequences for places still reeling from Hurricanes Helene and Milton, or from the devastation wrought by recent fires in LA.

Salt Air and Roots

Under the actuarial gaze, Florida is an entity defined by exposure and vulnerability—a bundle of risks to be ordered and priced with cold analytic precision. With so much reliant on outside investment, how probable is it that one of the next unprecedented storms will finally tear right through the fragile market-driven risk-scapes that hold Florida’s political economy together?  

In this volatile climate, with most people unwilling or unable to retreat from Florida’s high-risk areas even in the face of imminent danger, real estate speculation, insurance arrangements and reactionary conservative politics bolster the inertia that drives the Floridian compulsion for repetition. Together, these forces underpin what outsiders perceive as complacency but what Floridians experience as foundational—a levee effect, where embedded risk and the desire for rootedness sustain the sunshine and salt-air imaginary that defines the place.

Regardless of what happens at the federal level, Floridians need new approaches to pooling risk that are decentralized and non-speculative. Why not community banking, which could facilitate member-driven funds for reconstruction? Why couldn’t pooling take the form of mutual aid? And why can’t these models be supported by a system that socializes the costs of disaster risk—one that meaningfully protects people and their livelihoods through public insurance programmes, rather than treating risk as a financial opportunity for investors?^[4] Where collective ritual is compulsive, markets will always be far removed from the very real crisis, and the grief of loss and alienation, that drives it. What’s missing—and so hard to find—is a system rooted in community.

To be rooted, wrote Simone Weil, is to have “real, active and natural participation in the life of a community, which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future.” Florida’s climate future is projected by those who seek to make it in their own image, but it has yet to be written. The compulsion to stay reflects an inertia built up over years, where genuine roots are strained under extractive capitalism, climate crisis, and political violence. Under these conditions, anyone would mistake the collectivity of embedded risk for belonging, and the death drive for resilience.