Mega malls, nuking Iran’s deal and plastic pollution

Mall overload

Including a tower in plans for America’s largest mall, to be built right here in South Florida, doesn’t make enough of an architectural statement.

Instead, the entire mega mall proposed near the edge of the Everglades should be built in the shape of a giant, extended middle finger.

That’s the real message this enormous retail folly sends. It’s a monument to the notion that we will build whatever we want, wherever we want, no matter the consequences.

Plans call for American Dream Miami to rise from about 175 acres near where I-75 converges with Florida’s Turnpike, just south of the Broward County line.

It was one thing to drain half of the Everglades through the decades to make way for farming and South Florida’s out-ofcontrol development. At least we got food and places to live as a tradeoff for wrecking the River of Grass.

But now we are going to take land that used to be part of the Everglades to build a mall complex big enough for an indoor ski slope. And a waterpark. And a submarine ride.

At a time when online shopping is shuttering other malls across the country, American Dream Miami developers say more people will flock to their mall each year than Disney World’s Magic Kingdom. Seems like economic Fantasy Land.

And what if they do? Mall backers expect 30 million visitors a year. How will South Florida’s already-clogged roads handle this influx of snow-skiing shoppers?

Broward officials have raised traffic concerns, but that didn’t stop MiamiDade’s planning advisory board from giving its thumbs-up to the project this week. The Miami-Dade County Commission could give its blessing on May 17.

It’s hard for Broward to shake its finger at its neighbors to the south for allowing over-the-top building plans on the edge of the Everglades.

A drive along the Sawgrass Expressway, with the Everglades on one side and sprawling neighborhoods on the other, takes you past a hockey arena as well as the Sawgrass Mills mall.

American Dream Miami is just a bigger, badder incarnation of the middle finger South Florida development has been shooting at the Everglades for decades.

Developers will keep angling to use every bit of land left east of what remains of the Everglades, even as they keep trying to push that dividing line farther into the struggling swamp. We have to snow ski somewhere.

Trump’s Iran gamble

President Donald Trump’s Nobel Peace Prize campaign didn’t last long.

Just days after Trump’s diplomatic progress with North Korea had some suggesting he should be in the running for a peace prize, the president decided to stir up trouble with Iran.

Someone must have told Trump that President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. And winning one of those can’t be part of Trump’s presidential to-do list, which calls for doing the opposite of all things Obama.

Trump on Tuesday withdrew the U.S. from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal — opting for imposing economic sanctions instead of sticking with Obama-era restrictions and inspections aimed at keeping Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

To Trump, scrapping a peace deal is no different than gutting environmental regulations or trying to torpedo health care reforms. Trump will probably even find a way to change the birth certificate that launched his political career.

Yes, scrapping the Iran deal was one of Trump’s campaign promises.

But he’s had two years on the job to learn that what plays well to a red-hatwearing campaign crowd isn’t always the right thing to do for national security.

Leaving the Iran deal in place wouldn’t have hurt his standing with the Don’t-Tread-On-Me Trump loyalists. After all, Trump hasn’t managed to collect that wall-building check from Mexico and his crowds still show up to cheer.

Boycotting plastic bags

Forget sea turtles, pelicans and dolphins. The same kind of plastic bags polluting the oceans might be trying to kill me, too.

An avalanche of these unwanted shopping trip souvenirs come tumbling down on me whenever I mistakenly open the wrong kitchen cabinet.

And big plastic bags stuffed with dozens of smaller plastic bags are filling the back of my car to near blind-spot proportions — more likely to decompose before ever making it to the recycling drop-off bins back at the store from whence they came.

Yes, it’s troubling that plastic bags are polluting the seas — creating floating islands of waste and killing marine creatures that mistake bags for food or get tangled in the mess.

A study this year out of Florida State University even found that tiny pieces of plastic are mixing into the sand on Gulf Coast beaches, raising temperatures and causing other problems that threaten the nesting of endangered sea turtles.

Of course I’m concerned about a proliferation of plastic adding to the mess man made of the oceans. But now these bags are imperiling my personal environment and it’s time for action.

So I’m giving up plastic bags — at least for a month.

If I start with just the month of May, maybe I can teach myself to break away forever from this plastic menace foisted upon me at the end of every checkout line.

I already use reusable grocery bags when I remember to bring them. Now, to try to turn the tide on plastic, I will simply refuse to walk out of the store with any bags that won’t decompose before I do.

Hopefully my temporary plastic bag boycott will lead to a lifetime of change. If not, at least I can give myself — and the sea turtles — a month-long reprieve from plastic-induced extinction.

Building a giant mall near the Everglades, President Trump scrapping the Iran nuclear deal and boycotting plastic bags are topics from The Buzz that had South Florida talking this week.