The Florida Roundup - Winter reading special

Episode Date: November 28, 2025

This week on The Florida Roundup, we spoke with three authors for a special “winter reading” program. First, we spoke with journalist and author Carl Hiaasen about his latest novel “Fever Beach��� (00:00). Then, we had a conversation with Michael Grunwald, journalist and author of “We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix our Food System and Save Our Climate” (19:34). Plus, journalist and author Danny Rivero spoke with us about his book “Just Freedom: Inside Florida’s Decades-Long Voting Rights Battle” (37:26).

Support for Florida Roundup comes from the Everglades Foundation, working to restore and protect Florida's $1 trillion asset that helps to bring clean water to Floridians. Learn more at Everglades Foundation.org. This is the Florida Roundup. I'm Tom Hudson. Great to have your company today. We're going to present our winter reading special on our program. Whether you curl up in front of a fireplace or unfurl your beach blanket this winter, we have three Florida authors for you. really write about any place else to write about Florida because I've never lived

anywhere else. I don't care about any place as much as I like Florida. Carl Hyacson has been writing and reporting about Florida for 50 years. And after a half century of writing, he still finds plenty to get P.O.ed about. If everybody who got discouraged in the state bailed out, who's going to be left to fight these bastards, you know? This hour, you'll also hear from Michael Grunwald. He's traveled the world investigating the links between what we eat and climate change, including munching on lab-grown meat, but that's illegal in Florida. It's insane that in the free state of Florida, right, supposedly cares about competition and the free market,

telling us what kind of meat we can eat. And then hear from journalist Danny Rivera, who takes us along in the long fight to restore voting rights to felons. There is a conception for a lot of people that this mostly impacts black Americans, which means mostly Democrats. That is wrong. Let's start with Carl Heist. He started as a reporter at the Miami Herald almost 50 years ago.

His efforts to flush out facts from all kinds of Florida characters has found its way into novels like striptease, bad monkey, and his newest Fever Beach. In fact, the inspiration for Fever Beach began at the end of his driveway in Florida. Describe the inspirational spark, the moment, the seed that grew into Fever Beach. They can't see this on radio, but I'm going to show it to you. this is a bag that was thrown on my frame in my driveway so it's a Ziploc bag weighted down with rice rice you can see but there's a star of david and it says the every single aspect of the COVID agenda is Jewish and that's exactly the wording I used in the novel

about the same thing happening and so when this happened in my neighbor and everybody in our driveway He's got it the way my mind works. You're not even outraged or disgust and all that, but all I could think about was somewhere there's two idiots. One of them's holding the bag open. The other one's pouring and rice in and putting this crap in there. And that's their day. That's their

whole day. And I thought they might fit in one of my novels, these two clowns. So the anti-Semitism comes from that. And then you've also got the background of the January 6th insurrection with the two main characters. Why do you think, in all

seriousness, why do you think these ideologies, these kind of hateful ideologies, continue to find a home here in Florida? I knew that Florida was the home for the proud boys, you know, and the other groups, oathkeepers, they all have cells or clubhouses or whatever the hell it is in Florida. I didn't realize until later that we had, we contributed more defendants to the January 6 prosecutions than any other state, including Texas. I would thought Texas would have knocked it out of the park on that one, but we actually beat Texas. But it certainly made me think about it. The book, I always, I was kind of tackling the subject of not just hate, but especially

shallow, reflexive hate. Today, it's immigrants tomorrow, DEI, whatever it is, then it's the Black Lives Matter, whatever it is, they're just kicking and flailing with the underlying idea that that's the root of all of America's problems, you know, which is complete nonsense. Obviously, the Florida connection to these folks, and it's horrible was January 6th is, and now we have all the rioters pardoned the people who beat on police officers and sprayed a police officer in the face with not just mace, but with raid, insect repunt. These kinds of creeps are walking the street, and now many of them seeking compensation for the trouble they had, all trouble they had to go through.

That itself almost defies satire, that whole scenario. You've been asked a lot about the impact of the make America great, again, impact on political satire. You've said that it's harder to be funny these days about politics. But what I want to know is how has the audience for political satire changed, do you think? That's a good question. I'm not sure I can answer it except to say that the Fever Beach has done really well in the book before it squeezed me, which was basically in a nutshell, giant pythons visit Mar-a-Lago, okay?

Right. That was the literary, you know. That was the pitch to the agent. Yeah, basically, yeah. Okay. So, but they did, they both done very, very well. So there is an audience for it. how it's changed, I couldn't tell you because I've just, I don't think, I mean, I certainly

am not doing anything different. I spent all those years at the Miami Herald. I mean, after I got the column, after I was a reporter there, I mean, as a columnist, you're reacting to headlines. And you're supposed to be giving your opinion, whether it pisses people off or not. But the point is, you're watching for all those cues every day because you've got to grind the stuff out. And, and it works that way in slower motion with the novels. I mean, there has to be some level of outrage. It does, but we've seen just in the past two months your fictional Florida noir, a cannon, come alive. There was a protest outside alligator Alcatraz in August, where one person carried a sign that said, quote, is this a Carl Heison novel? It was literally on on Tamiami Trail there. One of my sisters sent me that. I hadn't seen it. I think I posted the picture. You did. Yeah, I was on your Facebook page. Now, I tell people that over the years and I've been doing these books a long time, I now am in a position when I sort of, as I'm writing them, even though it's saturned, even though it's supposed to be cranked up a couple notches, I always now carry the feeling that I'm writing something that's eventually going to come true. Whether you wanted to or not, that's the direction we've been heading. So state government here in Florida has been controlled by Republicans for about 30 years.

The state population has grown. The GOP now has almost a 1.5 million voter registration advantage over Democrats. Florida used to be that Democratic state back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, then a purple state, and now a deep red state. So as a native Floridian, one who has reported for decades on Florida, does Florida attract more conservative voters to move here? or is there something in Florida that makes voters more conservative as they live here? I think the first is true.

I think it definitely has attracted more. One of the reasons for that, you know, Florida's been growing, at least in terms of the actual numbers, at about the same rate ever since I can remember. And a net of about 350, 375,000 people a year growing up moving here. DeSantis acts like he created this growth. It's a complete baloney. It's been going on. Which pause for a moment there, right? That's a thousand people a day. A thousand people a day. And that's accounting for those who don't make it through the day and come off the ledge on the other side, right? Yeah. So this has been going on a long time. And traditionally, you know, in the early days of Florida, most of the migration was from the East Coast, Boston, New York, which you would call more liberal, at Democratic areas, the Upper East Coast there.

And that came down to the Gold Coast, Palm Beach County, Brower County, Miami-Dade County. Now the tremendous, most tremendous growth is on the other side of the state, which is always, in the past, drawn from sort of the Midwestern voters and from more conservative states. Are you as outraged as you were when you started writing columns in the mid-1980s and novels in the 1980s? At least is outraged, probably more. yeah I'd say I'm just as pissed off now as I was you know 40 years ago how could you not be how could you not be you told CBS Sunday morning quote it is the overwhelming beauty of this place that makes my characters behave the way they do why do you think it is the natural beauty of Florida that's such a bad influence on your characters well in my novels these characters usually

are committing some sort of crime, some sort of atrocity involving the beauty of this place. And it's still, there are remarkable places you can go in Florida still and not realize there's 22 million other people in the place. And there are parts of the Everglades. You can look like they did thousands of years ago if you know how to get there. And all that exists and is pristine. And the books, it becomes a sacred thing because in my memory, and even in my memory, And even in the memory of my oldest son, you know, there are things that my grandkids didn't get to see and their kids aren't going to get to see.

But it doesn't mean you don't fight for them. But in my mind, there's nothing worse than the abuse or the desecration or the, you know, the greedy exploitation of something as beautiful as Florida. But the whole state's been built on greed. The greed is the engine that runs Tallahassee. Oh, and it has always has. Yeah. After all, you know, Broward County, which I believe you're from, named for a riverboat captain that, you know, helped begin to carve up the Everglades.

Yeah, Napoleon Bonaparte, Broward. In fact, his master plan, and I'm really glad they named the county abdrim, his grand plan was to drain the Everglades. He thought that was feasible. Pestilence-ridden swamp, I believe. believe is something like he called it. Yeah, he wanted to drain it and subdivide it. And his reward for that kind of thinking was you get a county named after you. So there you go. That's all you need to know. So, Carl, in what ways do you think Florida is better off today, better off today than when you

were growing up in South Florida? I can't think of a single way. Is that right? Not one. Is that a romantic view, though, of your childhood, perhaps? No, because, I mean, all I got to do is look at the population numbers. Since the year I was born, the state is it's more than quintupled in population. I don't know of any single place, country state or anything else, that can absorb that kind of stampede and not start coming apart at the seams or showing signs of distress.

And the amazing thing is that Florida has over time, I believe thought, there were people thought the Mario Boat Lift was Armageddon. And it was, at the time, traumatic. There was a tremendous number of criminals that Taster had released. And they had to work their way through the system and many of them in a violent way.

But all of this was overcome. And the cities themselves are strong, but at the same time, we're still bleeding the resource, exploiting the resources. I'll give you a good example. A few months ago, when this idea that we could maybe put

private golf courses in parks, in state parks. Ostensibly charity. This is a dissanus scheme. And as usual, It blew back in his face. He said, oh, this was half-baked. I didn't know all this. He was in the middle of all of it, it turned out, shockingly. If you remember the outcry, and it was from the panhandle to South Florida, and it was Democrat and Republican counties. The people love their parks. They love whatever left taste of Florida they have left, whatever glimpse of old Florida is left. They do not want it carved up into 18 holes, 18 privileged holes. Nobody wants to do that. and they rose up and they raised hell and it went away. So what that tells you is that there are millions of people that feel very similar to the way I do.

And one of the things that I hope for the books, even though, you know, obviously they're not, they're sold all over the place. But what I'm writing, I'm writing them as a Floridian. And with the idea that I know that you're out there. and I know you get what I'm doing. The coolest thing about my readers is that they're in on it. They get it. They know, I mean, it's not just recognizing characters from the novels, but the undercurrent of the novels, they get it.

But I always tell people is they laugh, they're laughing for the right reasons, you know, and that's important. We can always change where we're at. You can't change where you're from. You're from Florida. It has infused your life's work, your professional output, your personal life. Why do you choose to remain a Floridian, given your continued and growing outrage that you clearly have? People have been asking me that literally for more than 40 years.

Why are you still here? I got asked a lot. And I always tell people, it's, I mean, first of all, somebody's got to stay in the fight. And I was lucky enough to be born and to work in a place that I care about. I couldn't really write about any place else the way I write about Florida, I don't care. I've never lived anywhere else. I don't care about any place as much as I like Florida. If everybody who got discouraged in this state bailed out, who's going to be left to fight these bastards, you know? Seriously. You've got to do your best. Carl, it's always a pleasure to speak with you. Again, congratulations another terrific novel. A lot of fun to read. Thanks, Tom. Thanks for the very kind words. Take care. Thanks, Tom.

Journalist and novelist Carl Hyacin. Now, we took the liberty here at the program of creating a radio video play of the first pages of his newest novel, Fever Beach. So here it is with the Florida Roundup Players. On the afternoon of September 20th, Dishwater Gray and Rainey, A man named Dale Figo picked up a hitchhiker on Gus Grissom Boulevard in Tangello Shores, Florida. The hitchhiker, who reminded Figo of Danny DeFito, asked for a lift to the interstate. Figo agreed to take him there after finishing an errand. Soon they entered a manicured subdivision called Sanctuary Falls,

where Figo eased his Dodge Ram 1500 quad cab to the road. curb and told the hitchhiker what was about to happen. The hitchhiker placed his backpack on the floorboard and pivoted warily toward the back seat, where he saw an assault rifle, a can of bear spray, a sex doll made to look like the lower torso of a woman, and a pile of clear Ziploc bags. Each bag contained a handful of what appeared to be beach sand and a garrishly printed flyer. Reading upside down, the hitchhiker saw that one of the words was Jewish. Figo began sorting and stacking the bags on the console.

I'll drive, you throw. Do what? The same is for weight. Also, so the baggies won't blow away. I'm pretty sure Holocaust isn't spelled with a K. And I'm pretty sure I didn't tell you to proof-teach my business. Slowly, Figo began driving up and down the tidy streets. The hitchhiker reluctantly lobbing the slur-filled ziplocks onto driveways of multi-million-dollar properties, lush with bogan vias, block olive trees, and hybrid palms.

When the hitchhiker noticed a shamrock painted on one of the mailboxes, he asked Figo if they were in the right neighborhood. Never questioned the mission. What mission exactly? Community outreach, dumbass, to enlight the mother-fitting citizen. Enlight? For real? Figo reached across and popped him in the jaw.

Ow! What the hell? It was the first time he'd been slugged by a driver. Propositioned? Sure. Robbed too many times to count, but never once punched, and he'd thumbed his way from coast to coast. You want to ride a 95 or not? Why'd you hit me? For Christ sakes, I'm old enough to be your dad.

Just keeping it real. That's what I do. My top forte, you might say. After all the bagged tracks were distributed, Figo made a phone call to say. somebody named Jonas and reported that the run had been completed without incident. Fever Beach by Carl Hyacinson. Our Florida Roundup Players there, Christine DiMatte, Mark Rowe, and Grant Hudson. Still to come on our winter reading special,

how our appetites impact climate change. I'm Tom Hudson, and you're listening to the Florida Rondup from your Florida Public Radio Station. Support for Florida Roundup comes from the Everglades Foundation, working to restore and protect Florida's $1 trillion asset that helps to bring clean water to Floridians. Learn more at Everglades Foundation. org.

This is the Florida Roundup. I'm Tom Hudson. Great to have you along. Today it is our winter reading special because, you know, if you moved from Florida, maybe you've got a little more free time this winter since you're not having to shovel any snow. Let us know what you're reading this winter by emailing radio at the Florida Roundup.org. Send us any of your book recommendations.

Radio at the Florida Roundup.org, especially focus on Florida authors or Florida subjects. Imagine a football field, an American football field, 100 yards long, right? From one end zone to about the 15-yard line, that represents the proportion of land in Florida that's occupied by cities and suburbs, roads, and homes, kind of where all of us, most of us, kind of live and build our lives. The next 20 yards, though, that's used by agriculture throughout the Sunshine State. farms and ranches take up more land here in Florida than our neighborhoods and strip malls, more than our beach parking lots and theme parks. Ag is, after all, one of the traditional

legs of the three-legged stool of Florida's economy, tourism, agriculture, and real estate development. And you know those last two are often in opposition with each other in the battle for land. And land, how it is used as one of the themes of the new book, We Are Eating the Earth, the Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate by journalist Michael Grunwald, who joins us now. Welcome to the program. Nice to see you. Oh, thanks for having me back, Tom. Congratulations on the book. It is a fascinating and, dare I say, a bit terrifying read as well about the path that we're on here.

You write, the carbohydrate problem will be even trickier to solve than the hydrocarbon problem. So does food pose a higher risk to the climate than fossil fuels? I mean, it poses a pretty big risk to the planet generally, right? I mean, agriculture uses about 70% of our fresh water. It's the leading driver of deforestation, of wetland. drainage, of water pollution, of biodiversity loss. But yeah, right now it's about a third of our climate problem and it's getting bigger. And the main reason is, you know, we're eating the earth.

We're hungry. More people, more tummies to feed. Right. And more land. It's two of every five acres of the planet are now either cropped or grazed by contrast, one of every hundred acres or cities or suburbs. So it's even worse globally than it is in Florida. And what was it, 10 or 15 years ago where you start the book about looking to the land to help feed our fuel hunger, not our appetites?

That's right. I mean, there was back then 20 years ago, right, there were no alternative to fossil fuels when people started really coming up with this idea like, hey, well, we could just grow alternatives, corn ethanol, soy biodiesel. But it turns out to be way worse for the climate than even gasoline, certainly worse than electric vehicles. but the reason, again, is because, you know, biofuels, it turns out they're eating about a Texas worth of the earth. Now, livestock are eating 50 Texas's worth of the earth, so it's an even bigger problem. Agriculture is eating 75 Texases, but it really is when you take a cross-country flight and you look out the window and you see all those rectangles and circles, it's like you know there's a lot of agriculture out there, but there is a lot of agriculture out there. And you don't even to go cross-country. you could fly from Tallahassee to Key West.

Okay, maybe you'll go across the Gulf on that one. How about Tallahassee to Orlando, for instance, right? No, it's true. And obviously, as you know, when I wrote the swamp, there was a, you know, and this was now, God, I mean, we're old Tom. That was 20 years ago. I know. I know.

But then, I mean, there was a lot in there about cattle pastures and about, of course, sugar farms, vegetable farms. But I wasn't at the time thinking at all about the climate impact. And again, you have the crop dusters and diesel tractors, you have the burping and farting cows and the fertilizer. The methane, all that. But the main impact on the climate, again, is that when you use more acres, when you can grow fewer acres, less food per acre, you need more acres to grow food, you end up chopping down trees that store a lot of carbon. Right. This was the insight by your main character, Tim Surchinger, who got.

some of his environmental credibility right here in Florida. That's right. He was one of the lawyers on the original Everglades lawsuit, the water quality lawsuit, which is still going on today, and, of course, has led to better water quality in the Everglades, even if some of Everglades restoration isn't going so well. But that's when I first met him. Yeah, and his big insight that he shared with you was that land is not free. And listen, Florida knows that.

We used to sell land by the gallon, as the saying used to go, right? We're very familiar with this, that the cost of land and how we use it has a cost and an opportunity cost by not using it in other ways, right? That's exactly right. And I think that's what Tim found is that basically climate analysis of biofuels, but really of all agriculture, was just ignoring the cost of land. Right. If you grow fuel instead of food, then somewhere else you're going to have to grow more food. And it's probably not going to be a parking lot, even in. in Florida, right? It's going to be a wetland or it's going to be a forest. And my line is always

that trying to decarbonize the planet while we're continuing to vaporize trees. It's like trying to clean your house while smashing your vacuum cleaner to bits in the living room because you're making a huge mess, but you're also really crippling your ability to clean up the mess because that's what forests do. Real estate development has been driven by the concept of higher, highest and best use, right? Highest and best use. You know that phrase. As an investigative reporter, as a Floridian, you know that use, that phrase. What's the opportunity cost to food and climate as we think about the growing population in Florida and the highest and best use of the limited land we have? Well, one of the things, and this gets a different group of people mad at me, is that you have to

remember that American agriculture generally is pretty efficient. We make more food per acre, so we don't need as many acres to make the same amount of food. Like you took look at a, you know, an Indian dairy cow. You need 23 of them to make as much as a California dairy cow, which means you have to feed them 23 times more to grow all those hooves and those tails and all those things that don't make milk. So again, there is absolutely an opportunity cost

not only to using land for agriculture, but to using land inefficiently. And that's something that, you know, when I talk to farmers, some of them, they don't like the idea that, like, hey, you know, they think of themselves as good stewards of the land. Conservationists themselves. Yeah. But what I always say is that, like, that may be true, but collectively, you're stewarding a mess. And so what we need to do is help you make even more food with even less land and fewer emissions because we're going to, to meet those Paris climate targets, we're going to have to make about 50% more food with 80% fewer agricultural emissions. and no more land.

Michael Grunwald is with us, the author of the new book. We are Eating the Earth, The Race, to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate. Elon is listening in Hollywood. Elon, go ahead. You're on the radio. Hi, thank you for the opportunity to participate. Yes, I turn, I have been a vegetarian for a long time, but five years ago, I turned vegan because of all the impact that the dairy and the carols have on the environment.

Basically, we are growing crops to feed the cattle and the peak and, you know, all the meat that we eat. So it's not efficient. It's completely disproportionate. And, yeah, because, so because of the impact of the environment and because of ethical reasons. So, you know, I think it's a win-win for everybody to become vegan. Elon. Some people that are, go ahead. Yeah, just thanks for sharing us your story.

We want to get to another one. And he's right. Elon's right, that going vegan is the best diet for the planet. I'd like to say I'm vegan, but I'm not. I've cut out beef and lamb because it turns out beef and lamb are about 10 times worse for the climate and the planet than poultry and pork. They're just spectacularly inefficient converters of their feed into our food. I mean, unfortunately, only about 1% of Americans who are vegan. vegan. I'm not one of them. I'm not one of them. I am not either. And I want to ask you about

cultivated meat and lab-grown meat in a second here. But David's been patient in Delray Beach. Go ahead, David. You're on the radio. Hi. Liberal Democrat here. I very reluctantly believe that human beings are supposed to eat meat. That this is what our ancestors were eating 60,000 years ago or 80,000 years ago. And that's what we evolved. to live on. I've been eating since 2008. I've been eating high fat, meat, protein, high fat, and I'm healthy. I'm lean. I get a blood test every year, and I'm healthy. Oh, I'm glad to hear it. Stay healthy and keep listening to Public Radio, David. Appreciate it, regardless of what you're diet. Well, there's some truth to what he said. We actually did evolve

our ancestors two million years ago when they started eating meat. That's when we started developing bigger brains and smaller stomachs, but not this much meat. And in fact, the average, the average American eats the equivalent of three burgers a week. And if you cut it to two, we'd save a Massachusetts worth of land every year. Look, we eat four times the global average. So a little less probably wouldn't kill us. And protein is the macro of the moment, certainly, when it comes to diet. You know, when I started working on the book, veggie diets were the macro. Sure, plant-based. Exactly, right? There was that movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger produced that James Cameron directed was telling you you're going to have a great sex life if you went vegan. Well, listen, before there was artificial intelligence. It was plant-based and lab-grown, cultivated meat, right? That was the hype in Silicon Valley that you detail extensively in the book.

Absolutely. I started my reporting for this book at the Good Food Institute conference in 2019, sort of all the fake meats companies getting together. and I thought I was going to accidentally raise a series A round in the drinks line, right? You were going to be the investor. Beyond it just gone public. It was going up to $250 a share. Now it's down to $2 a share. But again, look, the dogs didn't like the food, but the cow is a pretty mature technology and alternative proteins aren't, so they could get better.

So with alternative proteins, Florida has become the first state to ban lab-grown meat. This is what Governor DeSantis said in 2024 when he signed that prohibition into law. Take your fake lab-grown meat elsewhere. We're not doing that in the state of Florida. So that's been banned. Michael Chuck sent us an email writing, I find it outrageous that our elected officials have outlawed lab-grown meat. Scientists are in agreement.

Animal agriculture is a leading driving force of the environmental collapse that we're experiencing. Raising animals for food uses vast amounts of resources that are better used. utilized by using them directly to feed humans. Lab-grown meat uses way less resources. What hope does lab-grown meat hold and is Florida missing out somehow with this prohibition? Well, that email is exactly right. Lab-grown and real, I call it cultivated meat, the industry, because it actually isn't grown in a lab anymore. It's going to be brewed like in a brewery. And I've eaten it. It's delicious. Brood meat doesn't quite have the same. Yeah, you know, cultivated is nice. And I've eaten it. I've eaten it. I've eaten. I've eaten, you know, cultivated sushi, I've eaten cultivated burgers, I've eaten cultivated

chicken, which tastes like chicken because it is chicken. And as the caller said, it's 90% less land, 90% fewer emissions. And it's insane that in the free state of Florida, right, supposedly cares about competition and the free market. They're telling us what kind of meat we can eat. It's not even on the market, and they're already sucking up to the cattlemen to try to ban this stuff. I'm Tom Hudson.

You're listening to the Florida on. up from your Florida Public Radio Station. We're speaking with Michael Grunwald, author of We Are Eating the Earth, The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate. We're talking about the climate in your cupboard. Richard is joining us from Redlands. That is the rural agriculture area in Miami-Dade County. Yeah, Richard, welcome to the program.

Thanks for listening and calling. Well, thank you very much. Pleasure to be on your show. You've got an aquaponic farm, is that right? That's right. It's an indoor farm. Basically, we raise fish and plants. They work in synergy to nurse and nourish each other.

And we are USDA certified organic. Hmm. So tell us, yeah, go ahead, Richard. Well, I was going to say a one acre facility, 43.5,000 square foot building, which is one acre, we could put out the annual output of a 609-acre farm. That's great. And that's from the fish protein that you're producing?

Right, and also the produce. In our case, lettuces, leasy greens, and herbs. Yeah. We can produce any kind of vegetable fruit or tuber. And so are you planting that? You're planting that not in the soil of Florida, but in what exactly? Well, we produce our own plugs. And then basically aquaponics is a con.

combination of aquaculture, which is raising fish, and hydroponics, which is producing plants in a water-based media. I see. Richard, thanks for listening and sharing your perspective there from Redlands. Mike, you talk about these alternative farming methods, and here it is in our backyard here in Florida with Richard doing it. Yeah, not only there are vertical farms, mostly growing lettuce, and it seems to work pretty well for lettuce, maybe tomatoes, strawberries, and weed certainly isn't going to.

We needy marijuana. Yeah, you're not going to feed the world with this stuff. But I also write about land-based fish farms, including the huge one in homestead. There's an enormous one that grows salmon, I think it is, right? Atlantic Sapphire, exactly. But is that a highest and best use for limited land to essentially put an entire aqua farm there to grow something that we could have in the ocean? It absolutely could be. I mean, certainly the, I mean, Atlantic Sapphire has had some real problems.

They've had some major fish kills. Right. But the idea of doing it on land and, you know, getting salmon are incredibly efficient converters of their feed into our food and doing it indoors without spoiling the oceans, without having all these pesticides and antibiotics. It's a very promising technology, but like many of the technologies I write about in this book, they kind of haven't nailed it yet. Yeah, the scalability factor.

It's really tough to make this stuff work. I mean, I always say that if it was easy, somebody would have already done it. But look, we're still on track to deforest another dozen Californias by 2050. So I'm very excited about these, you know, people who are trying to do it differently. You know, I think hopefully there'll be the kind of investment that we saw in alternative energy in solar, wind, and electric vehicles that are now you're seeing get to scale. Food is kind of 20 years behind. We've got about 30 seconds left here, but folks are looking at a. Friday night dinner, maybe, you know, Saturday brunch, Sunday brunch. Like, how does this have packed

what were, the produce were, or protein, we're purchasing a Publix? Well, look, if you want to do something for the planet with your own diet, and I think it's great to try to be better, eat less beef and waste less food. Beef really is the baddie. It's 10 times worse than chicken or pork. It's a dairy's a problem, too, because cows are the problem. But of course, like, you know, they make milk several times a day and only make beef once. And then food, we waste a quarter of our food. That means we waste a quarter of the farmland. We use to grow it. We use it landmass the size of China to grow garbage. It makes no sense. Those are really the two biggies. The scale of this is, it's just overwhelming at times, but you write about it very eloquently and in a way that we can

conceptualize all of this scale here, Mike. But we appreciate your sharing the book with us today. Oh, thanks so much for your kind words, Tom. Yeah, I really appreciate it. We are eating the earth the race to fix our food system and save our climate by best-selling author Michael Grunwald. So what's on your reading menu? Email us radio at the Florida Roundup.org to let us know. Still to come, the long struggle to restore voting rights for felons in Florida. There is a conception for a lot of people that this mostly impacts black Americans, which means mostly Democrats.

That is wrong. That's next here on our winter reading special on the Florida Roundup. I'm Tom Hudson. You're listening to the Florida Rondup from your Florida Public Radio Station. Support for Florida Roundup comes from the Everglades Foundation, working to restore and protect Florida's $1 trillion asset that helps to bring clean water to Floridians. Learn more at Everglades Foundation.org. This is the Florida Roundup. I'm Tom Hudson. Our winter reading special continues because you can

still do some beach reading in winter in some parts of Florida. In 2018, Florida voters added about 60 words to the state constitution. Those words were aimed to restore the right to vote for most felons in Florida, potentially adding over one million people to the voter rolls. Clarence office was one of those who registered to vote in 2019. It had been 13, years after he had pled guilty to a felony. It's like, for me, it's like a sense of renewal. It's just a simple thing of being able to vote. That's a, it's a big thing for me.

Anthony Bouchel had not been able to vote since the 1990s when he was convicted of a drug possession. He also was early to register when that amendment took effect. I wanted to do my part as soon as possible versus having a wait and seeing how things go, you know, put my name in the beginning. Now, on that January day, almost seven years. ago, optimism was running high in the election supervisor's office in Miami-Dade County and across Florida. Felons who had completed their sentences were coming in. Lorenzo was one of those.

He was calling friends and telling them the address of the voter registration office. It feels great. It feels outstanding. Any election that's coming up, I'm going to be a participant. More people in Florida than any other state could not vote because of a felony conviction. And the few dozen words that were added to the Constitution seven years ago was supposed to change that. Wow. I think this is the largest extension of the right to vote in America since the 1920 extension of the right to vote to women and the constitutional amendment that extended the right to vote to people who are 18 years old. That's Howard Simon, the day after Election Day in 2018. Back then, he was the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, which helped sponsor the amendment. Desmond Mead led the effort to add the words to the Constitution. It tore down that Jim Crow wall and created another avenue that American citizens could take to be able to participate in elections without having to go and beg a politician for that right.

Now, before the amendment, it was up to four people in Florida, whether or not a felon who had completed their sentence could regain their right to vote, the governor, the chief financial officer, the attorney general, and the agriculture commissioner. But voters approved the language to restore the right to. to vote to most felons, quote, upon completion of all terms of sentence, including parole and probation. Seven years ago, Simon of the ACLU figured that phrase was perfectly clear. This language is as clear as it could be and as self-executing. It says that voting rights shall be restored. I don't know what is unclear about that. Except it wasn't that easy. Dennis Baxley was the Republican chair of the Senate's Ethics and Elections Committee in 2019. It can be very clear what to implement, but then it can be unclear how do you go about actually delivering on that implementation.

What did it mean for a felon to complete all terms of a sentence? Neil Volz was the political director of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, a group that campaigned for the amendment. Amendment 4 is very clear that when you've completed all portions of your sentence, you're eligible to vote. The fight to automatically restore the right to vote to most felons was not over by a long shot. It would be fought in court over what it means to complete a felony sentence and how does someone convicted of a felony in Florida check to see if they are eligible to vote again? It's restoration of voting rights for felons in Florida. Danny Rivera chronicles this journey in his book, Just Freedom, Inside Florida's Decades Long Voting Rights Battle. And he's a colleague with me here at our partner station, W. LRN in Miami.

Danny, welcome to the program as a guest. Good to be on this side of it. Nice to have you. So what does it mean today here in 2025 as we're talking? to complete a felony sentence in Florida to be eligible to vote? Well, it means if you had any prison time, you have to serve your sentence, any probation, and the additional part of it where a lot of this confusion came around

is it also means paying any fines connected to that case, any fees, court costs, restitution, kind of any financial obligation, with the exception of interest payments if it went to collections, as long as you don't have to pay everything owed if it went to interest, it's just like the dollar amount that was, that was tacked onto it if you put it all together. In 2001, as you tell in the book, there was a bill that would have restored voting rights in

Florida one year after a felon completed, quote, all non-monetary conditions in their sentence. That was part of that legislative language now almost 25 years ago. Why didn't that language find its way into the constitutional amendment in 2018? When the groups that got this on the ballot and gathered the signatures for it and whatnot, when they were doing studies and polling about the kind of language that people would support they found that adding that would draw down just a tiny percentage of the support that might threaten it was still over the 60 percent that they needed but it would just be a few percentage points down so they changed the language to say all terms of the sentence

just blanket don't specify financial non-financial monetary non-monetary and that left this little bit of ambiguity into it. And that's where all the drama unfolded after it passed. A little bit of ambiguity and an enormous gap in implementation here and interpretation. Right. And it became, you know, I mean, this is something that took place over several years. It was a profoundly confusing period of time for someone with the felony conviction in the state of Florida. Because you had court orders, you had reverse.

I mean, I talked to people for this book that gained the right to vote, lost the right to vote, gain the right to vote, flip-flopping back and forth. And at the end of the process, not even the end of the process, by the middle of the process, people were just scared. You had people that were eligible to vote and they didn't want to run the risk around it because there was so much confusion about what it meant and how to check your status, et cetera. So how does a felon who has completed their prison sentence? sentence, their parole, any probation. How do they find out if they're eligible to register to vote and to actually cast a ballot in Florida now? Six years after a federal court case, the state and the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition had a mediation because the state was sued because of all this confusion. They were getting questions like, am I eligible, am I not?

People couldn't figure it out. So just very late last year, the state and entered into a mediation and there is actually a form now on the the state division of elections website you can fill it out just ask am i eligible to vote and the state has a 90 days to tell you in concrete terms yes you are eligible to vote or no i just want to underscore there are thousands upon thousands upon probably hundreds of thousands of people that could put in these requests and um they haven't been putting in their requests i don't think a lot of people know that it exists. So this, if we go back to 2016 and 2017, as you chronicle in the book, this was purposely a nonpartisan issue. In fact, the organizers of this Amendment 4, as it

was called back then, really were publicly allergic to political endorsements. They banned politicians from speaking at any rallies. I mean, it was outright, I would call it transpartisan. It was not even bar partisan. It was all of the above. How did this become then a political issue after Floridians passed this with a pretty significant margin of victory? The Republican Party of Florida never took an issue on this. In fact, it had a lot of support from Republicans to get it across the line. There was over 65% of voters passed this, more than any politician in that election. By far the most popular thing on the ballot.

But in response to this, there was a very sharp partisan divide. Democrats, by and large, favored a more lenient process or a definition of what it means to complete the all turns of a sentence. And Republicans down the line chose essentially the most restrictive version of the definition of completing your sentence that they could. As I outline in the book, I'm not just saying this, there were many options on the table. They chose the most restrictive version of it that they possibly could. So coming out of that, it did become somewhat of a partisan issue. You write in the book, quote, Florida didn't have to be like this. It didn't have to reflect the worst cliches of the south of the thinly cloaked racism,

playing games with the right to political representation, the weaponization of the state bureaucracy. Where do you think the balance is between restoring the civil right of voting and ensuring election integrity? Frankly, I think voters said their piece on that. I mean, this effort to make these electoral reforms and bring people back into the fold was the backlash to what happened under the administration of Governor Rick Scott. And it was, I mean, I watched some of those meetings. It was painful to see how politicians treated people coming before them. This was the cabinet of Florida, the four individuals who had the power to restore a felon's voting rights.

Exactly. It was completely up to just personal opinion. There was no guardrails. There was no guidelines, et cetera. So people banded together, truly grassroots effort and said, let's take the politicians out of this. And, you know, after the fact, politicians found their way back into it. But it was really, I think voters and Floridians have largely spoken on that. So what about the journey of this effort to restore voting rights to most felons in Florida?

What does that tell us about voting rights here in the Sunshine State today? you know i think a lot of people wish it was something that was not political um because it's just do you have a voice in the political system or not but it is profoundly political and questions of everything about voting it's about the you know how many early election days you have are college campuses allowed to be used as polling locations um vote by mail vote by mail i mean these are These have all become very partisan issues. And we see that in the history of this issue. It's more or less depending on what administration,

what the political tone of the country is. These things ebb and flow back and forth. And it is extremely political, even though it's, you know, there is a perception for a lot of people that this mostly impacts black Americans, which means mostly Democrats. That is wrong.

Danny Rivera is the author of Just Freedom inside Florida's decades-long voting rights battle. He's also a colleague of mine at WLRN in Miami. And that is our program for today, produced by WLRN Public Media in Miami and WSF in Tampa by Bridget O'Brien and Denise Royal. WLRN's Vice President of Radio's Peter Merritt. The program's technical director is M.J. Smith,

engineering help each and every week from Doug Peterson and Ernesto J. Our theme music is provided by Miami Jazz guitarist, Aaron Libos, at Aaron Leibos.com. Thanks for listening. You can always email us radio at the Florida Rondup.org. I'm Tom Hudson. Have a terrific weekend. Support for Florida Roundup comes from the Everglades Foundation, working to restore and protect Florida's one trillion dollar asset

that helps to bring clean water to Floridians. Learn more at evergladesfoundation.org.