Ron is not a member of the Everglades Division.
Ron is the reason the Everglades Division exists.
Every file on every desk in the division traces
back to a decision Ron made, a law Ron signed,
or a right Ron took away. The Division does not
hate Ron. Hate is inefficient. They document Ron.
They organize against Ron. They turn out the vote
against Ron. And when Ron is finally gone, they
will still be here — because Florida’s problems
did not begin with Ron and will not end with him.
But he is the assignment. For now.

Ron’s medallion hangs on the wall of the
Division’s meeting room. Not as a trophy.
As a reminder of why they meet.

Bruno has been in the Florida wilderness longer
than most of the people trying to manage it.
He has watched his habitat shrink decade by
decade — not from natural causes but from
deliberate policy decisions made by people who
have never spent a night in a forest. He became
radicalized, as he puts it, the day he read the
fine print on a ballot initiative that had been
rewritten after it passed. He is the Division’s
loudest voice and its most visible presence —
which is both an asset and a liability, since
a 400-pound bear in a resistance meeting is
not easily overlooked. His cause is personal
freedom in all its forms: the right to make
your own choices about your own body without
the government deciding it knows better. He has
made this argument to three different state
legislators. None of them have called him back.
He is no longer waiting for a call back.

Dr. Claudette has a PhD in marine biology from
the University of Miami, which she earned in
the same year that a state legislator proposed
a bill she describes as “the single most
scientifically illiterate document ever printed
on official letterhead.” She has spent her
career defending evidence — not opinions about
evidence, not feelings about evidence, but the
documented, peer-reviewed, reproducible record
of what is actually true. She is the sharpest
mind at the table and the one most likely to
end a debate in two sentences. She has no
patience for misinformation and has developed
a system for dismantling it in public that is
so efficient it has been described by opponents
as “unfair.” She considers that a compliment.
She joined the Division because she understands
that science without political protection is
just data waiting to be ignored.

Valentina was born in Florida, which she points
out frequently to people who suggest she should
go back where she came from. She has been
visible her entire life — it is, she notes,
structurally unavoidable when you are a
six-foot-tall hot pink bird — and she made
a decision early on to make that visibility
mean something. She is the Division’s public
face, its most eloquent speaker, and the
operative most likely to be photographed at
a rally, a march, a school board meeting,
or a pride event in the same week. She has
been called every name. She has answered
every one of them with the same composure
and the same counter-argument, which she has
refined over years into something so precise
it has been described as a verbal scalpel.
She does not need a trench coat and fedora
to disappear into a crowd. She chooses to
stand in it instead.

Rex has been in Florida’s waterways for as long
as anyone can remember, which gives him a
perspective on what this state looked like before
the current administration decided to decide what its citizens were allowed to read. He is not an angry animal by nature. He is a patient one.
He waited thirty-seven years in the same stretch
of water, watching, until the day a school board
meeting agenda landed on the bank in front of
him — literally, carried by the wind — and he
read the list of books being removed and decided that patience had a limit. He maintains the Division’s library, which contains a copy of
every book that has been banned, challenged,
or removed from a Florida school or public
library since 2021. The collection currently
requires two rooms. He has kept the list.
He has read every book on it. He has thoughts.

Mae has watched the water temperature rise
every year for the last two decades. She has
watched the seagrass die. She has watched her
family lose members to boat strikes that stricter
regulations would have prevented. She does not
speak at high volume. She does not need to.
When Mae speaks at the division table, the room
goes very quiet, because Mae speaks from a place that nobody else at the table has access to — the direct, documented, lived experience of a
species whose existence is a real-time indicator
of how the ecosystem is doing. And the ecosystem is not doing well. She is the Division’s moral center, the one who brings every political
argument back to its physical consequence —
the water, the land, the air, the animals,
the children who will inherit whatever is left.
She has never raised her voice. She has never
needed to. The facts are loud enough.

Selene moves through the Florida wilderness
like a secret — which is how panthers have
always survived here. There are fewer than
two hundred of her kind left in the wild,
a fact she carries with her as both personal
history and political argument. She knows
what happens when a species loses control
of its own reproduction, its own habitat,
its own future — she is living it. She
joined the Division the day a piece of
legislation was signed that she describes
as “a declaration of war on every creature
in this state that has a body and isn’t
the one making the law.” She is the fastest
member of the Division and its most
dangerous. She does not announce herself.
She does not need to. She is already there
before anyone knows she is coming, and she
is already gone before anyone knows what
changed. What changed: everything she
touched on the way through.

Vega is an invasive species, and she knows it,
and she has made her peace with it, and she
has also made it her entire argument. She did
not choose to come to Florida. She was brought
here. She did not choose the conditions that
allowed her to thrive here. Those conditions
were created by human decisions. She is, in
every measurable sense, the living consequence
of unregulated introduction — the thing that
happens when you bring something dangerous into an ecosystem without thinking through what
comes next. She has been making this speech,
in various forms, at various public forums,
for three years. The irony is not subtle. She
does not make it subtle. She is the Division’s
most controversial member and its most
effective public communicator on the issue,
because her argument is not abstract. She
is the argument. She goes where others
cannot — she has a talent for appearing
in places where she was not expected and
is not easily removed.

Jimmy represents something the other Division
members sometimes forget: Florida is not only
its politics. Florida is its people — the
strange, sunburned, improbable, magnificent
chaos of people who ended up here for every
reason imaginable and stayed. Florida Man is
not a punchline. Florida Man is a symptom.
Of poverty, of inadequate mental health
resources, of a state that has always been
better at creating headlines than at taking
care of the people generating them. Jimmy is
the Division’s field operative and its street-
level intelligence source — he knows this state
from the water up, from the coast in, from the
parts of Florida that never appear in the
tourism brochures. He is unpredictable in
meetings, invaluable in the field, and the
only Division member who can get information
out of sources that nobody else can reach.
He is not always on time. He always shows up
exactly when needed. Nobody has explained
this satisfactorily, including Jimmy.