EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Have you ever stopped to think about yourself and your story? If someone were to write your memoir what would it say? We all seek some level of authenticity but have trouble removing the labels and finding our whole story. Welcome to Dropping In with Diane Dewey. In this program we’ll explore diverse stories on identity to help determine what is truly yours. Now here is your host Diane Dewey.

Diane: Welcome to the show everyone. We’re digging in deep today. First to check in that everyone’s taking good care of themselves and looking after one another. We’ve been all across America and today we explore the wackiness of Florida. Back here in my home state I’m broadcasting live from St. Petersburg Florida with Craig Pittman author of five books on the subject. Alert also from St. Petersburg the beaches here are closed. I wanted to mention that because it’s astounding on Saturday I couldn’t park the car along the beach in Pasa Grill which is a few minutes away from home. It was spring break then and parents had a couple extra weeks with their kids so the beaches were packed. Instead I headed north and grabbed a salad with a non-hugging friend at a burger joint. We savored one another’s company, in-person company and then seeking quiet I went to my local indie bookseller Tombolo, a bookstore off of funky Central Avenue in St. Petersburg. The store is lined with homemade bookshelves, a round nook for kids to read in and flowering trumpet vines outside.

There I saw Craig Pittman’s two current books Oh Florida and Cat Tale. They were sitting on a shelf behind the checkout. Both fascinating books. The proprietor Alsace told me that they were there because of the groups that were coming in and that was no longer but she did say that her bookstore would deliver books on order. I’ve gone in to pick up mine because I’m curious and I’m nosy. Right now Tombolo is open every day but even if the worst happens and they were to close Alsace and her staff would be busy on the inside filling orders.

I just want to mention this to everyone if you have a local indie book seller in your neighborhood like ours it’s probably true that if people want to drive up they’ll deposit the car, deposit the books in the car or deliver the books to your home. It’s a great service and a sensitive idea typical of our close community here where the brewery Three Daughters is making hand sanitizer and the coffee shop Intermezzo is giving away cans of coffee to first responders. It’s a very heartening situation here in St. Petersburg.

As I chatted with Alsace at Tombolo I longed for the days when I will be able to see people firsthand again like in the book club that was to meet there next month. Instead I took my package of books and drove off. Glad that I’d had the contact and savoring seeing two human beings in the same day that were not in my household. To you I say this. Look into whether your local indie bookstore delivers and if so use it. It’s a great way to support yourself and your local bookseller and businesses in your neighborhood.

Today, we’ll talk about identity and it’s the identity of a place Florida with the author of Oh Florida and Cat Tale Craig Pittman. He’s a first-hand expert and a Florida native which is even more unusual perhaps. Craig Pittman is the author of five books including Paving Paradise, Manatee insanity. Manatee is a large sea cow. I want to find out about manatee insanity, when that title got trumped up. It’s like a ben and Jerry’s ice cream flavor. There’s definitely a story behind it a room where you’d very much like to be sitting. All of Craig Pittman’s books are award-winning, entertaining and worthwhile reading. Up till 15 minutes ago or a day or so ago Craig was on staff as a writer for the Tampa Bay Times on environmentalism. Craig sadly was among the many talented staff writers to be let go over cuts at the newspaper recently. Many people here in St. Petersburg are reeling to think they’ll lose touch with the local environmental issues that Craig brought to light. I hope he’ll tell us later how he’s coping in the digital age and what’s next for you Craig. Welcome to the show.

Craig: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Diane: Delighted that you’re here. I’m going to insert here a very so we can make it official your bio here. It’s like biosphere. I’ve decided that once you read Craig Pittman you look at words differently and me feel that I’ve been warped Craig in the best possible way by your writing. It’s a kind of a wackiness that it’s like okay, biosphere. This is good. It’s environmental. It’s Craig. It’s all this good stuff. Craig’s bio will make you feel like a slacker and maybe you should but here it goes. We will start at the beginning of the early days anyway.

As a native Floridian Craig Pittman graduated from Troy State University which is in Alabama but there his muckraking work earned him the label the most destructive force on campus. That’s something to be unveiled. He has since covered quite a few natural disasters including hurricanes, wildfires and the Florida legislature. I do like the sequencing. After 1998 environmental issues for the Tampa Bay Times. He has won the Waldo Prophet Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism in Florida four times and twice won the top investigative reporting award from the Society of Environmental Journalists. The author of five books on Florida, he is the co-author with Matthew Waite of Paving Paradise: Florida’s Vanishing Wetlands and the Failure of No Net Loss which came out in 2019.

Craig: 2009.

Diane: The zeros and ones. It’s plain as day right in front of me 2009. It won the Stetson Kennedy award from the Florida Historical Society. His second book Manatee Insanity inside the war over Florida’s most famous endangered species came out in 2010 and was named by the Florida Humanities Council as one of the 21 essential book for Floridians. I’m here to tell you that Oh Florida and Cat Tale, I get confused with one of my favorite plant species. They’re both essential reading.

I feel now that I have read Oh Florida I wonder, I was suffering under delusion. First of all I did think that St. Petersburg for example had the most consecutive days of sunshine. I know it has a lot but you’ve disabused us of a lot of notions that this really makes this book Oh Florida, a towering success. Not to be confused with the phallic Tower in Tallahassee, the Edward Durrell Stone design capital building but from Oh Florida I can see. I can see the fuzziness. I can see the correlation between the fantasy of Walt Disney, Disney world, Epcot and Scientology in its headquarters in Clearwater. Thank you Craig Pittman, you’ve helped connect the dots on how to explain a lot. The covert real estate acquisitions, the autonomy of self-rule of these places Disneyland and Scientology, the self-sufficiency of their utilities and government. It’s scary.

Some of this has come to light through your writing. I think that’s a huge role to play in our public consciousness. I want to talk to you today Craig about the relative isolationism of Florida and how that impacts the anything goes attitude. You point out that even geographically side to side it’s very narrow. It maybe looks like the handle of a gun. This is also quite indicative of the lax I would say gun laws here previously especially to several of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman, a school and also of course at Pulse.

More to the point we now have a situation where geographically we’re living in a cul-de-sac. No one goes through Florida by train or car to get to somewhere else. I wonder if that means a lack of context with the other states in the union in a kind of, I mean unless you look at the southern influences in Miami from Cuba for example which is substantial and enriched I think culturally. You talk about it being a drainage pipe, more a place where there’s little circulation and a retired population that golfed and swam and played but didn’t necessarily travel by car from Florida. I wonder if you can talk to us about the isolation geographically and how it plays into our views here, our outlook.

Craig: I guess my main idea with oh Florida was to try to counteract a lot of the stereotypes that people have about Florida. People think of Florida, they think of generally they think of two things. They think of the theme parks, number one and number two they think about the all the Florida man stories that we all laugh about. Florida man calls 9-1-1 because strip club won’t let him enter with his cat, things like that.

I wanted to tell people Florida is sort of the punchline state but also there’s lots of important things that have happened here, people who have lived here who influence the rest of the country. The thing about Florida is we actually sort of started out as a sort of an isolationist place. I mean our economy depends on new people coming in but at the same time we sort of reject any attempt to try and change our ways too. The first flag that flew over the state capitol when we became a state in 1845, the flag actually said let us alone on it which you could take as either a wish or a warning I mean.

Diane: It’s a declaration. It’s a statement for sure.

Craig: Yes absolutely. Before we were even a state we were known as a rogue’s paradise. I mean a visitor who came here in the 1830s wrote that half of the population seemed to be scalawags and robbers and the other half were their penniless victims. Not much has changed I guess. We were a place that was very hostile to settlers just physically for until about the middle of the 20th century. I mean in 1940 we were the least populated southern state because air conditioning and bug spray were not a common thing at that point but one of those two came in…

Diane: And now?

Craig: Now we’re the third most populous state. We actually surpassed New York in 2014. We’ve got 21 million people living here and 100 million tourists who come every year. We’re not evenly spread over the whole peninsula. We’re kind of crammed into that 30 mile wide swath along the coast and along Interstate 4 where the theme parks are. People are all from different places, different cultures and so you bring that many people together in that smaller space and they’re bound to start you know ramming into each other’s cars and chasing each other around with machetes and hurting over whose dog pooped on who’s lawn.

Diane: All that normal stuff but Craig, I like this mental picture that you create. 100,000 tourists, they’re kind of going in and out. There’s a kind of like breathing mechanism so when you talk about the influence of Florida they’re also taking back impressions, ways of being from their vacation even though what happens in Florida’s stays in Florida. That’s another mentality that needs to be maybe in check but you’re talking about and this I thought was a brilliant point in the book is deny the influence of Florida at your own peril because it is a heavily influential state. In what ways? Describe some of the ways. I think we’re all too familiar with some.

Craig: I mean you could talk about the people. I mean Jeff Bezos, now the richest man in the world started his first business here in Florida. If it had failed would we have ever heard from him again? Would we now be dodging books being dropped in our heads from drones? Ray Charles learned to play the piano in St. Augustine. He had Georgia on his mind but it was Florida that taught him to sing about it. The first Native American casinos were here and there was a court decision that opened the door for all the other tribes across the country to open up their gambling casinos. Public defenders got started in Florida thanks to a court case that came from here.

I mean just there’s new, one of my favorite examples is because this is so Florida. There were two police officers in Miami Beach who would walk the beat in the business district every day and then at night they’d go back and rob those same businesses. One of them would stand guard outside with a walkie-talkie and the other one would be inside rifling through the cash register. If somebody was coming the guy outside would radio hey, here comes somebody. Turn off the lights or whatever. One night, there was a Ham radio enthusiast who lived in the neighborhood and he couldn’t sleep. He got up out of bed and turned on his radio and accidentally picked up their walkie-talkie transmissions and realized he was hearing a robbery in progress so he tape recorded it. Then passed the tape along to the cops. Of course the cops listened to it and go hey, we know these guys. It’s Bert and Ernie, whatever.

Diane: Sounds familiar.

Craig: They’re arrested. They go to trial. They’re convicted pretty quickly because the evidence is overwhelmingly against them but their attorney appealed that conviction all the way to the US Supreme Court because there had been a TV camera in the courtroom for that trial. Florida at the time was doing a one-year trial of allowing cameras into courtrooms.

Diane: Before the Sunshine Law.

Craig: Yes and the Supreme Court ruled you could have cameras in state courts that it would not alter, it had no impact on the jury’s ability to function properly. That’s why you’re able to watch trial coverage on TV. That’s when you could watch the OJ trial gavel to gavel all because of two crooked Florida cops and a Ham radio operator with insomnia.

Diane: I feel as though that’s an important cultural contribution. I’m not unproud of that. I think that this is kind of the service that you provided by taking the lid off this box of secrets in Florida. There are many. We are going to pause shortly for a break but I did want to talk about how there is this knack of one upsmanship in weirder than your story of Florida is this story. Wait until you hear this one. I think we could go on and on about that but I do want to examine with you. You touched on a couple of sensitive subjects to me.

One was the Indian reservations and gambling and Seminole Indians. How they then also took ownership of the Hard Rock Cafes as a result of many of the evolutions that occurred here in Florida. I think that you dealt with that really in an important way in the book. I realized that the book came out in 2016 but I would urge you to in our audience to pick up a copy. If you’re here it’s mandatory. If you’re outside the state and never visited and want to understand it better. Really pick up a copy and we’ll translate a lot of things for you. We’re going to take a break in a minute Craig but we’re before we do you mentioned also Saint Augustine, Ray Charles of course. That was the place where you found Martin Luther King’s steps. That was all that was left of the building.

Craig: It’s a great Florida story. It really is. He led he led protests there that that led to the passage of the civil rights act of 1964. I mean that’s a huge influence on the rest of the country from something that happened in Florida.

Diane: Yes, it’s huge and positive. That’s why I like the counterbalance. We’re seeing here that there are actually liberalizations that have occurred, progressiveness that’s occurred from Florida. There’s lots more to that. We are going to pause for a break. I was very touched that you went to the steps. I think that there’s a lot…

Craig: I was going to say that’s a very Florida outcome for that story.

Diane: Yes the steps.

Craig: The steps of a motel and a restaurant trying to go in and 25 years later the Hilton Company comes in and says we’re going to tear this down and build a new Hilton. The historic preservation people said you can’t do that. That’s where Martin Luther King was arrested. Law suits are filed, mediation occurs and they come up with a very Florida solution which is they tear down the hotel and the restaurant but they kept the steps. You can stand on the steps when Martin Luther King was arrested but like him you can’t go into the restaurant.

Diane: Okay but this is the tear down mentality and we’re going to hear from Craig Pittman when we come back from the break on what’s next. Don’t go away. You’re on Dropping In.

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Has your manuscript languished because you can’t find the direction it wants to take or have you lost the motivation to finish and polish it for publication because it can be such a big formidable task? Let Diane Dewey help you resolve your writing issues. Diane’s manuscript coaching offers help with sticking points like the arc of your story and how to flesh it out, finding the inner story and what you want to say, developing your message revelations that become your reader’s takeaways, helping to rally the motivation to finish your project and what to do next. We can analyze, edit and advise you on publishing. Who are the next collaborators on your writing path? If you seek resolution to these and other questions please contact Diane Dewey author of the award-winning memoir Fixing the Fates. Find her at trunordmedia.com. That’s T-R-U-N-O-R-D.com or on her author’s page dianedewey.com. Diane can also be found through social media. Connect with her through the links on the show page.

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You are listening to Dropping In with Diane Dewey. We’d love to hear from you if you have a question or comment about the show. Send us an email to ddewey@trunordmedia.com. That’s the letter ddewey@trunordmedia.com. Now back to Dropping In.

Diane: Welcome back everyone. We’re dropping in with Craig Pittman, author of Oh Florida, Cat Tale and several other wonderful books. If you’ve not read Craig, I’d suggest picking up a copy if nothing else you’re in for a hoot because Oh Florida is a funny book. It’s a tender book and it’s a revealing book. We were talking before the break about the ever-changing nature of Florida. That tear-downs make way for the new Craig, was alluding to Saint Augustine where the Hilton Hotel chain took command of a place where Martin Luther King protested and got civil rights movement going and all that remains is the stair steps.

I think Craig that you’ve talked in your book about how this this ever changing nature, this inability to solidify on any one thing creates a kind of a collective dyslexia that there’s no real memory because memories are erased. Some places have a memory of the depression and other traumatic events but here the boom and bust cycles happen with such frequency. We may now very well be in one. There’s not a sense of a collective memory here. I wondered also if this wasn’t a kind of stress diathesis model for ADHD that we really just can’t focus on anything any longer. We can’t be content with what we have and obviously a lot of that has to do with gentrification.

We’ve got strip malls that are turning into upper scale strip malls. Those strip malls used to have names and people called them affectionately by their names and I never knew where I was supposed to meet somebody when they gave me the name of strip mall but anyway it’s ever changing. How did you even decide to tackle the subject? I mean the book is a sprawling book. You go everywhere. How did you come about with the idea of it in the first place?

Craig: Well it actually came from twitter believe it or not.

Diane: I believe it.

Craig: I have a twitter account @craigtimes. In addition to posting a lot of environmental stories on there I’ll also post stories about some of the wacky stuff going on in Florida like man road rage incident runs over self, headlines like that. One of my followers on there was a woman named Laura Helmuth who at the time was working for Slate. She contacted me and said hey, the George Zimmerman trial is coming up for the killing of Trayvon Martin. We’d love it if you could do a month of blogs, blog items about Florida to tell people there’s more to the state than just this stand your ground case.

I got permission from my editors at the Times and so I did a month about blogging about Florida and different aspects about Florida. Of course had a ton of stuff that I couldn’t get to because a month is not nearly enough. Not long after that an agent in New York contacted me and said hey, we think 2016 would be a good year to put out a book about Florida because of the election and because Florida’s always mixed up in stuff going on an election time. We saw your blog and we think that would be a good basis for a book. They gave me the template to use to write a book proposal centered around. 15 publishers said no, we don’t think people want to read a book about Florida. Then the 16th one said yes St. Martin’s and it made the New York Times’ bestseller list. I was pretty happy about that.

Diane: Another triumph. Another triumph for Florida.

Craig: Since I grew up in Florida I’ve been saving a lot of this stuff in my head or in previous writings for years. I mean I grew up in a household where my parents would read funny stories out of the paper to each other. Hey, look at this. Our ex gospel singer state legislator who’s running for sheriff got arrested because he was financing his campaign by selling cocaine. Reflect that.

Diane: There was that one.

Craig: I had a lot of material but I also sat down with a couple of historians I know and said what topic should I be sure to mention. They gave me some great suggestions like that’s why there’s a whole chapter on gambling and how important it was for the development of Florida because from like the 20s to the 40s and 50s gamblers basically ran a couple of Florida’s biggest cities.

Diane: Yes, including Tampa.

Craig: They rigged the election to make sure that their people got elected and they controlled everything that went on. That sort of led up to the Fabra Committee coming down here discovering just how incredibly corrupt a lot of our cities were and exposing that. Then Disney came riding to the rescue and the space program and remaking our reputation sort of as a place of the future and not one that is mired in gambling.

Diane: Exactly and the fantabulousness of it. That’s always outsized. I think too that gambling it somehow seems tame by comparison to some of the things that I mean running numbers but the corruption is a theme that goes throughout. It’s even a little twisted if I may say so. I love the origins of this book Oh Florida but stand your ground obviously and the Trayvon Martin case. This was a landmark case. This was a tremendously important, George Zimmerman, a despicable human being. I’m sorry. That is something that really made everyone’s blood run cold in the country that I know of. Honestly, it’s not surprising that somebody would get in touch with you and say can we compensate for this somehow. I understand that mentality but I’m also wondering of course since he wrote it during an election year whether we’ve got a book coming out for 2020. What do you say to that Craig Pittman?

Craig: Well I mean I did. My 2020 book is Cat Tale: The Wild, Weird Battle to Save the Florida Panther. It came out in January. It looks at how panthers became the Florida state animal and then very, very nearly went extinct and got saved thanks to a desperate last minute scientific experiment that nobody’d ever tried before. There’s lots of weirdness in it too of course.

Diane: Yes, it’s written in a different style. It’s more of a storytelling and it’s just a beautiful book. It has a cast of characters. I really thank you as the author for bringing another who knew story to light but of course it is very Floridian for the state animal to almost go extinct. There was a cast of characters straight out of the Florida playbook. An extremely, really a serious book. I didn’t realize it was 2020 by just a little bit but because at Tombolo on the shelf and I’ve heard you speak on it. It’s an incredible story.

Do you want to delve into for a moment for example the inconvenient discovery that was made in Cat Tale about the Florida Panther which is by the way synonymous with Puma? You clear up a lot.

Craig: They’re part of the species known as puma which in Florida we call them panthers. In other parts of the world they’re known as mountain lions or cougars even catamounts at one point. With the discovery, you mean the genetics thing.

Diane: Yes. What you were just talking about is this flukey scientific, there was this with Melody Roelke. Fantastic photograph of her giving an intravenous unit to an anesthetized panther. She made it a disturbing discovery. Do you want to talk about that?

Craig: The book starts off with a chase, with a chase scene with some people who working for the state tracking a panther that had a radio collar on it. They were trying to catch it because the batteries in the collar had gone dead. They made a mistake and the panther died. If one of the biologists, two of them actually tried to give it mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to bring it back which frankly is a level of commitment to the job you seldom see in America these days. As a result of the death of that panther which by the way is now stuffed and mounted in front of the state archives in Tallahassee.

Diane: You saw it.

Craig: It’s quite bizarre that it’s there. The people in charge of the panther research said okay maybe we need to do something other than just sending biologists out there. Maybe we should also send a veterinarian to watch out for the health of the cat so they hired Melody Roelke to do that. The minute Melody got out there and started seeing the panthers she realized that they were suffering from genetic defects brought on by inbreeding. The population had dwindled down so far that the only chance for breeding involved breeding between members of the same family father to daughter, brother sister, that kind of thing. As a result they were losing genetic diversity and she could see it. It was plain as could be because the panthers they were catching all had a kink in their tail, a 90 degree bend like you’d see in a math textbook.

The biologists all thought that was just a regular sign of what made Florida panthers different from other pumas. She’s like no, that’s not a good thing. That’s a defect. The more she looks she found even bigger problems including there were holes in their hearts known as atrial septal defects. One panther kitten she said it sounded like he had a washing machine in his chest. Some of the males their testicles did not descend which meant they wouldn’t be able to breed at all. Up until that point the biologists had all been saying well the big problem for panthers is the loss of habitat, the development. Developments wiping out places where you can live. She said that’s a long-term problem. The short-term problem is they’re going to go extinct because they can’t breed anymore. That suddenly galvanized everybody to say we need to do something about this.

Diane: I think you make the point too that here she was a woman veterinarian out in the wilderness and then she had to convince her male biologist counterparts that this was happening and we needed to do something about it. I wonder if it’s a kind of a genetic, I mean a sort of evolutionary change. It’s very Darwinian for the testicles not to descend because what would be the point. There’s not procreation.

Craig: She’s doing this work in the 80s and early 90s and the projections were that if they didn’t do anything panthers would go extinct by 2016. They obviously needed to act very, very quickly. Like you said she had a really hard time convincing her male colleagues and superiors that this was the problem. In fact one of them even after the state accepted it, the guy who had been in charge of the capture team kept saying no, this isn’t the problem. The big problem is the habitat. There’s a sort of a theme in the book about women in STEM and women in the sciences and how because she’s the clearest example but there are two other women who are very prominent the book who also run into similar problems trying to get people to listen to them and listen to the warnings that they’re issuing. They get very frustrated by it as you as you might imagine.

Diane: I think it’s not unique to Florida although there is a high degree of misogyny that is kind of perpetuated by a lot of garishness that goes on in terms of the plastic surgery industry and all of it but a lot of the stereotypes are falling by the wayside. I met Sylvia Earle for example. She was a Floridian. Then this very important and this very important scientist in the field Melody Roelke who just really had an uphill battle. You would hope that in the scientific domain that the egalitarian views of the sexes it somehow would dissipate but you’re saying no. This is another eye-opener.

Craig: Well I mean with human nature it’s human nature to be very cliquish and to pay more attention to people who are like us as opposed to people who are not like us but if you do that then you run the risk of not hearing things you need to hear. She was telling these guys hey, this is really important. If we don’t do something about this now it’s going to be too late to worry about anything else including habitat loss.

Diane: Well that just opens up a whole vat of exploration when you talk about otherness because of course if there were more women in the field then women wouldn’t be considered other. There are lots of other domains including homophobia which you touch on in the book Oh Florida where there’s almost like an east-west dichotomy. We’re going to jump back and forth between the books because they’re both cautionary tales.

Craig: Anita Bryant was a Florida woman what can I say.

Diane: She became I think in such a galvanizing in kind of the best possible way of lightning rod for everything that was wrong in terms of the attitudes and of course the gay community embraced drinks made with cranberry juice. The whole grassroots movement really took flight. I remember it so much and you have broadened the perspective on a lot of things that we remember only vaguely as children with Anita Bryant being on television.

We’re going to take another quick break but I wondered if when you come back you’re willing to delve into some of the more sensitive subjects that we’ve just touched on homophobia and misogyny but also just give us right before the break a hopeful sign. What are the numbers now on the Florida panther for example?

Craig: In the mid-90s when they were, things looked very, very dire there were about 20 to 30 maximum that were left. Now we’re up to about 200. I wanted to write this book for 20 years and but I didn’t have a good ending. I wanted to have a good hopeful ending and about three years ago I got a good hopeful ending and sat down to start writing the book.

Diane: We think that these 200 are going to thrive and be able to well, I know that they were introduced to the Texas cougar. There was a transplant.

Craig: You forgot to say spoiler alert.

Diane: Spoiler alert. Oh sorry folks. Read the book. First of all these cats are beautiful and there are ample fabulous photographs including the cover of the book but you perpetuate it. You talked about the perpetuation of a species and the hopefulness of that. We’re living in a time where we really do need these signs of hopefulness and being able to conquer problems through science. I very much appreciate that you did that. We’ll talk about other areas where there may be signs of hope in the state of Florida even. Maybe we’ll pave the way Craig. Who knows for other breakthroughs?

Craig: If it involves paving we’ll do it in Florida.

Diane: Have you seen the size of the highways? It doesn’t eliminate crashes. That’s the amazing thing. We’ll find one another and crash no matter what. Okay, we’re going to take a short break and when we come back we’ll continue with Craig Pittman.

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Has your manuscript languished because you can’t find the direction it wants to take or have you lost the motivation to finish and polish it for publication because it can be such a big formidable task? Let Diane Dewey help you resolve your writing issues. Diane’s manuscript coaching offers help with sticking points like the arc of your story and how to flesh it out, finding the inner story and what you want to say, developing your message revelations that become your reader’s takeaways, helping to rally the motivation to finish your project and what to do next. We can analyze, edit and advise you on publishing. Who are the next collaborators on your writing path? If you seek resolution to these and other questions please contact Diane Dewey author of the award-winning memoir Fixing the Fates. Find her at trunordmedia.com. That’s T-R-U-N-O-R-D.com or on her author’s page dianedewey.com. Diane can also be found through social media. Connect with her through the links on the show page.

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You are listening to Dropping In with Diane Dewey. We’d love to hear from you if you have a question or comment about the show. Send us an email to ddewey@trunordmedia.com. That’s the letter ddewey@trunordmedia.com. Now back to Dropping In.

Diane: We’re back with Craig Pittman, author of Cat Tale: The Wild, Weird Battle to Save the Florida Panther. He’s a New York Times best-selling author. Oh Florida made the New York Times’ bestseller list after having been turned down by as we just learned 15 publishers. I do think that Cat Tale is a book that’s important to read for a sense of optimism that doesn’t come from just la la land but comes from actual scientific cooperation and actually being obedient to science and actually accepting scientific information which is what environmentalism is all about. That’s the subject that you wrote about for a couple of decades now Craig for the Tampa Bay Times.

There are other you know points that you make in your book, your earlier book Oh Florida. Much of the population in Florida is transient. I look at it in my own neighborhood. Up until a short while ago there were a lot of part-time people here. People who maybe didn’t care about supporting the schools to systems through taxes, who maybe didn’t have a vested interest in what happened in infrastructure-wise or even preservation-wise or certainly conservation-wise long-term issues. There are other issues that are completely underfunded. One is mental health care.

Now we have crossed the threshold of being ranked 50th in the nation. Doesn’t get any worse than that folks. I think that this is some kind of a byproduct of people not having rootedness here. We need that sense of commitment to solve some of the problems that are not just indigenous to Florida but are everywhere as you well know through your work in reporting on climate change. Do you have any other hopeful indicators that any of these other subjects are taking a turn for the better or that we were coming about in any of these other areas?

Craig: It’s taken a couple of disasters to get to this point but I think the people who have been in Florida longer than a year or two now understand that if you mess up the environment in Florida you mess up the economy, that the two are inextricably linked. We saw the first signs of how important that linkage is when we had the BP Oil spill in 2010 and even though it happened in Louisiana or rather off Louisiana the oil wound up coating beaches in eight of our Florida panhandle counties and ruining their tourist seasons. The ramifications were actually felt all through Florida as a lot of tourists cancelled their reservations thinking the oil was all over the place.

Then when we had this 16 month long red tide algae bloom recently that had a similar impact on beaches all over the state and on tourism related economies all over the state. People really got fired up about that and about there was a blue green algae bloom over on the Atlantic coast that had a similar political impact where people were showing up when they saw politicians in the neighborhood or in the area and saying what are you going to do about this. How are you going to fix this because you’ve shut down our businesses? Your lackadaisical approach to environmental regulations has fueled these algae blooms by not stopping septic tank leaks and not stopping pollution flowing off of over fertilized areas.

It got to the point where Governor Rick Scott was campaigning for senate and at one point he made a campaign stop and people actually heckled him out of the room by yelling Red Tide Rick at him. He actually fled the location. I’m sad that it took disasters to show people this but I’m glad that they’re that they’ve figured that out and they’ve demanded change. I think that’s a big reason why Ron Desantis won the governorship is because he promised to do something about this. He appointed a chief science officer. Something Florida’s never had before. he set up these algae bloom task forces to look at the situation and recommend changes that can be made to try and if not prevent then at least lessen the impact of future algae blooms. The question is what’s he going to do once those recommendations get put into effect. Is he going to follow up and make sure they’re enforced? We don’t know the answer to that yet but I do think that the political impact of those disasters are things that are still sending reverberations around.

The one thing I’m curious about is we’re undergoing a pretty severe economic impact from the coronavirus pandemic right now where everything’s shut down. They’re shutting down beaches all over the state etc. will there be some move now to waive environmental regulations to try and help businesses recover from that.

Diane: I hope not.

Craig: Well we’ll see. The legislature certainly does that. That’s one of the first things they always think of when they think of businesses. How can we help you by making it easier for you to pollute? We’ll see what happens with that.

Diane: That is a broader theme in the current administration in Washington. We will expand the economy by helping you pollute. I think that obviously we want to urgently help businesses but at the other end we want to maintain some kind of long-term perspective on impact as well. I know that governor Ron Desantis also was exceptional in the sense that he did tell the sitting president no, we don’t want continued offshore oil drilling. Look at the disaster we had with BP and that basin of oil is still sloshing around on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.

I mean I think that there has been an aisle crossing. There has been a stepping out of role that is tremendously important to try to solve these problems. Who knows? I mean the situation now is unprecedented. I do know that we’re going to have to work together. That’s absolutely true. I think what you’re talking about in terms of the economic impact of environmental disasters. That interconnectivity is the only way that it hits home. It’s the only way that people understand that we don’t go merrily living on. We won’t if we sacrifice national parks. We won’t if we do more pipeline, laying more pipeline. There’s the implication to our everyday life is huge and to economic well-being as well.

I commend you for bringing these subjects to bare. The red tide situation was also just a disaster for local residents because we were living with a fish kill in our canals and waterways. The fishermen that you saw lined up on every bridge, getting fresh fish that they sold to restaurants were not there anymore. The dead fish were being removed and it was a colossal disaster.

We came from Switzerland where there was also a fish kill on the Rhine River from rising temperatures and climate change. It’s hard to imagine that we’re going to be able to ignore these factors much longer. Do you think that there’s going to, are we going to feel this maybe at the polls? Is climate change going to be a pivotal point do you think in the upcoming election?

Craig: I think it can be. I think it ought to be obviously but I mean like I did you go visit a neighborhood where they had water in their streets for 90 days straight down in the Keys. It’s like those folks they’re keenly interested in solving the problem of climate change but whether that will spread out to the general populace I don’t know because I think what you’re going to see now is a shift towards economic concerns taking precedence given how many people are being thrown out of work or being idled or businesses being shut down as a result of the pandemic. We’re sort of forcing people to choose between their livelihood and their lives. I think that’s going to end up being a bigger question ultimately at the polls. I think if the pandemic hadn’t occurred climate change probably would have played a much bigger role in the election.

Diane: I do think that we’re going to see a different kind of priorities and hopefully will be prudent. It’s not always easy but thank you very, very much for your overview on the situation. I’m very much hopeful that we’re going to look at things on balance that may not be possible because people are fighting for their lives. These books are nonetheless important in terms of looking at how things are connected.

I want to know I guess from you because we are talking about you also being among people who because of their digital age have lost a position recently as a contributor to the Tampa Bay Times. What are your plans? How will you go about continuing to be a spokesperson?

Craig: I don’t know. This is this is uncharted territory for me. I haven’t been unemployed since I got out of college in 1981 but people have been very kind and very supportive. I’ve had lots of people contacting me saying they’re sorry about what happened and they hope I land on my feet which is nice. Right now I’m working on a freelance story for a Florida magazine, Flamingo Magazine. I’m writing about female python hunters. I’m applying for jobs and we’ll see what happens. I’m hoping that I can find something that will allow me to stay in Florida because that’s the subject dearest to my heart and the one that I know the best so stay tuned.

Diane: Yes. Well we are wishing you enormous success in your pursuit. I also share the sorrow to see you go because of course your columns are a mainstay in our household. I do think though at one point I saw a Facebook post that you had done before this recent layoffs, a series of layoffs at the Tampa Bay Times. There’s so much material here. It looked as though you might be entertaining the idea of a documentary or some other digital platform and which I hope you are successful with but is that what’s happening? Was that my imagination?

Craig: It’s not my documentary. I was interviewed for someone else’s documentary, a guy who’s making a documentary about Florida. He has interviewed, I think he interviewed Carl Hiaasen and he interviewed the woman who accidentally burned down the world’s oldest cypress tree, the senator and a variety of other interesting people to kind of piece together this mosaic depicting what Florida’s like in the 21st century.

Diane: I think a lot of what you talk about in your books is going to be central to what goes on going forward because we have these, first of all we’re still in need of entertainment and you are a prime storyteller. I very much look forward to some sort of revival or reincarnation of Craig Pittman. You certainly are in the right place for it. Florida specializes in reincarnation and I think if it’s going to be anywhere it’s going to be here.

I want the audience to know where they can reach you. On Instagram it’s Craig Pittman C-R-A-I-G-P-I-T-T-M-A-N-78. On your website it’s www.craigpittman.com. You also have a twitter feed and you have these two beautiful books Cat Tale and Oh Florida. I hope that people will tune in. I hope people will communicate with you and that you’ll find a platform Craig to continue with your very thoughtful and I think rational approach. We’re wishing you very good luck. With 30 seconds left we’re in this together. We’re going to fight this thing and any last thought. We’ve got 30 seconds.

Craig: Florida’s closed down. Everything you think of when you think of spring in Florida. We’ve closed Disney World. We’ve closed the beaches. We closed spring training. I think while we’re all sitting at home washing our hands a lot we should be thinking about what’s important about Florida and what is it we want to make sure once we’re able to get out and about again.

Diane: Great thank you very much Craig Pittman, a great conversation. We’ll hear next week on Dropping In. Thanks very much all of you and be safe.

Thank you so much for dropping in. Please join Diane Dewey again next Friday at 8 AM Pacific Time and 11 AM Eastern Time on the Voice America Variety Channel. We’ll see you then.