Welcome back, Gov. DeSantis! Now how about helping Florida’s environment?

Welcome back to Tallahassee! You were just here — briefly — for your State of the State speech, but it feels like a lot longer since we’ve seen you around. Probably, it’s because you’ve been out of state campaigning for president ever since your “book tour.”

Well, that’s all over now. You got your butt kicked but good, you’ve abandoned the campaign trail, and your book is selling for half off. A year ago, who’d have thought your apparently surefire presidential bid would be undermined by talk about how you eat pudding, whether you wear lifts in your fancy boots, and why you have such an awkwardly robotic laugh?

The result is not just that you wasted millions in donor and taxpayer money to go from Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down” to Beck’s “Loser.” You’re also a LOT less popular than before, both nationally and, more importantly, in Florida.

Don’t panic! I have some suggestions to revive your sagging popularity with Florida’s 22 million residents.

These ideas are all related to helping the environment, a cause you once supported. Then you dropped it like it was a vice-presidential offer from Vivek Ramaswamy. You shouldn’t have.

Nikki Haley accused you of being an environmentalist, like that’s a bad thing. Instead of denying that label, you should declare it to be true.

Here’s why: Whenever some environmental issue is on the ballot in Florida, the voters all go gaga for it. The environment is as popular in this state as Taylor Swift and Beyonce combined — which means it’s waaaay more popular than you.

If you take my advice, some of that popularity will rub off on you.

Now this list of suggestions did not spring from my feeble brain. I consulted experts on Florida’s environmental crises, of which we have quite a lot right now. Perhaps, with your remaining three years in office, you can bring our state through a few.

First, I recommend you end the longest running environmental dispute in Florida history — the one over the Kirkpatrick Dam and Rodman Reservoir.

Tear down this dam!

There’s a lot of competition for “The Worst Idea Ever in Florida.” Radioactive roads! An airport built in the Everglades! Sacrificing the Fenholloway River for a paper mill that’s now closed!

My nominee for No. 1 in idiocy is the Cross-Florida Barge Canal.

In the 1960s, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (official slogan: “We Can Fix What Nature Did Wrong”) decided to build the canal to give ships a way to slice straight across Florida rather than go all the way around the Keys.

The fact that it would also cut into the Floridan Aquifer and make the state’s primary source of drinking water a salty mess was conveniently filed under the heading of “eggs broken while making omelet.”

Before environmental activists persuaded President Richard Nixon to shut the canal construction down, the Corps built what was originally known as the 7,200-foot-long Rodman Dam in 1968, halting the flow of the wild Ocklawaha River.

The dam remains to this day, inundating 9,000 acres of the Ocala National Forest, smothering 20 natural springs, and blocking migrating manatees and other marine life from traveling up and down the river.

Some very stubborn lawmakers have thwarted every effort to remove it because, they say, the stump-filled reservoir is a fine place to catch a bass. They value their own angling over what’s best for the ecosystem.

One such lawmaker, the late state Sen. George Kirkpatrick, was so pigheaded in defending the river blockade that the dam now bears his name — a dubious honor indeed. (Just ask Herbert Hoover how much prestige there is in having a dam with your name on it.)

A group called Florida Defenders of the Environment, launched by canal opponent Marjorie Harris Carr, has been fighting for decades to knock down the dam, so far with no success.

“This has always been an issue that Florida’s governor must champion to make forward progress,” Jim Gross, their executive director, told me this week in an email. “Whereas every Florida governor from Reubin Askew (1971-1979) to Charlie Crist (2007-2011) supported restoration of a free-flowing Ocklawaha River, Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis have been entirely silent on this matter.”

Time to change that, Mr. D!

You know how Ronald Reagan stood in front of the Berlin Wall and said, “Tear down this wall”? You should call a press conference in front of the Kirkpatrick Dam and tell the Legislature, “Tear down this dam!”

Who knows? Maybe they’ll listen. After all, as soon as you said you’d veto any effort to use Florida taxpayer money to pay Donald “Nikki Haley Is the New Pelosi” Trump’s hefty legal bills, the sponsor announced she’d withdraw the bill.

All right, moving on. Let’s talk more about manatees.

Let the manatees eat!

Few animals are as emblematic of Florida’s distinctive flora and fauna as the manatee.

Each one is as big as a Volkswagen, with tough skin and brittle bones that are easily shattered by a collision with a speeding boat. We had a nice-sized population of them until a couple of years ago, when thousands died of starvation.

The seagrass they eat had been wiped out by toxic algae blooms that were fed by polluted stormwater runoff. This was something that took years to build up, but it happened on your watch, Mr. D.

And it happened after you’d promised in 2018 to fix Florida’s recurrent toxic algae problem. This still stands as one of your worst political betrayals.

You appointed a panel of distinguished scientists who made a number of well-considered recommendations to clean up Florida’s waterways. Then you ignored 87% of those recommendations — and manatees died.

Time for you to fix that!

The Clearwater Marine Aquarium is about to open a new treatment center for ailing manatees. You attend that opening and cut the ribbon. Then, while posing with one of the beloved sea cows, you announce that you are immediately issuing an executive order to enact all the rest of your task force’s recommendations.

Is that legal? Well, that’s something you’ve never seemed too concerned about when passing all your culture war stuff, monkeying with the election district maps and removing elected prosecutors. Why start now?

I should add, by the way, that this would enable you to stop paying millions of tax dollars to that Israeli company you hired to dump hydrogen peroxide in the water to make the toxic algae blooms go away. The blooms come back, forcing the company to repeatedly re-treat the waters with a chemical that may cause harm to birds and other wildlife.

Now that you’ve helped the manatees, how about tossing a lifeline to our state animal?

Protect the panther

An Orlando Sentinel columnist claimed this week that we could chart the downfall of your campaign as starting with that bizarre ad that claimed that God made you on the eighth day of creation. To be honest, that ad sounded to me like you were a mere afterthought for the Almighty, which I don’t think was your intention.

Anyway, my point is: You know what else God made? Florida panthers. In fact, Florida’s Native American inhabitants were so impressed that they called them “the Cat of God.”

Unlike us schlubby humans, they’re sleek and magnificent creatures. They are also, as I mentioned, our official state animal. And they’re featured on one of our most popular specialty license plates, which says “Protect the Panther.”

But we’re not protecting the panthers. They’re in deep trouble because of a couple of proposed developments that would wipe out a huuuuuge chunk of their habitat.

One development is a new city called “Kingston,” whose owner wants to build 10,000 homes, a hotel, and other businesses in a section of Lee County that’s supposed to be kept at a low density for groundwater recharge.

The other, known as “Bellmar,” is one part of a new city, a village that will plop 8,600 new residents on land that’s virtually next door to the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge.

According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, these two projects are expected to produce traffic that results in the deaths of 25 panthers per year. Bear in mind that there are now no more than about 200 total. You don’t have to be a math genius to see the problem here.

One thing only stands in their way. They need your Department of Environmental “Protection” (there are those air quotes again) to issue them federal wetlands destruction permits.

You pushed for your DEP to take over issuing those federal permits. Now, as everyone feared, your DEP has been handing them out with all the thoughtful moderation of the frat boys of “Animal House” handing out drinks at a toga party.

As a result, it seems unlikely they will say no to these projects, no matter how deadly they may be for our state animal.

This is where you swoop in to save the day, Super-guv!

You call a press conference at the entrance to the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge. Maybe even see if you can borrow a captive panther from the Naples Zoo as a prop. Then you announce that you have directed the DEP to deny those developers their wetlands permits.

This will not be easy for you, considering you’ve spent your entire time in office granting every developers’ wish as if they’re Aladdin and you’re their personal genie.

But this time, you have to say no.

And then, to lessen the sting of the denial, you say the state will offer to buy the land so it can become part of the Florida Wildlife Corridor. Then you pose for a photo next to the panther. (Make sure you smile more naturally than you did in Iowa.)

It’s a win-win!

Now let’s move on to the last step in the rehabilitation of your popularity. That’s the good news. The bad news: It involves your “pals” in the Legislature. Whoops, there go the air quotes!

Beat the heat

While “book-touring” and campaigning you’ve repeatedly called us “the Free State of Florida.” But it sure doesn’t feel all that free when you and your buddies in the Legislature repeatedly overturn something local government and its voters want. And y’all have been doing that a LOT.

You junked a popular citizen referendum in Key West that called for restrictions on cruise ship traffic there (after you received a million-dollar campaign contribution from the operator of the cruise ship pier, I might add).

You prohibited cities from banning sunscreens that could hurt the coral reefs, hacked away at city tree ordinances, limited local impact fees on development that would pay for the infrastructure to keep up with the development, and blocked local governments from making investment decisions based on what would be good for the environment.

You even signed into law a bill that prevents local governments from blocking utilities from using whatever fuel sources they’d like, regardless of potential environmental impacts or costs to consumers.

And when there was a fertilizer-fueled sneak attack on fertilizer sales bans by local governments, you didn’t bat an eye. You were fine with that too.

In other words, at every turn, you and our fine lawmakers have hamstrung city and county officials in ways that benefit polluters and developers.

The trend continues this year with bills such as HB 433 and SB 1492. These two bills would prevent cities and counties from enacting rules that protect workers from extreme heat such as we saw this past summer.

These bills are a perfect example of legislative overkill. Only one Florida county, Miami-Dade, has proposed such a heat protection ordinance for outdoor workers. When homebuilders and agricultural interests objected to it, the county commission shelved it until March.

If you want to regain some of your popularity, you need to rein in your buddies from their local government preemption crusade. You need to announce your opposition to this bill — and your support for a STATEWIDE heat protection ordinance.

And you can explain that you are in favor of this because you now realize — as you said while vying for votes out west — that climate change is real. Only a fool would acknowledge climate change and then refuse to do anything about the impact on humans.

The lawmakers who endorsed Trump right away may not listen to you. And the ones who supported you and were chagrined when you dropped out may not support you, either.

But as we saw with your smart move on the bid to pay the legal bills for the probable GOP presidential nominee-slash-criminal defendant, you have the perfect response.

You can offer them a robotic smile and then threaten them with your veto pen. You can promise to veto not only this bill but also any of their take-home prizes from the state budget.

So that’s my list of ideas to resuscitate your popularity in Florida.

Your former donors and your political appointees (pretty much the same people) won’t like it. But the voters will. And isn’t that the point of all this? So you can someday run for something else so you can get out of Tallahassee?

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