On hurricanes, Gov. DeSantis, honor the Indigenous, not Columbus
COMMENTARY It's a good bet Pre-Columbian peoples would have been smarter about modern hurricanes than Florida's climate change denier-in-chief has shown himself to be amid turbocharged storms.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is a Christopher Columbus guy. And there's nothing wrong with that.
This week, DeSantis was still observing Columbus Day while much of the rest of America was giving props to the actual discoverers of America on what's now known as Indigenous Peoples' Day. And that's his prerogative.
The Spain-sponsored Columbus was certainly a world-altering explorer, even if he did usher European enslavement and small pox into the New World. So if, on our hemispheric founder's day, Florida's anti-woke knight of Columbus prefers to honor Madrid over Miccosukees every second Monday in October, let him knock himself out.
But I'd advise DeSantis that when it comes to his own place in the history books, he might spend these difficult hurricane recovery days across his state thinking less about the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa María and more about the Maya, the Taíno and the Kalinago.
The former were Columbus' ships; the latter were among the most important Pre-Columbian peoples in our part of the Americas.
And they appear to have been smarter about hurricanes than DeSantis is showing himself to be.
Smart enough, anyway, that I doubt they would have dismissed credible climate-change science as contemptuously as Florida's governor did, once again, after Hurricane Milton tore through the state last week.
DeSantis was asked if human-made global warming — how fossil fuel-generated greenhouse gases have trapped heat in our atmosphere like thick attic insulation — helped make Milton a more turbocharged storm.
Faster than you can say "own the libs," and quicker than Milton morphed from a Cat 1 to Cat 5 monster out in the Gulf of Mexico, the governor who recently decreed that the term "climate change" may not be officially uttered in Florida ridiculed the idea.
"They try to take different things that happen with tropical weather and act like it's something," he said, referring to climate scientists as if they were delusional psychiatric patients. "There's nothing new under the sun."
That kind of old-school obscurantism — you get the feeling DeSantis and other climate-change deniers would strike Copernicus' heliocentric solar system from textbooks if they thought there were MAGA votes to be had — couldn't be more perilous in a place like Florida.
Study after reliable study has concluded that as global warming has turned waters like the Gulf's into hot tubs, it has produced hurricane 'roid rage — giving the storms more power, and especially more water and devastating storm surge, than they would have had otherwise.
In the crosshairs
Attitudes like DeSantis' encourage a continuation not only of the fossil-fuel reliance that brought us this ramped-up menace, but of the reckless coastal overdevelopment that's put so many more millions of people and property in its crosshairs.
I think Pre-Columbian indigenous groups that inhabited the islands of the hurricane bowling alley known as the Caribbean basin would've known better.
Take the Kalinago of the Lesser Antilles. They were much more careful than cavalier about the wind spirit Hurakán (whence comes the English "hurricane") and built homes with resilient materials like palm trunks. (It didn't escape their notice that palm trees withstand the wickedest winds.)
The Taíno employed savvy structural designs like circular, spaced walls that helped deflect gusts and balance air pressure. Meanwhile, the ancient Maya over on the Yucatán peninsula devised wind temples with webs of holes that loudly whistled when hurricanes approached.
If you had given people like these sound, peer-reviewed evidence a thousand years ago that something they were doing was angering Hurakán or giving the god more destructive muscle, my bet is they would have listened.
In fact, they probably would have paid more attention than DeSantis' hero Columbus and the Europeans who colonized the Caribbean after his 1492 "discovery" of the Americas did. Historians point out their structures — whose builders of course took little notice of the adaptive innovations of the "primitive" Pre-Columbians — were routinely flattened by Hurakán.
What's more, I bet if those indigenous peoples had to pay exorbitant sums for windstorm insurance, they would have been doubly attentive to the science that DeSantis spurns.
But in Florida's statehouse and legislature, owning the libs matters more than containing the premiums.
So they'll keep honoring the statues of Columbus instead of the structures of the Indigenous.
