Mario Alejandro Ariza - Disposable City: Miamis Future on the Shores of Climate Catastrophe

I cant imagine my son, or my grandchildren, living anywhere else, said the mayor of Miami to the former United Nations secretary-general. Perfectly tanned and impeccably coiffed, Francis Suarez was leading the soft-spoken Ban Ki-moon on a circuit of the citys dazzling downtown urban core. Seated next to each other on the hard-backed wooden benches of a City of Miami trolley packed with reporters and civil servants, the pair discussed the uncertain future of the Magic City as the ungainly vehicle trundled along narrow downtown streets. It was February 2019, and I sat behind them, listening as they spoke about the future of my city.

Ban, current head of the Global Commission on Adaptation, took as a given that climate change was happening, that it was having serious negative consequences, and that it was time to get smart about mitigating impacts. Like an aging rock star whod hired a new band and written a comeback album, Ban and his Global Commission were on a world tour. Their first stop was Miami, a city thatas you may have heardis probably doomed. But the metropolis at the tip of southeast Florida, set to drown in the rising sea by the end of the twenty-first century, was not going down without a fight.

We want to be the most resilient city on the planet, and a model for resiliency around the world, the mayor told Ban as the trolley arrived at its first destination: a giant pump, smack in the middle of the Brickell Financial District, a pump powerful enough to drain a swimming pools worth of water every minute. Across the street from the gleaming pump rose the towers of Brickell City Centre, a $1.5 billion development owned by Swire Properties. Swire had recently announced an expansion of the complex. They believe in the future of the city, boasted the mayor.

Impressive, affirmed Ban.

It was the nicest, shiniest, most capable pump Id seen. None of the people present commented on the fact that it was conveniently located next to one of the areas most expensive commercial properties. Alan Dodd, the director of the City of Miamis Department of Resilience and Public Works and a former colonel in the US Army Corps of Engineers, pointed out that the pump was connected to a giant sump, an underground chamber that cleaned the water the pump drained before moving it to the ecologically vulnerable Biscayne Bay. He then instructed one of his employees to open the gate to the sump, allowing everyone to peer into the vast cistern. As I listened to the water trickling down into the sumps cavernous depths, all I could wonder was, Will it be enough?

I started writing this book in the summer of 2015, though I didnt know it at the time. I was teaching English in Zhengzhou, China. Zhengzhou is what the Chinese term a second-tier city, a metropolis of eight million people that functions as the Middle Kingdoms equivalent of Cincinnati, Ohio. To me, climate change was, up until that summer, a vague nagging, a topic I could learn about latermaybewhen I had the time. And then one high-summer morning, in the middle of Hunan Province, at the center of the Middle Kingdom, on what otherwise should have been an unremarkable day, I stepped outside and found myself unable to see the skyscrapers on the other side of the street. I could barely see the sun. The black, acrid smog was that nebulous and thick.

It stayed that wayinexplicably hazy, ominously overcast, difficult to inhale, for days. Even with a breathing mask it felt like I was swallowing handfuls of cigarette ash every time I opened my mouth. I could smell what humans were doing to the earth. It smelled like exhaust. I could taste it. It tasted like ash. I could breathe itbut just barely. The thick haze covered more than just Zhengzhou. That summer I traveled across the breadth of Chinafrom Shenzhen in the south to Beijing in the northand the smoke and haze followed everywhere I went. This was more than mere pollution. This was climate change. But what did it mean for my plan to move back to Miami at the end of the summer, a city whose vulnerability was already making headlines?

What youre reading is the fruit of the research that I started in that Zhengzhou hotel room, with my laundry drying in the bathroom and the high summer sun obscured by smog. In the course of writing, Ive interviewed more than 150 sources, made half a dozen public records requests, reported on two hurricanes, helped catch a python, kayaked up the Miami River, investigated a nuclear power plant, and followed in the wake of quixotic public officials showing off a shiny new piece of infrastructure meant to hold back the inexorably rising tide.

This books title comes from a conversation I had with a lobbyist in January 2017 while working as a freelancer for a local media outlet on a story about affordable housing. On the phone with Ben Solomon, a squint-eyed, blond-haired real estate lawyer who sits at the nexus of power of realtors, construction companies, and developers in a city run by realtors, construction companies, and developers, we talked for almost forty-five minutes. Even though Miami was in the midst of a housing crisis, he pooh-poohed the idea of the county mandating that developers build affordable homes. (The state legislature would later take away municipalities power to do such pesky things.) Close to the end of the conversation, I asked him, tangentially, what he thought about all this climate change stuff. He started talking about Miami as if it were a patient suffering from a terminal disease.