Images of orange groves and Spanish-themed hotels with palm tree gardens filled countless pamphlets and articles promoting Southern California and Florida in the late 19th century, promising escape from winter’s reach.

This vision of an “American Italy” captured hearts and imaginations across the U.S. In it, Florida and California promised a place in the sun for industrious Americans to live the good life, with the perfect climate.

But the very climates that made these semitropical playgrounds the American dream of the 20th century threaten to break their reputations in the 21st century.

In California, home owners now face dangerous heat waves, extended droughts that threaten the water supply, and uncontrollable wildfires. In Florida, sea level rise is worsening the risks of high-tide flooding and storm surge from hurricanes, in addition to turning up the thermostat on already humid heat. Global warming has put both Florida and California at the top of the list of states most at risk from climate change.

My books and research have explored how these two states were sold to the U.S. public like twin Edens. Today, descendants of those early waves of residents are facing a different world.

Selling semitropical climates

As railroads first reached Southern California and the Florida peninsula in the 1870s and 1880s, land, civic and newspaper boosters in each state worked to overturn beliefs that people only thrived in colder climes. In the decades after the Civil War, white Americans living in the North and Midwest had to be persuaded that sun-kissed climates would not do them more harm than good.

Employed by the transcontinental railroads, influential writers like Charles Nordhoff contested eastern notions of Southern California as barren desert where “Anglo-Americans” would inevitably succumb to the “disease” of laziness.

Challenging persistent ideas of a malarial swampland, promoters in Florida, including the state’s own Bureau of Immigration, similarly put a growing emphasis on climate as a vital resource for fruit growers and health seekers.

Climate became integral to California’s and Florida’s growing reputation as idealized U.S. destinations. Moreover, it was deemed unlike other natural assets: an inexhaustible resource.

Tourists and settlers gave weight to these claims. “The drawing card of Southern California,” a tourist from Chicago visiting Pasadena wrote in the Chicago Tribune in 1886, “is the beautiful, even climate.” Peninsula Florida was “blessed by nature with a semi-tropical climate,” a visitor wrote in the Atlanta Constitution in 1890. He saw its destiny to attract those who would “bask in the sunlight of a genial clime.”

This proved a compelling vision. In the 1880s, both Southern California and eastern Florida saw booms in settlement and tourism. Southern California’s population more than trebled during the decade to over 201,000, while peninsular Florida’s doubled to over 147,000.

Affluent white Americans weighed up the merits of each: for citrus-growing, winter recuperation, land investment. The differences were, of course, numerous. One state was western, the other southern; one more mountainous, the other flat. Some boosters critiqued their subtropical rival’s climate.

Southern California was too arid, a writer in the Florida Dispatch claimed, a desert “parched for want of water.” Florida, meanwhile, had too much of the stuff, editorials in California replied: a wetland fit for reptiles but potentially deadly to new residents who would wilt in its torrid summers.

Yet Southern California and Florida became connected through economic futures founded upon climate promotion and related industries of citrus, tourism and real estate. If rivals, they shared distinct market ambitions.

“California and Florida can [together] control the citrus trade,” the Los Angeles Times declared in 1885, arguing for mutual benefits in the promotion of oranges. The pair had much to gain from persuading Americans to eat their fruit.

Developers in both also changed the landscape by rerouting water to create communities in once-inhospitable places. In California, the spread of irrigation to turn “desert into garden” enabled the growth of citrus towns such as Riverside, while vast aqueducts conveyed water to thirsty cities like Los Angeles.

In Florida, flawed schemes sought to “reclaim” – essentially drain – wetlands, including the Everglades, where boosters like Walter Waldin sold Americans on a once-in-a-lifetime “opportunity to secure a home and a livelihood in this superb climate.”

An inexhaustible resource

The roaring ‘20s saw a new influx of sun-seeking, automobile-driving Americans drawn by boosters to the beaches and orange groves of Los Angeles County and South Florida.

Comparing Florida and California had become a national pastime as popular as mahjong and crossword puzzles, according to Robert Hodgson, a subtropical horticulturist at the University of California, in 1926.

Hodgson traveled to Florida to act as a judge at an agricultural show in Tampa where, the Los Angeles Times reported in a dig at Florida, he visited everything “from the dizziest pink stucco shore subdivision to the latest aspiring farming colony reclaimed from the alligators.”

Snipes aside, climate and the lifestyle they offered to middle-class Americans set Southern California and Florida apart. Hodgson wrote that they were similarly “blessed by the gods” through a “joint heritage of something like 90% of the subtropical climatic areas of the United States.”

Climate, moreover, was unlike other natural resources. Whereas precious metals or forests could be mined or cut down, climate was different: an infinite resource. It “can never be exhausted by man in his ignorance or cupidity,” he explained.

Climate as crisis

This history of climate-based advertising puts into stark relief the challenges faced by California and Florida in the era of climate crisis.

Today, both confront recurring natural disasters that are exacerbated by human-caused climate change: wildfires in California, hurricanes and flooding in Florida, and increasingly dangerous heat in both.

Extensive home-building in wildfire and coastal zones has compounded these risks, with insurance companies now refusing coverage for properties at risk of fires or storm damage, or making it prohibitively expensive.

Once marketed successfully as the United States’ two semitropical paradises, Southern California and Florida now share disturbing climate-influenced futures.

These futures bring into question how historic visions of economic growth and the sun-kissed good life that California and Florida have promised can be reconciled with climates that are no longer always genial or sustainable.

Henry Knight Lozano, Senior Lecturer in American History & Director of Liberal Arts, University of Exeter

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The U.S. government is investing over US$7 billion in the coming years to try to manage the nation’s escalating wildfire crisis. That includes a commitment to treat at least 60 million acres in the next 10 years by expanding forest-thinning efforts and controlled burns.

While that sounds like a lot – 60 million acres is about the size of Wyoming – it’s nowhere close to enough to treat every acre that needs it.

So, where can taxpayers get the biggest bang for the buck?

I’m a fire ecologist in Montana. In a new study, my colleagues and I mapped out where forest treatments can do the most to simultaneously protect communities – by preventing wildfires from turning into disasters – and also protect the forests and the climate we rely on, by keeping carbon out of the atmosphere and stored in healthy soils and trees.

Wildfires are becoming more severe

Forests and fires have always been intertwined in the West. Fires in dry conifer forests like ponderosa pine historically occurred frequently, clearing out brush and small trees in the understory. As a result, fires had less fuel and tended to stay on the ground, doing less damage to the larger, older trees.

That changed after European colonization of North America ushered in a legacy of fire suppression that wouldn’t be questioned until the 1960s. In the absence of fire, dry conifer forests accumulated excess fuel that now allows wildfires to climb into the canopy.

In addition to excess fuels, all forest types are experiencing hotter and drier wildfire seasons due to climate change. And the expanding number of people living in and near forests, and their roads and power lines, increases the risk of wildfire ignitions. Collectively, it’s not surprising that more area is burning at high severity in the West.

In response, the U.S. is facing increasing pressure to protect communities from high-severity wildfire, while also reducing the country’s impact on climate change – including from carbon released by wildfires.

High-risk areas that meet both goals

To find the locations with greatest potential payoff for forest treatments, we started by identifying areas where forest carbon is more likely to be lost to wildfires compared to other locations.

In each area, we considered the likelihood of wildfire and calculated how much forest carbon might be lost through smoke emissions and decomposition. Additionally, we evaluated whether the conditions in burned areas would be too stressful for trees to regenerate over time. When forests regrow, they absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and lock it away in their wood, eventually making up for the carbon lost in the fire.

In particular, we found that forests in California, New Mexico and Arizona were more likely to lose a large portion of their carbon in a wildfire and also have a tough time regenerating because of stressful conditions.

When we compared those areas to previously published maps detailing high wildfire risk to communities, we found several hot spots for simultaneously reducing wildfire risk to communities and stabilizing stored carbon.

Forests surrounding Flagstaff, Arizona; Placerville, California; Colorado Springs, Colorado; Hamilton, Montana; Taos, New Mexico; Medford, Oregon, and Wenatchee, Washington, are among locations with good opportunities for likely achieving both goals.

Why treating forests is good for carbon, too

Forest thinning is like weeding a garden: It removes brush and small trees in dry conifer forests to leave behind space for the larger, older trees to continue growing.

Repeatedly applying controlled burns maintains that openness and reduces fuels in the understory. Consequently, when a wildfire occurs in a thinned and burned area, flames are more likely to remain on the ground and out of the canopy.

Although forest thinning and controlled burning remove carbon in the short term, living trees are more likely to survive a subsequent wildfire. In the long term, that’s a good outcome for carbon and climate. Living trees continue to absorb and store carbon from the atmosphere, as well as provide critical seeds and shade for seedlings to regenerate, grow and recover the carbon lost to fires.

Of course, forest thinning and controlled burning are not a silver bullet. Using the National Fire Protection Agency’s Firewise program’s advice and recommended materials will help people make their properties less vulnerable to wildfires. Allowing wildfires to burn under safe conditions can reduce future wildfire severity. And the world needs to rapidly transition away from fossil fuels to curb climate change impacts that increase the risk of wildfires becoming community disasters.

Jamie Peeler, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Montana

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

There were reports at about 5:30 p.m. of a new spot fire starting in Anderson Creek near Anderson Marsh. Initial response led firefighters to believe that it was drift smoke.

However, after getting another report of a new fire in that area just after 5:40 p.m., a small vegetation was in fact found in Anderson Creek.

By 6:30 p.m., the evacuation order for the zone LOW-E169 in Lower Lake has been reduced to an evacuation warning. Evacuation warnings for LOW-E161, LOW-E163 and LOW-E167 were lifted.

Just before 8 p.m., the California Highway Patrol reported that the portion of Highway 29 in the fire area had been reopened, with work to continue overnight for dealing with hot spots and conducting mop up.

A movement to weaken American child labor protections at the state level began in 2022. By June 2023, Arkansas, Iowa, New Jersey and New Hampshire had enacted this kind of legislation, and lawmakers in at least another eight states had introduced similar measures.

The laws generally make it easier for kids from 14 to 17 years old to work longer and later – and in occupations that were previously off-limits for minors.

When Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signed her state’s new, more permissive child labor law on May 26, 2023, the Republican leader said the measure would “allow young adults to develop their skills in the workforce.”

As scholars of child labor, we find the arguments Reynolds and other like-minded politicians are using today to justify undoing child labor protections echo older justifications made decades ago.

Many conservatives and business leaders have long argued, based on a combination of ideological and economic grounds, that federal child labor rules aren’t necessary. Some object to the government determining who can’t work. Cultural conservatives say working has moral value for young people and that parents should make decisions for their children. Many conservatives also say that teens, fewer of whom are in the workforce today than in past decades, could help fill empty jobs in tight labor markets.

Opponents of child labor observe that when kids under 18 work long hours or do strenuous jobs, it can disrupt childhood development, interfere with their schooling and deprive them of the sleep they need. Expanding child labor can encourage kids to drop out of school and jeopardize young people’s health through injuries and work-related illnesses.

Long-brewing battle

Child labor protections, such as making many kinds of employment for children under 14 illegal and restricting the hours that teens under 18 can spend working, are guaranteed by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. U.S. law also does not treat 16- and 17-year-olds as adults. The federal government deems many occupations to be too hazardous for anyone under 18.

Until that law took effect, the lack of a federal standard always obstructed progress in the states toward keeping kids in school and out of mines, factories and other sometimes hazardous workplaces.

Three years after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld it in the U.S. v. Darby Lumber ruling, which toppled a related precedent.

Challenges began during the Reagan administration

There were no significant efforts to challenge child labor laws for the next four decades. In 1982, President Ronald Reagan sought to ease federal protections to allow 14- and 15-year-olds to work longer hours in fast-food and retail establishments and to pay young workers less than the minimum wage. A coalition of Democrats, labor unions, teachers, parents and child development groups blocked the proposed changes.

By the late 1980s, child labor violations were on the rise. Some industry groups tried to loosen restrictions in the 1990s, but legal changes were minimal.

A more ambitious attempt to roll back child labor laws in the early 2000s, led by a homeschooling group, ultimately failed, but conservatives continued to call for similar changes.

When former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was vying to become a 2012 Republican presidential nominee, he made headlines by calling child labor laws “truly stupid.” He suggested kids could work as janitors in schools.

Today, the Foundation for Government Accountability, a Florida-based think tank, is drafting state legislation to strip child labor protections, The Washington Post has reported. Its lobbying arm, the Opportunity Solutions Project, has been helping push these bills through state legislatures, including in Arkansas and Missouri.

Iowa and Arkansas

In our view, Iowa has the most radical new law designed to roll back child labor protections. It allows children as young as 14 to work in meat coolers and industrial laundries, and teens 15 and older can work on assembly lines around dangerous machinery.

Teens as young as 16 can now serve alcohol in Iowa restaurants, as long as two adults are present.

U.S. Labor Department officials argue that several provisions of Iowa’s new law violate national child labor standards. However, the department has not disclosed a clear strategy for combating such violations.

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed her state’s Youth Hiring Act of 2023 in March. It eliminated work permits for 14- and 15-year-olds.

Previously, employers had to keep a work certificate on file that required proof of age, a description of the work and schedule – and the written consent of a parent or guardian.

Arkansas has scrapped those safeguards against child labor exploitation. We find it puzzling that supporters touted the bill as enhancing parental rights because the law removes any formal role for parents in balancing their kids’ education and employment.

Federal vs. state laws

You may wonder how states can undermine federal child labor laws. Doesn’t federal law preempt state laws?

Both federal and state laws govern the employment of minors, and all states have compulsory school attendance laws. Federal laws set a floor of regulations in youth employment that cover maximum hours, minimum ages, wages and protections from hazardous jobs.

If states pass tougher laws, as many have, the stricter standards govern workplace practices. School attendance requirements vary by state, but once someone turns 18, they’re no longer covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act’s restrictions.

Federal law, for example, does not require minors to obtain work permits or employment certificates, but most states mandate such documentation.

With the exception of New Jersey, these efforts to weaken child labor laws are being led by Republicans.

To be sure, some states are still attempting to strengthen child labor protections.

Democrats in Colorado introduced a bill that would allow injured children to sue employers for child labor violations. Gov. Jared Polis signed it into law on June 7, 2023.

Having child labor laws on the books at both the federal and state levels is only half the battle. Enforcement is another matter. Many violations in recent years have involved children who immigrated to the United States without their parents, only to wind up working long hours, sometimes in dangerous jobs, at young ages.

Construction sites?

Other states are trying to weaken protections. Ohio state lawmakers want to allow 14- and 15-year-olds to work until 9 p.m. during the school year with their parents’ permission, even though federal regulations don’t allow teens that age to work past 7 p.m.

Some states are considering legislation that directly conflicts with federal child labor standards on hazardous occupations. For example, a bill Republican Minnesota state Sen. Rich Draheim introduced would allow 16- and 17-year-olds to work in or around construction sites.

Strong opposition from politicians, child advocacy groups, education associations, labor unions and the public has defeated some of these efforts.

Georgia Republicans introduced a bill that would have eliminated work permits for minors, but they withdrew it without a vote. And Republican lawmakers in South Dakota sponsored a bill to extend working hours for children 14 and under from 7 p.m. to 9 pm. It was withdrawn as well.

In Wisconsin, Gov. Tony Evers vetoed a bill in 2022 that would have let teens work longer and later. In 2023, some Wisconsin lawmakers are trying again. They want to let 14-year-olds serve alcohol.

Taking aim at federal rules

There are some national efforts to weaken – or strengthen – child labor rules as well.

Rep. Dusty Johnson, a South Dakota Republican, seeks to revise federal regulations to permit 14- and 15-year-olds to work until 9 p.m. on school nights and up to 24 hours per week during the school year. We don’t expect his bill to pass in today’s divided Congress.

There’s also a push in the House and the Senate to let 16- and 17-year-olds work in logging operations with parental supervision.

And yet there’s also support in Congress to increase penalties for child labor violations. Currently, the maximum such fine is $15,138 per child. Pending bills in the House and Senate would increase the penalty to nearly 10 times that amount if enacted.

And several Democrats have introduced measures to strengthen federal child labor restrictions, especially in agriculture.

With so many states seeking weaker child labor protections, we believe a federal-state showdown over the question of whether young people in the United States belong in the workforce is inevitable.

John A. Fliter, Associate Professor of Political Science, Kansas State University and Betsy Wood, Assistant Professor of American History, Bard College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.