PositiveThe BafflerA nearly lifelong Miamian who has spent years reporting on the city’s political and environmental troubles, Ariza sets out at the start of the book to draft a kind of reported prognosis for his hometown, knowing full well that the final result won’t be encouraging ... ut as he sketches out the myriad threats to the Magic City’s survival, what Ariza shows most convincingly is that Miami is utterly unique, the product of a world-historical combination of bad decisions. What will make life in the city unsustainable over the next century is not a rise in sea levels or an uptick in ocean temperatures but the spatial and social dynamics of Miami itself. The climate crisis, in other words, has merely exposed the rot that was already there.
