What these hurricanes are telling us

We are riveted to images of the hurricane’s victims hauled by choppers from rooftops because we are as amazed by the ways life carries us away as we are by salvation. Hurricanes are never just about hurricanes.
They are also about communities pulling together and neighbors reconnecting. In time, what was torn down is rebuilt, often with a keener eye for opportunity in its garish forms. People go their own way. And the hurricanes come again.

Arthur Teele, environment linked in struggle

When Arthur E. Teele, once the most powerful elected official in Florida’s largest county, committed suicide last week, a shock wave pulsed through Miami, where he had served as chairman of the county commission and, later, as a city commissioner.

An African-American and Republican (he served in the Reagan administration as an undersecretary of transportation), Teele was a brilliant tactician with poor eyesight who saw into every corner of Miami politics.

In the end, a maze of debt and financial difficulties enmeshed him in a very ordinary way. But Teele was not an ordinary man. He will be remembered in sadness—and in one way that has not been remarked: for what he might have meant for the environment.