Florida no longer the "Sunshine" State

Time Magazine's Michael Grunwald recently wrote an excellent article on all the problems that South Florida's currently facing, including the housing and economic crises. Of the environmental crisis, he speaks at length.

Here, an excerpt of Grunwald's Is Florida the Sunset State?:

Florida now has 18 million residents, most of them south of Orlando. Such progress had a price. Half the Everglades is gone. The rest is polluted, disconnected and infested by invasive species ranging from fast-growing ferns to pythons.(Personal note- read about Florida's python problem here)

And South Florida is having an ecological and hydrological meltdown, the legacy of a century of plumbing and dredging and growing without much thinking. The Everglades ecosystem now hosts 69 threatened or endangered species, and its rookeries and fisheries have crashed. Massive algal blooms are turning Florida Bay into pea soup. The region's reefs have lost up to 95% of their elkhorn coral; persistent red tides have made it tough for sunbathers to breathe at the beach.

Now the rainiest swath of the country is running dry, facing a specter of structural droughts. And the dike around Lake O. is leaking so badly that water managers routinely dump billions of precious gallons out of the lake to avoid a 1928-style calamity, ravaging estuaries and draining the region's water supply. This spring the lake fell so low that 40,000 acres of its exposed bottom burned out of control, along with 40,000 acres of the perennially parched Everglades National Park...

Read the entire article here.

Study: Guys with "green" cars get all the babes

The results of recent study by the U.S. Department of Energy and General Motors are in: girls dig guys who drive ecologically-conscious cars.

Among the findings (as published on Yahoo.com):

-Nearly 9 in 10 women (88 percent) say they'd rather chat up someone who owns the latest fuel-efficient car versus the latest sports car.

-Eighty percent of American car buyers would find someone with the latest fuel-efficient car more interesting to talk to at a party than someone with the latest sports car.

-More than 4 out of 10 (45 percent) 18- to 43-year-olds say it's a fashion faux pas nowadays to have a car that's not green or environmentally friendly. (Of course, this doesn't mean that a man has run out and buy a hybrid right away. I mean if he can, great. But just as long as he drives a car that isn't a major offense against the environment and he makes the effort not to drive as much, or plan his trips accordingly, that's just as good.)

Recently a guy who drives a Hummer asked me out. I was coming out of the bank and there he was, standing in front of his H3, thinking he's all that, trying to make conversation. At some point, I asked him if he was aware of how much gas it wastes and how bad it is for the environment and he replied- "Well, it doesn't bother me. I can afford it, you know?" What a jerk! I wasn't interested anyway, but it's just perplexing how ignorant people are in regards of being kind to our planet.

Anyway, back to the study-it was part of a competition in which engineering students had to build vehicles utilizing innovative automotive technologies that would minimize the environmental impact of personal transportation and "illustrate pathways to a sustainable transportation future."

Personally, I totally agree with the study. To me, a man who's actually eco-conscious is incredibly attractive. (Other things taken into account as well, of course.)

I've never really cared about what kind of car a man drives. I had always thought that was superficial and irrelevant. But now things have changed. In these times when we really have to be aware of what kind of impact our actions have on our planet, I must say that I now do pay attention to things like that, not because I care how much money a guy makes or his "status," but because I care how much HE cares about the environment.

Now that's HOT!