Florida’s new tourism supremo has vowed to take full advantage of a massive $2.5billion initiative to attack the causes of the “red tide” that blighted major parts of the Sunshine State’s coast in 2018, and implement a new focus on the environment under her leadership.
Dana Young is the first woman to take the reins as CEO of official tourism marketing corporation Visit Florida, and her appointment by new governor Ron DeSantis represents a major change in both the politics and the thinking of the state’s senior figures.
Environmental programmes had been allowed to lapse under previous governor – and fellow Republican – Rick Scott, and became a hot-button topic last year when Florida suffered the worst outbreak of the toxic red algae in history, affecting more than 200 miles of coastline, closing some of the most popular beaches and devastating local businesses.
The outbreak coincided with a damaging rise in the equally dangerous blue-green algae along the rivers and inland waterways that is linked to industrial and farming contaminants, creating a ‘perfect storm’ of ecological calamity.
Now Young, 54, claims that the governor’s new Order, which creates a taskforce to combat the blue-green algae as well as an Office of Environmental Accountability, gives her the green light to promote an eco-friendly agenda, using her background as an environmental lawyer with a long-running commitment to ban fracking in the state.
Speaking at a press conference during the annual Visit Florida travel convention in Daytona Beach, she explained: “My family has been here for six generations and, from my personal knowledge of Florida, if we are not looking after the natural environment and we don’t have open, clean water, no-one is coming here, not on vacation, not to do business, not to move here permanently.
Young’s bullish approach to environmental concerns is in stark contrast to previous state government guidelines, which had refused to acknowledge the impacts of climate change even though some areas, notably in and around Miami, are already seeing the effects of rising sea levels.
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