A Case for Common Ground: Florida’s Environment Will Unite Us
Photo by Hannah O. Brown
GGS Editor’s Note: As Go! Gulf States launches so close to 2022, it’s a great time to consider where some of our collaborators were just one year ago. We’ve become great fans of The Marjorie, and we encourage anyone interested in the future of the Gulf to give them a read. Their sober reporting, analysis, and calls to common ground common sense have inspired this editor through some rough days getting this platform off the ground. It gives us great joy to be able to bring their writing to you.
If you know us, you know: we tell Florida stories. Though it sounds straightforward, this is a deceptively complicated task. Trying to tell the story of Florida is like trying to juggle a million balls: it’s simultaneously the state of unparalleled natural beauty, corrupt politics, Disney World, retirement homes, hurricanes, ranches, NASCAR, surfers, alligators, agriculture. You name it, we each have our own list. Florida resists being summed up, and our job is to grapple with the perceived “weirdness” and regional ambiguity of Florida as a result.
This quandary is something we at The Marjorie meet head on. It’s vital that we try to suss this out – it enriches not only our reporting but our understanding of what it means to be a Floridian and how that’s evolved over time.
This often means looking at statistics and trends to see how those data points might feel contradictory or complimentary, and why.
