Trying to Reason with Hurricane Season
In Florida, risk is a feature of life. In a deepening climate crisis, financial capitalism gives this risk new meaning.
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.