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Vulnerability And Power: Exploring The Confluence Of Politics And Climate Change In Cortez, Florida, Justin P. Winn

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis describes how politics shape vulnerability to climate change at the local level, based on an ethnography in Cortez, Florida. Focusing on a “traditional” commercial fishing village on the Florida Gulf Coast, my research indicates that such vulnerabilities are created at multiple scales of the nexus between governance and commerce. Moreover, a key finding is that, as a community closely linked to the health of local environments, the village in Cortez is largely organized to protect their commercial industry from regional economic overdevelopment; not in recognition of its role in contributing to global climate change, but because such overdevelopment …