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A Life on Our Planet is Sir David Attenborough's latest documentary about his amazing life and career documentary the extraordinary diversity of life on our planet, the severe degradation caused by human development and exploitation, and his hope and exhortation for our future. Below is a trailer for the documentary - the full documentary is only available to view on Netflix.

For more information, visit Attenborough's website at https://attenboroughfilm.com.

Florida’s insurance crisis is the canary in the coal mine. This election will shape what comes next.

Florida may be 'first and worst' into this mess, but sea level rise and worsening storms are coming for all coastal states.

I represent Rhode Island in the Senate, so why am I writing this in Florida? Because you are our preview of coming attractions. What’s happening in Florida will come soon enough to other coastal states, like Rhode Island.

As chair of the Senate Budget Committee, I’ve called expert witnesses who testified about the property insurance death spiral: First, climate conditions become so dramatic and unpredictable that insurance markets are clobbered. Then, when insurance becomes unavailable or unaffordable, mortgage and property markets get hit. Finally, you get what the former chief economist for mortgage giant Freddie Mac predicted: a coastal property values crash. He warned that it will be "systemic" — like the 2008 mortgage meltdown that ravaged the whole economy.

This warning probably seems familiar. On a recent visit to the Sunshine State, I heard from many of you that your home insurance rates have tripled or quadrupled. Many of you have had insurance companies deny you coverage, go bankrupt or pull out of Florida entirely. Many of you wonder if whatever insurer you’re left with will actually pay claims. Florida’s insurance crisis has begun to cascade into homeowners unable to find buyers, or having to reduce selling prices to unload a risk-burdened property.

Florida may be "first and worst" into this mess, but sea level rise, warming oceans and worsening storms — which delivered the one-two punch of Milton and Helene — are coming for all coastal states. And right beside the coastal property insurance crisis, there’s emerged a parallel wildfire property insurance crisis — the evil upland twin of what coastal states face, already affecting insurance markets out West.

This isn’t going to get better unless we change course. Fossil fuel emissions have put us on an unavoidable near-term trajectory of greater risk: more sea level rise, more heat into our oceans, more storm risk and damage. That means the insurance-mortgage-property value crash problem will get worse unless we change the trajectory and stop the nonsense about denying climate change and obstructing solutions. Climate solutions are there, and they are clear and obvious. It’s a matter of will and politics — against a lot of fossil fuel industry money.

Click here to read the full commentary.

The rise of flesh-eating bacteria is a true Florida horror story

Climate change is spreading the deadly organism, but our governor and Legislature couldn’t be bothered

Happy Halloween, everybody! In the spirit of this day for spirits, let me confess to you one of my greatest fears, the thing that haunts my nightmares:

Vibrio vulnificus.

In the logical part of my brain, I know that Vibrio is a minor concern compared to other life-threatening things we constantly face here, like lightning strikes (we’re No. 1 in the U.S. for those) or shark bites (we’re No. 1 in the world — sorry, Australia.).

But every time I see a headline about Vibrio — commonly called "flesh-eating bacteria" — I can’t help but shudder. It conjures up images from "Night of the Living Dead," with zombies (sloooowly) walking the earth, their skin falling off.

Now it turns out we’re No. 1 in this, too.

"In the U.S., Florida has the highest number of vibriosis cases, and most infections are reported in the summer months when water temperatures are the warmest and rainfall is the highest," a publication called The Scientist reported last week.

Flooding from hurricanes provides the perfect brackish habitat for the bacteria. Shortly after Helene and Milton hit, The Scientist reported, the Florida Department of Health disclosed "an increase in cases of vibriosis. … As of October 25, 2024, there have been 77 cases and 15 deaths, up from 46 cases and 11 deaths in 2023."

USA Today confirms this: "Florida has seen a surge of flesh-eating bacteria cases in recent weeks after parts of the state were inundated with heavy rain and flooding due to back-to-back hurricanes, according to state health department data."

That story noted how deadly the infections can be: "About one in five people die from this infection, sometimes within one to two days of becoming ill."

But wait, I haven’t told you the scariest part yet.

Click here to read the full commentary.

Vast taxpayer subsidies enable development on Florida's fragile coasts

A more rational public policy would demand that people who build on a shoreline assume more responsibility for the risks

Gov. Ron DeSantis cites historical "precedent" to dismiss climate change. His reasoning: Florida has always had hurricanes and always will have hurricanes.

Here are two precedents that seem relevant.

To free up vast expanses of "fabulous muck" for farming, Gov. Napoleon Bonaparte Broward began to drain the Everglades.

And after hurricanes killed thousands, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built a dike around Lake Okeechobee to render its shores safe for human habitation.

Both projects — carried out at enormous public expense — did what they were intended to do. Agriculture is a huge South Florida industry, and farms, towns and suburbs have taken root on one-time Okeechobee flood plains.

But both of those projects, inevitably, have had costly negative consequences that continue to haunt us today.

Broward’s folly forever interrupted the natural flow of Florida’s River of Grass, creating so many water quality and quantity problems that billions of dollars are still being spent on 'Glades restoration.

And the Herbert Hoover Dike turned Okeechobee into an algae-clogged cesspool, whose tainted waters must periodically be released — lest the levees burst — into rivers that carry its pollution toward both coasts.

I bring up these precedents to point out the fallacy of DeSantis’ insistence that it is not government’s role to restrict coastal development.

This after hurricanes Helene and Milton — supercharged by increasingly warmer Gulf waters — destroyed or damaged countless homes, condos and businesses up and down the west coast.

DeSantis told reporters "people work their whole lives and work hard to be able to live in environments that are really, really nice, and they have a right to make those decisions with their property as they see fit."

The problem is that the ability of individuals to exercise their private property rights the length and breadth of Florida’s fragile coasts could not exist without the backing of vast taxpayer subsidies.

Click here to read the full commentary.

Federal judge backs the EPA in a Florida water quality dispute

In a case that started after a dramatic increase in manatee deaths, a federal judge has rejected a lawsuit aimed at requiring the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to take another look at water-quality standards in the Indian River Lagoon.

U.S. District Judge Carlos Mendoza last week issued a 23-page decision that sided with the EPA in a lawsuit filed in 2022 by the Save the Manatee Club, the Center for Biological Diversity and Defenders of Wildlife.

The lawsuit came after a record 1,100 manatees died in 2021 in Florida, many because a lack of seagrass — a key food source — led to starvation. The most deaths, 358, were in Brevard County, which includes a large part of the Indian River Lagoon.

The environmental groups, represented by the Earthjustice legal organization, sought to require the EPA to undertake what is known as “consultation” with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service about water-quality standards in the lagoon. That would include looking again at standards approved in 2013.

Florida developed the standards, which needed approval from the EPA under the federal Clean Water Act, Mendoza wrote.

Click here to read the full story.

Politicians must wake up to the economic realities of disasters like Hurricane Helene

The government ends up paying billions of dollars. Here’s a better way.

Climate change is real, and its effect on life, safety and property are tragically apparent. Politicians who deny this aren’t engaging in legitimate debate; they’re wasting our time.

As the headlines from Hurricane Helene are appropriately focused on the immeasurable loss of life and entire communities, there will also be a measurable economic loss. In states like Florida and others where lawmakers and governors have played the denial game and failed to address the root cause of much of our devastation, it’s time for voters to demand something better, something smarter. The same holds true of policymakers in Washington.

From hurricanes in the South to wildfires in the West, ice storms in the North, flooding in the Plains, tornados, droughts and other natural disasters, Congress always responds with billions of taxpayer dollars in financial relief to communities. As private markets fail, the government steps in. The financial repetition raises the question of whether this is the most efficient way to govern our responses. It seems not.

Click here to read the full story.

Unprecedented Numbers of Florida Manatees Have Died in Recent Years. New Habitat Protections Could Help Them

The critical habitat in the state would expand to nearly 2 million acres in the first update since the West Indian manatee was protected under the Endangered Species Act in 1976.

ORLANDO, Fla.—The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service this week proposed expanding habitat protections for ailing manatees, which in Florida have suffered in recent years through extraordinary habitat challenges that have left the sea cows emaciated and dying.

The update to the manatee’s critical habitat would be the first since the animal was protected under the Endangered Species Act in 1976, according to the Center for Biological Diversity, one of three conservation groups that brought a lawsuit to pressure the federal agency to take action. Critical habitat is a legal term encompassing waterways considered vital to the manatee’s recovery. The West Indian manatee, of which the Florida manatee is a subspecies, was downlisted in 2017 from endangered to threatened.

Nearly 2,000 manatees died in Florida in 2021 and 2022—a two-year record. The calamity prompted wildlife agencies to go so far as to provide supplemental lettuce for starving manatees in the 156-mile Indian River Lagoon on the state’s east coast, where water quality problems have led to widespread seagrass losses. Conservation groups said the deaths represented more than 20 percent of the state’s population. This year more than 130 manatee calves have died in the state.

The proposal would expand the manatee’s critical habitat in Florida to nearly 2 million acres and establish new critical habitat in Puerto Rico spanning 78,000 acres. Notably, the proposal for the first time emphasizes the significance of habitat features such as seagrass and natural warm-water sites, said Ragan Whitlock, staff attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity.

Click here to read the full story and view maps showing critical habitat areas.

Feds Urge Sending Back Florida Wetlands Case

TALLAHASSEE — In a case closely watched by Florida businesses and environmental groups, the Biden administration Monday argued that a dispute about permitting authority for projects that affect wetlands should go back to a federal district judge.

Attorneys for the U.S. Department of Justice and other agencies contended in a 66-page appeals-court brief that U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss made errors this year when he vacated a 2020 decision by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that shifted permitting authority from federal officials to Florida.

But the brief also conceded that the EPA had erred by failing to consult with another agency, the National Marine Fisheries Service, before approving the permitting shift.

As a result, the Biden administration argued that the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia should send the case back to Moss. If that occurs, Florida could continue to be stripped of the permitting authority until the issues are resolved, according to the brief.

The EPA approved the transfer of the permitting authority to Florida in December 2020, about a month before former President Donald Trump’s administration ended. The move made Florida only the third state, after Michigan and New Jersey, to receive the authority, which involves dredge-and-fill permits.

Click here to read the full story.

Whistleblower who warned about Florida state parks fired by state agency

The employee’s dismissal letter, shared with the Tampa Bay Times, said he released ‘unauthorized’ information to the public.

James Gaddis had just returned home Saturday afternoon when he found a dismissal letter waiting on his Tallahassee townhouse’s doorstep.

The former two-year Florida Department of Environmental Protection employee told the Tampa Bay Times he was the one who leaked information about the state’s plans to build golf courses, 350-room hotels, pickleball courts and more at nine state parks, including two in the Tampa Bay area.

Now, the agency appears to be firing him, according to a copy of the letter shared with the Times.

Gaddis, 41, who was hired by the agency as a cartographer, said his actions weren’t political, and that there were two main reasons he chose to speak out: The rushed secrecy that was behind the park plans, and the vast environmental destruction that would be caused if they were to be completed.

"It was the absolute flagrant disregard for the critical, globally imperiled habitat in these parks," Gaddis said in an interview Tuesday morning. Gaddis said he was tasked with making the proposed conceptual land use maps that depicted the golf courses and other developments. Two proposals were especially egregious in his eyes: The Jonathan Dickinson State Park golf course, and the 350-room hotel at Anastasia State Park.

"This was going to be a complete bulldozing of all of that habitat," Gaddis said.

Click here to read the full story.

Will one invasive lizard eating another in Florida make West Nile, similar diseases worse?

Can one Florida invasive lizard preying on another that doesn't belong here lead to more mosquito bites and dangerous viruses for us all? Researchers suspect the answer might be 'yes.'

Invasive brown anoles inflict their own ills on our ecosystems. For one, this Cuban native nudges out native lizards. But when mosquitoes fill up on brown anole blood — as those wily little lizards sleep — the skeeters don't feed as much on us. So ostensibly, the risk of infecting us with West Nile or some other potentially deadly virus decreases.

Enter Peter's rock agama, now established in Brevard and 19 other Florida counties: This agama, from Africa, may slowly be wiping out the brown anole, making mosquitoes look for new blood meals — like us.

"Any time a mosquito bites a lizard, it doesn’t bite a bird or a human," said Nathan Burkett-Cadena, associate professor at University of Florida's medical entomology lab in Vero Beach. "This could result in fewer cases of mosquito-borne disease, because birds are natural hosts of some dangerous mosquito-transmitted viruses."

The study he's leading is one of seven projects funded by a $350,000 grant from UF’s Invasion Science Research Institute. The researchers are looking into critical ecological impacts of the Peters’s rock agama.

"It’s possible that brown anole lizards have been unwittingly and unintentionally protecting us from West Nile virus and some other mosquito-transmitted diseases," Burkett-Cadena added.

Florida has had more introductions of invasive reptile species than any other region on Earth, according to UF. There are about three times as many species of established, nonnative lizards in the state as there are native species.

Click here to read the full story.

Snakes are slithering north: Where Burmese pythons have been spotted in Florida

Burmese pythons – nonvenomous, but large enough to eat alligators and household pets – are moving north across Florida from the Everglades toward Georgia, taking out hundreds of native species and dominating the region.

The pythons, which can live up to 20 years and grow as long as 23 feet, reproduce quickly. Florida has started statewide hunts to control the population.

The snakes are "one of the most destructive invasive species affecting the Sunshine State," according to the Fish & Wildlife Foundation of Florida.

Click here to read the full story.

DeSantis vetoes bill to bolster warnings about Florida’s polluted waters

The governor said the bill was “ill-advised,” but one of the measure’s sponsors argued he’s ignoring the state’s water quality problems.

Gov. Ron DeSantis on Wednesday night vetoed a measure that would have increased warnings for Floridians and tourists when a beach or public waterway is polluted.

The bill required the Florida Department of Health to issue health advisories if water quality failed to meet the agency’s standards and required closing polluted beaches "if it is deemed necessary to protect the health, safety and welfare of the public," according to a House staff analysis of the bill.

The measure also required municipalities and counties to notify the state health department of unsafe water quality within 24 hours and required counties to post signs warning of unsafe waters, according to the bill.

Not only was the bill bipartisan, it sailed through both the Florida House and Senate with unanimous approval.

"Our water quality issues are not going to go away, and ignoring it is not going to solve the problem," said Democratic state Rep. Lindsay Cross of St. Petersburg, who was one of the bill’s main sponsors.

Click here to read the full story.

The return of toxic algae blooms exposes Florida’s failure. The federal EPA must act.

In what has become a disturbing annual rite of spring here in Florida, blue-green algae blooms have already cropped up in rivers and lakes across the state.

Many of the blooms contain cyanotoxins linked to a wide array of human health problems, including liver and neurological disease. They can also harm, and even kill, wildlife and pets. Exposure can occur through incidental ingestion, skin contact and inhalation of aerosolized bacteria during activities like swimming, wading and surfing.

Blooms with cyanotoxins exceeding federal safety guidelines have already been reported, not only on Lake Okeechobee, but in the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie estuaries. A health alert was also issued in Lake County, which, with 250 named lakes, touts itself as "Florida’s lakeside escape."

Until recent years, the blooms were largely a summer and fall problem.

Not anymore.

Thanks to warming waters, unchecked pollution and years of inaction from state regulators, algae blooms have become a growing health threat and a stain on Florida’s reputation as a subtropical wonderland.

Click here to read the full opinion piece.

What Florida Loses by Deleting “Climate Change”

On May 15, 2024, Republican governor Ron DeSantis of Florida—the second-hottest US state behind Hawai’i, which also saw its hottest year since 1985 last year—signed a law that deleted the phrase "climate change" from many of the Sunshine State’s laws. Despite recent survey findings that show that 90 percent of Floridians think that climate change is real and happening (compared to 72 percent of all Americans), the law takes effect July 1.

In addition to ensuring that Florida will no longer have to consider the climate crisis in its energy policies, the bill, along with two others that DeSantis signed the same day, will, according to DeSantis on X, "keep windmills off our beaches, gas in our tanks, and China out of our state" as well as "restore sanity in our approach to energy and [reject] the agenda of the radical green zealots."

But what the law really does, as explained by the Orlando Sentinel’s Jeffrey Schweers, is "reverse 16 years of state policy, finishing the work started by former Gov. Rick Scott and undoing former Gov. Charlie Crist’s signature piece of environmental legislation."

Sponsored by state representative Bobby Payne, a Republican from Palatka, House Bill 1645 took a scattershot approach to deleting the phrase "climate change."

As a result, the bill outlaws offshore wind energy within a mile of the state coastline while encouraging nuclear energy technologies, "a frightening prospect to those who remember nuclear plants at Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Crystal River," Schweers writes.

One highly impacted section has led to the elimination of a state-funded grant program that "helps local governments and school districts reduce greenhouse gas emissions," writes Emily L. Mahoney of the Tampa Bay Times. It also "preempt[s] local governments’ control over the location of natural gas storage facilities and makes it so state agencies and local governments no longer have to consider fuel efficiency when buying vehicles, among other changes."

Yoca Arditi-Rocha, executive director of the Miami-based Cleo Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to improving climate change education, advocacy, and engagement, tells WFSU Public Media that "this purposeful act of cognitive dissonance is proof that the governor and the state Legislature are not acting in the best interests of Floridians, but rather to protect profits for the fossil fuel industry."

The Nature Conservancy’s Florida director, Greg Knecht, calls the law "very much out of line with public opinion." State Rep. Randy Fine, a Republican from Palm Bay who owns two electric cars and voted against the bill, tells the Tampa Bay Times that "we can’t set ourselves up to cripple an industry that is coming down the road—and for the record, is generally run by American companies," speaking about the future of electric vehicles and other green technologies.

"Florida is not an island, its risks have national implications," writes William S. Becker, a former regional director for the US Department of Energy, in an op-ed in the Hill. "For example, nearly 5 million property owners in the state have filed flood damage claims with the federal government since 2000. As that number grows, all of America’s taxpayers will pay for the downsides of Florida’s climate denial law."

With sea levels along the Florida coast predicted to rise one to four feet in the next century and with dangerously high temperatures ever increasing, the state is extremely vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, which makes its denial of the phrase all the more troubling.

As Becker puts it, "Maybe Congress should stop rewarding negligence by withholding federal disaster assistance for any state that hides its head in the sand about climate change."

Click here to read the full story.

‘Don’t say climate change’ highlights need for constitutional environmental rights

A proposed amendment to the state constitution would recognize every Floridian’s right to clean water

Last year, 16 young Montanans sued their state government over an illogical, mission-warping law that prevented its Department of Environmental Quality from considering environmental consequences when weighing permits for fossil fuel operations. Such a law is an example of how oftentimes the system does not work the way it should.

These young people argued it violated their right to a healthful environment — a right explicitly stated and enshrined in the Montana State Constitution in 1971 — and they won. The ruling means that the state must now consider climate change when deciding whether to approve fossil fuel projects.

There have been other youth climate cases, but so far, they have not been successful. Montana’s was because it was predicated on this constitutional right.

One of those other youth climate cases was here in Florida.

In 2020, eight young Floridians sued our state government, arguing it "violated their fundamental rights to a stable climate system under Florida common law and the constitution." The rights identified were those to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, because Florida’s constitution doesn’t explicitly recognize every Floridian’s fundamental right to a healthy environment.

Although he found the youths’ climate concerns legitimate, the judge dismissed the case. He determined it was inappropriate for courts to provide the climate action the young plaintiffs sought. That would have to come from the legislative and executive branches of government. (Bearing in mind that no two cases are the same, the Montana judge rejected this argument.)

Unfortunately, those branches of government are the most vulnerable to the influence of special interests and changing political winds, and some rights — like the right to healthy ecosystems we depend upon — are so fundamental they sometimes need protection from government itself. Our Founding Fathers understood this latter point, and it’s why we have our Bill of Rights.

Click here to read the full commentary.

Sea levels in Florida are rising fast. Tough decisions ahead

An analysis of sea level rise showed that the American South is experiencing one of the most rapid surges on the planet

In Jacksonville, street flooding could soon make major roads inaccessible to emergency vehicles. In Pensacola, officials are offering some coastal residents a choice: Elevate your home or take a buyout. The situation isn’t much better in parts of Pinellas County, where high tide alone is enough to inundate some streets and yards.

Anyone who thought the very real impacts of sea level rise are decades in the future needs to recalibrate their thinking, and quickly. Sea level rise is already happening, affecting almost all of Florida’s 1,350 miles of coastline. And experts say it’s going to get worse at an increasing pace.

That gloomy forecast is one of the major findings in a startling Washington Post analysis of sea level rise across the American South, which is experiencing one of the most rapid surges on the planet. Scientists aren’t sure why it’s happening, but sea levels from Texas to Florida are at least 6 inches higher than they were 15 years ago. That matches the sea level rise that occurred over the last 50 years.

"We are preparing for the wrong disaster almost everywhere," Rob Young, director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University, told the Post. "These smaller changes will be a greater threat over time than the next hurricane, no question about it."

Click here to read the full editorial.

Young Florida manatees top 2024 death toll

One in four manatees found dead in Florida this year died within one year of birth, state data shows, making it the leading known category of death for sea cows so far in 2024.

The 66 so-called "perinatal" deaths also are almost double last year's and the five-year average of 35 manatee deaths within a year of birth, as well as this year's 34 deaths by collisions with boats.

But state biologists aren't sure yet what so many young manatees dying might mean. That's also obscured by how many aren't even examined — 98 so far this year — because they're too decomposed, not recovered or for other reasons.

This year's jump in perinatal deaths — although the scientific jury is still out — could be fallout from two years of manatee famine in the Indian River Lagoon region due to seagrass loss. Biologists at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) had warned of long-lasting health effects of malnutrition on the next generation of manatees. But it also could be a sign that manatee reproduction is slowly getting back to usual, after years of fewer births during the famine.

Click here to read the full story.

DeSantis signs bill erasing the term ‘climate change’ from state law

The legislation deletes more than 50 lines of previous state statutes dealing with climate change

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation (HB 1645) on Wednesday that will erase several instances of the words "climate change" from state statutes and restructure the state’s fossil fuel-based energy policy that listed climate change as a priority when making energy policy decisions.

The priority now is to ensure "an adequate, reliable and cost-effective supply of energy for the state in a manner that promotes the health and welfare of the public and economic growth"....

Among the parts of current law that will be removed are a provision for addressing "the potential of global climate change" as a state energy policy, and a provision for the state to "play a leading role in developing and instituting energy management programs aimed at promoting energy conservation, energy security, and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions."

This isn’t the first time that the DeSantis administration has shown a disinclination to combat climate change. A year ago he turned down more than $350 million in federal funding for energy efficiency initiatives in the Sunshine State. That was followed by rejecting another $320 million in federal funding to reduce vehicle emissions, part of the Infrastructure and Investment Jobs Act intended for carbon-reduction projects, as reported by The News Service of Florida.

The bill signing came one day after a poll of 1,400 Floridians found that 68% say that the state government should do more to address climate change.

The legislative analysis that accompanied the bill stated "The bill does not appear to have a fiscal impact on state or local government revenues but may have an indeterminate negative fiscal impact on expenditures."

Click here to read the full story.

Martin County Favors Develoeprs (AGAIN). But You Can Vote For Change

Martin County Florida - Your County. Your Communtiy. But Developers Come First.

Last week the Martin County Board of County Commissioners sided with a developer over clean water and constituents, approving a project known as “The Ranch” (formerly “Calusa Creek”) which will be some 6,000 feet — that is, more than a full mile — beyond the county’s urban service boundary.

Normally, development is discouraged where those “urban services” — think water and sewer — are lacking. But in 2022 Martin County officials (at the behest of a developer) added the new "rural lifestyles" text amendment to its comprehensive plan, allowing parcels of 1,000 acres or more adjacent to the the urban service districts to be developed.

But developers are eager to play leapfrog, and last week Martin County Commissioners helpfully voted (again, at the behest of a developer) to allow the "rural land use" designation to apply to projects up to a mile past the urban service boundary, paving the way for "The Ranch."

The project includes 175 pricey homes, nature preserves and two private golf courses catering to high-end players. Meaning, there’ll be lots of pressure to keep those greens green — involving lots of fertilizer.

But not to worry, said the developer: The Ranch will use water from the nearby C-44 canal and water going back into the canal will be cleaner than the water coming out. Of course, there’ll be no regular testing to verify this. So the commissioners are basically taking the developer’s word for it.

Great idea, don’t you think?

Click here to read the full story.

FIU researchers use this unexpected tool to clean dirty canals in South Florida

The waterways in South Florida all lead to the ocean, which is why it’s so important to clean them up.

Researchers at Florida International University are finding new and innovative ways to clean up dirty canals in South Florida.

Jazmin Locke-Rodriguez, a postdoctoral associate at the Institute of Environment at FIU, is among the team that’s figured out a way to clean them up using an unlikely source: flowers.

"We found that the flowers did an incredible job at removing the nutrients and the pollutants the same way that we would expect from wetland plants," Locke-Rodriguez said.

Over the course of 12 weeks, Locke-Rodriguez and FIU students planted flowers on floating platforms and placed them in polluted waterways like Little River.

"The roots that are hanging in the water help uptake these pollutants and their nutrients, essentially remediating the water, cleaning the water up," she said.

Click here to read the full story.

Florida fueled the first Earth Day; now we need another one

But how can we get our elected officials to pay attention to what we voters want?

Earth Day is coming up next Monday, which will probably elicit a fervent "meh" from a lot of people. These days, Earth Day seems more like a marketing gimmick than a holiday, not unlike President’s Day. It’s more about greenbacks than being green.

When I worked for Florida’s largest daily newspaper, I used to get lots of companies’ story pitches connected to this annual "celebration." Some started months early. Many were downright ludicrous.

"Make every laundry day a celebration of Earth Day with (insert name of product here)," said one, apparently unaware of the term "greenwashing." Another urged me to write about how their "nonstick pots and pans have been tested to be recyclable." I think they’d recycled the story pitch, too.

But waaaaaay back when it first launched in 1970, Earth Day was the most effective protest action since the American Revolution, which you may recall spawned both a new nation and two Broadway shows, "1776" and "Hamilton."

Thanks to that first Earth Day, we got the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and a bunch of other environmental regulations. We also got the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The environment became so popular, even the people making the junk being thrown out as roadside litter ran ads encouraging everyone to pick up their trash.

Politicians from then-President Richard Nixon on down scrambled to make those things happen because they saw the turnout for Earth Day. An estimated 20 million Americans — a tenth of the nation’s population — flooded the streets for it. That was five times bigger than the biggest anti-Vietnam War rallies, 20 times bigger than the biggest civil rights protest.

People were, in the immortal words of the movie "Network," mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore.

They turned out to protest the rampant pollution they were seeing (and breathing). A lot of the protests were about things that had happened or were happening in Florida — problems with both pollution and development.

With what’s been going on in Florida in recent years, I think it might take another protest like that first one to get the attention of our current crop of "leaders."

Click here to read the full story.

Florida Lawmakers Pass Ban on Intentional Balloon Releases

State lawmakers in Florida have passed a bill, HB321, to ban intentional balloon releases and charge intentional balloon releases as littering infractions.

The bill passed with overwhelming support in the state’s House of Representatives and Senate in March. Now it awaits signing into law by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

"What goes up must come down, and when it comes to balloons, that can have deadly consequences for marine life," Jon Paul Brooker, director of Florida Conservation at Ocean Conservancy, said in a statement. "The ingestion of a single piece of balloon has the potential to kill a seabird, which shows why even one intentionally released balloon is one too many."

"Florida made the right call today in banning intentional balloon releases. Balloons are one of the deadliest forms of plastic pollution for ocean wildlife," Hunter Miller, Oceana Field Campaigns Manager, said in a statement. "It’s great to see state legislators from both sides of the aisle come together to support a commonsense bill and get it passed. We call on Governor DeSantis to quickly sign this into law."

Click here to read the full story.

Museum should display wetlands and other artifacts of a Florida that’s fast disappearing

Dear Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd,

I am writing to you about some ideas I had for one of your museums.

As you know, Tallahassee is home to more than just the Florida State Capitol (congrats on ridding it of the recent infestation of lobbyists). It’s also the home of the Museum of Florida History, which exists to show visitors that lots of interesting stuff happened here before Walt Disney World opened in 1971.

Your agency, which operates the museum, announced last week that because of the renovations, it will remain closed until 2026. Whew! I sure hope nothing historic happens in Florida between now and then! Especially nothing controversial about how we teach history, right?

In the meantime, though, you’ve said you want us Florida citizens to tell you what we’d like to see displayed in the museum.

I’d like to see more of an environmental emphasis. So please consider this list my contribution to the museum’s curation.

I consulted a few experts and came up with a few things that are important to Florida’s existence but may soon cease to exist themselves. Some may even disappear in the next two years, given the way Florida seems to be heading lately.

The first item on my list: An exhibit about our rapidly vanishing wetlands.

Every decade since the 1950s, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service publishes a report on the status and trends of the nation’s wetlands. Usually, the news is about as optimistic as the old "Hee Haw" sketch about gloom, despair and agony.

The [latest] report documented a loss of 670,000 acres of swamps and marshes in the most recent decade they checked — an area about the size of Rhode Island. Worse, the rate of loss has accelerated by 50 percent since the previous report.

Only Alaska has more wetlands than Florida, but we’ve been doing our best to get rid of ours for a century or more. We’ve been replacing them with those retention ponds and golf course water hazards, or just paving right over them.

That’s bad because wetlands filter water pollution, soak up floods and provide habitat for important species. Concrete, surprisingly, does none of those things.

Click here to read the full story.

Wouldn't cleaning Florida waters help manatees more than listing them as endangered?

A new lawsuit on behalf of manatees in Florida and Puerto Rico was announced March 21 by the Center for Biological Diversity, a national conservation nonprofit. The suit says the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has not responded to requests for further protections to manatees under the Endangered Species Act.

I have a hard time understanding how a legal definition further protects the innocent, lovable manatee, one of Florida's most iconic animals. I do have ideas of how we can really help manatees; that is, if we're serious about it.

I'd say a better lawsuit might be served on whomever is responsible for the pollution of waterways the manatee calls home. The main threat to manatees is not from hunting, careless boat operators or natural predators, of which they have none, really. The main threat facing manatees is starvation.

I know efforts are underway by the state Legislature and agencies such as the Department of Environmental Protection to strengthen rules about runoff into our lakes, rivers, estuaries and lagoons.

But these rules are not going far enough. And their enforcement is severely lacking.

Upland polluters are allowed to bleed nutrients into our ditches then canals then rivers, which eventually lead to algae blooms, degraded water clarity and quality, and finally die-off of seagrasses and habitat.

I think manatees are special creatures deserving of all the protections we afford them and I applaud all the federal, state, local and non-governmental organizations working to help them.

I just think time and energy would be better spent by suing Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Legislature, to get them to better protect the state's waters where manatees and thousands of other organisms live. Earthjustice already took the lead on the federal level by filing a lawsuit on behalf of Center for Biological Diversity, Save the Manatee Club and Defenders of Wildlife against the Environmental Protection Agency for not protecting water quality in 2022.

Cleaning up our waters will go a lot further to protect manatees than federal listings. We should all be fighting for that.

Click here to read the full story.

Looking North of the Lake for Storage Solutions: The Lake Okeechobee Component A Reservoir Project

For decades, Audubon has advocated for water treatment and storage solutions north of Lake Okeechobee to address water issues while supporting broader Everglades restoration goals.

In February, the Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) announced plans to discharge water from Lake Okeechobee to the coasts to reduce water levels in the lake. High water in Lake Okeechobee both increases flood risk to nearby communities and harms the overall health of the lake. However, water discharges could create conditions for harmful algal blooms in both the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie estuaries.

Given the high nutrient levels in this watershed, water treatment is needed as a project feature for north of Lake Okeechobee efforts to address pollution concerns.

The South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD) and USACE are working together to meet the region’s water storage needs. These efforts include the Lake Okeechobee Watershed Restoration Project, the Lower Kissimmee Stormwater Treatment Area project, and most recently, the Lake Okeechobee Component A Storage Reservoir (LOCAR).

LOCAR is the largest storage feature of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Program north of the lake and includes plans for a 200,000-acre-foot reservoir. The project will store water during wet periods for use in drier times, while also providing flexibility for managing the lake and basin water levels to enhance overall environmental health.

Click here to read the full story.

Critical Habitat Designated for Endangered Florida Bonneted Bat

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla.— Following a court-ordered agreement, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today designated more than 1.1 million acres of ­­critical habitat for the endangered Florida bonneted bat. The indigenous bat faces devastating habitat loss from sea-level rise and destructive development.

"This is a much welcomed, albeit delayed, action by the Service," said Dennis Olle, president of the Miami Blue Chapter of the North American Butterfly Association. "This critical habitat designation for one of North America’s rarest bats, provides an umbrella of protection for all species living thereunder."

Encroaching development and pesticide use nearly drove Florida bonneted bats extinct before litigation filed by the Center compelled the Service to protect the bat under the Endangered Species Act in 2013. Conservation groups sued in 2018 and again in 2022 to secure habitat safeguards for the species.

Click here to read the full press release.

This tiny butterfly was thought to be gone in Florida. Gardeners and naturalists brought it back

Craig Huegel smiled like a proud father as he gazed at a little black Atala butterfly, no bigger than a moth, clambering on a daisy-like wildflower called a Spanish needle, and sucking nectar from its golden center.

"They are so gorgeous," said Huegel, director of the Botanical Garden at the University of South Florida.

Once thought to be gone forever from Florida, the story of the Atala butterfly (Eumaeus atala), is one Huegel has been involved with for years. He’s written many books about gardening for wildlife, and how to use native plants that coax birds and butterflies to one’s yard.

The Atala’s story is particularly inspiring, according to Huegel, because it shows how people can fight back against the factors that are pushing many butterflies to the brink these days, such as climate change, pesticide use and loss of habitat.

To that end, "the Atalas may be the best story, because it shows if you put something in your yard, you get something in return," said Huegel.

Click here to read or listen to the full story.

Feds erred in transferring wetlands permitting to FL agency, U.S. judge rules

Environmentalists laud preservation ‘of some of the last remaining habitat for one of the most endangered animals in the world’

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., has overruled the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s relinquishment to the state of Florida the authority to regulate development in protected wetlands, garnering praise from the environmentalists who said the outcome would protect endangered species including the Florida Panther.

"Wetlands are the lifeblood of Florida, comprising a crucial habitat component for the world’s only population of the critically endangered Florida panther and many other imperiled, rare, and endemic species, all found within one of the most biologically diverse states in the country," Elizabeth Fleming, senior Florida representative for Defenders of Wildlife, said in a written statement.

"The court’s ruling restores essential guardrails provided by the Endangered Species Act. Requiring agencies to follow the law is a win for wildlife, protecting habitat and the public alike, as protecting our wetlands also safeguards drinking water and ecosystems across the state," Fleming added.

U.S. District Judge Randolph D. Moss, in a 97-page decision handed down Thursday, accepted the environmentalists’ arguments that the transfer, hastily arranged during the closing days of the Trump administration, violated the federal Endangered Species Act and Administrative Procedures Act.

The judge ruled that the agencies ceded too much authority to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to assess how development permits would affect federally designated threatened and endangered species.

One agency assessment "makes no effort to undertake any species-specific effects analyses whatsoever," Moss wrote. Because both were "were facially and legally flawed, the EPA unreasonably relied on those documents in approving Florida’s assumption application," he added.

He therefore voided the transfer of authority to the state.

Click here to read the full story.

Judge rejects handing over wetland permitting duties to the state of Florida

In what is being hailed as a victory to conservationists, a U.S. district judge has ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service don’t have the right to hand over wetland permitting duties to the state of Florida.

The ruling will affect large planned housing developments in rural areas outside Naples that conservationists and biologists consider crucial habitat for the endangered Florida panther.

Prior to December 2020, when the federal agencies handed over wetland development permitting to Florida, permitting required federal Fish and Wildlife impact reviews on endangered species.

The plaintiffs claimed that the Florida process was less rigorous, and therefore a violation of the Endangered Species Act. The judge agreed.

"No state can be allowed to take over a federal program as important as the Clean Water Act’s wetlands permitting program by making an end run around the Endangered Species Act," said Earthjustice attorney Christina I. Reichert.

Click here to read the full story.

Red tide, manatees and hurricanes: NASA PACE spacecraft to collect Florida environmental data

Algal bloom and red tide detection and prediction. The health of seagrass beds, a key food source for manatees. Coral reef bleaching. And even hurricane forecasting.

Florida's shallow-water coastlines may be environmentally analyzed in unprecedented detail via NASA's PACE spacecraft....

Armed with a hyperspectral imaging radiometer and two polarimeters, PACE is NASA's most advanced ocean-color-detecting mission to date, spokesperson Katherine Rohloff said during a Sunday press conference.

Of note to Floridians: NASA touts PACE as "the first mission to provide measurements that enable prediction of the 'boom-bust' cycle of fisheries, the appearance of harmful algae, and other factors that affect commercial and recreational industries."

Brian Barnes, a research associate in the Optical Oceanography Lab at the University of South Florida College of Marine Science, specializes in assessing and monitoring coastal systems using satellite-based sensors. He said PACE should help scientists track growth and decline of seagrass beds across the Sunshine State.

Click here to read the full story.

Python found nowhere near the Everglades lead northward invasion of undesirable pests

On a sunny Saturday afternoon in late October, an apex predator slithered through the un-mowed grass of an East Central Florida canal bank. The 12-foot-long Burmese python soaked in the sun's rays as it prepared for a post-sundown hunting trip.

Roseate spoonbills, ibis, wood storks, ducks, turtles, alligators, otters, native snakes, marsh rabbits, raccoons and opossums were all potentially on the menu that night. Any unsuspecting animal small enough to fit into the python's dislocatable jaw was at-risk.

But this uninvited transplant — this terror of Florida's wildlands — made one fatal mistake: It was spotted on the canal bank by a foursome of alligator hunters.

Florida alligator hunters finding a python isn't really newsworthy. It happens occasionally.

Where the python was found, however, should alarm all of us.

T.M. Goodwin Waterfowl Management Area is in southern Brevard County along the Indian River County line. It's adjacent to the Stick Marsh, Headwaters Lake and only a few miles from Blue Cypress Lake, Lake Kenansville and Garcia Reservoir — all in Indian River County near Fellsmere.

Pythons are just one small part of Florida's 500-species invasive problem. If you live in South Florida, you've become accustomed to living alongside iguanas, Agama lizards, Egyptian geese, Muscovy ducks, Nile monitor lizards, cattle egrets, giant African snails, red imported fire ants, bufo toads, wild hogs and tegu lizards — to name a few of our terrestrial pests.

Invasive species cost Floridians $500 million a year. These pests have spread across 1.7 million acres. Pythons, lionfish, Mayan cichlids and monitor lizards eat or outcompete many native animals, including endangered wildlife, according to the Fish & Wildlife Foundation of Florida. A fishing guide told me that tropical nonnative species fish such as peacock bass and clown knifefish are starting to be caught in Lake Okeechobee.

Controlling their spread has been a losing battle. Python and lionfish removal programs operated by the FWC and SFWMD are trying to do their part. Removal programs and roundup tournaments have removed about 25,000 pythons since 2000.

Unfortunately, there are still over 100,000 in the wild and some estimates are as high as 300,000. The FWC's Lionfish Roundup this year harvested over 30,000 lionfish. Only trouble is, that was a drop in the bucket.

Click here to read the full story.

Study identifies Florida’s potential invasive species threats

In a first-of-its-kind study for North America, scientists accumulated a list of potential invasive species for Florida, and researchers deemed 40 pose the greatest threat.

A team of experts, led by University of Florida scientists, evaluated terrestrial, aquatic and marine species with characteristics that make them particularly adept at invasion. Their list includes 460 vertebrates, invertebrates, algae and plants.

"Invasive species management tends to be reactive, instead of preventative," said Deah Lieurance, who led the project as the then-coordinator of the UF/IFAS Assessment of Non-Native Plants and is now an assistant professor of invasive species biology and management at Penn State University. "This was the reason behind this project: to protect Florida’s natural areas, while also saving the money and effort that would go into management strategies."

The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services estimated that the annual cost for invasive species management globally in 2019 was $423 billion, and that cost is estimated to quadruple every decade.

Florida is "ground zero" for invasions in the United States, says Matthew Thomas, the director of the UF/IFAS Invasion Science Research Initiative, which was created in 2022 to address the state’s unique challenges.

Click here to read the full report.

Orange County Revises Wetland Conservation Areas Ordinance

Revisions Aim to Enhance Wetland Protections, Improve Permitting Process

The Orange County Board of County Commissioners voted unanimously on December 12 to update its Wetland Conservation Areas Ordinance to strengthen protection of valuable wetlands and surface waters, make permitting processes more streamlined, predictable, and consistent for applicants, and ensure that natural resource protections are balanced with property rights.

"Over the past three years, this Board has voted to fund the acquisition of environmentally sensitive lands, update rules for fertilizer use, enhance tree protections, and now we’re taking steps to preserve our vital wetlands and surface waters," said Orange County Mayor Jerry L. Demings. "I’m very satisfied to see our government and community coming together once again to improve the way we care for our natural resources."

One notable change is a new tiered approach to permitting that encourages applicants to limit wetland impacts. For example, a small project in and around low-functioning wetlands will qualify for an expedited process, while a larger project with proposed impacts to more sensitive wetland areas will undergo rigorous technical review. Furthermore, a project may incur additional levels of review and be required to provide further analyses, at a more significant cost in time and effort, if it includes certain environmental risk factors (modifiers), such as impacting a wildlife corridor or a recorded conservation easement.

Click here to read the full press release.

Big Win for Florida Bonneted Bats

Miami Wilds Stalls as Commissioners Withdraw Proposal in Victory for Endangered Wildlife

MIAMI— Miami-Dade County commissioners voted today to withdraw a proposal that would have amended the development lease agreement with Miami Wilds, LLC. Today’s decision stymies plans for a controversial themed water park and retail development that threatens endangered species near Zoo Miami.

The commission decision follows a recommendation by Mayor Levine Cava to rescind the lease and abandon the project to best safeguard the county’s interests and the community’s needs and objectives. It also follows a legal victory for conservation groups who challenged the National Park Service’s decision to release land-use restrictions in connection with the project. A Dec. 11 federal court order reinstated those restrictions, which prohibit leasing and commercial development on lands within the project footprint.

"Today was a good day for wildlife," said Mike Daulton, executive director at Bat Conservation International. "We’re encouraged that commissioners spoke out against Miami Wilds and voiced their support for the mayor to start the process of rescinding the ill-fated lease."

"This is a step in the right direction, but the county can’t keep kicking this can down the road," said Lauren Jonaitis, senior conservation director of Tropical Audubon Society. "Our elected officials need to take meaningful action to protect endangered species and ensure the preservation of the largest and most biodiverse fragment of critically endangered pine rocklands outside of Everglades National Park."

On Monday the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service sent a letter to the county advising that lands within the project area for Miami Wilds are environmentally sensitive and have high ecological value for rare species, including at least 12 species that are federally protected or proposed for federal protection. Specifically, the Service noted that the lands were likely to be considered essential for the conservation of the Florida bonneted bat. The Service encouraged the county to maintain the ecological function of those lands to support species conservation.

In 2022 Miami-Dade County and Miami Wilds, LLC, agreed to build a theme park, retail area, hotel and acres of associated parking lots in an area that hosts critical habitat for endangered Florida bonneted bats, Rim Rock crowned snakes, Miami tiger beetles, Bartram’s scrub-hairstreak, Florida leafwing butterflies and several endangered plants.

The development threatens to cause cascading effects on imperiled species and surrounding ecosystems, destroying dark, open foraging habitat for bats and hampering natural fire needed to support ecosystem health of the critically endangered pine rocklands, which are home to dozens of rare and endangered animals, plants and insects found nowhere else on Earth.

Click here to read the full press release.

Green Macroalga Has Replaced Seagrass in the Indian River Lagoon

The Indian River Lagoon was considered one of the last "unpolluted coastal lagoons" in Florida in the 1970s. Fast forward to today and most of the 156-mile lagoon is now considered impaired because of external sources of nutrients including human waste, fertilizers, stormwater runoff, agriculture, rainfall and sub-marine groundwater discharge.

As a result, the lagoon – especially the Northern Indian River Lagoon and Banana River – has experienced various harmful algal blooms, catastrophic seagrass losses, and is the epicenter of Florida manatee starvation and deaths. Seagrasses are keystone species within estuaries and provide many important ecosystem services, including the facilitation of nutrient cycling, essential habitat, sediment stabilization and carbon sequestration.

To better understand factors related to seagrass losses in the Indian River Lagoon, researchers from Florida Atlantic University’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute conducted a unique, long-term monitoring study that examined the cover of seagrass and macroalgae in the lagoon from 2011 to 2020 compared to factors such as nutrients and the chemical composition of macroalgae. Data from the study provide important insight into the drivers of change in the lagoon, which are necessary for managers seeking to mitigate habitat losses, facilitate recovery and improve resilience.

Results of the study, published in the journal Ecological Indicators, reveal that since the 2011 blue green "super bloom," benthic cover in large parts of the Northern Indian River Lagoon and Banana River has significantly changed from primarily the seagrass Halodule wrightii until 2015, to primarily the green macroalga Caulerpa prolifera after 2018. While native to the Indian River Lagoon, C. prolifera acts as an invasive species that can move into new spaces and dominate due to its competitive ability in impaired habitats. Though with the low seagrass cover, competition was likely not a factor in this replacement.

"The change in primary benthic cover from seagrass to green macroalgae has the potential to cause cascading ecological effects, both directly and indirectly," said Brian Lapointe, Ph.D., senior author and a research professor at FAU Harbor Branch. "Vegetation on the bottom of a body of water responds to multiple simultaneous pressures, including variations in light availability, nutrient availability, salinity, and herbivore pressure, which is why we used a multivariate approach to determine variables that are important to change."

Ammonium is the predominant form of nitrogen in septic tank effluent that flows into groundwaters and ultimately the lagoon. The apparent relationship between increasing C. prolifera percent cover and ammonium suggests that improving wastewater infrastructure and reducing the number of homes using septic systems could help to reduce these blooms, which would favor seagrass recovery by decreasing competition with other primary producers.

"Loss of seagrasses in urbanized estuaries is common, as they are highly susceptible to watershed nutrient and sediment inputs, making seagrasses effective biological sentinels," said Rachel Brewton, Ph.D., first author and a research scientist at FAU Harbor Branch. "Reducing stormwater runoff and inputs of human waste and the associated nutrient load will help promote the recovery of seagrasses in the Indian River Lagoon. Importantly, our study findings have implications for urbanized estuaries experiencing seagrass losses globally."

Click here to read the full story.

Another Legislative Gift to Developers

CS/HB 1-C: Disaster Relief "Disaster Relief" was approved during the recent Florida legislature’s special session and signed into law by Governor DeSantis on November 13, 2023.

Portions of the "Disaster Relief" bill are legislative gifts to developers as provisions of these bills prevent local governments from imposing building moratoriums or amending comprehensive plans or land development regulations associated with damage caused by Hurricanes Ian and Idelia. The Disaster Relief Bill will likely result in reduced building standards for hurricane recovery efforts and set a bad legal precedent for the next legislative session.

Instead of preempting local governments from adopting policies that protect the lives and property of the residents of Florida, coastal setback codes need to be strengthened in a manner that provides for greater disaster preparedness so inappropriate development does not continue to impact our coastline.

Development interests have a vast influence on Florida’s legislative process. The Governor and the Legislature will be lobbied to further gut growth management regulations so local governments will no longer be accountable for their growth plans, ensuring local comprehensive plans will remain the toothless documents they have always been.

Florida is known for its unique and valuable wetlands, wildlife habitats, beaches, and marine resources, but our weak land development regulations are underwriting the continued development in flood-prone, coastal, and environmentally sensitive areas. Local governments routinely approve construction seaward of established coastal control lines where no construction is supposed to occur.

Click here to read the full opinion piece.

Florida Lawmakers Put Developers’ Interests Ahead of Residents’ Hurricane Safety

When people talk about the great love stories of history, they often mention such figures as Marc Anthony and Cleopatra, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert (not in a can), and Johnny and June Carter Cash, who got married in a fever hotter than a pepper sprout.

But this roll call of romance leaves out one contemporary match made in Florida that I contend contains far more passion than all the rest.

I am speaking of our fine Legislature and our rapacious development industry. They love each other SO much! And they’re willing to do just about anything for each other. It’s so sweet!

Case in point: Last week, the Legislature held a special session in Tallahassee. Their glorious purpose was to further burnish the presidential credentials of Gov. Ron “I Didn’t Know It Was So Hard to Run in High Heels” DeSantis. For instance, one major drive involved banning the state pension fund from investing in companies that do business with Iran, which is definitely the No. 1 priority of every insurance-paying homeowner in Florida.

But they snuck in a little surprise gift for their developer darlings, too.

In a bill to supply aid to the victims of Hurricane Ian and Idalia, lawmakers told local governments in counties hammered by the storm that they were not allowed to make "burdensome" changes to their land-use or growth plan regulations for three years.

No learning from their mistakes and trying to avoid repeating them. No sir! The tyrants of Tallahassee have decreed that that kind of education is as forbidden as learning anything negative ever happened during Black history.

As one House committee was discussing the bill last week, one of our fine lawmakers, Rep. Bob Rommel, R-UForReal?, noted that section with approval, and then he added, "There is nothing more important than protecting private property rights."

Yes, that’s MUCH more important than protecting people’s lives.

Is it kookypants-crazy to claim that property is worth more than human beings? Sure it is. But you say crazy stuff like that when you’re madly in love.

Senate President Kathleen Passidomo, R-UKiddingMe?, told Politico Florida that the goal of this moratorium on making changes is — I am paraphrasing here — to help builders rebuild in exactly the same way in exactly the same place that was wiped out before so it can be wiped out again.

Click here to read the full story.

Jeff Bezos, welcome back to a very different Florida from the one you left

We could sure use your help with our many, many environmental woes

Dear Mr. Bezos,

Congratulations! After three decades in gloomy Seattle, you’re finally — as the elaborately coiffed Wayne Cochran used to sing — going back to Miami.

Allow me... to say welcome back! As a billionaire, you may be the only person who can afford our skyrocketing property insurance rates.

Because you graduated from Miami Palmetto Senior High School and even started your first business here — the Dream Institute! — you may feel like you’re returning to familiar surroundings.

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but — like your own hairstyle — Florida has undergone some radical changes since you left us in 1986 for a job on Wall Street.

When you departed, the governor was a popular Democrat known for his concern for the environment. There was a growth management system that limited the impacts development had on roads, water, and sewers. And the coolest show on TV was "Miami Vice," a drama about catching drug dealers in South Florida, which aired for five seasons on a network you could watch for free.

Now the governor is a hardcore Republican of waning popularity known for his odd footwear choices.

Our growth management system was junked in 2011 by pro-developer politicians. As a result, our roads are increasingly clogged, our overloaded sewer systems repeatedly give way under the strain, and our water supply is threatened by rampant pollution.

And the coolest show on TV is probably “Killing It,” a comedy about catching pythons in the Everglades. You can watch it only on a service you have to pay extra to receive.

In other words, we’re not quite the "same old place that you laughed about," as they used to say on "Welcome Back, Kotter." We’re much more crowded, our waterways are dirtier, our wildlife is in peril. Meanwhile our state is in the news now for our book bans, not our high-powered speedboats.

To help you out, I sought out several Floridians who, by dint of their experience, could best explain the difference between 1986 Florida and 2023 Florida.

One was Estus Whitfield, who served as environmental adviser to five Florida governors in both parties.

"In 1986, Florida was probably in the best environmental position it’s ever been, before or since," he told me. "A lot has changed."

Click here to read the full story.

Some Florida houses are being built to survive hurricanes, cut emissions

With climate change spawning intense hurricanes and billion-dollar disasters, some developers are making homes that can withstand the weather and be better for the environment.

When Hurricane Michael hit the Florida Panhandle five years ago, it left boats, cars and trucks piled up to the windows of Bonny Paulson’s home in the tiny coastal community of Mexico Beach, even though the house rests on pillars 14 feet above the ground. But Paulson’s home, with a rounded shape that looks something like a ship, shrugged off Category 5 winds that might otherwise have collapsed it.

Some developers are building homes like Paulson’s with an eye toward making them more resilient to the extreme weather that’s increasing with climate change, and friendlier to the environment at the same time. Solar panels, for example, installed so snugly that high winds can’t get underneath them, mean clean power that can survive a storm. Preserved wetlands and native vegetation that trap carbon in the ground and reduce flooding vulnerability, too. Recycled or advanced construction materials that reduce energy use as well as the need to make new material.

A person’s home is one of the biggest ways they can reduce their individual carbon footprint. Buildings release about 38% of all energy-related greenhouse gas emissions each year. Some of the carbon pollution comes from powering things like lights and air conditioners and some of it from making the construction materials, like concrete and steel.

... companies are developing entire neighborhoods that are both resistant to hurricanes and contribute less than average to climate change.

Babcock Ranch is another sustainable, hurricane-resilient community in South Florida. It calls itself the first solar-powered town in the U.S., generating 150 megawatts of electricity with 680,000 panels on 870 acres. The community was also one of the first in the country to have large batteries on site to store extra solar power to use at night or when the power is out.

In 2022 Hurricane Ian churned over Babcock Ranch as a Category 4 storm. It left little to no damage, said Babcock Ranch founder Syd Kitson.

"We set out to prove that a new town and the environment can work hand-in-hand, and I think we’ve proven that," said Kitson. "Unless you build in a very resilient way, you’re just going to constantly be repairing or demolishing the home."

The development sold some 73,000 acres of its site to the state for wetland preservation, and on the land where it built, a team studied how water naturally flows through the local environment and incorporated it into its water management system.

"That water is going to go where it wants to go, if you’re going to try and challenge Mother Nature, you’re going to lose every single time," said Kitson. The wetlands, retention ponds, and native vegetation are better able to manage water during extreme rainfall, reducing the risk of flooded homes.

Click here tp read the full story.

Protecting Our Wetlands

A wetland is not an island.

It seems self-evident, though in practical terms our nation’s waterways are connected — even when they are not wet year-round.

Broad swaths of the more than 290 million acres of U.S. wetlands are now at risk thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Sackett v. EPA case. With one opinion, backed by just five justices, the court rolled back federal protections for wetlands that filter clean drinking water for people, provide critical flood protection for communities, and serve as essential wildlife habitat. EPA estimates that the Sackett decision removes federal Clean Water Act protections from up to 63% of wetlands and threatens protections for up to 4.9 million of miles of streams.

We only need to look to half a century ago to see why these protections have been invaluable.

The post-war boom has fueled rapid development and accelerated industrialization throughout the country. What was a golden age for the U.S. economy was not without its toll: Just two decades after the war, 7.6 million acres of wetlands — an area roughly the size of Maryland — were destroyed in the lower 48 states. Toxic waste and sewage were dumped, untreated, into the nearest stream. A series of high-profile river fires — yes, rivers on fire — are why Congress intervened and passed the Clean Water Act.

Passed with sweeping bipartisan support 51 years ago, few laws have been as transformative to the nation’s quality of life as the Clean Water Act. The goal of the Act was nothing less than "to restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation’s waters." To achieve this goal, Congress created a cooperative federal structure that gave the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers working with states broad authority to protect important waters throughout the watershed.

While its implementation has certainly met with roadblocks, it is hard to overstate the ongoing protective importance of the Act.

Click here to read the full commentary.

New study projects sea level rise to drain Florida’s financial future

One million Florida properties are projected to become chronically flooded: properties that today fund nearly 30% of local revenues for more than half of the state’s municipalities, according to a new study conducted by researchers at Cornell and Florida State Universities.

As sea level rise drowns those properties, the state can expect to lose a combined assessed value of $619 billion this century, the study’s authors write, and that figure’s likely a significant underestimation.

The study’s statewide survey also revealed that for the most part, Florida’s local government planners and managers don’t realize how drastically climate change will impact them financially.

The stakes are high, but the study’s researchers say Florida’s future is not inevitable.

Click here to read the full story.

'Starting to get worse': U.S. Fish and Wildlife considering more manatee protections

BREVARD COUNTY, Fla. - Manatees may become an endangered species again.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service made them a threatened species back in 2017. Now, the federal agency says they may have acted too soon.

From starvation and boat collisions to climate change, experts say Florida’s beloved sea cows are in trouble.

"The trend is in the wrong direction," said Pat Rose. He’s the executive director for the Save the Manatee Club which is a non-profit committed to worldwide manatee protection and preservation.

Rose is also an aquatic biologist who’s been part of manatee restoration for decades in Florida. Save the Manatee Club joined with the Center for Biological Diversity, Harvard Animal Law & Policy Clinic, Miami Waterkeeper and Frank S. González García to submit a petition to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service asking them to reconsider the decision that moved manatees from "endangered" to "threatened".

"They never should have been down-listed in the first place," Rose added.

Click here to read the full story and watch the video.

Will Florida manatees be listed as an endangered species again? Feds to review data.

Environmental groups say the change would be welcomed, but long overdue.

In the wake of thousands of Florida manatee deaths in recent years, federal wildlife officials Wednesday announced they will launch a new scientific review to determine whether the animal should be reclassified as an endangered species.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the coming months will round up manatee data and decide whether the West Indian manatee species should be given bolstered protections under the federal Endangered Species Act.

In 2017, federal wildlife officials downlisted West Indian manatees to a "threatened" species, a decision the agency claimed was based on improved population numbers. Many environmental advocacy groups have decried that decision as premature, especially after 1,100 animals died in 2021, many of them from a human-fueled seagrass famine.

Pollution fueled by a cocktail of human influences through wastewater discharges, rainfall runoff laden with fertilizer and leaky septic tanks have contributed to more algal blooms in the Indian River Lagoon. Those blooms block sunlight that seagrass needs to survive and thrive. Dying seagrass prompted the manatees to starve after months of emaciation and weakness.

Click here to read the full story.

Report says better management needed for Florida's wastewater

A new report says amid the Sunshine State's burgeoning population growth, better wastewater stewardship by replacing aging infrastructure is needed.

Florida TaxWatch has released a report on the state’s use of septic tanks and their environmental effects. The report states that protecting Florida’s ground and surface water is essential to public health and supporting population growth.

President and CEO Dominic M. Calabro states in the report foreword, that Florida’s water is at risk because even properly working septic tanks are seeping heavy nutrients into groundwater. Florida has approximately 2.6 million septic tanks and drain fields.

"An excess of certain nutrients, specifically nitrogen, encourages the growth of algal blooms on rivers and lakes and degrades the quality of groundwater to levels unsuitable for drinking, consumption, and direct public use," Calabro wrote.

A study conducted in 2008 by the Florida Department of Health found that over half of Florida’s septic tanks were over 30 years old at that time. Now those tanks are over 45 years old and prone to failure.

The report further states that the state research office says in its 20-year needs analysis that significant investment is needed to convert septic systems to sewers. Around $2 billion in funding has already been secured, however, the project still needs an additional $6.7 billion.

Click here to read the full story.

Manatee County votes to cut local wetland protections in favor of developer interests

The Manatee County Commission voted to cut back the government’s environmental protections for local wetlands over the protests of hundreds of residents.

After an extended debate on the issue, which saw dozens of residents concerned about conserving sensitive wetlands in the Bradenton area, the board voted 5-1 to reduce buffer requirements. Scientists predict the change will have a negative impact on local water quality, which in many cases already fails to meet state standards.

"Right when we need to be doing more for our water quality, we’re going backwards," said Suncoast Waterkeeper chairman Rusty Chinnis, who was among speakers pleading with county leaders to reconsider. "This is going to affect all of the citizens of Manatee County for decades and generations to come."

... one after another, local residents said they feared the county’s changes would increase flooding, disturb sensitive environmental areas and lead to an increase in pollution runoff. "The common people of this county deserve clean waters over the profit of developers," said Colin Curtis, a Palmetto fisherman.

"We don’t feel like there’s a government taking of our property because we can’t go in and bulldoze our mangroves," said Glenn Compton, chairman of local environmental advocacy group ManaSota–88. "We feel like there are rules and regulations that need to be followed for the benefit of the community and the environment."

Click here to read the full story.

New study warns of ‘climate insurance bubble.’ Is that driving costs up in Florida?

Florida already has deep property insurance problems. Rates are skyrocketing for tens of thousands of homeowners.

A new study and a string of recent financial and industry reports suggest it could get even worse for Florida and other states like California and Louisiana hammered by natural disasters like wildfires, floods and hurricanes.

The latest study, released Wednesday by the First Street Foundation, warns of a looming "climate insurance bubble" — a double whammy of rising rates and rising risks that potentially could have major economic ripple effects on Florida’s housing market and economy. ...it could set off a spiral of declining demand and declining property values.

"The biggest problem is we’ve been subsidizing insurance and risk for so long, which ended up ultimately promoting development in risky areas for the last half century or so," said Jeremy Porter, First Street’s director of research and development.

"We’ve built up a climate debt that hasn’t been paid yet."

Recovering after a disaster has also gotten more costly because more and more people are packed into some of the most dangerous and hard-to-insure places in the county, like Florida’s coasts.

While Florida’s insurance issues are more complicated than just more floods and storms, ...the Sunshine State isn’t the only one feeling the effects of a warming world.

Sea levels are already several inches higher, which makes coastal flooding more frequent and more intense. Extreme rainfall, scientists say, is also getting more common, raising the risk of rain bombs like the one that crippled Fort Lauderdale earlier this year.

Donald Hornstein, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s law school and a board member of the state’s insurer of last resort, said he doesn’t think of the problem as a bubble, but as an issue that has been simmering for many years already.

"Climate insurance is a systemic and long-term problem. It’s not going to pop. It’s going to get worse," he said.

Click here to read the full story.

Florida's coastal homes may lose value as climate-fueled storms intensify insurance risk

Climate-fueled disasters like Hurricane Ian are wreaking havoc on home values across the nation, but Florida’s messy insurance market makes it one of the most stressed, new research out of a nonprofit climate modeling group indicates.

High insurance premiums and a state-backed requirement that homeowners covered by the state-backed insurer of last resort enroll in the National Flood Insurance Program over the next three years could drop home values up to 40% in Florida in the next 30 years, data provided by First Street Foundation shows. And climate and insurance experts say that may further gentrify Florida’s coastal regions and barrier islands.

Using what First Street representatives described as a typical institutional-investing calculation, First Street Foundation found some homes, adjusting for 2023 insurance costs, have already lost up to 19% of their value.

The News-Press reported earlier this month on middle-class families being forced off Fort Myers Beach due to the rising costs associated with living on a barrier island in a time of stronger storms, including more stringent, expensive building requirements and a high demand for Beach property.

Click here to read the full story.

Old Florida growth rules thwarted development that would have made Idalia worse

Now there’s nothing that could stand in the way of a project like one that would have remade Taylor County’s coast

Last month, when Hurricane Idalia clobbered the sparsely settled coast of Taylor County in Florida’s Big Bend region, it sent my memory spinning back nearly 20 years to the first time I visited that area.

I was there to report on what was happening to hundreds of acres of swamp and salt marsh in an area that was aptly called "Boggy Bay." This undeveloped acreage lay in the middle of the Big Bend Seagrasses Aquatic Preserve, the state’s largest such preserve and one of the largest stretches of uninterrupted sea grass in North America.

On that warm May day in 2006, the only sounds I heard were the wind riffling through the Spartina and needle rush, the cry of a passing osprey, and the scuttling of thousands of fiddler crabs as they scurried across the mud flats.

But the bulldozers weren’t far off.

Boggy Bay had been targeted for a massive development called the Magnolia Bay Marina and Resort. There would be a marina, of course, and also thousands of condos, a hotel, a helicopter landing pad, a public aquarium, a marine science laboratory, and 280,000 square feet of commercial space.

"I think it’s going to be a neat thing for Taylor County," the property owner, a wealthy 74-year-old heart surgeon from St. Petersburg named J. Crayon Pruitt Sr., told me at the time.

It’s instructive to play "what if?" with the notion that Pruitt’s project was just 20 years too early. These days, hardly anything would stand in the way of a very bad idea like this one.

Florida’s rules for development have been bent to favor the builders’ every whim. They are no longer set up to protect the environment, steer growth away from hazardous areas or spare rural communities from unwanted intrusion by outside forces. Flood zones? Poisoned waterways? Environmental destruction? Not a problem!

If Dr. Pruitt were to propose the same thing now, "it would be very difficult to fight," said Shaw Stiller, a Public Service Commission senior counsel who, back in the mid-2000s, was involved in the battle over Pruitt’s plans. "Anybody who chose to contest it would be looking at some major legal fees, too."

Fortunately, at the time when Dr. Pruitt was proposing turning Boggy Bay into Magnolia Bay, Florida still had a growth management system that made some sense.

Otherwise, Stiller said, we’d probably have seen a whoooole lot more casualties from Idalia.

"There was never any forward motion on that project," Danny Griner, Taylor County’s top building and planning official, told me this week. "After the doctor passed away, his family wasn’t interested in pursuing it any further."

Pruitt’s death occurred the same year that the Department of Community Affairs was killed off by Gov. Rick "I Love the Smell of Bulldozers in the Morning" Scott and our pro-sprawl Legislature. (Tom, Secretary of the Dept. of Community Affairs) Pelham had already resigned by then, surrendering to the inevitable.

"It’s very discouraging to public servants, who are given a mission and responsibility to enforce laws enacted by others, to be constantly bashed for doing their job," he said at the time.

Click here to read the full story.

Babcock Ranch: Florida's first hurricane-proof town

Florida's Babcock Ranch was built to survive a storm. Hurricane Ian was the town's first test. Incredibly, the community weathered the storm – emerging almost unscathed.

When Hurricane Ian made landfall on the southwest Florida coast, it brought 150mph winds, 17 inches of rain within 24 hours, and storm surges of up to 18ft. It was the costliest hurricane in Florida's history, causing more than $112bn in damage – and at least 150 deaths.

The category four storm, which hit Florida on 28 September 2022, knocked out power to more than four million people in the state, and caused catastrophic flooding.

Amid the calamity, there was one community that weathered the storm surprisingly well: Babcock Ranch, an 18,000-acre development that was sitting in the eye of the storm, on the southwest of the state, just north of Fort Myers. Built to withstand powerful storms, the town came out relatively unscathed.

Florida is more likely to flood than any other state in the US due to its flat terrain. Despite this, only 18% of Florida homes have flood insurance – some residents even report their insurance would be more than their rent. A recent study found the cost of insurance was projected to increase by 40% in 2023. Exacerbating the issue is the explosive population growth and subsequent housing development that's taken place over the past century – much of it on the wetlands that would normally help prevent to flooding.

Building climate-resilient communities is especially important in a state like Florida, which experiences a six month-long hurricane season. And that's exactly what Syd Kitson, developer of Babcock Ranch, hoped he'd achieved.

Five days before Hurricane Ian hit, Kitson sat around a table with his team of engineers, contractors and internal managers, and pored over the layouts of Babcock Ranch. He asked them: "Have we done everything humanly possible to ensure we're safe?"

Kitson had built the development above building code requirements – at a large additional cost – to ensure it was capable of withstanding a storm. "We spent a lot of additional dollars to make it safe, to plan it differently from other communities," he says. "The entire plan was based on the environment and resiliency. Everything we did was to address those two concerns."

In the aftermath, not a single house lost power, internet, or access to clean water, and the development opened its doors to the surrounding community who had lost their homes, turning a sports hall into an emergency shelter. And when Kitson drove around the site the next morning to inspect the damage, he found that the community he had built had survived – almost unscathed, bar a few upturned palm trees and street signs.

"We had minimal damage. If we hadn't had put in place those resilient steps, we would have had tens of billions of dollars of damage. So those upfront costs to make Babcock resilient paid for themselves in just the first couple of years."

The realisation that his climate-resilient design had worked was an "emotional" moment for Kitson. "It was incredible to see this new town had really proved climate resilience planning can be done the right way."

Click here to read how they learned to build a storm-resilient community.

PEER review finds Florida once again is under-punishing pollution

After a promising first few years under Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida is right back to its dirty old ways of going soft on environmental violators, a nonprofit watchdog group says.

Anti-pollution enforcement sharply declined in 2022, according to a new analysis by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. PEER found Florida Department of Environmental Protection enforcement actions were 59% below 2010 figures — the watershed year when enforcement peaked before former Gov. Rick Scott drastically cut environmental enforcement, after taking office in 2011. And despite an initial increase under DeSantis, DEP enforcement actions remained well below long-term averages, PEER's report shows.

"By all measures, the pollution burden placed on Florida’s lands and waters continues to grow," said PEER Executive Director Tim Whitehouse, a former senior enforcement attorney with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

But DEP says they've heard it all before from PEER and for almost two decades the group "has perpetuated an inaccurate characterization" of the agency's enforcement, "based on information that has either been misinterpreted or misrepresented."

Officials say the agency has long had a philosophy of helping to bring polluters into compliance, rather than focusing on punishing them with fines.

Click here to read the full story.

Florida county’s swampy politics lead to bad decision on wetlands

Commissioners listen to developer’s expert instead of actual wetlands scientist

Have you ever made your way through a marsh? Tromped through a swamp? Waded in a wetland?

I have. It was soooo icky! And wet! Ewwww! I mean, I’ve seen some real prize-winners for swampiness.

No wonder Manatee County wants to get rid of their marshes, bogs, and swamps.

Sure, sure, sure, Florida’s wetlands filter out pollution, hold back floods, and recharge the aquifer, the source of our drinking water. Not to mention providing essential habitat for imperiled species. And of course, soaking up the carbon emissions that cause our climate to change.

But c’mon, y’all! They’re constantly getting in the way! How inconvenient for developers and phosphate miners!

That’s why it is totally understandable that the Manatee County Commission voted last week to make it easier to turn all those soggy spots into nice, clean pavement.

"We all want to protect our environment," Commission Chairman Kevin Van Ostenbridge — who’s been a real estate salesman for 20 years — said during the commission meeting. "At the same time, we also have to protect private property rights, which are part of the foundation of this country."

Of course, we have to protect the rights of property owners. Somehow, though, the folks who keep crying about property rights never worry about the rights of the owners whose property winds up inundated after those flood-absorbing wetlands have been turned into a slab of concrete.

How did the county named after Florida’s most adorable wildlife species, the gentle sea cow, wind up taking this extreme anti-environmental stance?

When you follow the path that led to this point, it makes perfect cents — er, I mean sense.

While Florida has worked hard to make it easier than ever to wipe out wetlands, we’ve also seen an increase in water pollution. A recent study found Florida has more polluted lakes than any other state, and we’re second for the most polluted estuaries.

Click here to read the full story.

What climate change means for Florida's future

The tide is coming in

Over the weekend, a marine heat wave warmed Florida's surface ocean temperatures to the mid-90s, reaching as high as 97 degrees Fahrenheit off Johnson Key. The high temperatures are "threatening delicate coral reefs" and "depriving swimmers of cooling dips," The Associated Press reported.

Rising temperatures also damage Florida's coral reefs, and the state could lose $55 billion in reef tourism money by 2100. And with the second-longest coastline of all American states, Florida is especially vulnerable to rising sea levels. Tidal flooding from sea level rise has already cost Miami-Dade County $500 million in lost real estate value, according to a report from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Levels are rising at a rate of one inch every three years in Florida.

A task force of experts from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA forecast that coastal flooding in Florida will increase rapidly over the next 30 years. By 2050, the sea level may rise by up to 18 inches. Cities like Clearwater, Port Canaveral and St. Petersburg might see levels rise by up to a foot over the next two decades.

Dr. Harold Wanless, a geologist and professor at the University of Miami, told CBS News that his research indicates that 60% of Miami-Dade County will be submerged by 2060. Some scientists are worried the lower third of Florida will be submerged by the end of this century, The Guardian reported.

Climate advocates fear that people moving into the area do not know the full scope of the danger of coastal flooding. Realtors can keep a property's flood history private, and that information can be challenging for potential buyers to gain access to on their own. Many of FEMA's flood maps are outdated and don't consider rising sea levels or flooding from sudden storms.

Click here to read the full story.

Florida moves forward on radioactive road paving plan as Gov. DeSantis signs new law

Florida is another step closer to paving its roads with phosphogypsum — a radioactive waste material from the fertilizer industry — after Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a controversial bill into law Thursday.

Conservation groups had urged DeSantis to veto the bill (we also submitted a letter to Gov. DeSantis requesting his veto -ed.), saying phosphogypsum would hurt water quality and put road construction crews at a higher risk of cancer.

"By signing off on this reckless handout to the fertilizer industry, Gov. DeSantis is paving the way to a toxic legacy generations of Floridians will have to grapple with," said Elise Bennett, Florida and Caribbean director at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a statement sent to NPR.

The Environmental Protection Agency also has a say: The agency regulates phosphogypsum, and any plan to use it in roads would require a review.

Click here to read the full story.

DeSantis to pause bans on fertilizer. Advocates worry it’ll worsen water woes

Nearly $800 million for water quality programs. Close to $700 million for Everglades restoration. A $100 million Indian River Lagoon Protection program.

These are all environmental projects Gov. Ron DeSantis proudly approved funding for at a press conference Thursday in Fort Pierce where he signed the largest state budget in history.

But many Florida environmentalists feel one critical action was missing — a line-item veto to a measure that would suspend creation of new city and county fertilizer bans past July 1 and fund a $250,000 study at the University of Florida to evaluate their effectiveness.

Its approval won’t affect existing fertilizer bans.... Rather, it’ll prevent cities and towns from creating new ordinances or extending existing ones.

Pushing a policy change through the budget rather than allowing it to go through the legislative process with public input was a mistake, said Eve Samples, executive director of environmental group Friends of the Everglades.

"It was really a sneak attack," she said. "There’s a disconnect between what we’re seeing out of Tallahassee and the dire water quality issues we’re facing in Florida."

Throughout Florida, there are more than 100 municipalities that restrict fertilizer use during the rainy season in order to prevent excess phosphorus and nitrogen pollution.

High levels of these nutrients have been tied to persistent issues like diminishing sea grass, algal blooms and fish kills. For years, municipal fertilizer bans during rainier months have been heralded as one of local governments’ most effective tools to regulate water quality.

Click here to read the full story.

Florida lawmakers propose about $1 billion in land conservation for the next fiscal year

Florida Forever would receive $100 million, another $100 million is earmarked for the Rural and Family Lands Protection Program, and $800 million would fund projects connecting the Ocala and Osceola National Forests.

The Florida Legislature has proposed about $1 billion in land conservation funds for the fiscal year starting July 1, 2023.

Legislators directed about $100 million to Florida Forever, the state's land acquisition program.

Dean Saunders is a real estate broker in Lakeland with SVN Saunders Ralston Dantzler. He’s also a former state legislator representing Polk County from 1992 through 1996 who helped pioneer Florida Forever when it was known back then as Preservation 2000.

Another $100 million is earmarked to purchase conservation easements on agricultural lands through the Rural and Family Lands Protection Program.

And a hefty $800 million would go toward the Ocala to Osceola Wildlife Corridor, known as O2O. The governor has not yet signed off on the budget.

Click here to read or listen to the full story.

New water quality standards, money for land preservation signed into law

The new law takes a comprehensive approach to stopping water pollution, sponsors say.

The law of the land now prohibits new septic tanks in some environmentally sensitive areas and sets a new, dramatically lower standard for pollutants allowed in state waterways, according to legislation Gov. Ron DeSantis signed.

The Governor’s office is highlighting the measure (HB 1379) that became law Tuesday as advancing the environmental priorities DeSantis laid out in a January executive order.

Republican Rep. Toby Overdorf of Palm City, who filed the legislation with Republican Rep. Kevin Steele of Dade City, said it’s an effort to take a comprehensive approach to protecting sensitive land and water. The effort drew cosponsors from both sides of the aisle.

The new law is broadly aimed at reducing pollutants in rivers, streams, springs, and coastal areas that can cause the types of algae blooms that in 2016 turned parts of the state’s coastal waters into the "Guacamole Coast."

For homeowners and developers in these environmentally sensitive areas, the new law means new homes must be connected to existing sewer systems if one is available. And large-scale developments can’t be built in these areas if there isn’t the ability to connect to a sewer.

Click here to read the full story.

Governor Signs SB 540 - "The Worst Environmental Bill Passed by the Legislature During the 2023 Session"

Despite strong opposition from environmental groups throughout the state, the Governor on Wednesday signed Senate Bill 540 into law, without any fanfare, picture or announcement from his office.

The new law takes effect July 1. It will now require citizens who challenge a local comprehensive plan amendment to pay the legal fees if they lose their suit, including developers’ attorney fees if they join the case. It could end citizen challenges to questioned developments.

In a release, Friends of the Everglades, which dubbed the measure the "sprawl bill", said the measure is "the worst environmental bill passed by the Florida Legislature during the 2023 session." They said the Governor's decision to sign SB 540 into law "defies the spirit of DeSantis’ own Executive Order 23-06, which called for protecting the long-term planning process that safeguards sustainable growth in Florida." The environmental group said it will only "embolden developers to propose more environmentally perilous projects."

Click here to read the full report.

Governor DeSantis Signs Senate Bill 540

We are deeply disappointed to report that Governor DeSantis has signed Senate Bill 540, legislation that will decimate citizens’ planning rights and imperil the future of Everglades restoration. We regret that he did not heed the warnings of so many Floridians like you, including more than 5,770 who signed our veto petition, that SB 540 would pave the way for urban sprawl and do irreparable damage to Florida’s environment and quality of life.

SB 540 will threaten ordinary Floridians with financial ruin for exercising their right to legally challenge amendments that conflict with their communities’ comprehensive plans — their blueprints for environmentally and fiscally sustainable growth. Floridians who lose such challenges could be forced to pay the attorney fees and costs of the prevailing local government and any developers that chose to intervene.

The risk of getting stuck with this five- or six-figure expense will virtually eliminate citizen challenges, a crucial check on growth under Florida’s community planning process. This loss will be especially dangerous for the Everglades, where a wave of development proposals could do irreversible harm to the multibillion-dollar taxpayer funded restoration. This terrible law also will force taxpayers today and in the future to bear the costs of unsustainable development.

Click here to read the full press release.

Florida’s fertilizer addiction leads to ban on sales bans, roads that glow

Legislators approved a sneaky budget attack on clean water and testing radioactive roads

Hey everybody, good news! We can all come out of the storm shelters! The Legislature left!

The two-month session ended last week with the traditional declaration of "sine die," which is Latin for "good riddance." As the lawmakers departed, they left behind teams of lobbyists gleefully tallying their clients’ per-hour charges as a handful of reporters picked through the rubble to see what passed.

Two of the worst things that survived the session are related to our ongoing water pollution woes. Both are likely to make things a lot worse. Both came as something of a surprise.

One was a surprise in that it sounded so darn Goofy you’d think all the avowed enemies of Disney World would have shot it down. Fortunately, it may get blocked by the feds. More on that in a bit.

The other was a surprise because nobody saw it coming — except, of course, for the nefarious political forces that sprung this last-minute assault on clean water.

Both have to do with our addiction to the F-drug. Fentanynl? No, something even more widespread and insidious: Fertilizer.

You may have noticed all the headlines lately regarding toxic algae blooms that wipe out marine life and threaten human health. Fertilizer washed into waterways by our frequent summer storms tend to fuel these algae blooms.

One of the most effective measures to combat these awful algae attackers is a summertime fertilizer sales ban. Such bans cut back on fertilizer use at a time when it really counts, and when your lawn doesn’t need as much fertilizing.

"Lawmakers took no testimony from local government officials or environmental advocates, who are now warning that the measure could dramatically impede efforts to curb toxic algae outbreaks that feed on nitrogen and phosphorus-rich runoff," the Miami Herald reported.

Cue Private Gomer Pyle shouting, "Surprise, surprise, surprise"

But wait, I haven’t told you yet about the other fertilizer-related measure that our fine legislators flung at us like angry monkeys at the zoo. That’s another messy one.

Click here to read the full story.

Florida Legislature poised to deal serious blow to local water quality efforts

A proposal to restrict fertilizer management ordinances was tucked into a budget proposal at the last minute.

Florida legislators are poised to block one of the most effective tools local governments say they have to protect water quality in their communities in the face of red tide and blue-green algae outbreaks by banning rainy season restrictions on fertilizer use.

A measure quietly tucked into a budget proposal over the weekend would prohibit at least 117 local governments from "adopting or amending a fertilizer management ordinance" during the 2023-24 budget year, requiring them to rely on less restrictive regulations developed by the University of Florida, which are supported by the state’s phosphate industry, the producers of fertilizer.

Legislative leaders tentatively agreed to a $116 billion budget on Monday and, with no public debate or discussion, included the fertilizer language that emerged late Sunday.

It is the latest proposal to emerge in a legislative session that has fast-tracked industry-friendly bills aimed at removing local control and public input over emotionally-charged environmental and development issues.

Lawmakers took no testimony from local government officials or environmental advocates who are now warning that the measure could dramatically impede efforts to curb toxic algae outbreaks that feed on nitrogen and phosphorus-rich runoff.

"Supporting this change would allow more fertilizer runoff into Florida’s waters, period," said Eve Samples of Friends of the Everglades. "That doesn’t benefit anyone except big fertilizer companies."

Click here to read the full story.

A bill to protect the habitat and food source of Florida manatees has the Senate's okay

The full Florida Senate okayed a bill Wednesday aimed at addressing the state’s alarming rate of seagrass loss and record breaking manatee deaths.

Florida's waterways and manatees have been making national headlines lately. Good Morning America visited Crystal River in West Florida earlier this month. to highlight efforts to restore the sea cow's habitat. St. Rep. Lindsay Cross (R-St. Petersburg) is glad to see the issue getting attention.

Cross, an environmental scientist, and says seagrass plays an important role—especially in coastal estuary systems.

"Our estuaries are where the young fish, they’re often called nursery areas, the young fish come and live in these areas. Particularly in the more protected sheltered seagrass areas, so they serve as very important habitat," Cross says.

The underwater plant also serves as a primary food source for the Florida Manatee.

The Indian River Lagoon which spans across seven counties of Florida’s east coast has lost almost 60 percent of its seagrass. This habitat loss is causing record breaking manatee deaths. 2021 and 2022 were the worst two years recorded for manatee mortalities, with more than 2,000 manatees deaths reported in the two years combined. The overwhelming reported cause of death was chronic starvation and malnutrition.

Sen. Jim Boyd (R-Badenton) is sponsoring the bill passed out of the Senate Wednesday that would create a partnership among scientific and government organizations to develop a 10-year seagrass restoration plan.

Boyd’s bill along with a House companion will allocate $2-million to the Department of Environmental Protection through 2028 to develop a comprehensive plan on how to regrow and restore seagrass habitats.

Cross is happy lawmakers in Tallahassee are aware of the issue but she has some concerns about the legislation. She says the underlying problem needs to be addressed first.

"The only true way to restore seagrass is first to have clean enough water and then to work on some specific techniques that may be specific to that local estuary or that local water body," Cross says.

"I don’t think we’re doing a good enough job of ensuring that we are offsetting the new pollution while we’re still trying to fix the mistakes from the past," Cross says.

Click here to read the full story.

Climate change makes Florida ‘rain-bombs’ more common

Governor and Legislature focus only on coping with sea level rise, ignore other effects of warming climate

If you live in Florida, you never suffer from an irony deficiency. Case in point: Flood managers from across the nation gathered in South Florida last week for a conference — only to run into the region’s worst flooding in yeeeeeeeeears.

(Hey, do you think we can get the nation’s lottery managers to meet at my house? Just asking.)

We’re accustomed to a little rain here in Florida. We call ourselves the Sunshine State, but that’s a lie we made up to fool the tourists.

Most of our cities get more annual rainfall than famously drizzly Seattle. Four show up on the top 10 list of the rainiest cities in America: Pensacola, West Palm Beach, Miami, and Tallahassee.

But what hit Fort Lauderdale last week was the kind of storm that would make Noah start rounding up animals: nearly 26 inches in 24 hours.

Some news stories referred to it as a "rain-bomb," which sounds fairly accurate for the amount of damage it caused. The airport shut down, schools closed, scores of people abandoned their cars and fled their waterlogged homes.

"If the numbers hold up, Wednesday’s storm will go down in the history books," the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported. "The previous record for 24-hour rainfall for Fort Lauderdale was 14.59 inches, set in 1979."

Bear in mind that that record-shattering rainfall hit right after three days of storms that deposited more than 31 inches of downpour in Broward County’s drainage system. Bear in mind, too, that rampant development has covered much of the once-porous landscape with concrete, making the flooding worse.

On Sunday, so much rain fell on West Palm Beach in 24 hours that it broke a record set in 1897.

The aftermath of such a deluge is obvious. Regional waterways are now so full of pollution they’re filthier than a gas station toilet. Meanwhile, so much standing water seems likely to breed a bumper crop of disease-bearing mosquitoes.

After reading all these soggy stories, I called up David Zierden, who serves as our state climatologist (Yes, we really have one! Don’t tell the politicians!)

As I suspected, he said those heavy rainstorms are showing us just one aspect to the alterations that climate change has brought our world.

Click here to read the full story.

With Broward, Fort Lauderdale under water, Senate panel advances ban on environmental investing

As torrential rains caused flooding in Fort Lauderdale, forcing its airport to close, a Senate committee voted Thursday to forbid state and local agencies from considering the danger of climate change when investing pension money.

The bill (SB 302) cleared the Fiscal Policy Committee on a 13-6 party-line vote. Its next stop is the Senate floor. Similar legislation has already passed the House.

The measure targets “ESG” investing, or considering environmental, social, and governance factors when making investments. Gov. Ron DeSantis and Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis are pushing to outlaw what they consider "woke" capitalism that subordinates returns for political or ideological factors.

Palm Beach County Democratic committee member Lori Berman remarked upon the dissonance between what the panel was doing and what was happening in Broward County.

"If you don’t think we should be looking at these issues, look at Fort Lauderdale today," Berman said.

"The flooding that is going on right now shows the dramatic economic impact that climate change can have and how it can hurt all our businesses throughout the state," she said.

Click here to read the full story.

Nature is coming for Florida’s barrier islands. Should we give some over?

Rewilding, an adaptation to change, is a solution that allows us to take action before nature rewilds barrier islands for us.

In the wake of Hurricane Ian, a mail carrier and a postal inspector entered the U.S. Post Office on Sanibel Island to assess the damage. But they soon had to step gingerly back out. An alligator had taken up residence in the swamped-out building.

As amusing as the story was, it is also a powerful reminder of the true wild nature of Florida’s barrier islands. Sanibel had preserved an amazing 67% of the island as conservation land, with more than half of the island being managed for the gators and wading birds and other wildlife that make the island their home. This preserved land also helped protect the human residents. Ian’s destruction would have been an order of magnitude worse if Sanibel had been paved over or packed with high-rise condominiums.

As climate change intensifies storms and drives sea-level rise, nature is taking back some of Florida’s barrier islands. "The ocean is attempting to equilibrate sea levels to reinstate historic sea levels and is swallowing land as a result," says Andrew Gude, manager of the Cedar Keys National Wildlife Refuge in the northern Gulf of Mexico. "Coastal communities are witnessing severe ecological changes, stronger storms and higher floods."

The growing risk of living on Florida’s barrier islands has many people contemplating how to better protect life and communities. "One thing is for sure: You cannot mess with Mother Nature," said Syd Kitson, developer of Babcock Ranch, the inland sustainable community that made it through Ian unscathed. "She is going to win every single time."

Click here to read the full guest column.

Good news-bad news on Florida manatee deaths this year

Loss of seagrass to pollution-fed algae blooms continues taking a toll

My dad, an inveterate jokester, was a big fan of "good news-bad news" gags.

I thought of my dad..., last week when state officials held their final press conference of the year to talk about the starving manatees they’ve been feeding lettuce to get them through the cold months. The feeding had ended for a second year.

The day they held the press conference, by the way, was "Manatee Appreciation Day," which was rather ironic. If you’ve lived here a while, you’ve probably noticed that every day in Florida is Irony Appreciation Day.

The good news, the state folks said, was this: Fewer manatees died this winter.

That’s a relief, because over the past two years we’ve lost 2,000 of them. Many died of starvation caused by algae blooms that killed off the seagrass they usually eat.

In 2021, 1,100 manatees died, shattering all previous records. Another 800 died last year, which is still pretty high.

So far this year, scientists have spotted only 215 dead manatees. In the first three months of last year, the number of dead manatees hit 463. The year before that — the one that broke the record — the scientists by this point had already collected 559 carcasses.

"We’re well below what we experienced the past two winters," Andy Garrett, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s manatee rescue coordinator, told reporters last week.

But before we start unfurling the victory banners, holding a parade, and singing manatee songs ("Barbara Manatee" from "Veggie Tales" is my go-to sea cow carol)... here’s the bad news: Part of the reason the death toll is down this spring is because there are now far fewer manatees than there used to be.

"The population is still really precarious," Patrick Rose, longtime executive director of the Save the Manatee Club, told me this week.

Just five years ago, biologists counted about 6,000 manatees swimming around our waterways. The official U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimate of the population prior to the die-off was 6,300. Some estimates said we hit 7,000.

I’m no math whiz. When the numbers go higher than 10, I have to take off my shoes. But even I can see that we’ve lost about a quarter to a third of all manatees.

That’s sure to put a crimp in their future.

Here’s the really scary news. It involves the little manatees, which — as with land cows — are known as "calves."

Even under normal circumstance, there aren’t a lot of calves. Female manatees generally give birth to a single calf every two to five years.

Some calves don’t live long enough to grow into a sofa-sized adult aquatic mammal. Often, it’s because Mama Manatee was killed by a careless boater or some other cause.

Normally the number of calves killed in a year is around 4 to 8 percent of the total number of deaths, Rose said. But right now, "the raw numbers are showing it’s less than 1 percent."

Martine de Wit is the veterinarian in charge of the state’s Marine Mammal Pathology Laboratory in St. Petersburg. That’s where she and other experts examine the carcass of dead manatees for clues on what killed them. She spelled out the calves’ problem last week: "We can assume less manatees were born if we see less dead ones...."

And she said we won’t know for sure the impact this die-off has had on the manatees’ reproduction rate for several years. Malnourished and starving animals generally lack the energy to produce any young.

That’s [sic] means it’s liable to take a looooong time to rebuild the manatee population to the size it was in 2017.

That’s the year that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials announced they were so confident about manatees’ future they were taking them off the “endangered” list and calling them merely "threatened."

They did that the day after Manatee Appreciation Day. Ironic, don’t you think?

Click here to read the full story.

Report: Surging population, rising seas could lead to more of Florida being paved over

As Florida’s population swells to more than 26 million people and more land is lost to rising seas, about 1 million more undeveloped acres could be paved over in less than two decades, according to a new study released Wednesday by the University of Florida and 1000 Friends of Florida.

Potentially hardest hit: large, intact rural lands that offer the best hope for saving wild Florida.

"We're about to hit a threshold where we're going to start seeing more rural impacts if the current pattern continues," said Tom Hoctor, director of the University of Florida’s Center for Landscape Conservation Planning.

...growth is also now occurring in a state unfettered by growth management laws forged in the 1970s and 1980s that once held it in check. In 2010, the rules were mostly wiped out by then Gov. Rick Scott and state lawmakers who disbanded the state agency overseeing development.

This latest study by UF and 1000 Friends, a land use advocacy nonprofit, builds on a 2016 report by the group that looked out to 2070 and the impact of poor planning.

Click here to read the full story.

How a destroyed eagle nest led Florida legislators to attack local pollution rules

The bills banning local wetland and water quality protections began with the building of a lake house in Pasco County

It’s been a while since I went on a tour of the Florida State Capitol, the esteemed winner of the Most Phallic Public Building in the World contest.

So, you’ll have to forgive me if I am unable to tell you exactly where to find the Well of Nincompoopery. I can only assume its existence from the behavior of our fine legislators, who seem to drink deeply from this well whenever they’re in session.

Based strictly on the ridiculous bills they’ve sponsored this year, some of them aren’t just sipping the well water. They’re soaking in it.

The bills that struck me as the biggest evidence that there’s a Well of Nincompoopery in Tallahassee are a pair that come out in favor of water pollution.

The bills — HB 1197 in the House and SB 1240 in the Senate — would forbid any local governments from "adopting laws, regulations, rules, or policies relating to water quality or quantity, pollution control, pollutant discharge prevention or removal, and wetlands."

Bear in mind that these bills are being put forward at a time when our beaches are plagued by a months-long red tide toxic algae bloom fueled by pollution in stormwater runoff.

Worst of all, a recent court decision found that the state Department of Environmental Foot-dragging — er, excuse me, "Protection," — has failed for the past four years to clean up the pollution sources degrading our springs. You can bet the springs aren’t the only Florida waterways being neglected.

Click here to read the full story.

Florida's Right to Clean Water: Sign this petition before it's too late

Never should it come to this.

The Florida Right to Clean Water is a petition movement sweeping its way across the Sunshine State. It's goal is to place an amendment to the Florida Constitution on the November 2024 ballot.

The language in the amendment is self-explanatory: Fix Florida's waterways and stop polluting them. Make state agencies enforce laws on the books and quit trying to squirm out of them. And when the agencies assigned to protect the water don't do their jobs, Floridians have the right to sue. Legal action takes precedent over politics.

Clean water in Florida is not just for Republicans or Democrats. It's for ALL of us.

As a Floridian, protecting our waterways should be incumbent upon all of us — whether we're fifth generation or just moved here a few months ago. Lately, the tentacles of special interests have wormed their way into the halls of the Florida Capitol. They've placed an ever-increasing stranglehold on the politicians in Tallahassee.

Polluters pay to keep politicians in office. In return, the elected do their bidding.

Florida's waterways suffer. So do property values, businesses, wildlife and people. Communities suffer.

Even when Gov. Ron DeSantis pledges billions to fix the water, the results are the same year to year.

Health department officials run ragged all summer placing "Don't touch the water" signs on half of the state's waterways.

"It's easier to stop people from fishing and boating than it is to clean up the mess in the water," said Laurilee Thompson, owner of Titusville's famous Dixie Crossroads restaurant.

Click here to read the full opinion piece.

Listen Now! Clean Water petition gives Florida glimmer of hope as waterways continue to suffer

If you only know the name Marjory Stoneman Douglas because of the school shooting in 2018, you'd be doing yourself a favor by looking up the person for whom the school is named.

I’ll give you the short, short version.

Marjory was an environmental champion who fought for the Everglades for a majority of her 108 years on Earth.

Her book, "The Everglades: River of Grass," released in 1947, redefined the popular conception of the Everglades as a treasured river instead of a worthless swamp.

She pointed out its biodiversity and importance to the existence of South Florida. It is because of her efforts we still have a huge swath of the Everglades, yet it’s nowhere near as expansive as it once was.

Today, while we have environmentalists fighting to preserve many of Florida’s treasured ecology, no one with Marjory’s voice is at the forefront of the fight.

Throughout the state, bodies of water such as the Indian River Lagoon on Florida’s East coast, have become victims of overdevelopment and lack of legislation to stop what has been making our waterways polluted.

Our manatees, fish and seagrass are dying and very few are being held accountable.

However, there is a glimmer of hope for those who still care about our environment in the form of the Florida Right to Clean Water petition, an initiative to amend Florida's Constitution by the voters in November 2024.

Click here to read the full story.

Head scientist at Smithsonian in Fort Pierce explains blue-green algae growing in Blue Cypress Lake

Dr. Valerie Paul says growth likely caused by summer temperatures Florida has been experiencing

VERO BEACH, Fla. — Health officials in Indian River County have issued a blue-green algae alert for Blue Cypress Lake in Indian River County. Dr. Valerie Paul, the head scientist at the Smithsonian Marine Station at Fort Pierce, said there's a reason for it.

"They can produce all sorts of toxins, and one of the more common ones is a whole group of toxins call microcystins," Paul said. "This time of year is normally a little early for them, but look at how warm it's been. Blue-green algae like nice warm temperatures, and we've had a nice warm February."

Paul said it's hard to say what the outlook for summer would be, but with algae blooming so early in the year, the outlook could be grim for boaters, fishermen and participants of outdoor recreation.

Click here to read the full report.

DEP drags its feet on halting pollution of Florida’s precious springs

Court ruling says agency has failed to do its job for the past four years

Florida, as I am fond of pointing out, is like no other place on earth. We get more lightning strikes here than the rest of the country. More sinkholes than the rest of the U.S., too. More shark bites than anywhere else in the world.

If you get the impression that Florida’s trying to kill us, all I can say is: You’re not wrong.

On the plus side, though, we’ve also got more first-magnitude springs than anywhere else on the planet, "first-magnitude" referring to how much water gushes out from underground.

Early accounts of our springs are credited with inspiring Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous poem about Kubla Khan, which talks of a sacred river running through "caverns measureless to man." Another writer, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas dubbed the springs "bowls of liquid light," which is a lovely image indeed.

Our springs were our earliest tourist attraction, with thousands of Northern visitors drawn here by medical hucksters pushing a sit-and-soak as the ultimate cure-all. ("Florida: Ripping Off the Gullible Since the 1870s!")

A lot of the springs are public property now as part of our award-winning state park system. One example: Weeki Wachee Springs, the only state park in the nation where the roster of government employees includes mermaids.

Most importantly, the springs give us windows into our drinking water supply because each one is connected to our aquifer. If the springs are healthy, so is our drinking water. If they have problems, so do we water-guzzlers.

Given all that, you’d think we’d take better care of these precious jewels than we do. Instead, the state agency in charge of protecting them, the badly misnamed Department of Environmental "Protection," has treated these "bowls of liquid light" more like toilet bowls that never get flushed.

But a court ruling issued in mid-February may turn things around — at least, that’s the hope.

Click here to read the full story.

Florida attorney general tries to make it easier to pave over wetlands

We all should object to Ashley Moody joining this anti-environment lawsuit

Court cases can be quite entertaining. And I don’t just mean the fictional courtroom dramas on TV, ranging from "Perry Mason" to "LA Law" to "Law and Order: No Not That One, The Other One."

In the four years I spent covering criminal courts for Florida’s largest newspaper, I saw some amazing cases.

There’s a case going on right now involving Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody that is more outrageous than entertaining.

Moody, a Plant City native, is a former federal prosecutor, judge, high school cheerleading captain, and all-around overachiever. She was even the Strawberry Festival Queen.

As the state’s chief legal officer, she’s got her hands full. The A.G.’s office is supposed to protect consumers from fraud, enforce the state’s antitrust laws, go after drug traffickers and gangs, represent the prosecution in criminal appeals, and issue formal legal opinions at the request of public officials.

When Moody ran for attorney general in 2018, she vowed that she wouldn’t politicize the Cabinet-level office. The A.G.’s role, she said during a televised debate, "is not to advance a political agenda or pick topics that are personal to me and use the office to sue anybody I can come up with."

But now she’s signed onto the most raggedy RAGA (Republican Attorneys General Association) lawsuit of all, one that’s aimed at hurting the environment. It’s an attack on our wetlands.

And from what I can see, Florida’s top lawyer has gotten herself mired in a legal swamp.

I asked Moody’s staff to explain why she enlisted Florida in this kooky crusade.

"Florida already has strong laws to protect our waterways, and we cannot allow the federal government to usurp the states’ traditional power over their own waters," Moody spokesman Whitney Ray told me.

As I have pointed out before, Florida’s "Clean Waterways Act" is a sham, a law designed to fool the public into thinking we’re stopping pollution while not requiring the polluters to lift a finger. Everything in it is voluntary.

Click here to read the full story.

Fellsmere awarded $4.5 million federal grant for storm water projects, lagoon restoration

FELLSMERE — The city will get $4.5 million in federal COVID-relief money to tackle a handful of storm water treatment projects.

As part of a $20 million grant to help restore the Indian River Lagoon, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection selected four Fellsmere projects. Most of the money will go toward storm water treatment projects in Brevard County; Fellsmere is the only Treasure Coast municipality to receive money from the grant.

Compared to towns such as Sebastian and Vero Beach, Fellsmere is especially in need of infrastructure for collecting and treating storm water, City Manager Mark Mathes said. The town couldn't fund these projects itself, so it applied for help from the state.

While Fellsmere is not directly on the Indian River Lagoon, the town's storm water runs into canals connected to the St. Sebastian River, which feeds into the lagoon.

Other cities along the lagoon, such as Sebastian, still are lacking in significant storm water infrastructure, said Friends of St. Sebastian River President Tim Glover. He'd like to see Sebastian focus on the issue more and take advantage of state funding, he said.

Better storm water retention is something Friends of St. Sebastian River and fellow environmental groups — such as the Clean Water Coalition, Indian River Neighborhood Association and Pelican Island Audobon Society — have advocated for as Sebastian aims to annex about 2,000 acres Feb. 8. But the groups' input has mostly been ignored throughout the drafting of the agreement, he said.

Click here to read the full story.

The myth of progress on restoring Florida’s waters

Officials unwilling to make meaningful policy changes to stop the pollution

It is becoming obvious that Florida’s water restoration programs cannot keep pace with the pollution generated from poorly planned growth and development that has skyrocketed in Florida over the past decade.

A case in point is the Caloosahatchee River Basin Management Action Plan (BMAP). Adopted in 2012 and implemented by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP), the BMAP is aimed at reducing nitrogen pollution to levels consistent with state and federal water law.

The ecosystem goals are to lower the loading of nitrogen and phosphorus to avoid harmful algal blooms, prevent oxygen depletion that kills fish and wildlife and eventually enable restoration of seagrass within a 20-year timeframe.

The 2022 draft BMAP review, required by the Legislature, summarizes various elements of the plan spun mostly as progress. However, a closer reading of the report reveals some systemic failures that are anything but progress.

The draft BMAP review states that stakeholders assigned pollutant load reduction targets have exceeded the 10-year milestone adopted in the plan. In contradiction to the stated progress, the report goes on to describe nitrogen loading reported by the SFWMD in 2022 has increased 77 percent since the BMAP was adopted ten years ago. The situation is apparently worsening rather than improving.

Unfortunately, we have seen similar outcomes statewide where water quality impairment has increased significantly in Florida waters for pollutants like nitrogen and phosphorus since 2010. Yet, we don’t see concurrent and significant increases in water quality restoration programs or timely and effective implementation of the Blue-green Algae Task Force (BGATF) consensus recommendations.

Click here to read the full opinion piece.

Can we grow seagrass on land to revive the lagoon? Maybe

The grass is seldom greener these days on the underside of the Indian River Lagoon. For the past decade, the waterway has become a graveyard for seagrass: the place where it just dies.

Rhizomes, or the seagrass roots that enable it to spread and grow, drift along Brevard's lagoon bottom and perish quickly before they can take root in the sand. Science blames the nutrient-rich output from septic tanks, sewage spills, fertilizer free-for-alls, and willy-nilly paving over wetlands as the killers.

Nevertheless, a few companies, nonprofits and government agencies believe there might be an extraordinarily, seemingly simple solution to the problem. The idea is to just grow the grasses in large tanks on land and then transplant them into the lagoon to nurse it back to health.

But biologists say its anything but simple and straightforward. And some critics of the concept see it a costly waste of time, the equivalent of throwing good money into bad water at the expense of more tried-and-true restoration methods. They say that until we get a grasp on exactly why the seagrass can't re-establish itself in the lagoon, the idea of simply trying to regrow seagrass in the estuary is futile.

Indeed, there are many unknowns in the effort. Is it possible to harvest enough of the scant remaining lagoon grass, nurture it in special nurseries, then simply transplant it back to the river to reestablish the thousands of acres of lost beds. Or would poor water quality quickly kill off all the transplants? Or would starving sea cows eat up all the newly sprouting blades overnight?

Some of the answers might emerge from what's just been submerged in Palm Bay.

In tributaries there and several other places around Florida, a few companies are placing big bets they can nurse back one of nature's foundational foodstuffs for fish, manatees and other lagoon life.

Click here to read the full story.

Even my hard-headed dad understood the importance of Florida’s wetlands

As a land surveyor, he warned a developer not to build in a marsh

We buried my dad last week. Oscar Pittman had a good, long life. He’d just turned 87, and he and my mom had celebrated 67 years of marriage.

After the funeral, though, my mom told me a story about my dad that I had never heard before. It showed me a different side of him than the one I knew. It concerns Florida’s all-important wetlands.

My dad made a good living off all the development in the Panhandle. But he didn’t necessarily hold the developers themselves in high regard.

This guy — let’s call him Bombastic Bob — was pretty sure he was king of the world and everything in it should bow to his implacable will.

There was something BB wanted my dad’s help in bending to his will. And my dad didn’t want to do it.

It involved a place known as Floridatown.

Even if you’re a Florida native like me, you’ve probably never heard of Floridatown - an unincorporated area in Santa Rosa County, lying right on the shore of Escambia Bay.

Because Floridatown sits on the edge of the bay, there are saltwater marshes there. That’s where, in the 1990s, this particular developer wanted to build his subdivision — smack in the middle of those marshes. According to my mom, he wanted to hire my dad to lay out a high-priced subdivision atop all the wetlands. She says dad’s response was to shake his head and say, "You don’t want to do that."

That didn’t stop Bombastic Bob, of course. He found a less scrupulous surveyor who was eager to collect a paycheck and the development proceeded. The fancy subdivision got built atop the wetlands, and people bought those houses. And then, a few years later, the storm came.

Click here to read the full story.

Sea & Shoreline and the Fish & Wildlife Foundation of Florida Partner to Plant Seagrass in the Indian River Lagoon Tributaries

WINTER GARDEN, FLA., November 14, 2022/ PRNewswire/ -- Today, aquatic restoration experts Sea & Shoreline and the Fish & Wildlife Foundation of Florida began a series of restoration projects in the Indian River Lagoon (IRL) tributaries to restore meadows of seagrass and submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV) that have disappeared due to harmful algal blooms. The projects will help to improve water quality and provide a sustainable food source for starving manatees who are dependent upon this vegetation for survival.

The restoration, which is being funded by the Fish & Wildlife Foundation of Florida and Sea & Shoreline, involves planting, caging, maintaining and monitoring seagrass and SAV plantings in Goat Creek, Turkey Creek, Taylor Creek, Crane Creek, the Sebastian River [sic] and the North Fork of the St. Lucie River. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has permitted and is overseeing the projects.

To read the full press release and for more details, visit the Sea & Shoreline website.

Good news! You’re Florida’s new governor. Bad news: Now you have to save our environment

Water pollution, dead manatees, climate change — here’s a list of what to tackle

Imagine you were just elected the governor of the third largest state in the U.S.

It’s all on you. And you’re facing a God-awful task.

You’ve got to fix Florida’s ailing environment before it crashes, taking the whole state down.

In Florida, the environment is the economy. If you screw up one, you’ve screwed up the other. And we’ve screwed up the environment, big time. That recent pile-up of dead manatees is just one sign. One more looming toxic algae bloom is another.

I contacted a bunch of Florida environmental activists to see if they were thinking what I was thinking on this subject. Many were.

Job one, several agreed, is fixing Florida’s nasty water pollution problem.

"From north to south, east to west, Florida’s natural waters are being degraded by agricultural and urban runoff, septic tanks, and wastewater treatment plant discharges," said Estus Whitfield, who for 30 years was principal environmental adviser to Florida’s governors. "And the state is doing little or nothing to handle the problem."

Click here to read the full story.

Hope for a Languishing Lagoon

After a decade of intense algal blooms, the Indian River Lagoon is making fragile gains. "We’re about halfway home," says one expert.

The Indian River Lagoon saw a brief respite from massive algal blooms this year. But heavy rains from Hurricane Ian led to wastewater spills and stormwater outflows in yet another setback to water quality. Even so, natural resource managers say the lagoon's restoration is still attainable.

In the Indian River Lagoon of 20 years ago, Capt. Billy Rotne could hook a spotted seatrout on cast after cast. Lush seagrass meadows teemed with schools of fish, among them world-record-sized seatrout and bull redfish upwards of 50 inches, making the lagoon a top destination for anglers.

But today, the lagoon’s seatrout numbers are 90 to 95% below historic levels, Rotne estimated. The species, an indicator of water quality, has dwindled in the wake of a decade-long series of severe algal blooms.

Nutrient pollutants in wastewater and stormwater supercharge these blooms, which block sunlight from reaching seagrass, killing fish habitat. About 75% of the lagoon’s seagrass acreage has vanished since 2011, with a near-total loss in some areas, experts say.

Seagrasses are ecosystem engineers, organisms that radically shape their surroundings. They anchor the seafloor, slow wave action, store carbon, and house other organisms. A single acre of seagrass can support 50 million invertebrates and 40,000 fish.

This year has seen a brief respite from the massive blooms that have come to characterize the Indian River Lagoon.... Drier conditions have tempered nutrient-carrying runoff, keeping blooms small, patchy, and short-lived.

With improved water clarity, some seagrass has returned. It’s a hopeful sign, but these gains could easily disappear, Rotne said.

Click here to read the full story.

Bacteria outbreak after Ian tells a scary story about Florida’s broken sewage systems

Spills happen all the time from overloaded plants and pipes, not just after a hurricane

Halloween is once again looming over us like a dark shadow, bidding us to buy tons of tooth-rotting candy, dress up in weird outfits (sexy Bob Ross, anyone?), and decorate our houses with skeletons, ghosts, and monsters. It’s also a time for telling scary stories.

Here’s one that should scare the bejabbers out of you: Lee County, the place where Hurricane Ian slammed ashore three weeks ago, is suffering from a record-breaking epidemic of Vibrio vulnificus, sometimes known (incorrectly) as "flesh-eating bacteria."

"Lee County’s 29 cases and four deaths are the most in the state in both categories," the Fort Myers News-Press reported this week. The statewide total, which includes numbers from other counties smacked around by Ian: a startling 65.

Every time a hurricane hits Florida — and they hit here more than any other state — we longtime Floridians know that certain stories inevitably follow in the weeks afterward. ...stories about the sketchy clean-up contracts, the boom in disease-bearing mosquitoes because of all the standing water and, of course, the multiple stories about sewage spills.

According to health officials, the infections, which can destroy soft tissue (a condition called necrotizing fasciitis — now there’s a Halloween term for you), are connected to those multiple sewage spills. Those occurred all over the state.

Click here to read the full story.

Shutting [down] an agency managing sprawl might have put more people in Hurricane Ian's way

More than a decade ago, growth in Florida was managed under a statewide agency that provided checks and balances to prevent sprawl. Then state leaders closed it.

When Hurricane Ian roared ashore the Southwest Florida coast last week, it hit one of the fastest growing areas in the nation that's been fueled by sunshine and paved with lax growth management rules.

Since 2010, NPR found, the area's population has rapidly swelled despite the increasing risk from powerful storms like Ian, which devastated some of those growing communities and narrowly missed others.

Now, in the wake of the Category 4 hurricane, state and local leaders have promised to rebuild. Stronger building codes like the kind created after 1992's Hurricane Andrew will make the area more resilient to future storms, they say. But climate and planning experts warn that rebuilding along the crowded coast, following a decade of weakened rules governing development, is what helped create the disaster now unfolding.

Specifically, they point to Florida's decision in 2011 to abolish the state agency that managed risky development even as threats from climate change deepened.

"The result is what we're looking at today," said Richard Grosso, a land use attorney who worked for the state in the 1980s helping implement the 1985 law that created the agency, Florida's Department of Community Affairs. "We put way too many people, way too much private and public investment dollars than we should have, in those vulnerable areas."

Despite increasing warnings about rising sea levels and the risk to coastal development, the Republican-controlled state legislature led the charge a decade ago to do away with the agency governing growth.

Click here to read or listen to the full report.

Can we protect ourselves from hurricanes? Expert has some thoughts

After Hurricane Ian passed Northeast Florida, I wrote the same thing that, in some shape or fashion, I’ve probably written after every major hurricane of the last couple of decades.

We should do more to prepare. Not the emergency response. Even if there are questions about that in Southwest Florida following Ian, I’d say for the most part we have that part down pretty well.

I’m talking about the long-term vision.

Robert Young is the director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines, a joint venture between Duke University and Western Carolina University. Here’s a few things he said we should be doing:

"One thing you need to understand is that when we engineer coastal, quote, protection — and I'm doing air quotes on the protection part — we could not possibly afford to provide the kind of coastal protection that would protect you from a storm like Ian," he said. "...we give a lot of communities a false sense of security — particularly in Florida."

"Beach nourishment projects or dune building, they're not going to protect Sanibel or Fort Myers or any other place from a hurricane like Ian, or from Sandy or Katrina," he said. "Yet those are the storms that we keep having. It just doesn't seem like we're acknowledging the real exposure of these coastal communities."

As climate changes, and seas rise and warm, he says resilience spending is just a Band-Aid, not a cure.

There are more than 60,000 miles of shoreline in the United States, excluding Alaska. We can’t provide protection everywhere. Young has been saying for years that we must seriously discuss not only where money goes, but how in some places we can take measured, gradual steps to move people and homes away from the hazards.

"We need to make it politically palatable to take baby steps back from those places on the coast that cause us the biggest headaches and problems," he said.

In 2017, he wrote an op-ed for the Orlando Sentinel after the Florida Department of Environmental Protection issued an emergency authorization, allowing individual property owners in a portion of St. Johns County to build new seawalls without the typical engineering and scientific analysis.

He called this "a terrible mistake," noting that some states have banned seawalls altogether and predicting that a patchwork of walls intended to protect individual properties — big walls, small walls, no walls — would only create more problems than they solved.

"This is the worst — I repeat worst — possible way to manage the coast," he wrote.

"We spend a lot of money on resilience — billions of dollars a year — and we make almost no demands of those communities where the money goes. So if I could fix one thing immediately, it would be that the federal money that pours into communities after a disaster, or even outside of a disaster, for resilience projects and coastal storm protection, you should have to promise us something in return for that money — like no new infrastructure in the floodplain. Period."

Click here to read the full story.

Five things to know: Nearly 70 species of lizards have invaded Florida, the Everglades

Unwelcome guests making themselves at home in Florida as invasive species wrekc environment. Florida is plagued by by more than 500 non-native plant and animal species.

Florida is home to some pretty fantastic animals.

From fish-eating spiders to alligators, crocodiles, panthers, black bear and all sizes and sorts of sharks, the Sunshine State has a lot to offer when it comes to physically capable hunters and the intimidation they can breed.

The Burmese python has wreaked havoc on animals in the historic Everglades, eating many native animals and competing with others for breeding and feeding space.

Lizards are here, too. From the mentally menacing to the exotic and even blasé, most of these animals don't belong here; but they've become a permanent part of Florida's landscape.

From the mop-headed iguana to the Chinese water dragon, there are at least 67 foreign species that call Florida home. They range from the docile and domesticated to outright predatory killers.

The invasion started in 1928 with the horned lizard, according to state wildlife records.

Many were introduced to the wild's of Florida through the pet trade. Owners have released enough lizards in some areas to form breeding populations that will likely be a permanent part of Florida's landscape.

Click here to continue reading about five of the worst of these invaders.

Joint statement on proposed Graves Brothers annexation

Four environmental groups today issued a joint statement critical of the city of Sebastian and the Graves Brothers for not preparing a detailed plan for the 1,984 acres proposed to be annexed to the city. The environmental groups argue that there should be a plan based upon community input and collaboration with local and state agencies, one that protects the headwaters of the St. Sebastian River, provides for known residential capacities, development patterns, open-space locations, and community amenities.

The four environmental groups are Friends of St. Sebastian River, Pelican Island Audubon Society, Indian River Neighborhood Association and Clean Water Coalition of Indian River County. They are concerned about the future impact on our community of the proposed Graves Bros. annexation to the city of Sebastian and the impact on Indian River county as a whole.

"We have urged the City Council to hire a qualified consultant to guide the annexation process. We are also urging the city to draft a strong legal agreement that protects our quality of life and our pocketbooks. Furthermore, we want to see a land use plan that conserves large areas of open space to protect the headwaters of the St. Sebastian River. Finally, we want a planning process open to broad community input."

Click here to read the full story.

Turning Florida’s rural lands into urban sprawl is a tragedy worthy of Shakespeare

Sarasota County officials are willing to break their carefully crafted comp plan for a big-bucks developer

Florida is home to a lot of imperiled species that are badly in need of protection. That includes the panther, of course, and the Key deer, the manatee, the gopher tortoise, and a whole lot more.

To this very long list I’d add one more: our remaining rural residents.

These are the folks who live far from Florida’s madding crowd, grow at least some of their own food, keep some livestock, and know all their neighbors even though they may not live close enough to wave. Their roads are canopy roads, their backyards big pastures, their future a question mark.

Lately, it seems Florida’s big-money developers, aided by politicians from the governor on down, have put a target on every rural spot that’s left on the map of Florida. From the Panhandle to the Keys, they want to change everything that’s now slow-paced and softly green to match the cookie-cutter concrete sprawl found everywhere else.

It’s a tragedy worthy of Shakespeare, just like Romeo and Juliet.

Lean in close and I’ll tell you a secret (looks around, then whispers): A lot of the folks who live in areas notable for their peace and quiet like them for that very reason. They don’t WANT to be turned into a clone of Tampa or Fort Lauderdale.

In Sarasota County, residents concerned about a recent large-scale proposed development, requiring a change to the County's Comprehensive Plan, hired a professional planner to review the changes requested by the developer. His biggest criticism was that "this is textbook urban sprawl."

After hearing from the opponents, the commissioners explained at length why their objections were much ado about nothing.

Click here to read the full story.

Study: Roundup weed killer ingredient possibly linked to animal seizures

A new study published Tuesday is the first to link trace amounts of a commonly used but controversial weed killer to seizures in animals, raising new questions about how the chemical may affect the human nervous system.

Researchers at two Florida universities showed how glyphosate — an ingredient in the popular Roundup herbicide — increased seizure-like behavior in roundworms that live in soil and share the same receptors that help humans regulate sleep and mood.

"People say, 'Why should we care about a worm?'," project lead Akshay Naraine told TCPalm Monday. "This little worm lives in the soil. And that — and a whole host of microorganisms — are important and vital to making our soil healthy so we can have crops and food supply."

The research follows a July study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that shows 80% of children and adults in the U.S. had glyphosate in their urine.

Click here to read the full story.

WATER QUALITY WOES IN S.W. FLORIDA LINKED TO SEEPING SEPTIC SYSTEMS

From fecal bacteria to blue-green algae to red tides, Southwest Florida’s water quality has declined as its population has increased. Researchers from Florida Atlantic University’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute took a deep dive into this region’s degrading water quality. Multiple lines of evidence from their multi-year microbial source tracking study point to septic systems as a contributing source for this decline.

Florida’s coastal regions are particularly vulnerable to pollution from septic systems because of shallow water tables and porous soils. To identify sources of pollution contributing to the water quality woes, researchers examined septic system- groundwater- surface water couplings through the analysis of various parameters.

In each watershed, researchers found several lines of evidence that indicated septic systems were adversely affecting water quality. Notably, shallow water tables demonstrated that many of these systems, installed prior to current septic system design standards, did not have the physical separation required for adequate treatment of human waste. Due to elevated seasonal high water tables, many septic systems in Florida may not meet the state regulatory requirements. Thus, septic systems may actually be sitting in groundwater, during certain times of the year, which means that they cannot function properly.

"These water quality issues in North Fort Myers are caused by aging septic systems installed in high densities in areas with shallow water tables. In addition, the presence of canals in these residential areas with septic systems may increase the rate of pollutant transfer from groundwater to surface water via tidal pumping," said Brian Lapointe, Ph.D., senior author and a research professor at FAU Harbor Branch.

Indeed, evidence of human waste contamination was observed in all three affected watersheds in the study and included high ammonium concentrations in groundwater and surface water, enriched nitrogen isotope values of groundwater and phytoplankton that closely matched septic system discharge....

"It would be beneficial for coastal areas with high densities of septic systems and canals to be prioritized for septic-to-sewer conversions or other advanced wastewater treatment options," said Lapointe.

Click here to read the full story.

Chronic Starvation Remains Threat To Florida Manatees, Officials Say

Last year, a record number of manatees died mainly from a lack of seagrass food, which was decimated by water pollution.

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) — Fewer manatee deaths have been recorded so far this year in Florida compared to the record-setting numbers in 2021, but wildlife officials cautioned Wednesday that chronic starvation remains a dire and ongoing threat to the marine mammals.

Between Jan. 1 and July 15, about 631 manatee deaths have been confirmed by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. That compares with 864 during the same period last year, when a record number of manatees died mainly from a lack of seagrass food, which was decimated by water pollution. The five-year average of manatee deaths in that time frame is 481.

Despite some glimmers of hope, wildlife officials said during a news conference Wednesday that manatees continue to face dwindling food options and many survivors have been severely weakened by malnutrition, which leaves them more vulnerable once cold weather sets in.

How manatees fare this summer when more food is available will determine how they survive in winter, said Martine de Wit, a veterinarian overseeing necropsies and coordinating rescues of ill manatees for the state wildlife commission.

"There is not enough high-quality food for the animals," de Wit said, showing slides of necropsied animals with severe internal damage from starvation. "It’s going to be long lasting. It’s going to be years before you can measure the real effect."

Click here to read the full story.

SOS for Florida's wetlands: Time is running out for government action.

There have been editorials written urging Gov. Ron DeSantis to rescue Florida’s wetlands by returning the Clean Water Act section 404 permitting program to the federal government.

They cite the state’s lack of resources, familiarity, or political will to adequately tackle the more than 5,000 permit applications to destroy, alter or impact wetlands they have received. We agree and urge state and federal leadership to immediately begin the process of returning the program to the Army Corps of Engineers.

The state of Florida is close to deciding on immense and disastrous development projects that will forever change southwest Florida and the fates of our endangered species, wetland flow-ways, drinking water resources, and cherished public lands. Having access to all of our foundational federal laws — which Florida’s program circumnavigates – is absolutely essential at this very moment.

Click here to read the full opinion piece.

10 questions Sebastian, area residents must ask about city's proposed annexation

In 2005, Fellsmere embarked on an ambitious annexation plan, growing from 6 square miles to 55, stretching from the north Indian River County line almost to State Road 60.

The annexation binge concerned residents throughout Indian River County, including those who fled growth-ravaged South Florida and worried about the quality of life from Vero Beach to Sebastian.

Rural Fellsmere has seen relatively little development so far, but there's been lots in the rest of the county.

Sebastian’s proposed annexation of 1,984 acres of Graves Brothers farmland — from County Road 510 south to 69th Street, largely between what would be 74th and 90th avenues — is small potatoes compared to Fellsmere. Development could be years away.

Still, given the land’s proximity to the 510 corridor, Wabasso and its beach, Fellsmere, and the rural north-central county, Sebastian must tread carefully.

Some good news: The city will hold informational meetings in City Hall 5:30-7:30 p.m. June 16 and 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. June 30. I hope, no matter where you live in the county, you attend to learn more.

Click here to continue reading Reisman's opnion piece with his suggested 10 questions.

Sebastian Inlet sprouts hope for Florida manatees and other Indian River Lagoon life

SEBASTIAN INLET — Here, where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Indian River Lagoon, hope, in the form of new tufts of seagrass, is sprouting all around.

On a recent day, Don Deis snorkels through a crystal clear ocean-estuary mix, finding new signs of life among the blades that bud up here like alfalfa sprouts from the sun-glittered sandy bottom.

Between his fingers, Deis pinches thin strands of a once-rare grass. This so-called Johnson's grass lays lattice-like roots that are the groundwork for other seagrasses to take hold and reknit the Indian River Lagoon's food web, unraveled by decades of algae overfed by our sewage and fertilizers.

The stringy grass growing up here is telling. It's luring others, but not so fast.

"Mainly, it gives you an idea of what the recovery of seagrasses is going to be in the lagoon proper, and that they're going to recover very slowly," said Deis, the principal scientist for Atkins North America, which monitors seagrass for Sebastian Inlet District.

CLick here to read the full story.

Habitat Protections for Florida’s Threatened Manatees Get an Overdue Update

Federal wildlife officials acknowledged that changes were needed more than a decade ago but said they lacked funding. Now, with manatees perishing in large numbers, a lawsuit has forced the issue.

ORLANDO, Fla.—The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service must update and improve habitat protections for the state’s ailing manatees over the next two years, under a legal agreement announced this week.

The agreement comes as the gentle sea cows face extraordinary habitat challenges in Florida, most notably widespread water quality problems and seagrass losses in the 156-mile Indian River Lagoon, crucial manatee habitat on the east coast.

The problems led to a record die-off last year of more than 1,100 manatees in the state, prompting wildlife agencies to resort to the unprecedented measure of providing supplement lettuce for the starving manatees in the lagoon. The mortalities have continued this year, with 562 recorded statewide since January.

Under the agreement, U.S. Fish and Wildlife has until Sept. 12, 2024 to revise the manatee’s critical habitat under the Endangered Species Act. The Center for Biological Diversity, Defenders of Wildlife and Save the Manatee Club, which brought the lawsuit, say the critical habitat, a legal term encompassing waterways considered vital to the manatee’s recovery, has not been updated since 1976.

Click here to read the full story.

Environmental groups reach agreement with feds to help save Florida manatees

A record 1,101 manatees died statewide in 2021 largely because of starvation.

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Three conservation groups announced they reached an agreement with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to have the federal agency revise the critical habitat status for the Florida manatee by September 2024.

The Center for Biological Diversity, Defenders of Wildlife and Save the Manatee Club have urged officials to protect manatee habitats amid the significant die-offs in recent years. A record 1,101 manatees died statewide in 2021 largely because of the lack of food sources caused by pollution in the Indian River Lagoon, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC).

The legal agreement states that on or before Sept. 12, 2024, the Fish and Wildlife Service shall submit a proposed revision of critical habitat for the Florida manatee. This "essential step" helps to better protect species where they live, the groups say, adding that manatees were given critical habitat status in 1976 — the designation hasn't been modified since despite changes in their environment.

Click here to read the full story and watch the news report.

US agrees to update critical habitat for Florida manatees

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) — U.S. wildlife officials have agreed to revise the critical habitat designation for Florida manatees, which have been dying in record numbers because water pollution is killing a main food source.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said in a court settlement made public Wednesday that it will publish a proposed revision by Sept. 12, 2024. The agreement comes in a long-running court case involving the Center for Biological Diversity, Defenders of Wildlife and the Save the Manatee Club.

The rule would bring enhanced federal scrutiny to projects that might affect the manatee in waterways in which the marine mammals are known to concentrate. One such area is the Indian River Lagoon on Florida’s east coast, where this winter officials successfully fed manatees tons of lettuce in an unprecedented experiment to prevent more starvation.

The manatee critical habitat designation has not been updated since 1976; it’s something manatee advocates have been pushing for since 2008. The state wildlife commission estimates there are about 7,500 manatees in the wild in Florida.

The broader issue for manatee survival is improving water quality. Their favored seagrass food is disappearing due to chronic pollution from agricultural, sewage and urban runoff, as well as other sources. Efforts are ongoing to restore the crucial seagrass beds but those are long-term projects.

Florida wildlife officials were heartened this spring to find that some seagrass is growing back naturally in key habitat areas. But they cautioned it would only take one algae bloom caused by pollution to wipe out those gains.

Click here to read the full story.

Save the seagrass, lagoons and manatees

In recent months those fighting to save Florida’s beloved manatees have done things they never thought they’d do — and this month’s decision to sue the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is just the latest example.

Manatee experts, state workers and volunteers have rescued hundreds of emaciated, sick manatees whose main food source — seagrass — has been dying at a terrifying rate. Many will need months of labor-intensive rehabilitation and medical care before they can be released into the wild.

Advocates for manatees have begged state and county officials to stop spraying manatee-accessible inland water bodies for water hyacinth and hydrilla, two aggressive, invasive water weeds that can make streams and lakes unnavigable and degrade water quality. They hope the vegetation will provide extra food for manatees that survived the winter but are underweight.

And they’ve pulled hundreds and hundreds of bodies from central and south Florida waterways. Last year was the worst on record for manatee deaths — 1,101 — and as of early May, 541 have died this year.

State and federal officials know what is causing this slaughter. They saw this coming for more than a decade yet the only major action was to officially weaken manatees' protection status in 2017, from endangered to threatened.

More importantly, they know that manatee deaths are a small part of the ecological nightmare blooming along Florida’s southeast coast.

Click here to read the full editorial.

The Annihilation of Florida: An Overlooked National Tragedy

An accelerating race to destroy Florida’s wilderness shows what we value and previews our collective future during the climate crisis.

You can tell many stories about Florida, but one of the most tragic and with the worst long-term consequences is this: since development in Florida began in earnest in the 20th century, state leaders and developers have chosen a cruel, unsustainable legacy involving the nonstop slaughter of wildlife and the destruction of habitat, eliminating some of the most unique flora and fauna in the world.

Most of this harm has been inflicted in the service of unlimited and poorly planned growth, sparked by greed and short-term profit. This murder of the natural world has accelerated in the last decade to depths unheard of. The process has been deliberate, often systemic, and conducted from on-high to down-low, with special interests flooding the state with dark money, given to both state and local politicians in support of projects that bear no relationship to best management of natural resources.

Land trusts and other environmental advocates across the state are doing heroic conservation work to protect the state’s unique biodiversity. Thirty thousand acres of Apalachicola River floodplain just received substantial protections, for example. But this occurs in the face of ever-stiffer opposition: "the worst I’ve ever seen," the head of one major Florida-based conservation group told me, referring to the predatory and anti-science environmental actions of our Republican-dominated state legislature.

Marjorie Shropshire, a lifelong Florida resident active in environmental causes and organizations, sees part of the problem as lawmakers who "do not understand how they fit into nature or how nature works. Perhaps they just don’t care. Many hold the belief that there is no ‘value’ to nature. … If it isn’t ‘improved,’ it’s worthless. There is a lack of recognition of the ecosystem services that conserved lands can provide, therefore it is easy to claim that more conservation lands are not needed, or that they are too expensive."

Click here to read the full story.

Lawsuit: EPA Must Protect Manatees from Water Pollution

Hundreds starved to death in 2021 because unchecked pollution is killing seagrass

ORLANDO, FL — Three conservation groups sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today for failing to protect manatees and sea turtles from water pollution in Florida. Over half of the more than 1,000 manatee deaths in Florida in 2021 were attributable to starvation. The mass die-off is being caused by pollution-fueled algal blooms that have killed thousands of acres of seagrass in the Indian River Lagoon, highlighting the inadequacy of the state’s federally-approved water quality standards.

Earthjustice is representing the Center for Biological Diversity, Save the Manatee Club, and Defenders of Wildlife. Today’s lawsuit, filed in the Middle District of Florida, pushes the court to require EPA to reinitiate consultation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service under the Endangered Species Act to reassess its approval of Florida’s water quality standards for the Indian River Lagoon.

The Florida manatee is currently experiencing an officially-declared “Unusual Mortality Event” along Florida’s east coast, which includes important manatee warm-water habitat like the Indian River Lagoon. The lagoon supports more species of plants and animals than any other estuary in North America.

Unchecked pollution in the Indian River Lagoon — stemming from wastewater-treatment discharges, leaking septic systems, fertilizer runoff and other sources — fuels algal blooms that kill seagrass and prevent it from growing back. Nearly a decade ago, EPA approved the state’s water quality criteria for nitrogen and phosphorous, concluding the standards would not “adversely affect” manatees. New information, including the mass die-off of manatees in the lagoon, calls this conclusion into question.

Click here to read the full press release from Earthjustice.

Mass starvation of manatees impels federal lawsuit over FL water pollution

Save the Manatee Club and others demand EPA intervene

The mass starvation of manatees in Florida last year was caused by preventable water pollution, and state government should be forced to clean up the state’s waterways, says a federal lawsuit filed Tuesday on behalf of three major environmental groups.

More than 1,100 manatees died last year – an unprecedented number — mainly of starvation, state and federal authorities reported. More than half of the deaths occurred in the Indian River Lagoon, where ongoing pollution has spawned massive toxic algae blooms that kill seagrasses, the iconic mammals’ primary source of food, and cause widespread fishkills that foul the water and the shoreline.

Earthjustice, an environmental law organization, filed the lawsuit on behalf of nonprofit organizations Save the Manatee Club, Center for Biological Diversity, and Defenders of Wildlife. They demand that federal environmental regulators intervene to make state environmental regulators impose tougher pollution limits.

The lawsuit says the die-off of manatees, along with steep declines in green sea turtles, loggerhead sea turtles and smalltooth sawfish – all threatened or endangered species – in Indian River Lagoon demonstrates the 150-mile-long waterway on Florida’s Atlantic coast is suffering "ecologic collapse."

The chief culprit, according to the environmental groups, is leakage from tens of thousands of faulty septic tanks permitted by the state under a 2013 standard that is clearly not working. Climate change is believed to be exacerbating the problem.

Click here to read the full story.

Tampa Bay man dies of infection after beach visit

TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — The Tampa Bay Downs announced Monday that a trainer died Sunday from septic shock after visiting an Oldsmar beach.

Robert Raymond, 74, visited the Mobbly Beach Park in Oldsmar Wednesday. His son, Rob Raymond, told the Tampa Bay Downs that his father waded into the water, but a small cut on his leg caused bacteria to enter his body.

A release from the Tampa Bay Downs said Robert Raymond experienced some soreness at first but continued to train his horses Thursday.

The release said he was taken to the Mease Countryside Hospital in Safety Harbor Friday for treatment. He died two days later.

Click here to watch the full news story.

Florida's lack of proper growth management fuels climate change, other problems

I was born and raised in Pinellas County, back when it was an environmental paradise. This made it desirable and therefore people came and developed the landscape little by little, building lot by building lot. It's now one of the most densely populated counties in the state.

Development is to be expected as populations grow and human needs are met. Growth and the economy go hand in hand, of course, but here in Florida there is currently a very serious lack of proper growth management.

Our Legislature is made up largely of those who favor growth at almost any cost to the environment. As we grow, we are covering up the environment. Researchers estimate that in the not-too-distant future, one-third of Florida's land area will be covered with impervious surfaces, i.e. houses (as in urban sprawl), roads, parking lots and other construction that links it all together.

Click here to read the full commentary.

Sorry, better seawalls are not the answer to rising seas in Florida

We need 21st century solutions, not antiquated answers that make the problem worse and cost taxpayers money.

I read with dismay the perplexing editorial from the Tampa Bay Times’ Editorial Board on investing more in seawalls in the face of climate change. I say perplexing because they are right — action is urgently needed to prepare for the unavoidable impacts of climate change — but an outsized focus on holding back a relentless sea with 20th century technology was naive at best and negligent at worst. There is much we must do to prepare — but an emphasis on this outdated technology is a dangerous distraction from the real work the Tampa Bay area and indeed Florida must undertake.

In the 1900s, Floridians employed seawalls because they didn’t know any better — only later did we learn that seawalls don’t dissipate wave energy and can, in fact, accelerate scouring and erosion on adjacent properties without seawalls, creating an “arms race” wherein everyone needs a wall to avoid erosion. The increased wave energy and elimination of shallow-water habitats negatively impacts everything from seagrass to fish nurseries, which has cascading effects on water quality, fisheries and the food web — not to mention our coastal economies.

Most importantly, seawalls have landed us in the very predicament we find ourselves in today: The illusion of safety they provided allowed irresponsible development in hazardous coastal locations. Defending these poor choices is the equivalent of throwing good money after bad — but the good money is that of taxpayers and our environment paying to defend ill-advised, private waterfront investments of the past.

Click here to read the full commentary.

Florida manatee deaths reach grim milestone for 2022: More than 500 of the gentle giants have died

Manatee deaths just crossed the 500 mark this year. That macabre milestone puts the Sunshine State almost half-way to last year's darkest year on record for the threatened species.

But in what might offer some hope: this year's death rate is not nearly as bad as last year's at this time, when 673 sea cows had died by mid-April. Last year, 1,101 manatees perished, most from starvation.

Brevard County remains epicenter of manatee die-off.

But biologists say the herd, already thinned by an estimated 10% last year, continues to be under threat.

"Environmental conditions in portions of the Indian River Lagoon remain a concern," warns the FWC'S most recent update on the ongoing manatee die-offs.

Researchers attribute the unusual die-off to starvation because of a lack of seagrasses in the Indian River Lagoon, most of which is in Brevard County. State biologists say this has been man-made famine.

Decades of pollution from septic tanks, sewage spills, too much fertilizer and poor stormwater management set the lagoon on a collision course with the laws of nature, ecologists say. All the nitrogen and phosphorus those sources delivered fueled excess algae growth that blocked sunlight from seagrass — manatees' main diet — and otherwise choked out other marine life.

Click here to read the full story.

DeSantis’ algal bloom experts suggested water pollution solutions. Did lawmakers listen?

Florida's Blue-Green Algae Task Force gave lawmakers a C average on adopting the scientists' solutions to curb and clean up water pollution that ignites toxic blooms. The five experts Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed to the panel in April 2019, who have over a century of shared experience, say lawmakers largely aren't acting fast enough. "I'm not satisfied," said James Sullivan, a task force member and executive director of Florida Atlantic University’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute in Fort Pierce. "I won't be satisfied until Florida's water is cleaned up."

The Legislature hasn't fully adopted several of the task force's science-based initiatives, such as cracking down on polluters, increasing water testing around pollution hotspots, and revamping the state's flagship pollution-reduction program called Basin Management Action Plans, which a TCPalm investigation revealed isn't working. "So many of the issues Florida has right now are related to poor water quality and it's not just algal blooms," Sullivan said. "Dying manatees? Poor water quality. Dying coral reefs? Poor water quality. Drinking water contamination? Poor water quality.

TCPalm subscribers may read the full story here.

Once again, money and greed won the day over the environment in Tallahassee

A few months ago, I was asked to contribute a column on the outcome of the 2022 Florida legislative session for The Sun’s "Messages from the Springs Heartland" series. I happily agreed. Tracking legislation is part of my job at the Florida Springs Council. And I believe it is critical that Floridians understand what happens during the legislative session in Tallahassee and how the decisions made during those 60 days impact us and our environment.

Going into the 2022 legislative session, I was optimistic that this year would be different. (Optimism is as much a job requirement as being able to type if you want to work in Florida environmental advocacy.) It was an election year, water issues and manatees were on the top of people’s minds, and the Legislature appeared poised to take action on at least one top environmental priority.

I was wrong.

Once again money and greed won the day in Tallahassee, thanks in no small part to campaign checks handed out by industry groups like Associated Industries of Florida and to campaign fraud linked to some of Florida’s most powerful corporations.

Click here to read the full opinion piece.

Backed-up pipes, stinky yards: Climate change is wrecking septic tanks

Over two decades, Lewis Lawrence, the executive director of the Middle Peninsula Planning District (Virginia), has watched as rising waters and intensifying rains flood backyards render underground septic systems ineffective. When that happens smelly, unhealthy wastewater backs up into homes.

Local companies, he said, call the Middle Peninsula the "septic repair capital of the East Coast." "That’s all you need to know," he added. "And it’s only going to get worse."

As climate change intensifies, septic failures are emerging as a vexing issue for local governments. For decades, flushing a toilet and making wastewater disappear was a convenience that didn't warrant a second thought. No longer. From Miami to Minnesota, septic systems are failing, posing threats to clean water, ecosystems and public health.

Florida hosts 2.6 million systems. Of the 120,000 in Miami-Dade County, more than half of them fail to work properly at some point during the year, helping to fuel deadly algae blooms in Biscayne Bay, home to the nation’s only underwater national park. The cost to convert those systems into a central sewer plant would be more than $4 billion.

The issue is complex, merging common climate themes. Solutions are expensive, beyond the ability of localities to fund them. Permitting standards that were created when rainfall and sea-level rise were relatively constant have become inadequate. Low-income and disadvantaged people who settled in areas with poor soils likely to compromise systems are disproportionately affected. Maintenance requirements are piecemeal nationwide. And while it’s clear that septic failures are increasing, the full scope of the problem remains elusive because data, particularly for the most vulnerable aging systems, are difficult to compile.

"The challenges are going to be immense," said Scott Pippin, a lawyer and researcher at the University of Georgia’s Institute for Resilient Infrastructure Systems who has studied the problem along the state’s coast.

Clcik here to read the full story.

A Lake in Florida Suing to Protect Itself

Lake Mary Jane, in central Florida, could be harmed by development. A first-of-its-kind lawsuit asks whether nature should have legal rights.

Lake Mary Jane is shallow—twelve feet deep at most—but she’s well connected. She makes her home in central Florida, in an area that was once given over to wetlands.

Like most of the rest of central Florida, Mary Jane is under pressure from development. Orange County, which encompasses the lake, the city of Orlando, and much of Disney World, is one of the fastest-growing counties in Florida, and Florida is one of the fastest-growing states in the nation. A development planned for a site just north of Mary Jane would convert nineteen hundred acres of wetlands, pine flatlands, and cypress forest into homes, lawns, and office buildings.

In an effort to protect herself, Mary Jane is suing. The lake has filed a case in Florida state court, together with Lake Hart, the Crosby Island Marsh, and two boggy streams. According to legal papers submitted in February, the development would “adversely impact the lakes and marsh who are parties to this action,” causing injuries that are "concrete, distinct, and palpable."

A number of animals have preceded Mary Jane to court, including Happy, an elephant who lives at the Bronx Zoo, and Justice, an Appaloosa cross whose owner, in Oregon, neglected him.

Still, Mary Jane’s case is a first. Never before has an inanimate slice of nature tried to defend its rights in an American courtroom. Depending on your perspective, the lake’s case is either borderline delusional or way overdue.

"It is long past time to recognize that we are dependent on nature, and the continued destruction of nature needs to stop," Mari Margil, the executive director of the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights, said in a statement celebrating the lawsuit.

Click here ro read the full story.

Low-impact development like Mandala Village key to preserving Florida's future

When I was asked to write a column about Low Impact Development and sustainability I was happy to say yes.

Sustainability is the issue that drives our Mandala Village development (mandalavillage.com) in Indian River County. It’s where I spend the greatest amount of my time and focus, working to understand the dynamics and implement solutions.

As I began to write, I felt overwhelmed. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently made the stark pronouncement that major climate catastrophes are inevitable, and the trend, irreversible. Without great courage and resolve, the solutions to the global, local, and personal environmental problems we face will be unattainable.

It is comforting to know that there are long lists of steps we can and must take to right the course. But before we can have confidence these lists are sufficient to be the solutions, we must first deal with what I see as the central roadblock.

To put it bluntly, as a society we demonstrate a total lack of the will needed to change public policy. That is, in part, because we can’t even come to an agreement that real problems are in fact real.

Click here to read the full commentary.

Trying Everything, Even Lettuce, to Save Florida’s Beloved Manatees

It may not be enough. The iconic manatee remains in trouble, and with it, a piece of Florida’s identity.

For more than a century, the state has had a contradictory relationship with nature. The Florida lifestyle is synonymous with outdoor pursuits — but also with sprawling development that damaged the natural plumbing of Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades, threatened the drinking water supply and left the state gravely vulnerable to climate change.

Manatees had been something of a success story, their status upgraded to threatened from endangered in 2017 after years of educating boaters to avoid deadly strikes. Starvation has once again put them in peril.

Click here to read the full story.

FL Legislature: Bending over backwards to allow even more pollution into the public’s waters

What is happening is criminal — an intentional neglect of legal responsibilities

You have no idea how negligent Florida leaders are in protecting the state’s water quality.

A recent article says that “Florida Tops the List for the Most Polluted Lakes in the United States. That is bad and probably a bunch of elected and appointed officials deserve to be "water" boarded with this polluted water for allowing such extreme degradation to occur to it. Their deep dark excuse is that they thought that you wouldn’t notice and they were right until recently.

We learned from Environmental Integrity Project The Clean Water Act at 50: Promises Half Kept at the Half Century Mark, that Florida ranks first in the U.S. for the total acres of lakes classified as impaired for swimming and aquatic life, and second for the total lake acres listed as impaired for any use. As well that we have the second most total square miles of impaired estuaries (2,533 square miles), behind only Louisiana, which is impacted by the fossil fuel industry.

The Florida Constitution says that we should protect our natural resources, which includes the waters of the state. Article II, Section 7(a) reads that, It shall be the policy of the state to conserve and protect its natural resources and scenic beauty.

Florida law says in Chapter 403.021 that it is the policy of the state, to conserve the waters of the state to protect, maintain and improve the quality of public water supplies for the propagation of wildlife and fish and other aquatic life for beneficial uses and to provide that no wastes be discharged into any waters of the state without first being given the degree of treatment necessary to protect the beneficial uses of such water.

Seems like the constitution and the law are pretty clear, so why are Florida waters so bad?

Click here to read the full commentary.

'This should never have happened': Experts alarmed by more than 400 manatee deaths recorded so far

Experts say this is a very alarming trend, compared to the record number of manatee deaths at 1,101 cases in Florida last year.

"We’ve lost in just the last 15 months more than 20% of the east coast population. There’s no quick solution, so we’re going to lose more and those manatees that do survive are going to be less fit. They’re going to have less offspring," Patrick Rose, the executive director and aquatic biologist at Save the Manatee Club, told WPBF 25 News.

"Hundreds and hundreds of those died from starvation because of the loss of seagrass in the Indian River Lagoon which was caused by pollution from harmful algal blooms," Rose said. "Comes from human waste, literally our septic tanks, the improperly treated sewage, fertilizer runoff, all those have added together to feed … those blooms to the point they shade out and kill the seagrass."

"This should never have happened ... the problems we’re experiencing were ones we were warning about. The problems we’re facing on the east coast could still happen on the west coast," Rose said. "We’re going to be seeing this for a decade or more until we really put the time and effort and money into correcting the problem that we know why it’s happening.

Click here to read the full story.

For Florida’s ailing manatees, a "historic" $27 million

Florida lawmakers included $27 million for manatees in the state budget this session.

Advocates say the funding is historic but not enough to solve the long-term problems that have led to an unprecedented die-off.

Most of the money will go toward rescue and rehabilitation programs at SeaWorld and other aquariums and zoos that are taking in ailing manatees.

Pat Rose of the Save the Manatee Club says the money also will fund research, including a dozen new positions at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

"In the bigger picture, in the long-term it won’t be enough. But it’s a really important start on that, and we believe the Legislature was being very responsive to the immediate concerns.

Click here to read the full story.

Saving starving manatees will mean saving this crucial lagoon habitat

Not long ago, seagrass spanned the 156-mile Indian River Lagoon like a vast underwater meadow nourished by sunlight that reached through the crystalline water.

The lagoon, an estuary on Florida’s east coast, is among the most biodiverse on the continent, and has been a crucial habitat for manatees. But today its underwater meadow is gone.

Decades of nutrient pollution flowing from fast-growing communities and farm lands along the lagoon’s shores have left the water cloudy with harmful algal blooms, which can prevent sunlight from reaching the seagrass below. In parts of the lagoon as much as 96% of the seagrass has been lost, leading to a record die-off of some 1,100 manatees in Florida last year.

Florida’s staggering manatee die-off now is projected to last for years, and wildlife agencies are bracing for the worst by expanding their rescue and rehabilitation program. They have resorted to providing supplemental lettuce for starving manatees. Already this year some 420 are dead in Florida, a number that tracks closely with this time last year.

The Indian River Lagoon National Estuary Program, administered by the Environmental Protection Agency, estimates a comprehensive restoration of the lagoon would cost $5 billion and take some 20 to 30 years to complete.

"Nobody has done this scale of restoration, from a system this impacted," says Virginia Barker, director of Brevard County’s Natural Resources Management Department.

The restoration involves wastewater treatment plant upgrades, septic-to-sewer conversions, hundreds of stormwater treatment projects and dredging from the lagoon’s bottom vast amounts of muck representing decades of accumulated debris associated with fish and seagrass die-offs.

Barker says the effort is showing promise, but it was developed at a time when seagrass still was present in large swaths of the lagoon.

"The amount of nutrient reduction that is needed to flip that system back to a seagrass-dominated, oligotrophic system may be much more than what the prior modeling had indicated," she says. "We have a dust bowl underwater. So how do you restore tens of thousands of acres of seagrass to an underwater dust bowl, where there’s nothing to hold those sediments still?"

Click here to read the full story.

Florida government policies can save nature, people

Ukrainians are dying, and millions are losing their habitat, going without food, water, and forced to flee to find a safe place to survive from human aggression. They may even be exposed to chemical weapons soon.

How do we protect these vulnerable folks and allow them to resume life in a happy and safe world?

Unfortunately, this is what our birds, fish and manatees face daily: lack of habitat, food and clean water. Shouldn’t they also receive our protection?

At this critical moment, governments aren’t protecting us or our birds, manatees, fish, panthers, gopher tortoises and other wildlife. We are heading for disaster, imperiling biodiversity everywhere.

Even now we face high levels of fecal bacteria in our Indian River Lagoon, where we swim, fish and boat. Manatees are dying from starvation because excessive algae stopped sunlight seagrass needs to live. Also, herbicides are killing seagrass and invertebrates.

Click here to read the full article.

Florida tops list for the most polluted lakes in the U.S., study finds

Florida has climbed to the top of another ignominious list, thanks to its hundreds of thousands of acres of dirty lakes.

The state's waters have long been fouled by dirty stormwater and algae blooms fed by fertilizer run off from farms. Now a new study examining water quality across the U.S. shows Florida ranking first for the highest total acres of lakes too polluted for swimming or healthy aquatic life. That means water can have high levels of fecal matter and other bacteria that can sicken people , or have low levels of oxygen or other pollution that can harm fish and other aquatic life. The state ranked second for polluted estuaries.

The Environmental Integrity Project launched the project to track the progress of the Clean Water Act as it nears its 50th anniversary.

"Fifty years ago, we had the imagination and political will to face big problems and try to do something about them," said Eric Schaeffer, the project's executive director and former head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulatory office . "We're hoping at this half-century mark that we can find the courage to recommit."

In Florida, nearly 900,000 acres of lakes are classified as impaired for swimming or healthy aquatic life. About 2,500 acres of estuaries are polluted, accounting for 99% of the total assessed.

Click here to read the full story.

Florida’s Statewide Climate Change Response Ignores Cause

MIAMI (AP) — Despite years of warnings from top scientists around the world, Florida’s plan to address climate change only involves spending money to adapt to rising seas instead of cutting the emissions that cause them. In fact, the state has passed bills that work against those goals.

A recent exchange between two state representatives over the future of Florida’s latest Chief Resilience Officer, the person in charge of the state’s response to climate change, underscores the dissonance.

Moments before the unanimous passage last week of a bill that would create an office and staff for the state’s resilience officer, Rep. Ben Diamond, a Democrat representing St. Petersburg, suggested an amendment that would also ask the CRO to research the best methods to reduce emissions in the state.

If the world doesn’t stop emitting greenhouse gasses quickly, the planet could lose its chance to keep global warming to a manageable level, which could be devastating for the Sunshine State’s economy and environment, climate experts say.

The last time Florida’s Legislature addressed the root cause of climate change — greenhouse gas emissions — it was in a law that effectively blocked cities from cutting emissions.

Click here to read the full story.

Environmental groups sue over rising manatee deaths in Florida

Nearly 1,100 manatees reportedly died in 2021.

Environmental groups filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, claiming the agency has failed to help preserve Florida manatee habitats as the species faces rising deaths.

Nearly 1,100 manatees died in 2021, which is roughly 20% of the east coast population of manatees, according to a lawsuit filed by Save the Manatee Club, the Center for Biological Diversity and Defenders of Wildlife.

"We've now had almost 300 [die] in 2022," aquatic biologist Patrick Rose told ABC News. Rose is the executive director of Save the Manatee Club, the non-profit organization started by singer Jimmy Buffet in 1981 that is dedicated to protecting manatees and preserving their natural habitat.

The group tells ABC News that popular waterways for manatees, like the Indian River Lagoon on Florida’s east coast, have suffered years of pollution from sources like failed septic tanks, improperly treated sewage and fertilizer that deposits nutrients into the water.

According to the lawsuit, the Florida manatee was first listed as an endangered species in 1967, but to help protect the animals even further, USFWS designated areas where manatees are found as a "critical habitat" in 1976. Critical habitats are specific areas that have biological and physical features that are important for the survival of a species.

When the critical habitat was first established, important components of the habitat, such as the seagrass, were not taken into consideration, Rose said.

Click here to read the full story.

Fish on Valium: A Multitude of Prescription Drugs Are Contaminating Florida’s Waterways and Marine Life

One recent study identified 58 different drugs in bonefish from South Florida’s coastal waters, including 16 in a single fish.

Fish and marine life off South Florida’s coast are ingesting high amounts of pharmaceuticals flushed down the drain or excreted in wastewater, because outdated treatment facilities are unable to detect and filter out the contaminants.

Results from a study by researchers at Florida International University’s Coastal Fisheries Research Lab have identified 58 different pharmaceuticals in 93 bonefish, sampled along a 200-mile stretch of South Florida’s coastline over a three-year period. In one case, the researchers found 16 different drugs in a single fish.

Dr. Duane De Freeze, a marine biologist and executive director of Indian River Lagoon National Estuary Program, called the study an original contribution to existing research because it looked at the presence of contaminants in bonefish, an "incredibly important recreational sport fish with very high economic value."

"When you look at the research over the last couple of decades," he said, "whether it’s on Atlantic bottlenose dolphin, manatees and other species in Florida, what it’s building is a really strong case that we have toxicants and other emerging contaminants of concern that are getting through our wastewater systems."

He said previous studies in Florida have documented human antibiotics and some endocrine disruptors in wildlife.

"So, it is not surprising that we would see some of these chemicals in the tissue or the organs of marine organisms," he said.

In Florida, Dr. Jennifer Rehage, lead researcher for the study and associate professor at the Institute of Water and Environment at Florida International University in Miami, said, one-third of households have septic tanks and two-thirds have sewer lines, and "conventional wastewater treatment in Florida and other parts of the United States does not remove pharmaceuticals.

"It’s in our drinking water. We also have it in our fish that we consume," Rehage said, adding, "The risk is very small because concentrations are very small. But no one knows what it means for us to be exposed over our lifetimes to so many pharmaceuticals."

Click here to read the full story.

Just When You Thought the Waters of the United States Saga Couldn’t Get Any Stranger

EPA is in the midst of its eighth attempt to define Waters of the United States by regulation. In the meantime a basic principle of administrative law dictates that the Trump Administration EPA regulations remain in force except where they've been stricken down by a federal court. That's why, when the Obama Administration EPA regulations were challenged in court, they were the law in half the states (where they were upheld or not challenged) but not in the other half of the states where Courts of Appeal or District Courts struck them down. Ultimately the Trump Administration EPA rescinded the Obama Administration EPA's regulations and we had the same Federal law in all fifty states for a few months.

Which brings us to the Biden Administration EPA's turn at the Waters of the United States plate.

EPA made clear that it expected others to turn back the Waters of the United States clock as well even though the Trump Administration EPA's regulations have not yet been formally rescinded.

The State of Florida, which has been delegated by EPA the authority to administer the relevant sections of the Federal Clean Water Act says thanks but no thanks. Florida intends to continue to apply the Trump Administration EPA's regulations over EPA's objections which it may very well have the legal right to do since those regulations haven't been stricken down in the Eleventh Circuit or the State of Florida.

What happens next? Click here to read the full story.

Biologists take drastic measures to save Florida manatees at risk of starvation

Last year was the deadliest on record for manatees, many of whom starved to death because of a lack of seagrass. A die-off is happening again this year, and federal and state officials as well as volunteers in Florida are trying to save starving manatees with a pilot-feeding project this winter. But as Miles O'Brien reports, there are also larger environmental problems in the water.

It is a desperate measure for a desperate time, Florida manatees, freezing and famished, getting a handout from humans at a power plant near Titusville.

These gentle giants, also called sea cows, gravitate to the warm water discharges from power plants and natural springs every winter. But on the East Coast this year, like last, they're arriving hungry and weak. The seagrass they subsist on has all but disappeared.

At the root of the problem is an environmental collapse in Florida's Indian River Lagoon. It's a shallow body of water between the mainland and the barrier islands that spans 150 miles from Cape Canaveral to Jupiter. It was a manatee haven.

Dennis Hanisak is a research professor at Florida Atlantic University's Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute in Fort Pierce. He took us on a three-hour tour of the lagoon.

"It's definitely a lagoon in peril," said Hanisak.

Click here to watch the full report.

Central Florida manatee death toll spikes with cold snap

The feared eruption of Florida manatee deaths from cold and starvation became reality during the last week of January when 46 of the animals were found along on the state’s east coast, with 13 of those on a single day, Friday, in Brevard County.

Brevard is "ground zero" for the rapidly accelerating die-off, said manatee scientist Martine de Wit of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, during a briefing on the focused response to the disaster.

The mortalities are occurring primarily in the coastal Indian River Lagoon, where decades of pollution and repeated invasions of harmful algae have wiped out manatees’ main food source, seagrass.

Click here to read the full story.

Florida gets another $404 million for climate change prep. It needs billions more

The most vulnerable state in the nation is finally getting a billion-dollar boost to its plans to protect itself against the rising sea, the tip of the trillion-dollar iceberg of climate change expenses the state faces.

On Tuesday, Gov. Ron DeSantis announced funding for another 113 projects that will install new stormwater pumps and drains in flood-prone cities, convert leaky septic tanks to sewer lines, elevate and flood-proof critical buildings and restore wetlands over the next three years.

It’s the largest amount of money for climate change preparation ever seen in Florida — and the $404 million is all from the federal American Rescue Plan, the $1.9 trillion-dollar COVID-19 relief act championed by the Biden administration.

Click here to read the full story.

As Deaths Soar, Lawsuit Seeks to Protect Critical Habitat for Florida Manatees

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla.— Conservation organizations today filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for failing to revise outdated critical habitat for Florida manatees. A record number of manatees — more than 1,100 — died in 2021, with many of these deaths attributable primarily to pollution of manatee habitat.

"The carnage from 2021 should remove any doubt that Florida’s waters are in crisis," said Jaclyn Lopez at the Center for Biological Diversity. "With these sweet creatures dying in record numbers, the Biden administration needs to act fast to protect manatee habitat from further destruction."

"In less than one year, after many decades of conservation progress, we lost over 10% of the Florida manatee population," said Elizabeth Fleming at Defenders of Wildlife. "Without immediate action, the unprecedented manatee deaths of 2021 could become an annual occurrence. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service must stop these preventable deaths before recovery of the species is set back even further."

"The Service's failure to protect the manatees' critical habitat along with its biologically unjustified down-listing from Endangered to Threatened under the ESA left imperiled manatees to suffer the deadly consequences of agonizing, yet preventable, mass starvation," said aquatic biologist and manatee expert Patrick Rose, executive director of Save the Manatee Club. "More troubling is the fact that the FWS acknowledged more than a decade ago that updating critical habitat is essential to the conservation of the species. There can be no justification for further delays."

Click here to read the full press release.

Is Humanity the End of the Manatee?

On a recent Monday night I sat down to NBC’s Nightly News and saw a story about four manatees being “rescued” from starvation and flown across the country for treatment at an aquarium. This past year, over 1000 of the total 6000 manatee population have perished in their primary US habitat along the Florida coastline.

The primary culprit is the pollution of the coastal waterways and tributaries due to the runoff from land development and agricultural production. Ammonium nitrates from fertilizer are being washed downstream and causing large algal blooms that cover the surface areas of water to block the growth of the sea grasses that manatees eat.

"Rescue" stories like this are what we increasingly see in the news when it comes to human and animal health and welfare. We like rescuing things. We are attracted to inspiring and heroic stories that capture our emotions with technological solutions involving airplanes and aquariums that, as Lester Holt said as he closed his newscast, allow us to make "a noble effort to save them." What they really do is distract us from the reality that although four manatees, now in captivity, are being kept alive with human intervention while one thousand have perished from our destroying their habitat and wiping out their food source. Rescue stories like this one allow us to maintain our illusion that we are leading a sustainable way of life instead of confronting the fact that we are the cause of so much pain and suffering being felt by animals and people alike.

Click here to read the full story.

Opinion: Florida’s waters choke on fertilizer, dead fish and red tides — while Big Ag floats above it all

When I was a Miami teenager, spending weekends on the beach was a welcome ritual. The waters off Key Biscayne felt like paradise, so translucent we could see stingrays scurry and fish zigzag as we walked in the shallows.

So when I moved back to Florida a decade ago and roamed the state as a reporter, my heart broke. My beloved Biscayne Bay, featured in countless movies and television shows, may be nearing an irreversible pollution turning point — reflecting a crisis up and down the Florida coast and for its inland waters.

Along the coast, the seagrass that nourishes wildlife can be scarce, and near-shore fish hard to spot. Reefs are dying. Sewage is leaking. Stinky seaweed fields foul beaches. And many of Florida’s freshwater springs — we have more than 700 — glow with neon algae.

The decline in water quality is damaging Florida at its core, threatening sea life, the ecosystem and, if left unchecked, the tourist and fishing industries. Yet, except for the long-term restoration of the Everglades, which is critically important, state Republican lawmakers and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) — who has vowed to clean up Florida’s waters — have failed to implement more targeted solutions.

To DeSantis’s credit, he sent the state legislature a budget proposal that would spend $920 million to boost water quality and continue a decades-long plan to fix the Everglades.

The root problems are no secret: It’s pollution, and the worst offender is fertilizer from farms that spills into waterways, chiefly Lake Okeechobee, environmentalists say.

Other culprits are lawn fertilizer, stormwater runoff, septic tanks and creaky municipal sewage systems and wastewater treatment facilities.

Clcik here to read the full opinion piece.

Environmental group says more manatees will die if Florida’s seagrass mitigation bill passes

The proposed bill follows the deadliest year for manatees in Florida history.

Leaders of one of the country’s oldest marine conservation groups say a bill being considered by lawmakers would make it easier for developers to destroy seagrass that Florida’s manatees depend upon for survival.

Ocean Conservancy is urging Florida lawmakers to oppose the legislation. The bills (SB 198 and HB 349) would establish seagrass mitigation banks. That would allow a developer seeking permits for a project that would destroy seagrass to buy credits in a mitigation bank to cover the cost of seagrass restoration somewhere else. Theoretically, one acre destroyed would mean one acre built in another location.

But there are no guarantees, and seagrass restoration projects don’t have a great success rate. J.P. Brooker, Ocean Conservancy’s director of Florida conservation, said that’s especially concerning for Florida’s manatee population that depends on seagrasses for sustenance.

"Manatees are dying in record numbers in Florida, in part because we are losing so much seagrass and they are starving to death," Brooker said. "Florida should be protecting and conserving established seagrass beds by improving water quality and planting new seagrasses."

"Seagrass mitigation banks are an unproven tool for curtailing the negative effects of development," Brooker said. "They should not be viewed as conservation or restoration measures. They are solely an effort to offset the damage to seagrass caused by development."

Click here to read the full story.

With manatees in crisis, don't let developers kill seagrass here; plant it there

Many newsworthy events happened in 2021, but Florida's record number of 1,101 manatee deaths might top the "worst" list. Now, a fast-moving bill in Tallahassee may further endanger them.

This past year’s deaths are primarily attributable to massive seagrass losses caused by polluted water. Seagrass requires clean water to grow. When too many pollutants (nitrogen and phosphorus) enter our water from fertilizer and human or animal waste, it feeds undesirable algae, including toxic blue-green algae and red tide.

This ecological collapse demands an all-hands-on-deck moment, and government agencies and nonprofit organizations are taking unprecedented action, like supplemental feeding, to curtail this deadly trend.

But in Tallahassee, some lawmakers are actually looking for ways to make it easier, not harder, to destroy seagrass.

Click here to read the full opinion piece.

Feeding manatees is humane — but points to humans' environmental failures

As two longtime state and federal manatee conservation officials, now retired, we were surprised and disappointed to learn that state and federal authorities decided to feed manatees in Brevard County this winter.

Disappointed not so much in the decision itself but rather the circumstances that lead to the decision. We had spent decades overseeing state and federal manatee conservation programs in Florida; manatee speed zones, refuges, rescues, you name it. But we believe the decision to feed manatees this winter, while humane, sadly represents an overall failure in stewardship of the environment and management of this species.

The decline and collapses of sea grasses in Indian River Lagoon can be directly traced to decades of systemic neglect and mismanagement. Pollution and limited circulation led to nutrification, algal blooms, decreased water clarity, and ultimately the death of sea grasses ... the collapse of an ecosystem upon which all kinds of marine life, including manatees, depend.

Click here ro read the full opinion piece.

Bills would help consultants make a killing off of killing off Florida’s seagrass

I have two kids, so believe me when I tell you that all parents are terrible liars. We constantly use what I call "feel-good lies" to make our kids feel better about the world we live in — even if our lying sometimes leads to bad results.

In Florida, there’s a feel-good lie that keeps popping up like a crop of mushrooms sprouting after a hard rain. It’s the claim that mitigation makes environmental destruction all right.

For instance, say you wiped out a 5-acre wetland to build that Walmart.... It’s OK with the permitting agencies, so long as you make up for the damage. You get your permit if you pay someone to create new wetlands to replace the ones you paved over.

Voila! Mitigation makes everything hunky dory.

Except for one problem: Repeated scientific studies dating to the ’80s have found that wetland mitigation frequently does not work.

But mitigation looks good on paper, especially when a well-paid consultant has dressed it up in some trickeration language about “enhancing” and “preserving” what they’ve done.

"It’s a huge scam," one federal regulator told us. Another, just retired, said, "It’s a make-believe program."

And now here comes legislation that promises to do the exact same thing, but with seagrass.

One of the House sponsors is Rep. Toby Overdorf, who works as vice president of an engineering and environmental consulting firm. He made the real reason for the bill so plain that even a dumb old Florida boy like me could understand it.

Right now, when a developer has a project that will destroy seagrass, the state offers only two ways to mitigate the damage. One, developer can try to repair gouges left in the seagrass beds by boat propellers. Two, the developer can remove derelict boats that are shading the seagrass from getting sufficient sunlight.

That’s not enough to keep up with all the development that’s going on today, Overdorf told his colleagues.

Because this bill is so clearly designed to help Rep. Overdorf’s industry make its clients happy, I propose we change the name to the more accurate Assist Consultants Rake in Big Fees for Killing Seagrass Bill. I think that name would work on the Senate version, too.

Click here to read the full story.

Florida must follow data, enforce rules to clean up Lake Okeechobee pollution

Imagine living in a world where good intentions and wishful thinking are more important than reality. That pretty much describes where state regulators are in their efforts to curb pollution seeping into Lake Okeechobee.

The State of Florida has divided the properties along the lake into 32 drainage basins. A recent investigation by TCPalm found pollution in every one of those basins exceeded the limits deemed acceptable by the state between May 2016 and April 2021.

It's not entirely surprising, though. The state has been lax in other areas of environmental regulation, such as monitoring the amount of lead in the St. Sebastian River.

Along the Treasure Coast, water quality seems like a nonpartisan issue. Elected officials from both major parties seem to understand how important clean water is to our local economy and way of life.

Understanding is meaningless, though, unless it leads to action. The time for action is now.

Click here to read the full editorial.

'Look at the water for evidence.' Data proves Florida pollution prevention not working

It’s a textbook Florida morning at a ranch just north of Lake Okeechobee. Cattle roam. Herons and egrets hunt for food. Clouds mosey across the sky.

But beneath this idyllic scene, a silent byproduct lurks. Phosphorus levels, mostly from fertilizer and cow manure, exceeded the state pollution limit by 19 times.

The problem is not exclusive to this Rio Rancho Corp. farm. Rainfall runoff that flows into Lake O from hundreds of surrounding properties routinely exceeds the limit — without the state imposing any consequences, a TCPalm investigation found.

All 32 drainage basins around the lake with available data exceeded the limit over a five-year average, according to TCPalm’s analysis of “water year” data from May 2016 to April 2021.

The data proves — for the first time — that Florida’s flagship program to reduce water pollution isn’t working.

"All one has to do is look at the water for the evidence," said Indian Riverkeeper Mike Conner, who heads a Treasure Coast nonprofit that advocates for clean water. "The impairment of Florida waters is now at an all-time high."

The Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) oversees the program involving legally enforceable goals and strategies to reduce pollution, called Basin Management Action Plans (BMAPs).

DEP historically touts progress that often doesn’t match reality because it uses models to give credit for pollution-reduction measures — from reservoirs to informational brochures — assuming they produce intended results. DEP’s resulting graphics, used in public presentations, show progress is being made.

The truth is in the data recorded by the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD) water-quality monitors, which TCPalm analyzed.

"BMAPs aren’t working, and we’re having harmful algal blooms every time we turn around," Calusa Waterkeeper John Cassani said. "It’s killing seagrass, and manatees are starving. It’s a bad cascade that’s occurring now."

Click here to read the full story.

New FAU research pins Indian River Lagoon pollution problems on leaky septic tanks

When it comes to pollution in the Indian River Lagoon, everyone has a boogeyman.

In a year when a record manatee die-off put lagoon pollution under a microscope, some blame Lake Okeechobee's freshwater discharges for eviscerating seagrass. Others point to deluges of stormwater runoff choking the estuary with nutrient-dense fertilizers from nearby farms.

For Brian Lapointe, a Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute scientist, one polluter should carry most of the blame: Human waste leaking from septic tanks.

In 2015, researchers measured nitrogen isotopes in ground and surface water to pinpoint nitrogen sources affecting the lagoon. They used sucralose — an artificial sweetener that isn't totally cleaned by septic systems or wastewater treatment plants — as a human wastewater detector, according to Lapointe.

"Our research is showing that sewage in general is the biggest part of the pie of the problem" — particularly in the lagoon's northern section, Lapointe said.

To read the full story and view the photo gallery, click here.

Florida's environment took a beating in 2021. Could 2022 be even worse?

The list of environmental disasters that befell Florida's lands and waters in 2021 was as long as a tarpon killed by red tide. The headlines blasted across media platforms last year made tourist development council directors more nervous than a Florida panther in a room full of rocking chairs.

So as the calendar turns to 2022, all those terrible events will be lost in our rearview mirror, right?

Looking ahead into 2022, and considering how little was resolved in 2021 that might have resulted in real change, expect this year to look, feel and smell a lot like last year.

The list of assaults on the fragile environment seems endless: biosolids, wildfires, invasive species, coral bleaching, aquatic herbicides, Everglades destruction, oil drilling/fracking, lack of biodiversity, and sea level rise, king tides and erosion.

As if that's not enough, here are some of the biggest environmental eco-disasters the USA Today Network of 17 news sites in Florida will be watching next year: click here to continue reading.

Manatees are dying. We’re trying to force the state and the EPA to protect them

As we watch despairing news of starving manatees, many have been hoping someone will do something to stop this environmental nightmare. On Dec. 20, a group of committed conservationists took action and put the government on notice that we intend to file suit.

It is critical to remember that the United States of America has laws to protect clean water and the species that depend on those waters, and that’s why we’re heading to court. Earthjustice is representing the Center for Biological Diversity, Defenders of Wildlife, and the Save the Manatee Club — three groups that have spent years collecting crucial scientific data and repeatedly warning that manatees are in trouble.

More than 1,000 manatees have died so far this year — more than any other year in Florida history. They are starving because algae outbreaks in polluted water killed the seagrasses that manatees eat. We know what fuels these algae outbreaks — phosphorus and nitrogen in feces and fertilizer that gets into the public’s waters from sources like septic tanks, sewage spills and places where agricultural practices are poorly regulated.

Congress passed laws nearly 50 years ago to try to prevent exactly what is happening in Florida.... In 2013, the EPA and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service signed off on Florida’s water quality standards for phosphorus and nitrogen in the manatees’ habitat, concluding that manatees wouldn’t be adversely impacted.

Fast forward to today, and the manatee deaths are glaring proof that Florida hasn’t protected the water quality that manatees depend on for their very lives. Circumstances in the Indian River Lagoon have changed dramatically, and it’s time for the EPA to do its job — to come back to the table with USFWS and revisit its 2013 approval of Florida’s water quality standards.

Click here to read the full commentary.

Conservation groups to sue EPA over manatee deaths

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — Three conservation groups filed a formal notice on Monday of their intent to sue the Environmental Protection Agency if it doesn’t take steps to protect manatees from water pollution in Florida.

Pollution-fueled algae blooms are cited as the cause of over half of the more than 1,000 manatee deaths in Florida this year, according to a news release from the Center for Biological Diversity, Defenders of Wildlife and Save the Manatee Club.

The algae blooms killed thousands of acres of seagrass in the Indian River Lagoon, which highlights the inadequacy of Florida’s federally approved water quality standards, the groups said in the notice letter.

"It’s disgraceful that hundreds of manatees have died as a direct result of regulators’ failure to protect our water quality," Jaclyn Lopez, Florida director of the Center for Biologial Diversity, said in a news release.

Click here to read the full story.

Make it clear: Manatees are in crisis

There’s no way to pretend Florida’s manatees aren’t endangered. They are. In every sense of the word.

The official tally of deaths this year stands at 1,038 (as of Dec. 3 — more have died since then). That’s more than twice the annual average of the last five years — and nearly one-sixth of the entire population of manatees in the southeastern United States and Puerto Rico. In one year.

Even worse, the biggest factor in this "unusual mortality event," (as federal wildlife officials blandly tag it) is one that won’t be getting better any time soon. In fact, deaths may accelerate as Florida moves into colder-weather months. The problem is simple and horrible: Manatees are starving to death, particularly in the Indian River Lagoon, where the ecosystem is in a state of wholesale collapse after decades of pollution and inaction on the part of local, state and federal officials.

The peril is so great that manatee advocates along with state and federal officials have agreed to an unprecedented plan to supplement manatees’ diets in one key area with romaine lettuce. It’s a move that Pat Rose, longtime head of Florida’s Save the Manatee Club, never wanted to make. Feeding manatees only encourages them to linger in areas where there is no other food source. But many are just too weak to make it to safer feeding grounds, and Rose — along with others — is too heartbroken and weary of watching manatee carcasses hauled in nearly every day.

The manatees aren’t the only ones suffering. The vanished seagrass beds where they once foraged were also prime spawning grounds for the wide variety of fish, crustaceans and other sea life that make the Indian River Lagoon one of the most diverse estuaries in the nation. And if dollars and cents matter more to you than fish and wading birds, consider this: The lagoon is a multi-billion-dollar driver of the coastal economy from south Volusia down into Palm Beach County. Massive algae blooms have, in past years, turned portions of the lagoon into a fetid soup often compared to rancid guacamole. Imagine how many tourists want to return after seeing (and smelling) that.

Click here to read the full editorial.

Invasive tegu lizards survive Florida cold and eat tortoise babies

The lizards have thrived for years in South Florida, but are colonizing as far north as St. Lucie County.

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — The Argentine black and white tegu is multiplying and mobilizing in the backwoods and backyards of the Sunshine State — a creature more ominous than pythons because of its cold hardiness and indiscriminate palate.

Wildlife officials have warned for years about the tegu’s expansion in South Florida’s amenable subtropical climate, but now the unusually brainy reptile is colonizing as far north as St. Lucie County with an appetite for everything from gopher tortoise babies to bananas.

"It doesn’t seem like we’ve learned a lesson from our experience with pythons," said University of Florida wildlife professor Frank Mazzotti, who leads the Croc Docs research team.

Released and escaped pets as well as unscrupulous dealers are responsible for seeding the tegu spread, Mazzotti said. One of his key concerns is the tegu’s appetite for eggs, whether it be sea turtle, crocodile, alligator, gopher tortoise or bird.

Click here to read the full story.

Septic System Waste Pervasive Throughout Fflorida's Indian River Lagoon

For more than a decade, fertilizer leaching and associated stormwater runoff were thought to be the major drivers of harmful algal blooms in Florida’s Indian River Lagoon. Despite the numerous residential fertilizer ordinances passed since 2011, water quality, harmful algal blooms, and seagrass loss, which has resulted in mass deaths of the threatened Florida manatee, have continued to worsen.

There are more than 300,000 septic systems permitted in six counties adjacent to the 156-mile-long Indian River Lagoon, which makes up 40 percent of Florida’s eastern coast, and in Indian River and Martin counties, septic systems represent more than 50 percent of wastewater disposal. Five inlets allow the lagoon’s waters to drain into the ocean, potentially impacting another important Florida ecosystem.

To determine if septic systems in Indian River County contribute to nutrient enrichment of groundwaters and surface waters that discharge into the central Indian River Lagoon, researchers from Florida Atlantic University’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute assessed water quality at 20 sites in four Indian River County sub-drainage basins.

For the study, published in the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin, they measured stable nitrogen isotopes in groundwater, surface water, and macrophyte tissue to identify nitrogen sources impacting the Indian River Lagoon. Sucralose, an artificial sweetener that is not completely broken down by septic systems or wastewater treatment plants, was used as a human wastewater tracer, and fecal indicator bacteria density was used as an indicator of wastewater pollution.

Results reveal that nitrogen enrichment of all sub-drainage basins in this study supports that even "properly functioning" septic systems contribute nitrogen to surficial (shallow) groundwater. Furthermore, shallow ecosystems without a significant source of flushing and dilution, such as the central Indian River Lagoon are more susceptible to inputs from contaminated groundwater. Evidence shows that this issue is likely widespread in the Indian River Lagoon, including its canals, tributaries and rivers.

Click here to read the full story.

In a time of 'exponential everything' Florida's old planning laws could help fight climate change

In the 1970s, amid a wave of new laws created to control the rampant development paving over the Sunshine State, Florida named Earl Starnes as its first planning director.

Starnes faced a daunting task: convince landowners that to save Florida and its wetlands, springs and natural resources that made it unique, the state needed to impose tougher rules on big development.

It needed to slow the land rush lining their pockets. As he toured the state in a series of public hearings to promote this new vision for planned growth, Starnes encountered a skeptical public that instead viewed the laws as big government.

At the time, Florida had no requirements to keep sprawling new developments from overwhelming roads, water supplies, schools or other precious resources. No efforts were underway to preserve the state’s pristine springs, cypress forests, wetlands or mangrove-fringed coasts.

The Everglades was still considered a flood control issue, not a looming environmental disaster. And developers like the Mackle brothers were peddling mail-order paradise through the General Development Corporation, carving cities from tens of thousands of acres on floodplains and swampland.

As threats from climate change and over-development once again remind Florida of its precarious place, those who loved and worked with Starnes say his vision for urban planning, and the rules he tried to put in place, are worth remembering.

The laws have largely been whittled away over the decades since. In 2011, state lawmakers and Sen. Rick Scott, who was governor at the time, rewrote the 1985 Growth Management Act that grew out of the early laws. They also disbanded the Department of Community Affairs created to oversee growth. They replaced it with the Department of Economic Opportunity.

"The whole idea that somehow the well-being of the Florida lifestyle is subsumed under economic development just shows a complete switch and how the current government views the way of life in Florida," said Victoria Tschinkel, the Secretary of the Department of Environmental Regulation from 1981 to 1987.

In a time of "exponential everything," it’s time Florida lives up to the kind of smart growth Starnes and his colleagues at the time envisioned, she said.

Click here to read or listen to the full story.

Growing Pains: Florida's population boom is impacting the state's waterways

Blue green algae blooms are connected to population growth according to a marine biologist

Water is all around us.

And just as there is more of “us” here, the water is showing it.

"I’ve grown up in Jacksonville," says Melinda Simmons. Now, she's a marine scientist at Jacksonville University.

She was concerned about less state funding to test water quality, so she started testing the water routinely on parts of the St. Johns River.

"There’s too much algae in the water," Simmons says. "Too many nutrients."

"It’s a problem," Edie Widder said. She's a deep sea biologist. She was concerned about pollution in the oceans coming from inland waterways. So she started ORCA, an organization to monitor pollution levels in the Indian River Lagoon in Central Florida.

"... what we found again, and again, and again is wherever we have living shorelines, like mangroves or spartina, or natural shoreline, it's clean," Widder says.

The plants along the shorelines will filter the pollution from the runoff before it gets into the rivers.

"But all too frequently, more people moving into Florida has turned its waterways 'into an algae dominated system. So it’s happened pretty rapidly," Widder said.

The 2021 St. Johns River Report says development pressures are diminishing the wetlands.

"Wetlands are natural filters, and so that's very alarming."

So how does this affect you?

Blue-green algae can produce toxins, "a nerve toxin and a liver toxin," Simmons said.

So recreational fishing and swimming is not recommended when there are blooms, and they seem to happening almost every year now.

Click here to read the full story and view the news videos.

How much toxin from algae blooms is enough to make people sick? FAU aims to find out

Scientists know that red tide and other harmful algae blooms can kill marine life and make pets and people sick. Certain types of algae produce toxins that can cause respiratory problems, liver failure and nervous system issues. People and animals can be exposed by simply breathing in the air around a bloom or having skin contact.

But how much toxin is too much? And who is more at risk? Florida Atlantic University is starting a new study on the effects of human exposure to algae and their toxins after persistent blooms in South Florida over the past few years have fouled rivers and canals in the west and east coasts, killing fish, terrifying residents and scaring tourists away.

"Despite the intensity and frequency of cyanobacterial blooms in South Florida, data on human exposure to these blooms and microcystin concentrations in tissues of people who have been exposed is limited," said Shirley Gordon, lead researcher and a professor at FAU’s Christine E. Lynn College of Nursing. "Understanding thresholds for both short- and long-term health impacts is crucial to protect the health of Floridians."

CLick here to read the full story.

Something more insidious than pythons is coming for Florida's wildlife and it's terrifying

The Argentine black and white tegu is multiplying and mobilizing in the backwoods and backyards of the Sunshine State — a creature more ominous than pythons because of its cold hardiness and indiscriminate palate.

Wildlife officials have warned for years about the tegu’s expansion in South Florida’s amenable subtropical climate, but now the unusually brainy reptile is colonizing as far north as St. Lucie County with an appetite for everything from gopher tortoise babies to bananas.

Next month, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission is meeting with federal officials, landowners and university researchers to discuss curtailing the St. Lucie population and getting ahead of the tegu problem overall.

But it’s a race they may already be losing.

Click here to read the full story.

Lettuce, cabbage for manatees? Feds, FWC consider feeding sea cows after 1,000 deaths

Manatees are starving in Florida, so state and wildlife agencies are considering an unprecedented measure: supplemental feedings.

More than 1,000 manatees have died so far this year in Florida, a grim milestone that represents more than 10% of the population in the entire state. Most of the deaths are happening in Brevard County, where Indian River Lagoon provides an important refuge for the mammals to gather to escape cold water temperatures during winter months. Pollution and persistent algae blooms have killed off seagrass beds in the region in recent years, leaving manatees without enough of their primary source of food to make it through the winter.

State and federal wildlife agencies have set up a joint team to manage the emergency response and plans are being drawn up to provide manatees in the Indian River Lagoon area with just enough food and water so they don’t starve. The only thing missing is the approval from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service because it’s illegal to feed manatees according to federal and state law.

Click here to read the full story.

Florida Order Weakens Protections for Imperiled Gopher Tortoise

Gopher Tortoise at Greater Risk From Widespread Urban Sprawl

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has issued an executive order that weakens protections for tortoises displaced from development sites around the state and authorizes indefinite “temporary relocation” measures. The order comes as uncontrolled urban sprawl has caused a shortage of relocation sites for the rare and beloved tortoise.

"Gopher tortoises are caught in a habitat loss crisis, yet the commission is suggesting what amounts to a temporary storage solution," said Elise Bennett, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. "This move is deeply disappointing and dangerous to these imperiled animals, but it’s also no surprise. For years the state has enabled sprawl development by simply moving tortoises out of the way. Now there’s nowhere left to put them."

The order, issued by commission executive director Eric Sutton, broadly waives a rule that prohibits the relocation of tortoises more than 100 miles north or south of a given development site. The "100-mile rule" exists to ensure tortoise populations are relocated to areas that support long-term population viability and genetic integrity.

Because urban sprawl in peninsular Florida is consuming much of the tortoise’s remaining habitat, waiver of the 100-mile rule will likely direct tortoises from the species’ core range to peripheral areas in the Florida panhandle, where populations may struggle to survive.

Click here to read the full press release.

Et tu, Tegu? Florida scientists, FWC fight against alarming increase in invasive lizards

A large lizard that is sometimes kept as a pet is wreaking havoc on Florida’s native wildlife and scientists at the University of Florida are working on a solution.

Argentine black and white tegus have spread and established populations in and around Florida at a rapid and growing rate and that could have critical implications for natural areas and even restoration efforts for Everglades National Park, according to UF scientists at the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.

Scientists said the spread of tegus can impact Everglade’s restoration efforts by increasing predation on threatened and endangered species, including the American crocodile, the Key Largo woodrat, the Cape Sable seaside sparrow, as well as all other ground-nesting birds and reptiles.

After tegus were introduced to south Florida they spread into areas impacting wildlife, threatening nesting areas of protected and endangered species, and entered natural areas including Everglades National Park.

Tegus have since spread beyond south Florida and are likely to continue establishing without sustained control, research and monitoring efforts by partnering agencies, scientists say.

Click here to read the full story.

Nearly 1,000 of Florida's beloved manatees have died this year as toxic algae blooms choke off their food source

Nearly 1,000 of Florida's beloved manatees have died since the beginning of this year, mostly due to starvation, wildlife officials said.

The 984 manatee deaths recorded so far his year more than doubles last year's total of 483 deaths, according to mortality statistics provided by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC).

Most mortalities were associated with starvation due to the lack of seagrasses near warm-water refuge sites in the Indian River Lagoon, the FWC said, noting that a comprehensive investigation into the deaths continues.

But when nutrients from wastewater or runoff containing fertilizers, microplastics or toxic chemicals leach into a manatee's marine habitat -- whether freshwater or saltwater -- they can throw off the balance of the water and cause harmful algae blooms to form.

Click here to read the full story.

Florida manatee deaths soar as polluted water kills seagrass

Florida fishing guide and environmental activist Paul Fafeita says a highlight for his charter customers is spotting the manatees that forage for seagrass in shallow waters. It’s not so thrilling when they come across the emaciated carcass of a manatee that starved to death.

"It’s not good when you’ve got clients on the boat and all of a sudden there’s a dead manatee," Fafeita, president of the Clean Water Coalition of Indian River County, said during a recent excursion in the Indian River Lagoon, a favorite hangout for the marine mammals along Florida’s east coast. "They’re wanting to see them. They don’t want to see them dead."

Florida is experiencing an unprecedented die-off of manatees this year, with 959 documented deaths as of Oct. 1. That’s already more than any full year on record, and colder weather soon to come could bring another wave of deaths in a population that numbers between 7,500 and 10,200 along both Florida coasts, according to state estimates.

"There is a huge sense of urgency," said Gil McRae, director of the state Fish and Wildlife Research Institute. "We’re uncertain how long it’s (high manatee deaths) going to be."

The reason? Seagrass on which the so-called sea cows depend also is dying as water quality declines due to fertilizer runoff, wastewater discharges and polluted water that is increasingly diverted on purpose from Lake Okeechobee to coastal estuaries.

These manmade pollutants can cause algae blooms so thick that seagrass can’t get the sunlight it needs to survive, jeopardizing the manatees’ main food supply. Since 2009 about 58% of the seagrass has been lost in the Indian River Lagoon, state estimates show.

"Florida manatees desperately need us to help them by cleaning up and protecting their habitat," said Jaclyn Lopez, Florida director and senior attorney at The Center for Biological Diversity, a St. Petersburg-based nonprofit intent on saving imperiled species. The center and other groups plan to sue the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to boost habitat protections for the manatee.

Click here to read the full story.

Florida TaxWatch Looks at How Climate Change Impacts Sunshine State’s Economy

Last week, Florida TaxWatch (FTW) released “A Rising Tide Sinks All Homes: The Effects of Climate Change on Florida’s Economy,” a comprehensive report developed to help taxpayers and policymakers better understand the potential costs and consequences of climate change on each of the 11 industries that comprise Florida’s economy.

Florida TaxWatch President and CEO Dominic Calabro weighed in on the report on Thursday.

"The impacts of a changing climate translate into real economic repercussions. If bankers and insurers won’t secure the 40 percent of residential properties and 35 percent of commercial properties at risk of chronic flooding in Florida and they then come off property tax rolls, our communities will be impacted even when there is no rising water or storm surge in sight. If extreme heat deters outdoor recreation and tourism that drive our sales-tax-dependent economy, or if related disruptions stress supply chains or operations at airports, seaports, and spaceports, billions of dollars in payroll and investments needed to support schools, roads, bridges, water and sewer systems, public safety, and more will certainly be compromised," said Calabro.

"Florida’s economy and the quality of life of its citizens depend heavily on preserving and sustaining our natural resources.... Doing nothing is no longer an option. Making hard choices will establish Florida as a leader in this space and allow us to prepare for both the environmental and economic challenges ahead."

Click here to read the full story.

Florida paying a high price in damage from invasive species

Florida’s climate makes a cozy environment for a variety of plant species. The downside is that invasive and potentially destructive species often try to call Florida home, too. A new guide developed by UF/IFAS Extension Seminole County outlines which plants to avoid and which plants to embrace in a Florida landscape.

The annual impact of invasive plants, animals and disease to Florida’s agriculture industry is estimated at $179 million. To prevent contributing to the greater problem, homeowners, landscapers, small-scale nurseries and plant lovers should carefully select plants they purchase and install.

"Invasive plants are never the right plants," said Tina McIntyre, UF/IFAS Extension Seminole County Florida-Friendly Landscaping agent. "Ornamental plants sometimes become invasive species in our natural lands and waterways. I spent the first 10 years of my career in the field as a biologist and frequently saw this happen. Now, I educate homeowners, landscape professionals and the public about ways they can make a difference. This guide is one of those tools."

Some plants are invasive and their sale in Florida is prohibited. However, many plants in Florida are invasive and still permitted for sale.

"We want people to think more critically about the plants they select for their landscapes," said Morgan Pinkerton, UF/IFAS Extension Seminole County agent in sustainable agriculture and food systems. "It is up to all of us to make more sustainable choices in the landscape...."

Click here to read the full story.

Details on how, why TCPalm joined St. Sebastian River's friends to test sediment for lead

A breeze challenged Terry Greene to anchor his 23-foot Four Winns bowrider at one of the 36 exact latitude and longitude points in the middle of the St. Sebastian River specified in a research plan.

Once anchored, Bruce Sabol lowered his hand-held sampler into the water, collecting several inches of muck, eventually dumping it into a plastic bag, labeling and recording it and placing the bag into a cooler. As a retired civil engineer for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Roseland resident is experienced in proper sediment sampling procedures.

It all was part of a study designed to be more thorough than one completed by consultants for Brightline, which is replacing a 1926 rail bridge over the river. The bridge has been shedding paint containing toxic lead 30 times higher than federal limits allow, according to the consultants, who did not find potentially dangerous levels in the river.

Click here to read the full story.

Red tide and algae blooms: Florida waters in crisis

Fixing Florida's water crisis

TAMPA — Florida's water pollution crisis is reaching a breaking point, and the race to pass comprehensive legislation to fix our statewide problems is moving as slow as the environmental catastrophe unfolding in our bays, rivers, natural springs, and lagoons every day.

The question concerned citizens, charter boat captains, some politicians, and environmentalists are asking? How many tons of dead fish, how many manatees, dolphins, sea turtles, and majestic tarpons do we have to clean up before Florida implements a systemic change from the top down.

Everyone who lives in Florida or visits Florida is part of the problem. No person is less innocent or guilty than the other, and scientists hope that we recognize and fix the problem; before it's too late.

"So, if you live in Florida, if you work in Florida, if you play in Florida, you're part of the problem," Dr. Tom Frazer, Dean of the College of Marine Science at the University of South Florida, said.

Click here to watch or read the full report.

Does Nature Have Rights? A Burgeoning Legal Movement Says Rivers, Forests and Wildlife Have Standing, Too

Climate change and environmental destruction have inspired court cases around the country—and the globe—aimed at protecting the natural world.

For Chuck O’Neal, a lifelong outdoorsman and environmentalist, the moment of truth came on election night 2020, as results rolled in from perhaps the most partisan campaign season in American history.

He wasn’t watching Trump or Biden. O’Neal had spent the past two years running a campaign in Orange County, Florida, based on an unorthodox legal doctrine that holds that rivers, mountains and forests should have legal rights, just like people.

His effort involved amending the county’s charter, its mini-constitution, with a so-called rights of nature provision. The provision would protect waterways like the glassy Wekiva River from harmful pollution, such as that linked to toxic algae blooms fueled by fertilizer runoff from agriculture, septic systems and poor stormwater management.

While the rights of nature movement has been gaining ground for decades in countries around the world and in dozens of local jurisdictions in the United States, O’Neal knew that this fast-growing county in central Florida, home to Disney World in booming Orlando, would offer one of its biggest tests.

Click here to read the full story.

In Florida, Environmental Oversight Improves Under DeSantis, But Enforcement Issues Remain

ORLANDO, Fla.—Florida’s oversight of the state’s fragile natural resources has improved under Gov. Ron DeSantis but remains far behind where it was a decade ago, according to a new report by a nonprofit advocacy group supporting current and former government employees involved in environmental protection.

While DeSantis has made the environment a priority of his administration, the report by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) shows that the state Department of Environmental Protection conducted fewer inspections in 2020 than the year before.

The overall rate at which programs regulated by the Department of Environmental Protection were found to be in compliance with environmental laws declined to 59 percent from 64 percent, the report found. The lowest compliance was found in the domestic wastewater and potable water programs, with rates of 34% and 36% respectively. In the potable water program there were 185 inspections, compared with 785 in 2019.

Jerry Phillips, Florida director of PEER and a former enforcement attorney at the Department of Environmental Protection, said that the numbers reflect a boost in enforcement since DeSantis’ predecessor Rick Scott, a Republican, was elected to the U.S. Senate. But the number of enforcement actions is a fraction of what it was a decade ago.

“What this means to the average Floridian is that they can be less confident that the water that they’re drinking is safe,” Phillips said.

Click here to read the full story.

Guest opinion: Let's call the whole thing off: Clean Water Act permitting should return to Feds

At a recent industry conference, developers, their representatives, and consultants from across the state expressed frustration that the new “state 404” program had not yet lived up to their expectations. The tension in the air was palpable and it was standing room only. Participants were out of their seat, angry and upset at agency officials.

Approved in the last days of the Trump administration, the power to provide Clean Water Act wetland permits was taken from the Army Corps of Engineers, who have administered it for decades, and given to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP).

It was touted that transferring the program to the state would streamline processing of wetland destruction permits, and FDEP promised they could do so without significant increases in state funding or staff. The development community championed the idea; the environmental community opposed, citing concerns about loss of environmental protections and lack of sufficient resources to tackle the awesome responsibility of preserving Florida’s wetlands.

Yet, the state and federal agencies have now admitted that the workload and confusion associated with the transition was, and still is, much greater than expected. The necessary manpower at the FDEP and Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) to attempt to tackle the 404 program has far exceeded what they planned for, and both agencies have reallocated personnel off of other important issues to work on this program.

These were concerns the Conservancy of Southwest Florida and our partners had expressed at the start. We asked FDEP to focus its efforts on its critical existing water quality programs, and leave the Clean Water Act permitting to the feds where essential environmental laws like the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act are triggered and become part of the decision-making. Under a state program, these protections are completely lost or become just a shell of their original purpose.

It’s not often that developers see eye to eye with environmentalists, but representatives of both have shared worries that the state staff are attempting to tackle the new and unknown without adequate training, knowledge, and resources.

The state agencies have the future of Florida, and the future of the Florida panther, in their hands. FDEP and FWC currently have some of the most damaging proposals before them, including road expansions, mines, oil operations, and new towns.

Click here to read the full story.

Florida’s Majestic Manatees Are Starving to Death

Deprived of once plentiful seagrass, more than 900 have died this year. Some experts contend they were taken off the endangered species list prematurely.

ORLANDO, Fla.—The manatee was too weak to swim.

She lay still in a medical pool at a SeaWorld rehabilitation center, only lifting her whiskered snout every so often to breathe. Her snout rested upon a pipe to make the effort easier. Her body was slender, hardly that of the chunky manatee—a relative of elephants—that she should have been. Her underbelly was concave. The manatee was near death from starvation.

During 2021 an unprecedented 937 manatees have died in Florida, more than double the five-year annual average only nine months into the year. The staggering loss represents 10 percent of the animal’s population in the state, estimated at 8,810.

More than half of the deaths are in the Indian River Lagoon, a 156-mile East Coast estuary that is among the most biologically diverse on the continent. Ongoing water quality problems have led to a widespread loss of seagrass, the manatee’s preferred food. Many of the deaths are related to the kind of starvation No. 37 (37th manatee to be rescued this year) suffered from, although manatees also face threats from toxic blooms of red tide, habitat loss and boat strikes. Environmental groups say on Florida’s east coast, some 20 percent of the manatee population has been wiped out.

The calamity comes four years after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) effectively declared the manatee on the way toward recovery and downlisted the animal from endangered to threatened, a decision that generated widespread opposition. Now some experts say the downlisting not only was premature but neglected scientifically documented warning signs at the time that manatees were in trouble, leaving the animals vulnerable for the latest in a series of mortality events. Two congressional leaders—Reps. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.) and Darren Soto (D-Fla.)—have filed legislation aimed at restoring the manatee’s endangered status.

Among the most important habitats in the world for the iconic charismatic manatee is the Indian River Lagoon, which stretches five counties from Brevard near the state’s midsection south to Palm Beach County. The estuary’s warm brackish waters and historically lush seagrass provide a haven especially during the winter for the animals, which are stressed in cold water.

For the past several years ongoing nutrient pollution associated, for instance, with fertilizers, produced mainly from natural gas, and septic tanks have triggered harmful algae blooms that can cloud the lagoon’s historically crystal-clear water, preventing sunlight from reaching the seagrass undulating beneath the surface. Since 2009, at least 58 percent of the seagrass in the northern Indian River Lagoon has been lost. In the Banana River, part of the northern lagoon, at least 96 percent of the seagrass is gone.

Between December 2020 and May 2021 there were 677 dead manatees reported on Florida’s east coast, the highest number ever recorded in the state during a six-month period. Most of the deaths occurred in January, February and March. The animals were up to 40 percent underweight, with deteriorated muscle and fat and severe atrophy of the liver, heart and other organs. Sixty-seven manatees were rescued, some of them taken to nearby Blue Spring because the Indian River Lagoon at the time was considered “too dangerous” for them.

The calamity now has prompted an urgent federal and state effort aimed at bracing for potentially more deaths this coming winter, as the Indian River Lagoon’s water quality problems and seagrass losses will not be resolved anytime soon. USFWS designated the die-off as an Unusual Mortality Event, prompting a federal investigation into why the manatees died and how to prevent future deaths. The Florida Legislature included $8 million for manatees in the state budget. The funding is aimed at habitat restoration and springs, another important habitat for manatees because of their stable temperatures year-round.

Click here to read the full story.

Rescuers race to save Florida’s corals while federal government plan more dredging

Reviving the reef is hampered by corruption and cluelessness

About four months ago, I drove over to Orlando and saw something I’d never seen before, something guaranteed to produce a reaction of "Ooooo! Ahhhh!"

In an industrial park off the Orange Blossom Trail, I parked outside an office with blackened windows and no name on the door. Someone saw me walking toward the office and opened up before I could knock. Once inside, I could see the reason for all the secrecy.

In one large, eerily-lit room sat tank after tank of rippling water, and in each tank were dozens of corals, looking like weird, grooved rocks.

They aren’t rocks, though. They are living creatures — tiny animals with tentacles — and the work they do building coral reefs is essential for life underwater to exist.

Each of these corals was transplanted here, to what’s been dubbed the Florida Coral Rescue Center, from North America’s only coral barrier reef, which stretches for about 360 miles along Florida’s southeast coast. The goal: Save their lives so that someday — no one knows when — they or their offspring can be put back where they normally live.

Click here to read the full story.

Conservation groups plan to sue FWS to update Florida manatee critical habitat

Three conservation nonprofits plan to sue the federal government regarding Florida manatees' record die-off this year, they announced Monday.

At least 905 manatee deaths were recorded between Jan. 1 and Aug. 6, mostly in Brevard County's stretch of the Indian River Lagoon, according to state wildlife data. That surpasses the previous record of 830 set in 2013.

The nonprofits want the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to recognize the biological factors threatening manatee habitat — including seagrass loss, declining water quality and waning natural warm-water refuges — and expand the pre-existing critical habitat designation outlined by the agency since 1976.

While FWS recognizes the geographic locations of several Florida waterways as the manatee's critical habitat, there is no detailed description of the environmental threats those waterways face, said Jaclyn Lopez, Florida director and senior attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity.

Click here to read the full story.

It’s a sin what we’ve done to Florida’s seagrass

‘We’re pulling tons of floating seagrass out of the water. I mean tons.’

The news reports around where I live in St. Petersburg have been greatly concerned with weights and measures recently. It’s an effort to quantify the horror of the ongoing red tide algae bloom by recounting the staggering amount of the sea life that has turned up dead: 500 tons! Three million pounds! 1,711 tons! And so on.

After seeing enough of these reports, my curiosity got the better of me, so I called the person I call every time there’s a red tide bloom off the coast of Pinellas County, Kelli Hammer Levy.

“We’re pulling tons of floating seagrass out of the water,” Levy told me. “I mean tons. It’s very disappointing.”

The red tide algae bloom has been lingering along the state’s Gulf Coast since December, but it hit the Tampa Bay area during the seagrass’ growing season, she explained. The grasses the crews have been pulling out of the water look fine, other than being dead.

Despite what your homeowners’ association says, we can live without green lawns. But Florida can’t get by without our seagrass.

Florida has nearly 2.5 million acres of seagrass beds, more than any other state. The seagrass in Florida Bay down at the state’s southern tip, and in the Big Bend area from Tarpon Springs north to Apalachee Bay, “are two of the most extensive seagrass beds in continental North America,” according to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s website.

But, right now, an awful lot of Florida’s seagrass is being mowed down (so to speak) by us humans.

There’s one place in Florida where we have a pretty good idea how much seagrass has been wiped out: the Indian River Lagoon.

Once regarded as North America’s most productive estuary, the Indian River Lagoon once had 79,000 acres of seagrass beds that helped it achieve that reputation. Over the last 10 years, it’s lost 95 percent, according to Patrick Rose, executive director of the Save the Manatee Club.

My next call was to Leesa Souto, executive director of the Marine Resources Council in Palm Bay, an environmental group trying to restore the fish and wildlife resources of the lagoon.

When I asked what could fix the lagoon after such a dramatic loss, she gave me a two-word answer: “Clean water.”

The only way to make the seagrass come back, she contended, is to vanquish the poor water quality that killed it in the first place.

The fact that the lagoon’s seagrass died in such large quantities is a sign of what a poor job state officials have done at keeping the lagoon clean, she contended.

Click here to read the full story.

What You Should Know About Florida's Red and Green Slime Crisis

Florida is in crisis as, once again, outbreaks of red and green slime take over the state’s iconic beaches and waterfronts.

Whether it’s the red tide on Florida’s southwest coast, or the green slime on rivers, lakes, and other freshwater habitats across the state, these persistent, harmful outbreaks aren’t natural. The outbreaks are fueled by toxic pollution from sewage, fertilizer, and manure. And they’re threatening people’s health and livelihoods, as well as killing off seagrass beds and massive amounts of marine life.

Here’s a breakdown of the toxic outbreaks, why they’re harmful, and the concrete steps we can take to prevent them in the future.

Click here to read the full report.

Florida enacts sweeping law to protect its wildlife corridors

The Florida Wildlife Corridor Act was passed unanimously. It aims to protect green spaces, drinking water, and wildlife such as panthers.

Florida made conservation history by enacting a bill and securing $400 million in funding to help protect the state’s vast network of natural areas.

Known as the Florida Wildlife Corridor Act, the legislation passed the Florida State Senate and House unanimously in late April. It was signed by Governor Ron DeSantis on the evening of June 29.

The act formally recognizes the existence of the Florida wildlife corridor, an interconnected web of green spaces throughout much of the state that includes forests, swamps, fields, pastures, timberlands, and even the edges of suburbs.

These areas are crucial for the existence of Florida’s rich wildlife, especially wide-ranging species such as Florida panthers, black bears, otters, alligators, and many types of birds. Habitat fragmentation, caused by roads and development, is one of the most critical but least recognized threats to biodiversity.

The act is also intended to protect agricultural lands from development, to provide for continued recreational access to natural areas, and to safeguard clean water and air. That’s vital in the third most populous state, where an average of nearly a thousand people move every day.

Click here to read the full story.

As Seagrass Habitats Decline, Florida Manatees Are Dying Of Starvation

Over 10% Of Florida's Total Manatee Population Has Died So Far This Year

In Florida, wildlife managers and environmental groups are stunned by a record number of manatee deaths. More than 750 manatees have died since the beginning of the year, the most deaths ever recorded in a five month period. Most of the deaths are in Florida's Indian River Lagoon, where a large die-off of seagrass has left manatees without enough to eat.

Click here to read or listen to the full report.

DeSantis likely won't declare state of emergency amid record manatee deaths

A coalition of 16 environmental groups and businesses Tuesday urged Florida's governor to declare a state of emergency to help restore the Indian River Lagoon, ground zero for this year's record manatee die-off because of seagrass loss.

The four businesses and 12 environmental nonprofits likely won't get what they want, however. A state of emergency is "not necessary at this time," a state official said Tuesday, confirming what the governor previously has said.

The coalition said urgent action is needed to restore the lagoon.

"The time has come to act boldly and effectively to rehabilitate our waterways," the organizations wrote to Gov. Ron DeSantis in a letter dated June 8. "Our health, our natural environment and our economy depends on it."

Click here to read the full story.

Manatees are dying in droves this year. The die-offs could spell trouble for Florida

Despite their portly frame and inherent meekness, Florida's manatees are survivors.

When power plants began popping up along Florida's East and West coasts, manatees learned to follow the flow of the unseasonably warm water.

When boats with sharp motors increasingly flooded their habitats, they learned how to live with debilitating injuries, or tried to.

And when their favorite source of food began to disappear when toxic algae infested the water, they learned to eat less, often at the cost of their health.

Their gentle nature belies a deceptive resilience. Unathletic as they may seem -- they tip the scales at around half a ton -- they're built to endure.

But how much more can one species take?

"Manatees are literally that sentinel species," says Patrick Rose, executive director of the Save the Manatee Club, a 40-year-old nonprofit co-founded by Jimmy Buffet. "They're warning us of what else is going to come if we don't do a better job while there's still time to do something about it. If we don't, our own lives will suffer."

Florida, the third-most populous state in the US and still growing, stands to lose more than its state marine mammal if manatees go extinct. The same issues that have caused their mass deaths are disrupting freshwater and saltwater sanctuaries, killing off fish and other species and mucking up the water that millions rely on for their livelihoods. Florida beaches are now as well known for red tide as they are for pristine white sand and watercolor sunsets.

... problems had been bubbling below the surface for decades, and in 2021 it seems they've boiled over. The stressors facing manatees are numerous and entwined, and one can't be conquered without addressing the other, said Michael Walsh, a clinical associate professor at the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine who specializes in aquatic animal health.

The trouble, Walsh says, begins in the water.

Click here to read this extensive story.

Hundreds of Florida Manatees Dying Because of Starvation, Human Pollution

Several hundred manatees have died off the coast of Florida this year, and scientists think human waste is crippling their food sources.

So far this year, 738 manatee deaths had been recorded as of late last week, according to figures from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, already surpassing 2020's year-long figure of 637.

Martine de Wit, a veterinarian in the state's marine mammal pathology lab, told the Tampa Bay Times there are cases of manatees suffering from the effects of starvation, and pointed to the loss of huge amounts of seagrass—a key part of the manatee's diet.

Patrick Rose, executive director of the Save the Manatee Club, told Newsweek his organization is working to step up efforts to monitor the manatees' health in association with local authorities—but fears the situation could worsen come next winter.

Rose said: "The rescues of sick and injured manatees is the first priority while we work to clean-up and restore the manatees' essential aquatic habitat.

"Sadly, since the situation was allowed to deteriorate so dramatically, we could be facing an even more deadly scenario going into next winter and there truly is no time to waste in preventing such a recurrence."

According to Rose, populations of seagrass have experienced "devastating losses" in the Indian River Lagoon, where up to 90 percent have been killed off by repeated algal blooms.

These blooms, he said, are being driven by human waste and pollutants entering the environment through sources such as poorly treated wastewater, septic drain fields, and stormwater runoff containing fertilizers and other pollutants.

Click here to read the full story.

Manatees are dying in record numbers. Politicians’ contempt for environment is to blame

The biblical phrase “You reap what you sow” tastes like ashes grinding between the teeth this year as beloved Florida manatees die of starvation at record sickening levels.

Some 724 manatees — one in every 10 — have perished since Jan. 1, mostly because man’s pollution has ruined their once bountiful smorgasbord of underwater grassland.

The average annual number of deaths during the last five years was 261, but our careless contempt for keeping Florida’s waters clean now has caught up with these gentle creatures.

This isn’t just a coincidence.

How do you feel about that, Florida? Are you still cheering former Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s decimation of the state’s environmental watchdog agency in favor of making the state "business-friendly"?

Do you enjoy seeing fellow mammals wasting to bone, their carcasses rotting along waterways, their babies dying as fast as they’re born?

And you folks who joke smugly about “tree-huggers” and their oh-so-silly proposals — have you smelled the stench of manatee carcasses in Brevard County, ground zero for the die-off with nearly 300 rotting along the waterways?

The average Floridian has always respected wild surroundings and wants to protect the fragile parts, including its crystalline freshwater springs, its moss-draped woodlands and its rare animals.

The average state legislator, on the other hand, has always respected campaign contributions from wealthy polluters like phosphate mines and from developers whose goal is to cover sensitive land with subdivisions and golf courses that spew killing fertilizer into waterways.

Voters have said over and over again — loudly and unambiguously — that they want state money spent on the environment. Consider the 75% voter support for Amendment 1 in 2014.

The constitutional amendment ordered the state to use 33% of the proceeds — that was $750 million in 2015 — of an already-existing real-estate tax called documentary stamps to improve and protect water resources and to buy preservation land.

Instead, then-state Sen. Alan Hays, R-Umatilla, now the Supervisor of Elections in Lake County, chaired a committee that hijacked all but $37 million to feed bloated state bureaucracy, pay off state debt and keep the corporate welfare flowing.

That’s disgusting on two levels — the damage to the environment and the disrespect to the voters.

Scott, now a U.S. senator, led the environmental horror show as governor from 2011 to 2019.

He stripped the Department of Environmental Protection of employees and crippled the water management districts, mercilessly slashing employees and the ability to enforce environmental laws. He signed a bill that stopped local governments from regulating harmful fertilizer sales during rainy summer months and went so far as to ask the federal Environmental Protection Agency to back off enforcing water quality rules. Yeah, we don’t need any stinkin’ rules, right?

Of course, environmental degradation doesn’t happen in a blink. Disaster waits. Over the years, everything goes downhill.

And then one day it comes to this: “I think it will be the highest [number of manatee deaths] we’ve ever documented,” Martine de Wit, who runs the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s marine mammal pathology lab in St. Petersburg, recently told USA Today.

In the past, manatees had to fear the cruel cut of the boat propeller. Now, they have to fear politicians who make fun of attempts to protect the environment. There is no getting out of this one. Humans are responsible for the die-off of the very animals we claim to love and revere.

The sewage from septic tanks and fertilizers dumped into unguarded fresh and coastal waters have created repeat blooms of toxic algae and harmful plant life. They team up to destroy seagrass so that manatees, who need 100 to 200 pounds of the stuff daily, have almost nothing to eat.

Click here to read the full editorial.

Manatees are Starving in Record Numbers

Florida manatee deaths are a man-made environmental disaster

BREVARD COUNTY, Fla. – A sun-bleached skull, scattered ribs and the decaying husks of dozens of manatees sully the smooth tan sand on a handful of mangrove islands north of Manatee Cove Park in Brevard County.

The emaciated remains, reported by waterfront residents or spotted by boaters, have been collected and dumped on the sandy outcroppings by state wildlife officers, turning these idyllic tropical settings into sea cow mass graveyards.

The smell of death hangs in the air. Vultures own the sky above as they circle what is quickly becoming an environmental catastrophe.

Up and down the Sunshine State, manatees, the gentle giants of the inland waterways, are dying en masse. They are starving to death. The mangrove coves and canals that once were havens for the creatures are increasingly empty of them. Decades of conservation success have given way to jumbles of bones and rotting carcasses all around Florida.

"I think it will be the highest (number of manatee deaths) we've ever documented," said Martine de Wit, who runs the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s marine mammal pathology lab in St. Petersburg.

We humans, the residents of and visitors to Florida, own the reasons all this is happening, biologists say. Evidence from the massive die-off suggests this is a completely human-made famine. The sewage, detritus and fertilizers we have been dumping into our coastal waters for decades have created blooms of bad plant life while choking to death the seagrass on which the manatees and other marine life depend.

Click here to read the full story.

Giant lizards, hissing ducks, and pythons: Florida has an invasive species problem

Gillian Hicks and her boyfriend, Michael Litersky, were sitting on the porch of Hicks’s apartment in Lake Worth Beach, Florida, when they noticed a strange animal slinking along the fence. It looked a bit like a raccoon, but its color was too mustardy, and a bit like a cat, but its tail flexed and gripped with remarkable dexterity.

The next morning, Hicks awoke to screams. Sprinting out of bed, she discovered Litersky and the little animal doing battle in the kitchen. As Hicks would later explain to a local newspaper, Litersky had gotten up early to go to work. When he’d opened the front door, he’d been surprised to find the critter was still there, waiting on the step. And then, Hicks recounted, “it just bum-rushed him.” Litersky tried to shoo his assailant outside, but it latched onto his leg, biting him and slashing his calf.

Accounts of such odd creatures running amok in Florida have become commonplace—in an indignant editorial in 2019, the Orlando Sentinel dubbed the Sunshine State a “Jurassic Park” of exotic species.

That spring (2019), for example, in Palm Beach Gardens, thousands of poisonous cane toads—introduced to Florida years ago from South American to control agricultural pests on sugarcane plantations—emerged from the city’s gutters and canals, taking over an entire neighborhood. A few months later, in Melbourne, a 200-pound feral hog, a descendant of pigs brought to the peninsula by Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto, chased two girls at a bus stop before mauling a man attempting to catch it. And not long after, scientists announced that hundreds of rhesus monkeys living in a public park in Silver Springs, kin to a colony of monkeys imported in the 1930s for a jungle boat attraction, had begun spreading across the state. The monkeys are known to fling their poop at gawking humans—feces, scientists warned, that contain a communicable form of herpes.

Such interspecies assaults are often written off as a logical product of Florida’s ambient weirdness. They’re better understood, however, not as random attacks but as skirmishes in a war the state has been waging for decades.

According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Florida is home to more nonnative plants and animals than any other part of the country. This set of intruders now includes hissing ducks, walking catfish, hermaphroditic river eels, bloodsucking worms, pet-eating monitor lizards, dog-size rodents, gigantic snakes, and rodent-size African land snails, which, according to rumor, are smuggled in for esoteric religious rituals.

The origins of this absurd but somehow perfectly Floridian situation are sundry. The state’s subtropical climate, its many seaports and airports, bountiful farms, and intractably oddball culture—heavy on theme parks and the kind of Tiger-King-style eccentrics who have a yen for weird pets—combine to produce a welcome habitat for fugitive species. (Young collectors are helping fuel a boom in exotic pets in China.)

While most foreign plants and animals promptly die off or tuck themselves into a harmless ecological niche, some blossom uncontrollably, dominating native species and despoiling local ecosystems. The words biologists have long used to describe the influx of foreign organisms—“alien” species "invading" a “native” land—have spilled over into present-day human bigotry. A 2020 New York Times piece notes that members of the far right have taken to referring to immigrants and racial minorities as "invasive species."

Today, Florida’s multitudes of introduced species are an especially dramatic expression of global and national disasters. Every year, invasive species cause an estimated $1.4 trillion in various forms of damage and control costs worldwide, according to one widely cited estimate. In the United States, nonnative weeds alone annually cost $34 billion to remediate, and the Norway rat—thought to have first arrived around 1775 in the company of Hessian mercenaries hired by the British to fight the rebelling American colonists—is estimated to destroy $20 billion worth of stored grain.

The danger of transporting an organism to a strange land lies in its potential to disturb an established habitat, one with a brittle equilibrium, carefully composed over millennia, of predator and prey and symbiotic balance. Although most exotics loosed into a new world don’t survive, a few find themselves at a competitive advantage to the local plants and animals. These species become classified as invasive only when their existence is discovered to be a problem—when, say, in the absence of their former enemies or the presence of new, inferior peers, they become supremely powerful, tyrannizing the food chain and throwing the whole delicate balance into riot.

In 1999, ecologists Daniel Simberloff and Betsy Von Holle proposed the unsettling theory of “invasional meltdown,” in which the introduction of a single nonnative species clears the way for more nonnative species, leading to full-on ecological collapse. The addition, for example, of grazing cattle to rangeland in the American West allowed European cheatgrass to supplant native grasses. The flammable cheatgrass, in turn, dramatically increased the rate at which the plains suffered catastrophic fires, obliterating other native shrubs and vegetation.

Now, with climate change, scientists expect the problem of invasive species—already estimated to cost the U.S. more than $120 billion dollars annually—will only deepen nationwide. The hostilities in Florida may be but a preview of a coming national onslaught of bothersome or dangerous unwelcome arrivals. Think murder hornets.

Florida goes to war

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) is the beleaguered agency tasked with coordinating the war on invasives. The Everglades is where FWC deploys much of its staff and materiel, in the form of trucks, boats, and wildlife biologists, and the battleground for which the stakes of victory are highest. Its 2,400 square miles of sawgrass marshes, wet prairie, freshwater ponds, cypress swamps, and forested uplands provide drinking water to one in three Floridians and irrigation for every farm south of Fort Myers.

Flat as a putting green, the Everglades wetlands can soak up billions of gallons of rain and storm surge, preventing flooding during seasonal hurricanes. Setting aside any abstract appreciation for its natural magnificence, without the Everglades, and the hundreds of plant and animal species that keep it a viable ecosystem, South Florida’s eight million inhabitants would have to find somewhere else to live.

But signs abound suggesting that the war is already lost. The number of leviathan Burmese pythons despoiling the Everglades by gobbling up native species has grown an estimated 20-fold since 2005. Reef-annihilating lionfish have overrun the state’s coastlines and breeched the waters of Louisiana and Georgia. Florida’s hog population now exceeds half a million, a tusked legion marauding citrus orchards and golf courses.

For every victory—a combination of herbicides and controlled burns have halted the decades-long spread of river-choking melaleuca plants, for example—there are new fights with fresh enemies. Here comes the Brazilian pepper tree, the Mexican bromeliad weevil, and the capybara, a giant aquatic rodent from South America. “We’re all playing Dutch boy with the dike,” said Frank Mazzotti, a University of Florida biologist, after a glum summit on the conflict’s progress in 2019.

Click here to read the full article.

Stop governments from using herbicides in water

In a March 26 editorial cartoon, cartoonist Any Marlette squarely pointed the finger for the deaths of many of Florida’s manatees on our widespread use of commercial herbicides, specifically aiming at RoundUp and it prime ingredient – Monsanto’s (now Bayer’s) glyphosate.

We were warned by Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” in 1962 about the mounting dangers of the widespread use of a long list of deadly pesticides, including DDT. This was 10 years before glyphosate was invented, yet we must ask why we keep making the same mistakes over and over.

Environmental economists argue we should apply the precautionary principle to our decision making – that is, if we do not know for sure what the impacts will be on the environment and the creatures within, then we should not do it.

The picture is different now: We do know what the adverse impacts are of spraying herbicides, glyphosate included, enough to know the effects are not good for humans and for all life on earth.

So let’s look at the headlines from recent studies to show how widespread are the dangers of continuing to spray pesticides, specifically glyphosate products, on our fields, orchards, waterways and lawns. Marine Pollution Bulletin #85, 2014 told us that glyphosate persists in seawater.

Progressive Radio network, Sept. 14, 2015 reviewing the latest Carey Gillam book, "The Monsanto Papers: Deadly secrets, corporate corruption, and one man's search for justice," says: "over this years a large body of independent research has accumulated and now collectively provides a sound scientific rationale to confirm that glyphosate is far more toxic and poses more serious health risks to animals and humans than Monsanto and the U.S. government admit."

The Daytona Beach News-Journal, Feb 27, reported: "tens of thousands of acres of seagrass that is critical to the health of the Indian River Lagoon have disappeared. It's threatening a number of species, including manatees, who depend on seagrass for food."

Oregon Public Broadcasting (Portland State University) March 18 says, "Pesticides used on forests and in other applications have been found in watersheds along the Oregon Coast, raising concerns that aquatic species may be exposed to a toxic mixture of chemicals."

Center for Biological Diversity on March 19 reported: "A scientific study published this week concludes that Florida manatees are chronically exposed to glyphosate because of application of the pesticide to sugarcane and aquatic weeds. The study found glyphosate, the active ingredient in RoundUp and the world’s most-used pesticide, in the plasma of 55.8% of the Florida manatees sampled."

Florida Phoenix April 1 tells us "Herbicide used in FL as a cure-all is more like a kill-all." It continues: "Florida anglers have been protesting the rampant spraying and its environmental consequences. Turns out that loss of fishing is making them 'rattlesnake-mad,' so they’ve been pushing state agencies to put down the RoundUp spray wand and walk away. A change.org petition they launched called ‘Stop the State-sanctioned Poisoning of Our Lakes and Rivers!’ has attracted more the 178,000 signatures."

Let's round this out by looking again at our Indian River Lagoon. A draft paper by local fisheries scientist Dr. R. Grant Gilmore concludes: "There now is abundant evidence that herbicides not only kill plankton and plants on which our indigenous aquatic animals depend for survival, they produce a nutrient load from decaying plant and animal bodies that increases the nutrient (nitrate/phosphate/ammonia) burden in the water column."

"We tend to blame septic fields, crop and lawn fertilizer for most of this problem while millions of gallons of herbicides are purchased off the shelf at local stores, and also used by lawn care companies, or spread by municipal, county and regional governmental entities along with regional agricultural interests."

"We now know that the bloom of the toxic green slime, Microcystis cyanobacteria, is promoted by herbicides such as RoundUp. We also know that the largest application of herbicides in south Florida occurs around Lake Okeechobee, and in Treasure/Space Coast counties."

Florida Manatees Face A New Threat: Weed Killer

A group of Florida scientists published a study that shows the state's manatees are chronically exposed to a chemical in herbicides, like Roundup. The research concluded that the constant contact could affect the immune and urinary systems of manatees.

The weed killer glyphosate was originally thought to be short lived and dissipate quickly after use in the environment, but 55.8% of the 105 manatees tested had the compound in their plasma. The sea cows were tested in Brevard and Citrus counties and near the Georgia border.

Jaclyn Lopez, with the Center for Biological Diversity, said this is alarming because manatees are already facing other threats — including boat strikes, starvation and loss of warm water refuge.

Click here to read the full story.

Federal officials to help study why so many Florida manatees are dying

Federal officials will help investigate an alarming spike in Florida manatee deaths, according to multiple agencies.

At least 432 manatees had died as of March 5, the state reported, nearly 300 more than the 5-year average for the same period. Many of the dead manatees have turned up in Brevard County, where experts believe the animals are going without a crucial food source because harmful algal blooms have killed off seagrass beds.

The government has declared the issue a marine mammal “unusual mortality event,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries division’s website. It is listed as the 71st such event declared since 1991.

“Understanding and investigating marine mammal UMEs is crucial because they can be indicators of ocean health, giving insight into larger environmental issues, which may also have implications for human health,” NOAA Fisheries says.

Click here to read the full story.

A reptilian nightmare: Florida bans nonnative species despite industry outcry

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Florida's promoters like to sing its superlatives — best beaches, prettiest sunsets, perfect climate (except for the occasional hurricane). But there's a No. 1 distinction the boosters never mention.

Florida is infested with more exotic and invasive species than any other state and perhaps, some say, than anywhere else in the world. Though a few nonnatives have been running amok for centuries — today’s feral hogs descended from pigs that arrived with explorer Hernando de Soto in 1539 — most showed up in recent decades. Green iguanas, which now pop up in toilets and fall out of trees during cold snaps. Nile monitors, which terrorize tiny burrowing owls. Argentine tegu lizards, which gobble up native turtle eggs. And the poster child of invaders: the Burmese python, which first appeared in the Everglades in 1979.

The state Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has tried for years to cope with the influx. Among other strategies, it has told homeowners to shoot the iguanas on sight and invited amateur hunters to compete for prizes in a python roundup. Then late last month, commissioners took more extreme action, deciding 7 to 0 to ban possession and breeding of both those reptiles and 14 other nonnative species.

The wildlife commission’s action has drawn praise from the supervisor of Everglades National Park, environmental activists, animal welfare groups such as the Humane Society of the United States and others. All say it is critical to saving species that are native to Florida, including turtles, tortoises and imperiled wading birds. Most of the 5,000-plus comments collected in the months leading up to the vote voiced the same sentiment.

“We are very much in support of this,” said Mike Elfenbein of the Everglades Coordinating Council, an umbrella group of hunting and fishing organizations. “I cannot begin to express the devastation that this region has seen.”

Yet in a state where one island community voluntarily taxes itself to employ an iguana trapper — who has written an iguana cookbook — biologists who specialize in nonnative species say drastic measures are long overdue.

“Not only have they closed the door after the horses are gone,” said Don Schmitz, the former executive director of the North American Invasive Species Network, “but the barn has collapsed and been completely destroyed by now and the horses are all dead.”

Click here to read the full story.

Feds said manatees weren’t endangered — now they’re dying in droves

Two months ago, everybody got pretty excited when a Citrus County boat captain snapped photos showing some prankster had scraped out five letters in the algae growing on a manatee’s back. The letters spelled out the name of a certain former president now residing in Palm Beach.

Four years ago, a few months after the start of his administration, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that manatees — which had been on the endangered list since the first endangered list was drawn up — were now doing much, much better.

In fact, the feds said, they were doing so well that they could be taken down a notch. Instead of “endangered,” they would be reclassified as "threatened."

"While it is not out of the woods, we believe the manatee is no longer on the brink of extinction," Larry Williams, head of the agency’s South Florida office, said during a news conference that day in March 2017. (Ironically, the agency announced this step the day after celebrating "Manatee Appreciation Day" on social media.)

Fast forward to this month. Over the past couple of weeks, headlines have been trumpeting the fact that more than 400 manatees have died in just the first two months of the year, an alarming spike that’s well beyond what’s considered normal. As of March 5, the total was 435 and still climbing.

Usually, state wildlife experts go out and rescue manatees in distress and pick up the carcasses of those that die, so they can determine the cause of death. This year, because of the pandemic and the state’s budgetary limitations, they have only been able to get to about a third of the dead. The rest have been left to rot, which I’m sure really impresses the tourists.

Still, the experts have got a good idea of what’s driving this.

Click here to read the full story.

Florida manatees are dying at an alarming rate. Contaminated canals are partially to blame.

An alarming number of manatees have died in Florida already this year, on pace to be one of the deadliest years for the mammals in the past decade.

Scientists say the unusually high death count is due to a combination of cold weather and a decline in available sea grass for the vegetarians to feed on due to development, contaminated waterways and other human activity.

"It's this combination we have of cold weather, we have a reduction of where manatees can go, and in the places where manatees can go, as a consequence of human development and other activities, we have poor water quality which has resulted in these grass die-offs," said Jaclyn Lopez, Florida director of the Center for Biological Diversity.

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Scientists Find New Invasive Mosquito Species In Florida

Scientists have identified a new species of mosquito in Florida. I's called Aedes scapularis. Lawrence Reeves, an entomologist and research scientist with the University of Florida, identified them among mosquitoes he collected near Everglades National Park in 2019.

DNA analysis confirmed they were Aedes scapularis mosquitoes. In a follow-up study in 2020, Reeves found the species is well established in two South Florida counties, Miami-Dade and Broward. Up to now, the mosquitoes have been found mostly in the Caribbean and Latin America. In Brazil, Reeves says, they have been found to be infected with a range of diseases, "things like Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus, yellow fever virus, and a handful of others."

Climate change, international travel and global trade are all factors in the spread of invasive species. According to Reeves, 10 new species of non-native mosquitoes have been found in Florida since 2000. And more are on the way. Reeves says, "There's one in particular right now that a lot of people are worrying about, Aedes vittatus." Originally from India, Reeves says the mosquito "is kind of a vector for pretty much everything we're worried about: dengue, chikungunya, Zika."

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New Florida Invasive Species: a 10-Foot-Long River Monster

Arapaima are a monster fish that can grow up to 10 feet long and weigh hundreds of pounds

The Burmese python, green iguana and lionfish are, by now, well-known invasive species that have established a dangerous foothold in Florida.

But a fearsome new invasive predator has emerged in the state: the arapaima, a monster fish that can grow up to 10 feet long and weigh hundreds of pounds. A dead one recently washed ashore in Cape Coral’s Jaycee Park along the Caloosahatchee River, which runs from Lake Okeechobee west to the Gulf of Mexico.

The arapaima is native to the Amazon River in South America and is one of the world’s largest predatory fish. Its scales are said to be as impenetrable as armor.

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Florida manatees are dying at a worrisome rate. Many appear to be starving.

Experts blame a loss of sea grass in the Indian River Lagoon.

At least 432 Florida manatees have already died in 2021, well over double the state’s 5-year average for the same time period.

The Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has not thoroughly examined many of the dead animals, but one thing is clear: A lot of manatees appear to be starving.

A severe die-off centers on the northern Indian River Lagoon on Florida’s East Coast, where experts say losses of seagrass due to persistent algal blooms have left the beloved creatures without food.

A Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission veterinarian told Florida Today that manatees are turning up "severely emaciated."

"Environmental conditions in portions of the Indian River Lagoon remain a concern," the Commission wrote. "Preliminary information indicates that a reduction in food availability is a contributing factor."

Scientists are still trying to determine the exact causes of all the deaths, said Duane De Freese, executive director of the Indian River Lagoon National Estuary Program. Without those results, they are hesitant to declare that any one factor, such as hunger, is solely to blame. "With so many manatees, some of these deaths may not be caused by the same thing," he said. But there is "no question that this population of manatees is under significant stress because of the loss of seagrasses and appropriate forage foods."

The Indian River Lagoon lost about 46,000 acres of seagrass between 2009 and 2019, said Charles Jacoby, a scientist with the St. Johns River Water Management District. The main culprits are harmful algal blooms that block out sunlight the seagrass needs to survive, he said. Brown tides are fueled by excess nutrients from stormwater runoff and leaky septic tanks that reach the lagoon.

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Brevard ground zero as Florida manatee deaths surge past 400 in first two months

Florida manatees are dying at an alarming rate in the first two months of 2021, more than tripling the normal amount of fatalities seen during the same period over the last five years.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has posted in its preliminary manatee mortality statistics that from Jan. 1-Feb. 26, the state has recorded 403 manatee deaths, the majority of which have not had a necropsy to determine cause of death. Brevard County by far leads the way with 186 of those deaths.

The FWC said it was investigating the high mortality in the central and south Atlantic coastal regions of Florida. Most of the deaths are occurring in the Indian River Lagoon.

“Environmental conditions in portions of the Indian River Lagoon remain a concern,” the FWC posted on its manatee program site. “Preliminary information indicates that a reduction in food availability is a contributing factor. We will continue with a comprehensive investigation and share information as it becomes available."

“Too many nutrients, specifically nitrogen and phosphorus, are entering the lagoon from overfertilized lawns, faulty sewage treatment and leaching from septic tanks,” state Anne Shortelle, Executive Director of the St. Johns River Water Management District.

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Florida business groups wade into wetlands permitting fight

The Florida Chamber of Commerce and a major developers’ group are seeking to intervene in a high-stakes lawsuit over a move by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to shift permitting authority to the state for projects that affect wetlands.

A coalition of environmental groups filed the lawsuit in January, contending that the EPA and other federal agencies did not comply with a series of laws in making Florida the third state to have such permitting authority.

The EPA on Dec. 17 announced approval of the shift, which involves permitting for dredge and fill activities under part of the federal Clean Water Act.

"This action arises from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's unlawful approval of a state application to assume jurisdiction over the Clean Water Act's Section 404 permitting program, which regulates the dredging and filling of waters of the United States, including wetlands essential to water quality, storm and climate resiliency, threatened and endangered species and the economy," said the lawsuit, filed on behalf of the environmental groups by the Earthjustice legal group. "EPA’s approval is unlawful because the state’s program is not as stringent as federal law and rests on unprecedented arrangements that violate federal law."

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Florida manatees are dying in droves this year. Experts blame poor water quality, starvation

FORT MYERS, Fla. – It's already been a deadly year for Florida manatees.

More sea cows deaths have been documented through the first two months of the year than were recorded during those same two months in 2019 and 2020 combined, according to Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission records.

Through Feb. 12, the state recorded 317 manatee deaths, though former FWC commissioner Ron Bergeron said he thought the number was closer to 350 sea cows.

Manatee advocates said the die-off is another example of poor water quality.

"It’s something we’ve never really seen before," said Pat Rose, director of the Save the Manatee Club. "It looks like we have a substantial number of manatees that are starving."

The current rate puts the state on pace to record more than 2,100 deaths this year, which could be as much as a third of the state's documented population.

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A Florida Seagrass Success Story — For Now

Last summer, Florida created its first aquatic preserve in over 30 years. The Nature Coast Aquatic Preserve protects about 400,000 acres of seagrass just north of Tampa on Florida’s Gulf coast. These are part of the Gulf of Mexico’s largest seagrass bed and borders other existing preserves, creating a chain of protected ocean areas. Florida has the most seagrass diversity in the country, Huffington Post reports, with 2.5 million acres composed of seven different species. Protected aquatic areas are especially important in Florida, where runoff full of nitrogen and other nutrient pollution has led to devastating algae blooms in recent years with significant negative economic and environmental impacts.

Seagrass is both one of the most important and most threatened ecosystems on earth.

Last fall, the United Nations published an environmental report about the value of seagrass and calling for its increased protection. About a third of global seagrass has been destroyed since the late 19th century as a result of compounding pressure from nutrient pollution, climate change, and coastal development. The good news is that protecting seagrass ecosystems can help us take on the climate crisis.

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Seagrass Is A Vital Weapon Against Climate Change, But We’re Killing It

Seagrasses don’t get as much attention as coral reefs, but these “hidden forests” store carbon, keep the water clear and are a vital habitat for marine life.

Florida has the most diverse seagrass meadows in the U.S. The state is home to 2.5 million acres of seagrasses, made up of seven different species.

Around the world, 58 species of seagrasses hug the coastline of every continent except Antarctica. These underwater flowering plants — more closely related to lilies than grasses — are often overlooked and underappreciated, but these “hidden forests” have an outsized impact when it comes to tackling climate change and supporting other marine ecosystems.

Seagrasses occupy less than 0.2% of the seafloor but represent up to 10% of the ocean’s capacity to store carbon, known as “blue carbon.” Although the amount they can store depends on the species and location, some seagrasses can store twice as much carbon as the world’s temperate and tropical forests. They also help keep the water clear by capturing sediments. They cycle nutrients and provide important habitats for fish, crustaceans and shellfish.

But these underwater meadows are among the most threatened ecosystems on Earth - at risk from climate change, coastal development and nutrient pollution, such as phosphorus and nitrogen, which enter the ocean from wastewater treatment plants, stormwater, agriculture and other sources.

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Bringing back the ‘most endangered bird’ in the U.S.

Three years after being described as on its last legs, the Florida grasshopper sparrow is soaring again.

YEEHAW JUNCTION, FLORIDA — Ashleigh Blackford has seen her share of dramatic bird releases over the years. She vividly recalls California condors soaring high into the sky and San Clemente loggerhead shrikes fluttering free. The tiny Florida grasshopper sparrow, on the other hand, merely hopped out of an open screen and skittered along the ground, says Blackford, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist.

Still, it was a thrilling moment to witness: one of the most endangered birds in the continental U.S.—one that just two years ago seemed doomed to extinction—had begun a remarkable comeback.

The Florida grasshopper sparrow (Ammodramus savannarum floridanus) was first described in 1902 by a U.S. Army surgeon, Major Edgar A. Mearns. Back then the birds were widespread across central and South Florida. By the 1970s, though, most of the prairies that form their habitat had been ditched, drained, and converted to pastures or sod production.

By 1986, the sparrow population had plummeted to a mere thousand. By 2013, fewer than 200 of the little songbirds remained.

“This is an emergency, and the situation for this species is dire,” Larry Williams, head of the South Florida office of the Fish and Wildlife Service in Vero Beach, said at the time. “This is literally a race against time.”

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Defanged - Money and Politics Could Doom the Florida Panther - and the Endangered Species Act

Florida's Collier County is a place of conflict and contradiction. Its southeastern flank features sprawling public landscapes like Big Cypress National Preserve, that wild redoubt of rare orchids and alligator wallows. Its western edge is home to some of the state’s most valuable real estate, including Naples, a city of wealthy snowbirds who descend in droves down Interstate Highway 75 each winter. Elsewhere in the county, a booming population and frenzied development clash constantly with beleaguered remnants of the region’s flora and fauna — and especially with the endangered Florida panther, an iconic predator beset by existential threats. Collier County is the panther’s last best refuge. But it’s a panther killing ground too, and it’s getting more deadly by the day.

Florida’s state animal has been listed under the Endangered Species Act since the law’s inception in 1973. The panther was once so scarce that some thought it gone altogether. When scientists discovered survivors in the 1970s and ’80s, the cats were withered and gaunt. They were so inbred that they had crooked tails and faulty hearts. Some adult males even had undescended testicles. Their population had dwindled to a couple dozen hidden away in hot Florida forests.

At the time, the Florida panther was “just hanging on by a thread,” said Deborah Jansen, a National Park Service wildlife biologist who has spent decades wandering the backwoods of Big Cypress.

In 1995, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the country’s famed conservation agency, introduced eight pumas from Texas into the Florida panther population to fortify its failing genes. In the 2000s, the panthers’ numbers climbed and stabilized. Jansen was there through it all.

All that effort, however, has failed to fully safeguard the panther’s future. Now incessant development is devouring the big cats’ habitat. And bustling Florida traffic often leaves them dead and bleeding by the side of the road. “It is horrendous,” Jansen said. “In fact,” she added, remarking on the roadkill, “it just came up today that they picked up two more dead panthers.”

For years now, FWS has declined to fully employ the law’s most powerful provisions. In the case of the Collier County developers, FWS even accepted money for staffing costs from a private entity — one called Eastern Collier Property Owners, or ECPO, and composed of companies owned by the Collier family and other local landowners — whose permit application the agency is currently evaluating. This type of financial arrangement is troubling and could potentially create the appearance of conflicts of interest, according to government watchdog groups and Endangered Species Act experts. It is also a symptom of long-term deterioration within FWS, which has been beaten down by years of political attacks and starved budgets. All the while, animals like the panther remain in peril.

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Republicans file bill to set up Office of Resiliency, help study sea level rise

Sen. Ray Rodrigues and Rep. Chip LaMarca are spearheading legislation aimed at preparing the state for rising sea levels due to climate change.

The bills (SB 514 and HB 315) will create an Office of Resiliency under the executive branch and set up a nine-person Sea Level Rise Task Force.

“The task force shall develop official scientific information, from appropriate sources as determined by the task force, necessary to make recommendations on consensus baseline projections, or a range of projections, of the expected rise in sea level along the state’s coastline for planning horizons designated by the task force,” the legislation reads.

"Climate change isn’t a tomorrow issue, it’s a right now issue. Banning offshore drilling, investing in shore protection and beach renourishment projects, and supporting clean energy solutions are important, but we need smarter investment so that we can develop science-based solutions to this growing problem. Resiliency is a climate issue, it’s an environmental issue, and it’s a financial issue. It’s time that Florida becomes a leader on climate change," said LaMarca.

Click here to read the full story.

Fellsmere extends biosolids ban for a year; coordination with county, state to continue

The moratorium on spreading Class B biosolids on any property here will stay in effect another year.

The ban was adopted in 2018, and has been extended in six-month periods since then. Thursday's one-year extension was approved unanimously by the City Council Thursday.

As part of the continuing moratorium, the city will continue coordinating with Indian River County and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to study the adverse effects of spreading biosolids and will report those findings to the public.

Biosolids are partially treated sewage sludge from municipal treatment plants that is used to fertilize agricultural land.

In 2018, runoff from Class B biosolids was thought to have caused a toxic algae bloom in Blue Cypress Lake, the headwaters of the St. Johns River. No Class B biosolids have been spread anywhere in Indian River County since then.

Tim Glover, president of the Friends of the [sic] St. Sebastian River, spoke at Thursday’s public hearing, urging the council to extend the moratorium to protect the area’s waterways.

“Ultimately, most of the waterways drain into the Indian River Lagoon,” said Glover.

Florida Panthers Spiral Toward Extinction

Net Loss of More than 100 Cats in Last Five Years as Births Plunge

Washington, DC — For the fifth year in a row, mortality of highly endangered Florida panthers has substantially exceeded births, resulting in a net loss of 103 panthers since 2015, according to figures posted today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). The 2019 numbers also reflect a record high percent of vehicular deaths and a rising mortality among females of reproductive age, whose survival is key to re-growing the population.

“Florida panthers are in a slow-motion spiral toward extinction,” stated Tim Whitehouse, Executive Director of PEER, which unsuccessfully sued to win designation of critical habitat for the Florida panther, noting nearly 90% of known panther deaths are from vehicular collisions. “Today, Florida offers little safe habitat for panthers, with less available each passing year.”

Click here to read the full press release.

Fellsmere to debate biosolids ban

FELLSMERE - The city of Fellsmere will hold a public hearing on Jan. 14 to consider extending a moratorium on the land application of Class B biosolids.

Class B biosolids are solid, semi-solid, or liquid materials resulting from treatment of domestic sewage sludge from sewage treatment facilities.

Biosolids contain phosphorus and nitrogen, which scientists say promote algae blooms in surrounding estuaries and watersheds. Until 2018, biosolids were being applied on property near Blue Cypress Lake. Indian River County Commissioners and the Fellsmere City Council each passed temporary bans.

“There is evidence of significant increases in phosphorus and nitrogen and incidences of harmful and potentially toxic algae blooms in Blue Cypress Lake,” County Attorney Dylan Reingold told the county commissioners, in comments that have been incorporated into the proposed Fellsmere ordinance. “There appears to be a correlation between the increases of nutrients in Blue Cypress Lake and the land application of biosolids.”

According to the proposed ordinance, “phosphorus and nitrogen pollution have been a long-term problem for surrounding estuaries and watersheds, as phosphorus and nitrogen promote algal blooms, fuel growth of noxious vegetation, and replace the unique natural ecosystem with one which is undesirable to humans and native wildlife.”

Click here to read the full story.

Better boater safety will help save Florida’s manatees

The state Legislature has a chance to pass commonsense measures

They can grow to 13 feet in length, reach weights in excess of 1,000 pounds and swim at speeds of 15 mph. But Florida’s much-loved manatees have never been any match for the high speeds and quick turns of the thousands of power boats that ply virtually every corner of their natural habitats.

Sadly, 2020 has proved to be no exception.

A staggering 593 manatees died in 2020, an increase of more than two dozen over the most recent five-year average. The causes were varied, but we know at least 90 of the threatened sea mammals died after being struck by boats.

That number is very likely higher because the state stopped doing necropsies for two months during the first wave of COVID-19 cases last spring. But there’s no question that people continue to be a leading cause of manatee deaths, especially people piloting boats.

This year’s troubling death toll is only the latest evidence that our state leaders must take commonsense steps to better ensure boaters are safely sharing waterways with this highly unique, threatened species that evolved from land mammals more than 60 million years ago.

Click here to read the full opinion piece.

Florida takes wetlands permitting role from federal government; only 3rd state to do so

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency granted Florida authority Thursday to issue wetlands permits that were previously handled by the federal government, greatly increasing state responsibility for development affecting waterways.

The change means the state’s Department of Environmental Protection will replace the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in approving or denying most permits for work that places “dredged or fill material” — dirt — in wetlands or waterways.

The decision was condemned by a legion of environmental groups and cheered by business groups and politicians who argued the state can make those choices faster and more sensibly than federal regulators.

Critics said the change was about speeding up construction in Florida at nature’s expense.

“This is a parting gift to developers from the outgoing administration in Washington in coordination with the sitting administration in Florida,” said Tania Galloni, managing attorney in Florida for the activist law firm Earthjustice.

“It’s about destroying wetlands faster and cheaper at a time when we need more protection, not less. We’re considering our options,” Galloni said.

Click here to read the full story.

Marine conservationists sound alarm about hazardous plastics in FL and other Southeastern waters

Plastic waste kills and injures more sea turtles, manatees and marine mammals off the coasts of Florida and neighboring states than in any other region in the United States, according to an in-depth analysis of federal and state data.

Since 2009, nearly 1,000 endangered or threatened sea turtles found injured or dead along southern coastlines had eaten or become entangled in plastic waste, according to the report by Oceana, a nonprofit ocean advocacy group founded by Pew Charitable Trusts, Oak Foundation, Marisla Foundation (formerly Homeland Foundation), Sandler Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

In the same time period, 700 manatees — an icon of Florida wildlife — and 45 other endangered or threatened marine mammals found dead or injured in the same region had eaten or been ensnared in plastic.

"We are in a plastics pollution crisis," said Sarah Gledhill, Florida field campaigner for the Center for Biological Diversity, in an interview with the Florida Phoenix on Monday. "It takes a huge toll on wildlife, and it’s also in our drinking water, on our plates and in the air we breathe."

Click here to read the full story.

Florida's 'Unclean Waterways Act' does little to clean up our waterways

Florida’s waterways have been choked by blue-green algae and red tide for years, and are now on life-support.

On July 2, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the “Clean Waterways Act” at the Loggerhead Marinelife Center in Juno Beach. Relief for our waterways was on the way, he said.

What a laugh.

For starters, the Clean Waterways Act does nothing to reduce agricultural pollution – far and away the largest contaminator of Florida’s waterways. The law also does virtually nothing to reduce pollution from the state’s next largest waterway defilers, sewage systems and septic tanks.

Relief is most decidedly not on the way.

Agriculture

Agriculture accounts for more than twice as much of the pollution flowing into our waterways as the next two largest pollution sources combined (the aforementioned sewage systems and septic-tanks). Yet the new law contains no agricultural pollution reduction requirements and no agricultural pollution reduction plan.

Rather, the law says sugar growers and other agricultural producers can go on using the same “Best Management Practices” (BMPs) regarding their pollution that they’ve been using, and that have already been proven to fail -- causing the catastrophic proliferation of algae in our waterways.

The governor’s own Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has admitted as much in sworn testimony and in court filings.

Click here to read the full letter.

University of Florida scientists say airborne toxins from harmful algae blooms can travel 10 miles, linger for hours

STUART, Fla. — People who live near waterways prone to harmful algae blooms are no longer the only ones at risk for exposure to toxins.

Researchers at the University of Florida said they have discovered airborne toxins can spread miles beyond the bloom and linger for hours.

Scientists already know how toxins act in the water, but scientists at UF wanted to know more about how the toxin microcystin progresses in the air.

The study looked at the environmental conditions in the air that cause the toxin to deteriorate and spread. The study also looked at the potential for microcystin to impact neighboring areas as it becomes airborne.

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UF scientists show how long toxins produced by HABs of blue-green algae remain in the air

Rivers, lakes, and ponds are recreational destinations for swimming, fishing, boating and more. When cyanobacterial harmful algal blooms (cyanoHABs) form releasing toxins into these freshwater systems, there can be harmful impacts to all wildlife and humans creating symptoms such as nausea, skin and eye irritations, tumor production, and in some cases even death.

Cyanobacteria are a blooming problem across the country, and while there is information available on how toxins act in the water, there is limited information available on how the toxins progress in the air, until now.

A team of scientists at the University of Florida took the first steps by looking at how one of the most widespread and prevalent cyanobacterial toxins, known as microcystin-LR, reacts in the air and for how long.

The study also looked at the potential for microcystin-LR to impact neighboring communities as it mixes, or aerosolizes, in the air.

Click here to read the full story.

Don’t let Florida officials get their grubby little hands on fragile federal lands

One of the only positive things about having Rick Scott in Washington is that he can’t do as much damage to Florida ’s environment as a U.S. senator as he did when he was governor.

Unfortunately, one of his administration’s most flagrant schemes to expedite the destruction of wetlands remains very much alive — and is advancing unchallenged by Ron DeSantis, who ironically promotes himself as the “green governor.”

This month, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will hold online public hearings on Florida officials’ request to take over the federal program for issuing permits to build in sensitive wetlands.

Developers have been working for years to elbow the feds out of the way, for obvious reasons. State regulators are much easier to shove around.

Currently, under the Clean Water Act, any developer who wants to drain and fill a federal wetland needs a permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The EPA can veto that permit if it believes that the project will harm fresh-water sources, for example, or destroy habitat critical to panthers and other endangered wildlife.

Both agencies are now poised to cede their authority to Florida ’s anemic Department of Environmental Protection, which Scott gutted in 2011 at the urging of lobbyists for developers.

Click here to read the full story.

Environmental regulators cracking down on lagoon pollution

Citing weak sea grass recovery from recent algae blooms in the central Indian River Lagoon between Sebastian Inlet and St. Lucie County, state environmental regulators are requiring Indian River County, the city of Vero Beach, and other local government bodies and farms to drastically reduce the amount of pollution flowing into the estuary.

The Florida Department of Environmental Regulation is, for the first time, requiring local entities in our area to meet concrete targets for reducing the amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus from wastewater, stormwater, agriculture and septic systems that enter the lagoon.

Nitrogen and phosphorus are the main chemicals that feed algae blooms that smother sea grass – the foundation of the lagoon’s health.

Representatives from the city and county and other agencies... are required to tell the agency whether they can meet the revised limits in five to 10 years and what projects they could undertake to meet those targets.

Click here to read the full story.

Handing federal wetlands permitting to FL DEP is an idea that’s all wet

Florida is best known for its gorgeous beaches, but we also have a lot of wetlands. Bogs, swamps, marshes, you name it, we’ve got ’em — more than any other state besides Alaska.

Some are famous — everyone’s heard of the Everglades — but most are just anonymous soggy spots that help recharge our underground aquifer, filter pollution, soak up floodwaters, and provide valuable habitat for a whole lot of species.

Right now, under the Clean Water Act, two federal agencies are in charge of preserving wetlands: the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which issues permits for dumping fill in them, and the Environmental Protection Agency, which can veto those permits. But now both are considering handing the job of federal wetlands permitting in Florida over to the state DEP, according to a Federal Register notice published on Sept. 4 seeking public comment over the next 45 days.

Florida’s developers have been pushing for this handover to the state for a couple of decades. In 2005, a lobbyist for Florida developers said that a state takeover of federal wetlands permitting would be "the Holy Grail."

Why? Because they are convinced the state would grant them super-fast permit approvals, no matter how many acres of wetlands they were going to pave over, and because the state doesn’t protect as many different types of wetlands as the feds do.

Click here to read the full story.

Why Florida’s toxic algae crisis is worse than people realize

Water data reveal how a devastating agricultural legacy, aggravated by decades of political failure and now climate change, has thwarted quests for solutions.

Florida has struggled for almost two decades to control the blue-green algae that periodically carpets Lake Okeechobee and threatens tourism on the coast. The blooms in the state’s largest freshwater lake are stimulated by phosphorus, a key ingredient in the fertilizer used on nearby ranches and farms.

The state has passed laws and spent hundreds of millions of dollars on water treatment projects to reduce the phosphorus flowing into the lake. But it continues unabated, according to a review of state water-monitoring data by Weather.com and the Investigative Reporting Workshop.

The amount of phosphorus entering Lake Okeechobee today is roughly the same as it was in 2001, when the state ordered what would have amounted to a 70 percent reduction by 2015.

In March, the legislature tackled the algae problem again when it passed the Clean Waterways Act of 2020.

But the new law, like the 2001 law, doesn’t require growers to monitor or reduce the phosphorus running off their land, even though a court-ordered regulatory system south of the lake has been a big success. Instead, the new law continues what is effectively a voluntary program – one so forgiving that no rancher or farmer has been sanctioned for water-quality violations.

A 2016 algal bloom covered 5 percent of the lake’s (Okeechobee) surface. Two years later, 90 percent of the surface was covered, forcing then-Gov. Rick Scott to declare a state of emergency in seven hard-hit counties.

Click here to read the full story.

‘Clean Waterways Act’ is just a start

In signing the bill, the governor should be clear about what the bill does and doesn’t do, writes an environmental activist.

Gov. Ron DeSantis will soon sign what the Legislature, in an example of clever marketing, has labeled the “Clean Waterways Act,” Senate Bill 712. Will he give us straight talk about the limited advances in this legislation or will he take a victory lap?

Legislative leaders deserve credit for a comprehensive approach to our water problems. The 111-page bill addresses agriculture, using biosolids as fertilizer, oversight of septic tanks, wastewater treatment systems, enhanced penalties and other issues. But comprehensive is not the same as effective. Addressing pollution at its source means that the rules should be as tough for agriculture as on leaking septic tanks and outdated municipal sewage treatment plants.

Although "Outstanding Florida Springs" watersheds are substantially polluted by excess nitrogen and phosphorus from agriculture, SB 712 is light on enforcement and too reliant on voluntary best management practices.

Click here to read the full story.

Indian River County to build nutrient removal facility to protect lagoon

INDIAN RIVER COUNTY - Indian River County has received a $650,000 grant from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection for construction of the $8,705,000 Moorhen Marsh Low Energy Aquatic Plant System to remove nutrients from farm waters before discharge into lagoon.

The project seeks to mitigate the impacts on the Indian River Lagoon from large discharges of nitrogen and phosphorus into the watershed. According to grant documents, “the increased nutrient loading can contribute to algal blooms and reductions to the Indian River Lagoon’s water quality, impacting aquatic flora and fauna.”

The facility will use aquatic plants, specifically water lettuce, to absorb and remove dissolved nutrients from the North Relief Canal.

“Approximately 6,300 acres contribute stormwater runoff and groundwater seepage into the North Relief Canal,” the grant work plan says. The project will reduce nitrogen and phosphorous pollution in the Indian River Lagoon.

Click here to read the full story.

Miami Is the "Most Vulnerable" Coastal City Worldwide

In the next two decades, sea level rise, storm surge and winds will chew away at Florida’s $1 trillion economy, a new report warns

Florida’s next two decades could be more disruptive than any period in its history as climate change threatens the state’s 8,500-mile coastline and chews away at its $1 trillion economy.

New modeling by Resources for the Future, a nonpartisan economic think tank, reveals that “100-year floods” could occur every few years rather than once a century in many locations, endangering an additional 300,000 homes, 2,500 miles of roadways, 30 schools and four hospitals.

Miami will also become “the most vulnerable major coastal city in the world,” RFF said, with hundreds of billions of dollars in assets under assault from winds, storm surges, coastal flooding and sea-level rise.

“The sheer numbers of people who will feel direct climate impacts in their lifetimes is very, very significant, and it points to why public policies are necessary right now to start reducing the risks,” said Daniel Raimi, a senior research associate at RFF and lecturer at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.

Click here to read the full story.

Disappearing oysters could spell trouble for environment, economy

CRYSTAL RIVER, Fla. - Oysters are a common menu option at restaurants, but researchers at the University of South Florida found they are disappearing from the Gulf Coast, negatively impacting the environment and economy.

USF researchers said wild oysters in Crystal River are shrinking – now a third smaller than before compared to oyster shells from hundreds of years ago.

“Whenever these oyster populations are decreasing in size, that tells us that they're close to collapse and they won't take much more,” said Greg Herbert, an associate professor at USF’s School of Geosciences.

Herbert worked on a study published Wednesday in Biology Letters that shows how oysters in the Big Bend area, once thought to be pristine, and are disappearing.

“What our study does is that it tells us the Big Bend is in much more dire condition than previously realized,” said Herbert.

While doing the study in 2014, researchers said the Apalachicola oyster industry collapsed.

Herbert said some factors contributing to the loss of the oyster industry include sea level rise and the amount of water being drained from estuaries for development.

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Florida’s chief science officer doesn’t mince words on climate change, says humans need to reduce carbon emissions

“Ultimately we’re going to have to reduce carbon emissions to reduce warming and its effects,” Florida Chief Science Officer Thomas Frazer said Tuesday before a speech in Sarasota.

Florida’s new chief science officer spoke about the need to reduce nutrient pollution that is contributing to water quality problems and reduce carbon emissions that are warming the planet during a swing through Sarasota Tuesday.

Gov. Ron DeSantis created the position of chief science officer shortly after being sworn in, and University of Florida professor Thomas Frazer is the first person to hold the job.

Frazer, who has a PhD in biological sciences, primarily has been tasked with addressing water quality issues, which he described during a speech to The Argus Foundation Tuesday as “probably the most pressing problem in our state.”

But Frazer also made it clear that climate change is a big problem that needs to be addressed, and reducing carbon emissions is critical. That’s a message that has not been heard out of the executive branch in Florida in nearly a decade.

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Legislators dilute proposal to inspect Florida’s farms, septic tanks

Environmentalists say Florida faces a water quality crisis. But lawmakers are watering down rules to tackle fertilizer runoff.

TALLAHASSEE ?— A day after the state’s top forecaster announced that demand for fresh water in Florida will exceed supply in five years and Everglades restoration is years behind schedule, a Senate committee watered down a bill aimed at giving the state more tools to regulate agricultural runoff and septic tanks.

The bill, SB 712 by Sen. Debbie Mayfield, R-Indialantic, puts into law some of the recommendations of the Blue-Green Algae Task force, a panel of five scientists appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis to propose policies for combating the algal outbreaks that closed beaches and sapped tourism.

The governor’s task force recommended the state conduct more rigorous monitoring and testing of the fertilizer runoff into Lake Okeechobee, more storage of the polluted water before it is released into the lake from the north and tighter control of the septic systems that leak harmful nutrients into the ground.

Mayfield said her primary focus is to get communities to convert from septic systems to sewer. Her bill would allow DEP to set up a 50% matching grant program to encourage local governments to convert sewage connections from septic tanks to sewer systems and enact other wastewater improvements.

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We need biosolids-dumping rule that actually protects our waters

The Florida Department of Environmental Protection has responded to the environmental problems caused by the dumping of Class B biosolids on Florida pastures with the establishment of a Biosolids Technical Advisory Committee, followed with a draft of proposed new rules covering the land application of biosolids.

The immediate first impression of the proposed rules is that it is more heavily weighted to preserve the waste-producers’ ability to dump biosolids on Florida lands than it is to protect our environment, particularly the waters of the state of Florida.

The present rule appears to be focused on ensuring that biosolids management costs for municipalities are reduced, and not that the waters of the state of Florida are protected. This is something that our citizens cannot accept. They may not understand the ins-and-outs of biosolids and the rule-making process, but they know when something stinks — and the proposed rule stinks.

Click here to read the full opinion.

St. Sebastian River still in trouble, despite cleanup efforts

Of the eight tributaries that flow into the troubled Indian River Lagoon, the St. Lucie River gets the most attention as a waterway in desperate need of cleanup. But the St. Sebastian River, which draws far less scrutiny, has serious water quality problems of its own.

Six years ago, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection declared parts of the river “impaired” due to depleted oxygen and high levels of nitrogen and phosphorus that feed destructive algae blooms.

Tim Glover, president of Friends of the St. Sebastian River [sic] who lives in Micco on the river’s north prong, says he hasn’t seen any improvement since then, despite major cleanup efforts.

“I’d say there’s been a degradation,” Glover said. “Fishermen don’t get the kind of catches that they used to. There have been oyster die-offs over the years.”

Dr. Grant Gilmore, founder and chief scientist at Estuarine Coastal and Ocean Science, Inc., said he did not spot a single fish during a recent visit to the north prong where he’s been sampling fish for decades. What’s more, “the whole bottom was covered with cyanobacteria; all the vegetation they depend on was gone,” he said.

“Water quality isn’t where we want it,” said Dr. Duane DeFreese, executive director of the Indian River Lagoon Council. “The river . . . has many stressors – stormwater run-off, septic systems, fertilizer, herbicides, pesticides. A lot of work needs to be done to restore water quality to have the St. Sebastian River a healthy river like we used to remember it.”

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Sebastian residents pepper council with questions about herbicides used to kill weeds in Elkham Canal

SEBASTIAN — Residents are still upset about city contractors spraying RoundUp and other glyphosate-based herbicides to kill weeds in and around the Elkham Canal.

For the second council meeting in a row, residents concerned about the continued use of glyphosate-based herbicides spoke during Wednesday’s public input session, urging the town to move more quickly on an alternative plan.

RoundUp in particular has been the subject of some 11,200 lawsuits that tie its use to the development of cancer. In March, a California jury ruled Roundup weed killer caused cancer. The case was only the second to go to trial in the United States, according to Reuters news. Its maker, Bayer, denies allegations that glyphosate or Roundup cause cancer.

On April 10, council members directed City Manager Paul Carlisle to outline the current process by which the city keeps the canal waterways and banks clear of weeds and to research and bring forth any alternatives to the plan.

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Lagoon scientist gets grant to seek federal protection for endangered fish species

Vero Beach marine scientist Dr. Grant Gilmore says he is finally making significant progress in his long-term effort to have a dozen species of fish that reproduce only in three tributaries of the Indian River Lagoon protected under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.

Gilmore, founder and chief scientist at Estuarine Coastal and Ocean Science, Inc., has received a $30,000 grant from Martin County commissioners to petition the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to add three freshwater fish species to the endangered list – the Bigmouth Sleeper, Opossum Pipefish and Swordspine Snook.

The only North American breeding waters of these three species are the Loxahatchee, St. Lucie and St. Sebastian rivers.

He said all 12 of the fish are imperiled by toxic cyanobacteria blooms, herbicides and pesticides that wash into waterways, and competition for food and habitat from non-native fish species.

“The reason they’re endangered is we’re killing our fresh waters in this state,” Gilmore said. “These fish are really dependent on very specific locations and habitats and are very vulnerable to our efforts to eradicate what’s around them.”

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Florida: Republican 'green governor' seeks to reverse predecessor's legacy

Barely a week after positioning himself as the new champion of Florida’s polluted waterways and beaches, the new Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, is facing an early test of the environmental credentials that have put him at odds with his predecessor, Rick Scott.

Scott, elected as a US senator in November after two terms in Tallahassee, has a long record of campaign contributions from the sugar industry and was accused by environmental groups of favouring industry over ecology in numerous policy decisions.

DeSantis has called for the mass resignation of Scott’s hand-picked team of water policy managers, after they defied his request to delay awarding an eight-year land lease extension to the sugar industry giant Florida Crystals in the fragile Everglades wetlands. The land, south of Lake Okeechobee, is earmarked for a $1.6bn clean-water storage reservoir that DeSantis wants completed within four years, to hasten restoration of the state’s famous River of Grass.

“Our water and natural resources are the foundation of our economy and our way of life in Florida,” DeSantis said in announcing a $2.5bn package of environmental improvements. “The protection of water resources is one of the most pressing issues facing the state.”

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When it comes to saving Florida’s environment, DeSantis gets it — so far

Gov. Ron DeSantis got lots of attention when he focused on the environment for a handful of paragraphs during his inauguration speech last week.

The unusually optimistic reaction shows that Floridians who hope to preserve a few precious pieces of this remarkable place are starved for hope and desperate for leadership.

DeSantis began his green passage with an understatement: “Our economic potential will be jeopardized if we do not solve the problems afflicting our environment and water resources.”

In truth, Florida’s economy won’t merely be “jeopardized” if we don’t clean up our act; it will be strangled. Witness the crushing impact of the marathon red-tide outbreak and blue-green algae blooms upon businesses in coastal communities. That was a harrowing, nauseating, tourist-repelling glimpse of the future.

But, unlike his predecessor, DeSantis seems to grasp that it’s a serious long-term challenge, not a fleeting scientific anomaly-turned-political inconvenience. “The quality of our water and environmental surroundings are foundational to our prosperity as a state,” DeSantis said. “It doesn’t just drive tourism; it affects property values, anchors many local economies and is central to our quality of life.

Click here to read the full editorial.

Restoring Florida’s dammed waterways

Florida’s natural waterways have suffered from centuries of industrialised intervention

Another sweltering summer descended upon Southern Florida in 2018, bringing with it a toxic green plague - yet again.

Expansive algae blooms have become a bi-annual occurrence in recent times marring both of Florida’s once pristine coasts, but there has never been a lost summer like 2018. It is now October and "red tide" still lingers on Florida’s West Coast, while simultaneously closing beaches on the East Coast.

Florida's ecosystems have been largely destroyed over the last hundred years due to haphazard development of the state, which disregarded (and continues to disregard) potential repercussions.

River of grass

In the twenty-first century, Floridians are left to attempt to reconnect and reanimate what was once congruous and alive through managerial means similar to those employed by our forebearers. If we fail in this restorative endeavour, a slow but certain death awaits.

Florida's natural topography was seen by industrial-age settlers as something that needed "improvement" by “reclaiming land from the mucky jaws of Florida's natural landscape.

Click here to read the full commentary.

Microcystin bacteria blamed for dog’s death

STUART — Not only has Martin County served as ground zero for the blue-green algae plague flowing in from Lake Okeechobee, but now the City of Stuart and its environs are also seeing a rash of canine illnesses and at least one death resulting from the polluted water entering the St. Lucie River Estuary.

The issue came to light Sept. 10 after newly-sworn-in Stuart Commissioner Merritt Matheson made two motions addressing the algae problems the city has faced since the discharges began early this summer. The commissioner asked city staff to create an online letter template so residents could send uniform messages “not only to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the South Florida Water Management District, but to all elected officials deemed necessary” with their concerns about the algae-laden water. His second motion that evening was for city staff to schedule a time period soon for a showing of a film on the dangers of such algae he found on the www.toxicpuzzle.com website so all city staff and members of the public could be better informed on the issue.

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County commissioners back ban on new conventional septic systems beachside, near lagoon

Brevard County commissioners unanimously backed a major overhaul of the county's septic tank rules in an effort to reduce harmful nitrogen and phosphorus from going into the Indian River Lagoon.

The vote is seen by many environmentalists as a significant step in efforts to improve conditions of the lagoon, and another sign that county commissioners are serious in addressing the problem.

In the first of two required votes, commissioners on Tuesday night approved an ordinance to ban installation of new conventional septic tanks throughout Brevard County's beachside barrier island areas and on Merritt Island, as well as within mainland areas that are near the lagoon.

Under the plan, installation of new "nitrogen-reducing septic systems" that cut nitrogen emissions by at least 65 percent would be allowed in these areas. These tanks cost thousands of dollars more than conventional systems, but better protect the environment.

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Toxic Algae Seeps Into Florida Congressional Races

On Florida's St. Lucie River, east of Lake Okeechobee, locks and a dam hold water before it races downstream to the estuary on what is known as Florida's Treasure Coast.

But looking out over the river, Stephen Davis with the Everglades Foundation sees signs of trouble. "There's a pretty substantial mat of the blue-green algae we see floating on the surface," the wetland ecologist says. "As soon as these gates are open, the water will pass out into the estuary."

Peter Girard with the environmental group Bullsugar.org says, "You can smell it before you see it. And of course, heading into the holiday weekend, you had beach closings around the inlet up and down the Treasure Coast."

For months now, mats of algae from Lake Okeechobee have been flowing down the river, bringing toxins that can affect people and animals. In beach communities east of the lake, the algae have had a big impact on tourism and businesses.

With more toxic algae blooms on Florida's west coast and a red tide algae bloom causing massive fish kills in the Gulf of Mexico, water quality is increasingly having a big impact on key midterm races in Florida. While Democrats tend to be more outspoken on environmental issues, Republican candidates are also speaking up because they're feeling the heat.

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The Lagoon was once an aquatic wonderland

Bringing the Lagoon back to health

Once upon a time, the Indian River Lagoon was the image of vacation snapshots and postcards. Lush mangroves lined the shore, while boats and docks floated above swaths of unbelievably clear water, as if suspended over the sandy, grassy bottom of the lagoon.

Growing up on the water in Titusville, Laurilee Thompson a local fisherman and co-owner of Dixie Crossroads restaurant, remembers a vibrant, close-knit community blessed by an extraordinary degree of natural beauty.

“In the 1960s,” Thompson recalls, “a stroll down any dock was like wandering over a giant aquarium. Even though it was more than 10 feet deep out there, the water was so clear that you could see the fish swimming right up to your boat.”

As the fifth generation of a local fishing family, Thompson knew the bounty of the lagoon firsthand. She spent summer days roaming through its waters, catching everything from snook, red fish and trout to arrow crab and shrimp in the lush seagrass. The lagoon was a life source for the locals and a major attraction for visitors and fisherman from all over the world.

Click here to read the full story.

Florida’s Beaches and Waterways Devastated by Unprecedented Algae Outbreaks

An unprecedented environmental catastrophe is striking Florida’s storied beaches, lakes and rivers this summer. Outbreaks of three separate strains of harmful algae are killing fish and other marine animals, threatening public health and devastating recreation and tourism.

Along southwest Florida’s Gulf Coast, an outbreak of a type of toxic algae called red tide prompted Gov. Rick Scott’s declaration of a state of emergency in seven counties this month. Lake Okeechobee and two rivers that are important sources of drinking water were hit with outbreaks of toxic blue-green algae that, in June, covered almost the entire lake, leading to another emergency declaration. And this week, the Gulf Coast was struck by another outbreak of bright-green algae feeding on the rotting fish killed by the red tide.

Algal outbreaks can occur naturally, but they are also triggered when chemical pollution runs off into waterways from farms and other sources. The outbreaks – technically not algae but photosynthetic bacteria, or cyanobacteria – can harm people’s health and even kill pets. As EWG has reported, they’re a growing problem across the U.S., probably because too much fertilizer and manure is washing off farm fields, combined with hotter weather caused by climate change.

Florida waterways have long been plagued by algae, but this year’s outbreaks are some of the worst in history.

Click here to read the full story.

The heaviest lionfish ever caught in the Atlantic was speared off the Florida Keys

It was only 3 pounds and change, but for a lionfish that’s huge. Record-setting, in fact.

Florida wildlife officials say the spiny, stripy specimen caught by diver Timothy Blasko in the Florida Keys has set the record as the heaviest lionfish ever caught in the Atlantic Ocean.

Blasko speared the “large invader” on August 6, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

Lionfish, despite having a scary name, aren’t very big. The one caught by Blasko, which he snagged while diving at Tennessee Reef in the middle Keys, weighed in at 3.10 pounds, according to a Facebook post on the commission’s Reef Rangers page.

But they’ve been exacting a huge toll on coastal waters in Florida, mainly because they’re not supposed to be here in the first place. Native to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, they have no known predators on this side of the world. So they go on multiplying and eating native species and generally altering the ecosystem.

“Females release two gelatinous egg masses of about 12,000 to 15,000 eggs each,” according to the commission. “These masses float and can drift for about 25 days. Lionfish can spawn every four days in warmer climates.”

Lionfish were reportedly first spotted in South Florida waters in 1985, off Dania Beach. How they got here isn’t fully known, but one of the theories is that they were released from home aquariums.

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Florida beaches littered with dead sea turtles; scientists blame red tide

Nearly 100 sea turtles — many of which are endangered — have washed up on southwestern Florida beaches since October. More than half of that number were dead. Marine scientists are now blaming the mass mortality on the current red tide bloom, which has been the longest, continuous bloom in more than a decade, officials said this week.

In total, 91 sea turtles have washed up on Sanibel and Captiva beaches since October 2017, 58 of which were dead, according to the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation.

And 50 of the 91 have been found on beaches in June and July alone. That’s compared to the yearly average of 30 to 35, Kelly Sloan, a sea turtle researcher at the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation on Sanibel, told the News-Press.

“It’s really disheartening,” she added.

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Florida Racks Up Second Worst Eco-Enforcement In 30+ Years

Scott Pollution Forgiveness Paints False Picture of Compliance with No Follow-Up

Tallahassee — During the seven years under Governor Rick Scott, environmental enforcement has hit a modern nadir, with 2017 registering some of the most anemic results on record, according to a new analysis released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). The upshot is that not only is Florida’s environment bearing a greater pollution load, but also its Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) is losing revenue as well as its capacity to monitor--let alone deter--eco-offenses.

Apart from the 2017 results in isolation, the Scott record shows a deep, across-the-board nosedive in virtually every enforcement category. ...new cases opened, penalties collected, and other enforcement measures are all down more than three-quarters since Scott took office.

Click here to read the full press release.

Editorial: Judge backs voters on land conservation

In a recent ruling, a circuit court judge effectively advised the Florida Legislature that it cannot implement a constitutional amendment any way that its members see fit.

Good for the judge.

Good for Floridians — in this case, the overwhelming majority of voters who in 2014 supported Amendment 1, which was simply titled “Water and Land Conservation — Dedicates funds to acquire and restore Florida conservation and recreation lands.”

Environmental groups challenged the Legislature’s implementation of the amendment, which was endorsed by 75 percent (4.2 million) of those who voted on the measure. Amendment 1 was approved by 78 percent of voters in Sarasota County and 76 percent in Manatee County.

In other words, the water and land conservation amendment won in a landslide.

The amendment had several key requirements, and was proposed and adopted because the Legislature and governor failed to perform....

Click here to read the full editorial.

Questions loom over state environmental spending after surprise court ruling

TALLAHASSEE — Some environmentalists are claiming that Friday's decision by a judge on state environmental spending was a huge victory against legislators who "thumbed their noses" at the will of the voters.

But some other observers say the ruling involving 2014's Amendment 1 raises many more questions about current state spending that can't be answered until a written order comes out — or even possibly after appeals are heard.

State Circuit Judge Charles Dodson said Friday he agreed with the arguments by one environmental group that spending under the measure is supposed to go towards land purchased after 2015.

A written order expected in the coming weeks could shed light on whether hundreds of millions of dollars being spent each year on Everglades restoration, beach restoration and springs projects is at risk.

"This could be a historic moment for Florida," said Pepper Uchino, a former staff director of the state Senate environmental committee. He said the courts could decide how narrowly to restrict both spending under the 2014 amendment along with the Legislature's ability to interpret such ballot measures in the future.

Click here to read the full story.

Florida lawmakers wrongly diverted money meant for conservation, judge rules

TALLAHASSEE — State lawmakers failed to comply with a voter-approved constitutional amendment to buy and preserve environmentally sensitive lands, a judge ruled Friday.

Leon Circuit Judge Charles Dodson sided with environmental groups in the lawsuit centered on whether lawmakers defied the 2014 Florida Water and Land Conservation Initiative by improperly diverting portions of the money to such expenses as staffing. Legislative leaders have repeatedly disputed such allegations as they continued to make such budget allocations.

Attorney David Guest — representing the Florida Wildlife Federation, the St. Johns Riverkeeper, the Environmental Confederation of Southwest Florida, the Sierra Club and Florida Wildlife Federation President Manley Fuller — called Dodson’s Friday bench ruling a “100 percent victory.”

“The people of Florida voted with a firm, clear voice. And the court said today that counts,” Guest said after the hearing. “The Legislature has to comply with the law like everybody else.”

Fred Piccolo, a spokesman for House Speaker Richard Corcoran, called the ruling a “clear abuse of judicial authority.”

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Nathaniel Reed, icon of Everglades protection, dies at 84. He co-wrote the Endangered Species Act

Nathaniel Pryor Reed always had a passion for the underdog, and in his six decades of fiery activism, he found no better cause than Florida's environment.

The lanky outdoorsman was behind some of the most significant environmental movements in the state, as well as the nation: He co-wrote the Endangered Species Act, secured bipartisan support for the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, played a role in halting construction of the world's biggest airport in Big Cypress Swamp and helped establish a national park in Biscayne Bay.

He founded 1,000 Friends of Florida in 1987 as a watchdog organization for the state's runaway growth, and throughout his life loudly campaigned for the preservation of his beloved Sunshine State.

Reed was old money, raised both on an exclusive island resort in Martin County his father used his oil fortune to buy in the 1930s and in suburban Connecticut. On Jupiter Island, he brushed shoulders with Roosevelts and Bushes, but even as a child he could always be found with a fishing pole in hand or raising butterflies. He used his wealth to take small planes across Florida, wherever there was an environmental battle to be fought.

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Friends of St. Sebastian River to get lowdown on Indian River Lagoon May 22

The long anticipated Indian River Lagoon Report Card is on the verge of being released after two years of compiling, summarizing and grading data, followed by an extensive peer review.

The 156-mile-long lagoon is suffering from years of nutrient pollution. From north to south, efforts are underway to pinpoint causes for the declining health and fix them. The Report Card presents a condensed view of the current health of the lagoon and is expected to be updated annually.

The first public presentation of the Report Card in Indian River County is May 22 at a meeting of the Friends of St. Sebastian River. Guest speaker is Dr. Leesa Souto, who is overseeing the development of the Lagoon Report Card as executive director of the nonprofit Marine Resources Council.

Click here to read the full story.

Rare Florida jewel, Blue Cypress Lake, sickens with pollution

While Florida has spoiled multitudes of lakes, Blue Cypress has been widely revered as an icon of natural enchantment, ringed by swamp trees, patrolled by ospreys and secluded seemingly from pollution.

But since last summer, authorities have documented a surprising spike in contamination at the large lake 70 miles south of Orlando that spawns Central Florida’s biggest river and future water source, the St. Johns.

The suspected culprit at Blue Cypress Lake is byproducts from municipal treatment of sewage.

Pollution levels have risen sharply, said John Hendrickson, supervising scientist at the St. Johns River Water Management District. “One of the things that jumps out at you is the utilization of biosolids.”

Biosolids are left over at a treatment plant after bacteria decompose human waste into sludge fertile with nitrogen and phosphorus compounds.

Rarely drawing public awareness, biosolid sludge is a costly bane of cities and counties that operate sewage plants and one of Florida’s most vexing and environmental challenges.

Click here to read the full story.

Not again: Dreaded fish kill begins in Brevard

Puffers, mullet, catfish and other scaly carcasses dotted the surface of northern Sykes Creek on Tuesday, reminiscent of the Indian River Lagoon's worst known fish kill two years ago.

A state fish kill hotline this week fielded about a dozen reports, citing from 25 to 50 puffer fish, red drum, sheepshead, mullet, catfish and flounder in the Sykes Creek area near Ulumay Sanctuary. And fish have also been seen gasping for air this week in the Cocoa Beach area, said Capt. Alex Gorichky of Local Lines Charters on Merritt Island.

Fish kills often defy predictions, biologists say. But, with more cloudy weather on the way this week, prospects have grown of another mass fish die-off, like the "fish-pocalypse" the Space Coast saw in 2016.

"I wouldn't be surprised to see it get worse," said Duane DeFreese, executive director of the Indian River Lagoon National Estuary ?Program. "It's very hard to predict."

Click here to read the full story.

IRNA Magazine - The Lagoon Issue

Click here to view the Indian River Neighborhood Association's March 2018 magazine - "The Lagoon Issue," and be sure to check out "The Wild St. Sebastian River" article on page 5.

Vero Beach neighborhood now Florida-friendly to save Indian River Lagoon

INDIAN RIVER COUNTY — There's a different kind of "keep off the grass" rule at The Pointes section of The Moorings community on the barrier island.

The neighborhood of 39 condominiums and six cottages along the Indian River Lagoon has ripped up more than 5,000 square feet of grass and replaced tropical plants — some of them invasives — with 3,600 and counting Florida native and Florida-friendly plants.

The move will help save the lagoon from fertilizer runoff and grass clippings, both of which feed algae blooms. It also will save the residents money because the native plants require less water, less fertilizer and less maintenance.

"I'm over the moon about this," Edie Widder, founder and lead scientist at the Ocean Research & Conservation Association in Fort Pierce, said of The Pointes' project. "Wouldn't it be great if The Pointes was the starting point for people doing this all up and down the lagoon?"

Click here to read the full story.

Perspective: A picturesque calendar of ranches shows why the state needs to preserve wild Florida

These photographs may be the most important I’ve made in nearly 15 years focusing on Florida ranches. The reason is that all the properties featured are priorities for conservation that could be lost to development if the state of Florida doesn’t take action to protect them. It was a great honor to visit these spectacular places and spend time with landowners and workers who are doing their part to save wild Florida. Now it’s time for state lawmakers to do their part.

Click here to view the full story and photos by Carlton Ward Jr.

An Apex Predator Returns

After 35 years the only thing missing from this Florida paradise was the snake.

The reintroduction of the eastern indigo snake in Northern Florida could be as significant as the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone.

Put it down to natural antipathy or an ancient prejudice that has lodged in our amygdala. Or maybe it’s simply because snakes have been vilified throughout time and art from the Book of Genesis to Harry Potter (millennia of negative publicity can have that effect). For whatever reason, most people just don’t like them.

So why are so many government agencies and conservation groups, starting with The Nature Conservancy in Florida, so ecstatic about the recent release of 12 little snakes in a north Florida preserve?

For starters, the eastern indigo is not so little. The longest snake native to the U.S., it grows up to nine feet long, as sleek as a stair bannister, with conspicuous scales as black/blue and lustrous as the sky at the end of sunset. From a public relations standpoint, it doesn’t hurt that it’s non-venomous, docile (not aggressive even when cornered) and, at least as far as its diet goes, fond of its fellow snakes, particularly the venomous kind. A daytime hunter, it was once a common sight throughout Florida, right up into Georgia, southern Alabama and southeastern Mississippi. By 1978, however, its numbers had so declined it was one of the earliest entries on the list of protected wildlife under the Federal Endangered Species Act, victim to that natural antipathy, cars and the steady degradation of its habitat.

Click here to read the full story.

ORCA: No 'silver bullet' for source of Indian River Lagoon pollution

FORT PIERCE — Researchers at the Ocean Research & Conservation Association announced Wednesday evening they have discovered the primary source of pollution in the Indian River Lagoon.

"The problem is us," Edith "Edie" Widder, ORCA's founder and lead scientist, told a gathering at Pelican Yacht Club. "There's just too many of us living along the lagoon, and we're putting a lot of stress on the environment."

"We had hoped we would be able to pinpoint the source of pollution," Widder said before the presentation, "that we would be able to say, 'Agriculture is the problem,' or, 'Lawns are the problem.' But there isn't a silver bullet that you can point to and say, 'If you get rid of this, you'll clean up the lagoon.' It's all of us."

Click here to read the full story.

Florida's Latest Invasive Species: A Fern Capable Of Toppling Trees With Its Chokehold

LeRoy Rodgers pulls a pair of clippers from a bag and hops off an airboat.

He’ll need the clippers to cut a path through the Old World Climbing Fern choking this island of trees within the Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge, part of the Everglades.

The Old World Climbing Fern is Florida’s latest and greatest invasive plant species.

Click here to listen to the story or read the transcript.

Cancer-causing chemicals will go nicely with toxic algae, flesh-eating bacteria

Such auspicious timing. Rick’s gang at the state Environmental Regulations Commission could hardly have picked a more gruesome year to loosen restrictions on toxic chemicals dumped into Florida’s waterways.

A deluge of benzene, beryllium, trichloroethane, dichloroethylene and other known carcinogens ought to blend nicely with the stinking layers of Day-Glo green algae that has been sliming the St. Lucie River and threatening the Caloosahatchee River. Or with the massive fish kills along the Banana River, Sykes Creek, the Indian River and the Mosquito Lagoon.

The ERC, which voted last month to allow polluters to flush higher levels of 23 toxic chemicals (including 18 known carcinogens) into rivers, streams and canals, must assume that Florida waterways have become so adulterated that no one much cares about a couple of dozen more hazardous pollutants. Not in a state that frequently warns swimmers away from waters with high levels of enteric bacteria, attributable to fecal contamination.

Click here to read the full story.

Slimy Green Beaches May Be Florida's New Normal

The guacamole-thick algae that fouled both coasts earlier in July will likely be a regular occurrence for the Sunshine State. Here’s why.

The green slime that washed onto Florida beaches earlier this month marks the eighth time since 2004 that toxic algae have fouled the Sunshine State’s storied coastline.

The algae blooms of 2013 were so severe the event became known as Toxic Summer. And this year’s outbreak has so thoroughly spread through delicate estuaries on both coasts that Florida officials declared a state of emergency in four counties. Toxic sludge has killed fish, shellfish, and at least one manatee and has sickened people who have touched it.

“This is absolutely the worst,” says Evan Miller, an environmental activist and founder of Citizens for Clean Water. “We’ve never seen algae so thick. You can see it from space. There are places in Stuart that are on their third and fourth cycle of blooms now.”

As the latest outbreak continues to play out with sporadic bursts of new algae blooms, dismayed Floridians are wondering if the recurring appearance of this tourist-repelling, fish-killing scum is their new normal.

It may be.

Blue-green algae, also known as cyanobacteria, occur naturally and thrive in warm, calm water. Two conditions work against eradicating it: climate change and political inertia.

Click here to read the full story.

Public blasts DEP over new water toxin standards

Florida wants to weaken its standards for roughly two dozen cancer-causing chemicals it will allow to be discharged into its rivers, lakes, streams and coastal waters.

The Florida Department of Environmental Protection is in the process of revising limits on toxic chemicals that can be released into surface waters, something it’s supposed to do from time to time under the Clean Water Act but hasn’t since the early 1990s.

Of the 82 various toxic substances, the vast majority would have lower standards than recommendations from the Environmental Protection Agency. And of the 43 chemicals now regulated, about a couple dozen would see limits increased beyond those currently allowed.

DEP officials say the new standards — based on risk and factors like seafood consumption — would let Floridians safely eat Florida fish and drink local tap water their entire lives. They say the concentration of pollutants in the water wouldn’t pose a significant risk to the average Floridian’s health.

But environmental groups and concerned doctors say the new standards would increase chances people will get sick or develop cancer from the contamination in seafood and water. The agency’s proposal drew fire last week during a DEP workshop in Tallahassee, one of only three held around the state.

Linda Young, executive director of the Florida Clean Water Network, said Florida’s tourism economy could be destroyed if the state allows more and more pollution into its waters. “I can promise you that nobody takes a vacation to Love Canal,” she said, referring to the contaminated Superfund site in New York. “If you keep weakening Florida’s water quality standards, which you’ve been on a roll for a while now doing ... the word’s going to get out that Florida’s waters are toxic.”

Click here to read the full story.

Rising Seas: Florida's Vulnerable Beaches and Islands

Millions of people value Florida’s coastal beaches and saltmarshes as special places in which to live and play. Our coastlines also provide irreplaceable habitat for nesting sea turtles and millions of birds to nest, rest, and feed throughout each year. National Audubon Society's climate scientists recently modeled current North American bird distributions with climate change projections and found that 314 bird species are at risk of significant declines due to drastic shifts in their breeding or winter distributions.

Sea level rise is already evident along our eroding coastlines but we cannot hold back the ocean indefinitely with hard structures like seawalls. One alternative is to preserve and protect undeveloped lands adjacent to coastal beaches and saltmarsh habitat so that as sea level rises, habitat can reestablish naturally farther inland and the coastal birds that depend on these habitats for survival will have a place to live in our future.

For more information and resources, and to watch the Florida Audubon series of "Rising Seas" videos, visit http://fl.audubon.org/get-involved/florida-climate-change-messenger.

Creating a future for the Indian River Lagoon

The Indian River Lagoon needs our help.

This remarkable estuary is home to more than 4,300 species of plants and animals and a resource serving almost 50 human communities.

The lagoon has weathered countless changes over the past century. It's bottom has been dredged, filled and altered to accommodate our needs and its shoreline has been reconfigured and armored.

Its watershed was expanded by networks of canals that drain stormwater from land now occupied by urban development. These changes have increased loads of water, nutrients and sediments reaching the lagoon. We are all part of these problems. We are all part of the solutions.

Unfortunately, 2016 is shaping up to be a year that focuses our collective concerns — and awareness — on this vulnerable jewel in our backyard.

In mid-2015, the scientific community noticed an algal bloom in the Mosquito Lagoon. It moved into the northern Indian River Lagoon and affected the Banana River Lagoon and the Indian River Lagoon to the Sebastian Inlet by January 2016. The algae in these blooms include those in the 2011 to 2012 bloom, plus brown tide, which bloomed in 2012 to 2013.

Last weekend, waterfront residents and anglers discovered thousands of dead fish drifting in waterways and canals. Scientists are investigating the causes of the fish kill to see if algal toxicity may have been involved; however, oxygen depletion is a common occurrence during intense algal blooms, and fish and other animals die when they do not have enough oxygen.

People want action, and rightly so. More than just part of the fabric of our lives, the lagoon is an economic engine for our region. A 2007 study found the lagoon is responsible for one-seventh of the region's economy. The overall, annual economic value of the lagoon was estimated at $3.7 billion at that time.

In simplest terms, algal blooms do occur naturally, but we contribute nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus that fuel more intense blooms. It's a problem in coastal estuaries worldwide.

Click here to read the full commentary.

Brazen theft of our Amendment 1 bucks

Most embezzlers try to conceal their thefts, but not in Tallahassee. The looting of Florida’s Amendment One conservation funds took place in broad daylight, orchestrated by two poker-faced swindlers named Andy Gardiner and Steve Crisafulli.

Gardiner is president of the Senate. Crisafulli is speaker of the House. Remember their names, because they ripped you off big-time — and it will happen again next year, if they think they can get away with it.

More than 4 million Floridians voted last November to set aside 33 percent of the revenues from existing real-estate stamp taxes for buying conservation and recreation lands, and for the restoration of such areas already owned by the state.

The plan offered hope for the Everglades, the Indian River Lagoon and other places endangered by over-development and pollution.

Amendment One was approved by a landslide, an unprecedented mandate to protect what remains of Florida’s wetlands and wild places. And the Legislature, led by Gardiner and Crisafulli, responded with a bold statement of its own: Screw you, folks.

Click here to read the full editorial.

Has Florida Already Conserved Too Much Land? Do We Properly Manage What We Own?

Much of the debate surrounding the distribution of Amendment 1 funds has revolved largely around whether Florida should conserve additional land through public acquisition. Many legislators have taken the position that Florida is not properly managing the land it already owns – so it would be irresponsible to purchase more. Some legislators go a step further and suggest our inability to properly manage what we already own is a clear sign we have already acquired too much land.

Click here to download and read this full, excellent letter by the Florida Native Plant Society.

From the Water - Healing our Lagoon

The Indian River Lagoon is deathly ill.

Seagrass — the base of the food web — has yet to recover from severe algae blooms in 2011. And scientists are still puzzled by what killed more than 70 dolphins and hundreds of lagoon manatees and pelicans.

But the patient can be cured.

Ecologists say healing our lagoon will take multiple long-term remedies and all hands on deck. Dredges must first stop the bleeding, scientists say, removing noxious muck built up over half a century. A key battle this spring in Tallahassee will determine how much of the new state conservation money that voters approved in November will help buffer the lagoon.

Meanwhile, we need new ways to temper runoff, septic tank seepage and what we put on our lawns — all recipes for more muck.

Click here to view the full series on the Florida Today website.

Big Sugar weasels out of land deal

In Tallahassee you can be a gutsy champion for the Everglades, or just another lame shill for Big Sugar.

You can’t be both, though some politicians try to pretend.

In an email to the Palm Beach Post, Crisafulli (Steve Crisafulli, Republican speaker of the Florida House) stated his opposition to using Amendment 1 funds to buy the U.S. Sugar land “at this time,” saying Everglades restoration efforts should focus on pending projects.

This puppet dance, while pleasing to sugar growers, is a kick in the teeth to all the Floridians who supported Amendment One, especially those who’ve been watching the slow death of the Indian River Lagoon.

Every day 614 millions gallons of polluted water are pouring out of Lake Okeechobee toward the lagoon, but Steve Crisafulli has other priorities.

To read the full commentary, click here.

Lawyers Put State on Notice Over Indian River Lagoon Pollution

Manatees are threatening to sue the Florida Department of Health over leaky septic tanks tainting their habitat.

On behalf of manatees — which actually are named as plaintiffs in the case — two other animal species and the chairman of an environmental group, attorneys filed a 60-day notice of intent to sue state health officials Thursday over septic tank waste that has polluted the Indian River Lagoon on Florida's east coast.

Hundreds of manatees, dolphins and pelicans have died in the lagoon, once considered one of the most productive estuaries in North America.

The deaths were preceded by toxic algae blooms that wiped out more than 47,000 acres of its sea grass beds, which one scientist compared to losing an entire rainforest in one fell swoop.

Click here to read the full story.

Counties fighting Florida to keep fertilizer from ruining waterways

If clean water's your goal, it's not a good sign that your state's environmental efforts are being applauded by The Fertilizer Institute.

Fertilizer is to clean waterways as cigarette smoke is to clean lungs.

The fluorescent green slime that was the product of a massive toxic algae bloom that fouled the St. Lucie and Indian Rivers last summer was a result of the pumping of excess rainwater tainted with fertilizer and other pollutants to the ocean.

It's why the St. Lucie County commission voted unanimously last month to ban the use of fertilizers containing nitrogen or phosphorous from June through September.

But on that same month, the Fertilizer Institute was praising Florida's state government for successfully waging a legal fight to weaken the previously negotiated water standards set by the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

The Fertilizer Institute praised Florida for "its tireless work to craft strong, realistic and achievable nutrient criteria using a science-based approach that will have a positive impact on Florida's waters."

Hint: If the people who are in business of selling clean-water poison are patting you on the back for your clean-water efforts, it's not good news for clean water.

Click here to read the full editorial.

Troubled Water: The Indian River Lagoon in Peril

Unprecedented algae blooms. Thousands of acres of precious sea grass lost. Record numbers of manatee and dolphin deaths due to mysterious illnesses. The Indian River Lagoon is facing a crisis decades in the making.

The estuary is considered one of the most diverse in the world. But a host of threats — storm water, wastewater, septic tanks, fertilizer, and Mother Nature herself — have degraded the lagoon system.

A team of scientists is at work studying just what’s happened to the lagoon system, and what can be done to repair it. It could cost billions of dollars to fully restore the lagoon system. Doing nothing carries a cost of its own, experts and residents say.

This is a multi-part series of articles, assembled with photos and graphics. Click here to view the full series.

Local Volunteer Jane Schnee Receives U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service Regional Director's Honor Award

Local volunteer Jane Schnee just returned from a trip to Atlanta, Georgia where she was recognized by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service for her local volunteer efforts. Ms. Schnee received the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Regional Director’s Honor Award with other leading professionals and volunteers in the Southeast USFWS Region on October 30, 2013. “Recognizing the excellence of partners, volunteers and employees is one way we can say thank you to those who practice what we like to call ‘Southern-style conservation’,” USFWS Regional Director Cindy Dohner said. “Every day, they demonstrate their long-term commitment to working together to sustain fish and wildlife for future generations. We are indebted to them.”

In 2011, upon learning of a 10.67 acre parcel of land for sale that was occupied by a pair of scrub-jays and located near the Pelican Island Elementary School scrub-jay habitat, Ms. Schnee was quick to start finding a potential buyer that would preserve the land which was once slated for 80 multi-family residential units. During a time when Indian River County environmental land bonds were dwindling and the tax revenues were down, the County and City of Sebastian were not in a position to acquire the environmentally sensitive land. Other non-profits were either focusing on conservation acquisitions along the Indian River Lagoon or simply not in a position for such an acquisition. Ms. Schnee then decided to make the more than $100,000 purchase herself with her personal life savings. Since then, Ms. Schnee has tirelessly worked to improve the habitat with her own finances as well as receiving some grants through the USFWS Partners for Wildlife program and St. Johns River Water Management District.

Click here to read the full story on the IRCCLP facebook page.

Indian River Lagoon: Geography of a Collapse

The Indian River Lagoon stretches from Ponce Inlet to Jupiter Inlet. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent in taxpayer money to guard against population-fueled pollution since the lagoon became part of the National Estuary Program in 1990. But the lagoon remains in crisis. Here's why:

Click here to view the interactive slide show.

Fouling Florida's environment? Simply insane

Albert Einstein said that insanity is "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

In Florida, environmentalists have their unique definition of insanity: knowingly destroying our environment — one of our major economic resources — while blocking efforts to slow or stop the destruction.

This brand of insanity plays out daily and has for decades, from the moment business owners, their political supporters and lobbyists learned that the abuse of our precious wild places can bring huge profits.

Here on the southeast coast, the Indian River Lagoon, the St. Lucie River and its estuary are being polluted like never before — perhaps irreversibly — by an algae slime that proliferates from excess manure, sewage and fertilizer released by municipalities and, of course, from Lake Okeechobee.

Research clearly shows that most of the nutrients flowing into Lake Okeechobee come from tributaries in the northern Everglades. This is Big Sugar country, the Everglades Agricultural Area, where most of the nation's sugarcane is grown. Adjacent regions also are affected by discharges from the lake.

Elected officials and others have known for more than 30 years about our nutrient-rich water problems, but they consistently have put business interests ahead of eliminating the sources of the pollution. The discharge of dirty water from Lake Okeechobee is not new. It has been going on since the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers constructed the dike around the lake decades ago and created a reservoir system that enabled the sugar industry to operate without major interruptions or effective regulation.

Click here to read the full story.

Photos capture the disgusting reality of Florida’s water pollution

If these images don't convince Congress that Florida's estuaries are in serious trouble, nothing will

It can be difficult to conceive of just how polluted Florida’s estuaries are, even with reports filing in of the record-setting deaths occurring there — including over 60 dolphins and 120 manatees. In order to make the case to Congress that Florida is in a state of disaster, U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy, D-Jupiter, is holding a photo contest.

The devastation began earlier this summer, when huge amounts of rainfall overwhelmed Lake Okeechobee’s 80-year-old dike in South Florida. Faced with a problem to which there were no clear answers, the Army Corps of Engineers chose to release billions of gallons of polluted water into the St. Lucie River estuary in the east and the Calossahatchee River estuary in the west. Large algae blooms spread, and the delicate balance of salt and fresh water was overwhelmed.

Click here to read the full story and view a slide show of the photos from the contest.

Thousands link across Indian River Lagoon

Concerned citizens joined hands by the thousands Saturday to show they care about their dying lagoon.

MELBOURNE — Thousands linked hands across a cloudy Indian River Lagoon on Saturday to raise awareness about their beloved, dying estuary.

But as hands dropped, they exited the causeways determined to get their hands dirty doing more in their own backyards to help clean up their languishing lagoon.

“We’re all excited that so many people care about our lagoon,” Celia Phillips, of Melbourne, said from the U.S. 192 causeway. “This was definitely a heighten-your-awareness day.”

As part of National Estuaries Day, citizens held hands across at least seven bridges that span the lagoon, from New Smyrna Beach to Stuart. And about 100 kayakers and people on paddleboards launched from Kiwanis Island Park on Merritt Island.

Click here to read the full story.

With Murky Water And Manatee Deaths, Lagoon Languishes

Something is wrong in Florida's Indian River Lagoon.

Over the past year, record numbers of dolphins, manatees and pelicans have turned up dead in the 150-mile-long estuary that runs along Florida's Atlantic Coast. Bouts of algal blooms have flourished in the waters. All the signs point to an ecosystem that is seriously out of balance. The crisis has mobilized scientists, residents and elected officials in Florida.

Because of the release of water from Lake Okeechobee, the lower end of Indian River Lagoon this summer has been beset by large algae blooms, some toxic. They've killed off delicate sea grass beds and dealt a blow to a regional economy that depends on the lagoon for recreation and commercial fishing.

It's the third year in a row of bad news in the lagoon. In 2011, the northern end of Indian River was devastated by an algae superbloom, an event that was followed last year by a different outbreak.

"We have reached a tipping point in the Indian River lagoon now," says Brian Lapointe, a research professor at Harbor Branch who has investigated the algal blooms and the death of marine mammals in the lagoon.

Click here to listen to the NPR "Morning Edition" report, on read the full transcript.

Florida Fights to Save a Troubled Lagoon and Its Once-Flourishing Marine Life

Florida’s governor and legislature are finally taking an active interest in the demise of the Indian River Lagoon, which runs for 156 miles along the state’s Atlantic coast. The lagoon, once prided for hosting more species of marine life than any other estuary in the U.S., is now better known for its toxic algal blooms and mass animal die-offs.

In just the past year, 68 dolphins, 112 manatees, and hundreds of pelicans have turned up dead along the lagoon’s shores.

“The Indian River Lagoon has become a toilet,” said Brian Lapointe, a marine environmental scientist from the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute at Florida Atlantic University.

The lagoon’s continuing collapse has prompted impassioned pleas from citizens desperate to halt the catastrophe and save the embattled ecosystem; scientists are racing to find out what’s killing the lagoon’s treasured birds and marine mammals. Earlier this year, the federal government declared the manatee and dolphin die-offs an “Unusual Mortality Events” and sent federal funds and investigators to the region.

Click here to read the full article.

New lawn legislation fuels a growing debate

Here are some tips to do it effectively fertilize your lawn

To fertilize or not to fertilize, that is the question Space Coast residents face this rainy season.

If they live in unincorporated Brevard County, for the first time they must heed an ordinance this summer that discourages fertilizing when rain is in the forecast.

Rockledge goes further. Its new ordinance more specifically bans fertilizing from June 1 to Sept. 30. Other local cities are considering their own ordinances, which could make for a hodgepodge of approaches to prevent excess fertilizer from running off into the Indian River Lagoon, where it can fuel algae blooms toxic to wildlife and even humans.

Debate rages on about how to make the best policies match the best science. State legislators have talked recently of revamping Florida’s fertilizer rules to make them more uniform. Environmentalists fear changes that could thwart local governments from adopting stricter ordinances that include rainy season fertilizer application bans, yearly application rate limits and that require a high percentage of controlled-release nitrogen.

So as the debate simmers, what’s an environmentally conscious homeowner to do this summer?

University of Florida and industry experts say we can have healthy lawns and a healthy Indian River lagoon, too.

Deaths of Manatees, Dolphins and Pelicans Point to Estuary at Risk

MELBOURNE, Fla. — The first hint that something was amiss here, in the shallow lagoons and brackish streams that buffer inland Florida from the Atlantic’s salt water, came last summer in the Banana River, just south of Kennedy Space Center. Three manatees — the languid, plant-munching, over-upholstered mammals known as sea cows — died suddenly and inexplicably, one after another, in a spot where deaths were rare.

The cause continues to evade easy explanation. But a central question is whether the deaths are symptoms of something more ominous: the collapse of the natural balance that sustains the 156-mile estuary’s northern reaches.

“We may have reached a tipping point,” said Troy Rice, who directs the Indian River Lagoon National Estuary Program, a federal, state and local government partnership at the St. Johns River Water Management District.

Mr. Rice’s fear, widely shared, is that an ecosystem that supports more than 4,300 species of wildlife — and commercial fisheries, tourism and other businesses generating nearly $4 billion annually — is buckling under the strain of decades of pollution generated by coastal Florida’s explosive development.

Click here to read the full story.

Florida's Indian River Lagoon Is A "Killing Zone" Of Mass Animal Deaths: Video Report

Day after day, dolphins floated up dead, emaciated down to their skeletons. Florida's Indian River Lagoon, considered one of the most diverse ecosystems in North America, was in dire crisis.

And it wasn't just the 46 dead bottlenose dolphins. The casualty list is long and depressing: gone are 47,000 acres of sea grass beds, 111 manatees, and 300 pelicans, reports Fox News.

It's been described as a "killing zone" and a "mass murder mystery" that is perplexing biologists.

Click here to read the full story and watch the video report.

A lagoon in collapse? Something is happening in the Indian River Lagoon

Theories differ, but one thing is sure. Something is happening in the Indian River Lagoon

MELBOURNE — Something’s wrong with the Indian River Lagoon.

Manatees, dolphins and pelicans are dying at record rates. Blue crabs seem weak. Bloom after bloom of algae clouds the lagoon’s seagrass.

Scientists can’t say with any certainty what’s wrong, though all agree something has gone awry and may be irreversible.

Some point to global warming. Others blame pollution. Even manatees are among the speculation about what’s triggered the collapse.

Whatever the reasons, those who make their living on the lagoon — North America’s most biologically diverse estuary — witness daily signs of decline that make them worry: Is our lagoon in a death spiral?

Click here to read the full story.

Assault on Environment Unabated

Growth management has been gutted, and the water management districts have been neutered. Developers have free rein, and water quality rules have been weakened. The state spends a fraction of what it once did to preserve sensitive lands, and the Department of Environmental Protection makes up new rules when private interests can't make enough money under existing rules. Yet the Florida Legislature still finds more ways to do more damage to the environment.

A bill passed by the House and awaiting Senate action in the last week of the session would make it easier to pollute waterways, destroy flood protection areas, squander the drinking water supply and extend even more leverage to developers over when and where they build. It would hurt Florida's economy as much as its natural resources, and if the Senate votes for this mess Gov. Rick Scott should veto it.

The sponsor of HB 999, Rep. Jimmy Patronis, R-Panama City, describes the legislation as "tweaks and fixes" that would make Florida more business-friendly. But the provisions are toxic. They would prevent local governments from regulating the destruction of wetlands by small, independent drainage districts that oversee more than 1 million acres across the state. They would give legal cover to a no-bid, 30-year sweetheart deal that Scott and the Cabinet gave to two farming operations to continue polluting the Everglades. The bill also would fast-track permitting for natural gas pipelines, and big water users would have every incentive to continue pumping groundwater even after new technologies offer a more sustainable water source. So much for the House's truth in packaging.

Click here to read the full editorial.

Special interests vs. public interests

Pandering to special interests is routine in the 21st century Florida Legislature, something we Floridians have come to expect and, too often, accept. But even by the Legislature's own standards the House's approval of House Bill 999 on Thursday by a 98-20 vote signals a major sellout of the public interests to special interests.

HB 999, which 1000 Friends of Florida has dubbed “the most problematic environmental bill of the session,” now heads to the Senate where a companion measure, SB 1064, is awaiting for that chamber's vote, possibly as early as today. We urge ... senators ... to vote against this affront to the environment, home rule and anyone who cares about preserving Florida as we know it.

That the House voted for HB 999 so overwhelmingly shows its members' disconnect with everyday Floridians. The lengthy bill and its Senate companion are dubbed by their sponsors “environmental regulation” measures when, in fact, they are aimed at massive environmental deregulation. Everything from wetlands and marinas to water permits and pollution testing to fertilizer ordinances and local development permitting are covered, and in every case the bills seek to weaken regulations to the detriment of our communities and state.

“Line by line, and dollar for dollar, these bills were written for those who wish to exploit our environment for personal gain,” wrote the respected Florida Conservation Coalition, founded and chaired by former governor and senator Bob Graham.

Click here to read the full editorial.

Septic tanks a major threat to lagoon

New research by Harbor Branch scientist Brian Lapointe shows that septic tanks are flooding the Indian River Lagoon with nitrogen that is feeding algae blooms and killing marine life.

Countywide there are approximately 37,000 septic systems that dump more than 10 million gallons of effluent into the environment each day.

Because of the branching canal system that drains the county, nitrogen, bacteria and other pollutants that enter the groundwater miles from the lagoon end up in the estuary.

“Sewage is probably the biggest source of pollution in the estuary,” says Lapointe, who presented his findings for the first time at the recent county lagoon symposium put on by District 3 Commissioner Tim Zorc.

Click here to read the full story.

Bad policies pose historic threats to Fla. environment

Recent investigative reporting by Kevin Spear in the Orlando Sentinel reveals the dramatic and widespread pollution and flow problems facing so many of Florida's rivers and springs. These reports were echoed by editorials across the state calling on Florida's governor, Department of Environmental Protection and Legislature to take action to protect and restore our impaired waterways.

Yet instead of resolving the serious problems that threaten our state's most precious natural resources, efforts in Tallahassee have focused on rolling back environmental safeguards and growth-management guidelines, cutting funding for conservation and regulation, reducing enforcement against polluters and liquidating public lands.

Severe budget cuts are seriously compromising the ability of Florida's DEP and water management districts to adequately protect our state's natural resources. Funding for many important conservation, restoration, monitoring, research, enforcement and education programs has been drastically reduced or eliminated.

Our state has also lost decades of valuable knowledge and expertise from significant layoffs, resulting in less capable agencies with insufficient resources and demoralized personnel. Although the DEP recently claimed "these reductions have done nothing to erode the agency's role in regulating industry and protecting the environment," it is not hard to find evidence to the contrary.

Natural Florida needs stewards, not profiteers

In his 1998 book Some Kind of Paradise: A Chronicle of Man and the Land in Florida, environmentalist Mark Derr wrote that "in these past one hundred years, man has reshaped and relandscaped the peninsula, leveling forests, draining the marshes. The process continues at such a rapid rate that many residents of more than a decade barely recognize the areas around their homes."

Since Derr wrote those observations, the process of destruction has gone on at breakneck speed.

Two out of three Florida residents come from other states or foreign countries, and they have no memory of our old natural beauty and too often little respect for that beauty. Most have no qualms about electing lawmakers who dismiss the intrinsic value of our environment. As a result, Derr wrote, the "tale of Florida's development often is sordid, marked by the greed of people intent on taking whatever the land offered and leaving nothing in return."

Gov. Rick Scott is an outsider, and he is proving to be no friend of the environment in almost every move he makes.

Most recently, as suggested by an article in the Tampa Bay Times, the future of Florida's natural environment was put in jeopardy when Hershel Vinyard, secretary of the Department of Environmental Protection, laid off 58 DEP employees who have what is described as a "history and knowledge" of the state's critical environmental problems.

It is no secret that Vinyard, like the governor, is a probusiness crusader who has little use for environmental regulations.

Click here to read the full story.

Florida environmental agency lays off longtime employees and hires from regulated industries

In 2003, when a leaky gypsum stack at an abandoned phosphate plant threatened to kill a vast cross section of Tampa Bay's marine life, Charles Kovach came up with a solution that saved the bay.

But this month, 17 years after he was hired by the state Department of Environmental Protection, Kovach was one of 58 DEP employees laid off by the agency. Kovach believes those layoffs were designed to loosen regulation of polluting industries.

"I've seen the way politics has influenced that agency in the past, but never like this," Kovach said. "It's not about compliance (with the rules). It's about making things look like they're compliant."

On top of the layoffs is the fact that DEP Secretary Herschel Vinyard has installed a number of new people in the agency's upper ranks whose prior experience was working as engineers or consultants for companies the DEP regulates.

The DEP's deputy secretary in charge of regulatory programs previously spent a decade as an engineer who specialized in getting clients their environmental permits. Another engineer who worked for developers heads up the division of water resources. A lawyer who helped power plants get their permits is now in charge of air pollution permitting. An engineering company lobbyist became a deputy director overseeing water and sewer facilities.

The DEP "was never great," said Mark Bardolph, a 27-year DEP veteran — and onetime whistle-blower — who was laid off from the Tallahassee office. "But now it's all a political farce."

The hiring of people from the private sector to run the agency's most important divisions has been going on since Vinyard, a shipyard executive, was appointed to the office in January 2011 by Gov. Rick Scott. According to former employees, the hiring and layoffs reflect the Scott administration's pro-business attitudes.

"It's a hatred of regulation in general and in particular environmental regulations," Bardolph said. "It's profit that counts."

Click here to read the full story.

Florida Rivers Getting Sicker

Florida's rivers are in trouble.

That's what the Orlando Sentinel found after a yearlong evaluation of some of the state's biggest and smallest, most urban and remote, cleanest and dirtiest, protected and abused rivers.

Of the 22 rivers studied, from Miami to Pensacola, nearly half are in decline because of pollution from lawns, street runoff, wastewater and agriculture, and because of shrinking flows caused by drought and rising demand for water by cities and industries.

Other rivers in the group, while either stable or improving, are profoundly impaired.

Click here to read the full story.

EPA Must Protect Florida Waterways

For three years, Florida tried to stall on setting tougher anti-pollution standards for the state’s lakes, rivers, streams and estuaries. Finally, and correctly, it appears that Florida has lost — for now.

On Nov. 30, U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle refused to give Florida any more time in trying to set state rules that are weaker than those established by the Environmental Protection Agency. Earthjustice attorney David Guest said of the environmental groups that brought the federal lawsuit seeking enforcement of the Clean Water Act, “We won this case.” He believes that the more stringent standards will apply to roughly 85 percent of Florida waters, including canals in South Florida. “That’s the big story.”

Click here to read the full editorial.

Report Finds Water Pollution in Florida Costs up to $10.5 Billion, Annually

Tallahassee, FL — In the first comprehensive review of its kind, the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), based at Tufts University, has released a white paper entitled Valuing Florida's Clean Waters. The paper finds that algae and red tide outbreaks caused by water pollution cost Floridians between $1.3 billion and $10.5 billion each year.

The EPA will soon decide whether to accept a state-written water pollution plan (which clean water advocates say won’t do the job) or to step in with stronger federal rules and enforcement.

SEI researchers compiled data from dozens of studies and assessments to come up with the valuation of environmental services provided by clean water for Florida.

“The scientific community is now clear that pollution is a primary cause of harmful algae outbreaks. What remains is for federal and state agencies to set, and fund, an agenda for gathering the underlying data needed to comprehensively assess the value of Florida's clean waters.”

Click here to read the full press release and for a link to the SEI report.

Illuminating the Perils of Pollution, Nature’s Way

FORT PIERCE, Fla. — Edith Widder presented a handful of greenish muck that had been pulled from the shallows of the Indian River Lagoon and cupped it in her palm.

Collecting mud is a new calling for Dr. Widder, a marine biologist who is known around the world for her work in much larger bodies of water.

...Now, Dr. Widder has found a way to put bioluminescence to work to fight pollution in the Indian River Lagoon, a 156-mile estuary that scientists say is one of Florida’s most precious and threatened ecosystems.

...Scientists have long been aware of problems in the lagoon, where residential and commercial development has led to declining water quality and loss of habitat. But Dr. Widder’s work adds a visual element to what is already known, allowing people to see the hot spots most in need of immediate attention.

“It’s my belief if we can make pollution visible, and let people know what small things they are doing are actually making an improvement in this incredible environment,” she said, “I think it could make a huge difference. It can be a game-changer.”

Click here to read the full story.

New Conservation Coalition issues proposals that deserve the attention of Florida's elected leaders

Treasure Coast resident Nat Reed said he's ready to "raise Cain" with Gov. Rick Scott and the Florida Legislature over the last legislative session — in which lawmakers slashed programs and projects that support the state's water and other natural resources — and to encourage them to do better in the upcoming session.

"The developers paid for and got what they wanted," said Reed, the Jupiter Island resident who served as assistant secretary of the interior under Republican presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and is chairman emeritus of 1000 Friends of Florida. "And it's a disgrace to the state of Florida."

Reed is not alone in his outrage over budget cuts and policy decisions that threaten bipartisan efforts to protect the state's environment. Reed spoke in Tallahassee at a rally organized by the new Florida Conservation Coalition, founded by former Florida governor and U.S. senator Bob Graham, a Democrat, and whose members include representatives of the Florida Wildlife Federation, the Nature Conservancy, Everglades Foundation, Audubon of Florida, Sierra Club, the Trust for Public Land and the League of Women Voters.

Click here to read the full editorial.

For Florida, Water Quality an Increasing Challenge

Florida has 1,700 streams and rivers, 7,800 freshwater lakes, 700 springs, 11 million acres of wetlands, not to speak of 1,350 miles of coastline and more than 8,000 miles of tidal shoreline. And some of the largest population increases in United States history.

It’s a prospering recipe that lacks just one ingredient: water. Fresh, clean water. And lots of it. In 2005, Floridians used almost 7 billion gallons of freshwater a day. And there were almost a million fewer people in the state in 2005.

Water is the single most important resource in the Sunshine State. Which is why the state legislature passed the Florida Water Resources Act in 1972, creating six regional water management districts in 1972 (in 1975, two southern districts merged to become the South Florida Water Management District).

Now, 39 years later, the state is bursting at the population seams and facing unprecedented water-related challenges, such as the restoration of the entire Everglades ecosystem and the rehabilitation of other polluted freshwater supplies, mostly from agricultural runoff (agriculture also uses more freshwater than humans). In 2010, Florida had 1,918 miles of “impaired” or polluted rivers (that number almost doubled from 2008 to 2010), and 378,000 acres of impaired lakes.

Click here to read the full article.

Florida Loses Its Mind. Again.

If you think that Snooki has relationship problems because of overly strict drinking laws, or that the Bernie Madoff story is a cautionary tale about overly intrusive financial regulation, you're probably a Florida politician. Because the geniuses who run the state have decided that its economic distress is the result of overly strict growth management. So they're wiping out three decades of growth management laws and making it even easier for developers to build, the legislative equivalent of making it even easier for Kirstie Alley to eat.

This is so insane I don't even know what to say about it, except that I assume Carl Hiaasen has found the subject of his next novel. It's hard to imagine how any sentient being who's visited Homestead or Cape Coral or any of Florida's other boarded-up foreclosurevilles and seen all the vacant homes with unmowed lawns and mosquito-infested pools could conclude that the housing boom was insufficiently robust.

Click here to read the full story.

`The Real Florida' a moneymaker

Buying land for parks, refuges solid investment

What do Humphrey Bogart and John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park have in common?

The famous actor starred in the 1948 movie Key Largo, which, despite its depiction of a fierce hurricane, drew new visitors to the Florida Keys' northern-most island, according to the Florida Parks System.

Trouble was, many visitors wanted to collect saltwater mementos -- colorful corals, sea fans, sponges -- and that took a terrible toll on the only living coral formation in the continental United States. In 1957, Dr. Gilbert Voss of the Marine Institute of Miami joined other scientists and South Florida preservationists, including The Miami Herald's then-associate editor, John Pennekamp, to urge the state to designate the beautiful reef area a preserve that would be off-limits to coral collecting and the like.

In 1959, activists got their wish when a 75-square-mile reef tract was declared a state preserve, the first underwater park in the United States. The next year, the federal government kicked in more sea bottom, and on Dec. 10, 1960, the park was named for Mr. Pennekamp.

Now Pennekamp park is having a 50th-anniversary celebration with a series of events to please new and frequent visitors alike. The park's anniversary is actually the culmination of a year-long 75th-anniversary celebration of the Florida Parks System, which includes magnificent beaches, forests, bayous, caverns, historic sites and more. The state Parks Service likes to brag that it manages ``The Real Florida.'' It serves as steward to more than 700,000 acres of parklands.

Many state parks were established by the same kind of local activism that saved Pennekamp. We owe a debt of gratitude to the John Pennekamps and Dr. Vosses. They saw wilderness threatened by the state's relentless growth throughout much of the 20th century and spoke up to protect tracts for future generations.

But it isn't just beachgoers, campers, hikers and other nature lovers who can truly appreciate Florida's parks system. So can economists. Our parks and refuges are moneymakers.

A 2009-10 fiscal-impact assessment by the Parks Service found that the state's 160 parks had a direct impact of nearly $950 million on local economies throughout the state and accounted for 18,900 new local-area jobs. Last year the state park system contributed more than $66 million to the general revenue fund via state sales taxes.

Beyond the parks system, a 2009 Nature Conservancy study found that hunting and fishing on Florida's conserved lands and waters had an $8 billion economic impact in 2006 alone.

The Nature Conservancy's study had a purpose, of course -- to persuade the Legislature to continue funding the state's land-acquisition program Florida Forever -- using hard dollars as an argument. A smart move. Saving ``The Real Florida'' really does pay off. Just ask the owners of Key Largo motels, restaurants and dive shops celebrating this month.

Land Management In Florida: Old Challenges In The New Economy

We are all facing up to the gross financial mismanagement on the national level, but I would like to share with you some thoughts on how Florida fits into the picture. I agree with those who say that the Ponzi premise pretty much sums up Florida’s management strategy. As long as you can recruit new suckers to pay back the existing pyramid club members you’ll be okay. I would invite you to name one public program in Florida – transportation, education, public health, environmental resource management – where we have actually put the cost of meeting immediate needs upon the existing population. Florida’s history has been to expect that future growth will cover the cost of the current needs. Next year’s new taxpayers will get the bill for existing infrastructure deficiencies, and their new demands will in turn be paid by their successors. As the St. Petersburg Times/Miami Herald recently reported:

For years, governors and legislators relied on population growth to create jobs, avoid raising taxes, and shield the state from recession. The saw Florida’s population swell annually by 2 to 3 percent per year, adding the equivalent of a new Miami or Tampa each year.

We’ve marked ourselves as a low-tax, low-cost retirement haven. We have further convoluted the scheme with an absolutely archaic tax scheme, full of exemptions intended to provide short-term growth incentives but higher future costs, which will supposedly be covered by distributing those costs over a larger taxpayer base in the future.

But now we are finding that if Florida doesn’t keep growing, the pyramid can’t be sustained. Florida’s residential and commercial building spree has resulted in a vastly overbuilt market with, by some estimates, at least two years of inventory. The Times/Herald reported that Florida led the nation in job growth in 2005, and now leads the nation in job losses. After five years of double-digit increases in housing starts, it is now second in the nation in foreclosure filings. Florida led the nation in gross domestic product in 2005. It now ranks 47th in this most important indicator of a productive economy.

In its 2009 New Years Day editorial, the Palm Beach Post summarized brilliantly our past and possible future:

For decades Florida and the officials running the state, counties, and towns have perpetrated the myth that growth will pay for itself and provide a prosperous lifestyle for everyone who buys into the myth. With special tax breaks for long-time residents, the expectation that an ever-increasing supply of newcomers, snowbirds and tourists would pay most of the bills was as enticing a Ponzi scheme as any that Bernard Madoff promised. Now, Florida’s growth scheme has collapsed. The growth myth should collapse along with it. Yes, the real state market will come back – let’s hope in a more rational form. But unbridled growth never again should be seen as Florida’s perpetual money machine.

Some might argue that Florida hasn’t really had unbridled growth, but rather truly managed growth, some have said over-managed. This is a rather hard premise to accept given the obvious massive over-building which has glutted the state.

Over the past ten years, the Florida Department of Community Affairs – which oversees growth management in our state – has been continually reduced until, according to current DCA Secretary Tom Pelham, the agency is barely able to fulfill its statutory mission. Rather than confront the large public and institutional support for growth management controls, the budgetary process has become the tool to curtail growth management. In the early 1990’s – during the height of DCA’s efforts to implement the 1985 law – it had a staff of more than seventy professionals, two field offices, and three separate divisions. By the end of the Bush administration, the field offices were gone, one division had been reassigned to the Governor’s Office, and fewer than thirty professionals remain.

The Legislature is now faced with addressing a massive budget shortfall – in the neighborhood of $5 billion – for the 2099-2010 year and has only two options – further cuts in spending or additional revenue income. I expect that the legislature will be forced, reluctantly, to consider additional revenue sources. Higher “sin” taxes such as cigarettes or Internet taxes are easy, but reform of our tax codes will require real courage.

I also expect proposals to relax environmental rules, or even eliminate the Florida Department of Community Affairs, and/or all comprehensive planning will surface as possible “quick fixes.” Some of the same interests who gave us the current market glut claim that they need unbridled freedom to respond to “market conditions,” that the “planning process” takes too long and will impeded recovery. Private landowners who still believe that unrestricted property rights are a divine right will certainly join in any opportunity to eliminate growth management programs.

In another spin, counties across the state are all now facing requests to simply extend existing approved expiring development permits that are no longer economically viable until “the market improves.” In almost all cases, they are extending the projects. Is that really a good idea? Admittedly, it saves both the developer and the government the costs of repeating the permit process, but are all those projects really that good?

With hundreds of approved projects dormant for lack of funding, and with an estimated two-year glut in existing housing and commercial space, we should feel no urgency to encourage more. It will be a long time (if ever) before fixed-income retirees in the north again contemplate mass-migration to Florida. The bleak economic situation affords Florida a unique opportunity to reconsider our land management planning programs.

I think that all the discussions need to face the fact that sound economic policy must also be sound environmental policy – or we’re just once again pawning the true costs into the future – with compounded interest! And while “smart growth” is considered a desirable goal, I would argue that any growth that doesn’t pay for itself isn’t smart at all!

We now have the time, and hopefully the economic incentive, to move (sic) promote serious planning policies that would:

1. Promote infill and rehabilitation of existing urban areas over creating new towns. The argument for years has been that remote vacant land is cheap, and building on a blank slate is faster and cheaper – so we’ve gone toward new communities in the boondocks.
2. Pay special attention to agriculture in Florida. We need an environmentally sound, productive agricultural industry in our state for its economic, social and environmental benefits. Our current development model is driving out agriculture as speculative real estate ventures swallow rural tracts with “New Towns” that don’t pay for themselves.
3. Rethink new rural communities. In the future, they should only be built if they offer us true long-term benefits economically, socially, and environmentally. If they don’t, let’s learn to just say NO and wait for a true enhancement to the state to be developed.

Florida is truly at an economic crossroads; do we try to fall back to our old ways, or find a smarter growth model for our future, one that sustains our economy, protects our environment, improves education – and truly best serves our citizens? Do we simply try to jumpstart quick growth, or can we develop a well-devised, balanced economy and a rational growth program supported by a truly intelligent tax program? This will take true leadership and courage.

Reaping the fruit planted by greed

It wasn't surprising that President Barack Obama came to Florida to push his economic stimulus package, because no place in the United States has fallen so hard, so fast.

And when the mega-recession finally ends, Florida will be one of the last places in the country to turn itself around. That's because other states have actual industry, while our employment base depends fatally on double-digit population growth and, to a lesser extent, tourism.

Everything was going gang-busters when a thousand people a day were moving here, but now the stampede is over, and the jig's up. Without fresh meat for the housing market, Florida basically hasn't got an economy.

Developers have controlled state and county governments for so long that no Plan B exists. Lost and clueless, lawmakers desperately hack away at public budgets while clinging to the hope that boom times will return.

For good reason, Florida has become the poster child for America's fiscal disintegration. We stand at the top of the leaderboard in rising unemployment, foreclosures and, of course, mortgage fraud.

Where else could a man step out of prison and straight into a job peddling adjustable-rate home loans to buyers with virtually no credit?

Click here to read the full story.

by Jim Petrone, Hometown News, April 7, 2006

Vanishing Wetlands

"Florida has more wetlands than any other state but Alaska. They stop floods, clean up water pollution, and replenish drinking supplies. Yet despite government promises, they are disappearing."

This is a Special Report series of articles by the St. Pete Times that also includes multimedia graphics and photo galleries with some wonderful images. Click here to view their Web page with links to all the stories.

Our Coastal Watershed

What is a Coastal Watershed?

"A watershed is a geographic area in which all sources of water including the rivers, streams, lakes, wetlands as well as ground water, drain into a common surface water body. Because all watersheds are defined bu natural hydrology and ultimately drain to coastal waters, they are a good focal point for managing coastal resources. In Sebastian the watershed drains into the Indian River Lagoon, a distinctive estuary that extends from Volusia county to our south. This estuary provides a unique habitat for a diverse group of organisms. It is the breeding and feeding grounds for a variety of aquatic and terrestrial animals."

What are some of the Impacts on our Coastal Watershed?

"Loose soil from construction sites, farms, and other areas where dirt is exposed can wash off into the streams and rivers when it rains and flow to our estuary. The result is muddy waters which leave deposits in the Lagoon that smother the organisms living on the bottom, decrease the amount of sunlight reaching the sea grass beds, and clog fish gills. Some types of pollutants can bind to the sediment and flow with it to the coastal waters."

"Excess nutrients and pesticides can also wash off the land when it rains and end up in the coastal waters. Sources of excess nutrients include lawn and garden fertilizers and pesticides, pet and farm animal waste, decaying plant material, and failing septic tanks. The loss of wetlands in many watersheds has reduced the ability of nature to process these nutrients before they enter rivers, streams, and ultimately estuaries."

"Toxic substances such as lead, oils, antifreeze, brake linings and greases deposited on the roads from cars, trucks and buses, can all run off the streets and land with the rainfall. Commercial and industrial sites can also contribute to the amount of toxic substances entering the coastal waters."

What can I do to help protect our watershed, you ask?

"You can do several things to help protect our beautiful Indian River Lagoon."

• "Start in your back yard through sensible lawn care, and resource conservation. Use pesticides and lawn fertilizers sparingly and correctly. Composite (sic) organic waster."
• "Practice good housekeeping by properly disposing of toxic substances like paint and paint thinners, automotive fluids and cleaning products. Take your toxic wastes to the Indian River County Recycling centers. Many of the local automotive stores collect and recycle automotive wastes."
• "When walking your dog remember to pick p the waste and dispose of it properly. Co not leave it on the ground where it will increase the public health risks by allowing harmful bacteria and nutrient (sic) to wash into the storm system. Flush it to your septic system."
• "Properly maintain your boat, use pump out facilities, and operate your boat in a responsible manner to avoid shoreline erosion."
• "Pick up litter when you see it and properly dispose of your own trash."
• "Take your car to a car wash where the water is cleaned and recycled or wash your car over your lawn where the nutrient rich soapy water is good fertilizer but can lead to algae blooms in canals stream and the Indian River Lagoon."

"It is our duty as responsible citizens to start at home and do everything possible to protect our great natural resources, especially the Indian River Lagoon, a special waterbody that provides us with all types of wildlife, recreation and enjoyment."

Sebastian's Stormwater Utility and you, working together to improve water quality and protect your property!

What's the Problem with Stormwater?

The first and most obvious issue is flooding. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, one inch of rain falling on one square mile of land equates to 17,378,560 gallons of water.

Our environmental concern is the pollution all of this water picks up as it rushes into storm drains and heads to the receiving water body. In Sebastian, the runoff water goes to the Sebastian River (sic) and the Indian River Lagoon where the pollutants are deposited. In fact, stormwater runoff is the number one pollution problem in the Indian River lagoon (sic) and in other waterways across the country. When it rains, the water carries with it dirt, discarded trash, nutrient rich fertilizers, grass clippings left on the curbside, pet waste, insecticides, motor oils, brake dust, tire fragments, and toxic chemicals, from the road. The good news is that corrective action can be taken. The City of Sebastian and Sebastian Stormwater Utility is taking strong action to fight the problems of stormwater pollution, measures that will also help alleviate potential flooding problems. There are also many things residents can do to fight the problem and keep our waterways clean and safe so we can enjoy sailing, motor boating, fishing, kayaking, jet skiing, swimming, and nature watching.

What can I do?

Sweep up leaves or grass clippings that accumulate on your driveway, sidewalk or in the street. If you are using a blower, blow them back into your yard, never into a storm drain or swale.

• Pick up pet waste and dispose of it by flushing it down the toilet or by burial.
• Redirect roof down spouts from paved areas to grassy areas.
• Wash your car on the lawn rather then on the driveway. The nutrient-rich soapy water is good fertilizer for the grass but can lead to algae blooms if it enters the Indian River Lagoon system.
• Plant native landscaping and reduce your amount of sodded areas. Native plants require less irrigation, maintenance, fertilizers and pesticides.
• Dispose of used motor oil, paint and other household hazardous waste at a designated collection center.
  
  (The IRC Collection Convenience Center for the disposal of hazardous materials is located at 7860 130th Street, Roseland and is open daily from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., except Tuesday and Wednesday. For additional information call Solid Waste Disposal District at 770-5112.)



• Never throw trash or cigarette butts out the window where they can enter the stormwater system.
• Don't overuse fertilizers. The nutrients released into the water can cause algae bloom.
• Never fertilize before rain is expected.
• Use pesticides sparingly and only on problem areas.

There’s Something in the Water: The History of the Clean Water Act

There are a few things that every human needs to live: sleep, shelter, food—and clean water. Therefore, in the 1960s, when it was found that pollution in many of America’s waterways was causing mass deaths of fish and other aquatic life, rampant disease, and even a river fire, it was time to do something about it. The Clean Water Act, officially called the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972, was enacted into law on this day, October 18, in 1972, after Congress overruled a veto from President Nixon who feared that it was too expensive. Since the passage of the Act, pollution in the nation’s waterways has decreased, but we have not achieved the goals it set.

Click here to read the full commentary.

Another Supreme Court Decision Places Downwind Communities at Risk

After a Supreme Court decision handed down on June 27, "Americans will continue to be exposed to higher levels of ground-level ozone, resulting in costly public health impacts that can be especially harmful to children and older adults."

That’s what Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) spokesperson Timothy Carroll told the AP following the high court’s block of the "Good Neighbor" pollution rule. The rule was intended to reduce emissions from factories and other industries with drifting downwind or downstream pollution.

The reduction of the EPA’s authority has severely limited the federal agency’s abilities to combat air and water pollution or carbon emissions against the backdrop of ever-escalating climate events....

Perhaps overshadowed by the Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity on July 1 was the court’s ruling just days earlier on the "Good Neighbor" rule.

But according to Sam Sankar, senior vice president for programs at the environmental law nonprofit Earthjustice, the pollution ruling indicates that "this court is no longer neutral in cases involving environmental regulations."

Click here to read the full story.

City Trees Save Lives

Green spaces significantly cool our ever-hotter cities. New research suggests more trees could cut heat-related ER visits in LA by up to two-thirds.

The humble tree has long protected humans from sickness and even death—and in the modern city, it’s still doing so. As global temperatures rise, so too does the "urban heat island effect"—the tendency for cities to absorb and hold on to the sun’s energy, which is a growing public-health crisis worldwide. On a small scale, the shade under a single tree is an invaluable refuge on a blisteringly hot day. Scaling that effect up, neighborhoods with more tree cover are measurably cooler.

Now research is showing just what an impact this can have on people’s health. A new paper finds that in Los Angeles, planting more trees and deploying more reflective surfaces—something as simple as painting roofs white—could lower temperatures so dramatically, it’d cut the number of heat-related ER visits by up to 66 percent. That research follows a previous study by the same scientists finding that one in four lives lost during heat waves could be avoided with the same techniques.

Click here to read the full story.

Change in Federal Protections for Wetlands Poses Resilience Challenge for States

Habitats provide range of benefits to nature and communities

As the frequency and severity of wildfires, floods, and droughts intensify across the U.S., scientists have long pointed to the climate resilience benefits of healthy, intact freshwater systems, including ephemeral streams and wetlands—that is, those that fill only when it precipitates.

But while some states have historically prioritized the conservation, restoration, and management of wetlands to help address extreme weather impacts, a changing federal regulatory landscape is scaling back protections for some of these systems. That shift is driven by a 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision—Sackett v. EPA—that limits the federal government’s authority under the 1972 Clean Water Act to regulate certain wetlands.

Wetlands provide numerous ecological, social, and economic benefits and are an important component of nature-based resilience planning. For states facing more extreme rain and growing flood risks, wetlands can act as sponges, absorbing excess water during floods and minimizing overflow into surrounding areas; by doing so, they protect structures, businesses, and homes. In drier climates, wetlands can help stabilize moisture levels in vegetation and can act as natural barriers and firebreaks, slowing the spread of wildfires.

Beyond these risk-mitigation functions and community benefits, wetlands provide extensive ecosystem services such as habitat for diverse species, wastewater filtration, and carbon sequestration, and they support numerous industries from fisheries and tourism to outdoor recreation.

Click here to read the full story.

Flooding and River Conservation

In river conservation we strive to make our work and stories known, and we sometimes succeed. But when rivers flood, they always make it into the news.

In what has become a milestone in the history of American flooding, and of our responses to it, a deluge justifiably called the "Great Flood" of the Mississippi held the nation rapt in 1993 with images of mayhem and misery. But American Rivers’ then President Kevin Coyle and his media master, Randy Showstack, knew that the tale of misfortune, along with the response of mercy and recovery, was not complete without asking the hard but mandatory questions: What should we be doing differently? What can we accomplish to not just alleviate the losses but to stop them from continuing? Furthermore, how can the life and health of rivers be better reflected in the stories we tell and paths we take following a flood?

Responding to these questions, American Rivers launched an insightful campaign that looked toward actually solving the flooding problem, focusing on a brighter future rather than a tragic past. Scoring the attention of national talk-show host Larry King, plus big newspapers nationwide, Coyle and Showstack urged recognition that floods are natural events destined to reoccur no matter how much we try to stop them. Our response must be to avoid damage in the future rather than just pay for it after the harm is done.

In fact, while billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent building dams to stop floods from occurring, and more billions spent building levees to keep floods away from homes, and multi-billions more subsidizing people to rebuild in the aftermath, relatively little has been spent to protect floodplains from new development that will otherwise aggravate future disasters, and little has been invested to help people relocate away from deadly hazards whenever the flood victims are willing to go.

The Natural Resources Defense Council recently found that every $1.70 our government spends helping people move away from flood hazards has been matched with $100 helping people stay in the danger zone by paying for relief, rebuilding, and subsidized insurance, all in order await the next flood. None of that covers the cost of the dams and levees that are too often ineffective or even hazardous with risks of over-topping and failure in the largest floods—not to mention the well-known damage that dams and levees often do to the nature of rivers.

The challenge to public policy here goes far beyond practical and pragmatic issues of spending, and directly into the realm of river conservation with goals of healthy rivers in mind. Floods, after all, are natural events that ultimately cannot be stopped by dams and levees. Floods are necessary phenomena that shape streams with essential pools and riffles. Floods recharge groundwater that half our population depends upon for drinking supplies, that nourish riparian corridors as the most important habitats to wildlife, and that create conditions needed for fish to survive and spawn. Rivers need floods and nature needs floodplains.

Click here to read the full guest editorial.

Updated NEPA Rules Are a Big Win for Climate, Communities, and Birds

Improvements to the National Environmental Policy Act will increase community engagement and require that federal agencies consider climate impacts.

Since it was first signed into law in 1970, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) has been one of the most important statutes for protecting birds, other wildlife, and communities from the dangers of pollution, habitat impacts, and other environmental harm. NEPA requires that federal agencies assess the potential environmental impacts of proposed actions, and that communities be notified and have a chance to weigh in before a final decision is made. NEPA applies to actions taken by the federal government that could have a significant impact on the environment, including permitting of public or private infrastructure projects, drafting of regulations, and decisions about federal grant programs. Now, the Biden Administration has announced new rules that restore NEPA to its original intent while also strengthening community engagement and addressing environmental justice and climate concerns.

The revisions to NEPA will help ensure that Americans have a say in federal decisions, spanning from highway routes to energy production on public lands. As part of this updated rule, federal agencies will now be obligated to determine and publish the potential effects of decisions on climate change, public health, and communities historically exposed to pollution. They must also identify and directly analyze reasonable alternative actions that could reduce the proposed action's climate-related effects. If well-implemented, this approach will reduce conflict and result in more robust, more resilient projects, while ensuring that the voices of impacted individuals are heard.

Click here to read the full story.

Extinction Countdown - Six Degrees of Plant Extinction

When humans bring new plants to an ecosystem, it can slowly push out the original inhabitants. Research shows us how to identify this threat before plant species become "the living dead."

Japanese knotweed. Purple loosestrife. Kudzu. Mesquite. Giant hogweed. Bitou bush. What do these plants have in common? Easy: They’re among the most "invasive" plant species on the planet. When humans bring these highly adaptable, fast-growing plants to new ecosystems, whether it’s on purpose or by accident, native species often get squeezed out and pushed toward extinction.

But, unlike predators such as rats and cats — which have threatened animal species and caused extinctions around the globe — have displaced plants like kudzu ever actually driven another plant species extinct? The authors of a 2016 paper published in the journal AoB Plants couldn’t document any confirmed cases.

Not yet, anyway. But that’s only because globalization is a relatively recent phenomenon.

"The main reason why there is no clear evidence of extinction that can be exclusively attributed to plant invasions is that invasions have not been around long enough," co-author Dave Richardson of the Centre for Invasion Biology at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, said in a prepared release. "Our research shows that plant extinction is an agonizingly slow process. However, red flags are evident in numerous locations around the world — species that now exist in fragmented populations, with radically reduced opportunities to reproduce."

Click here to read the full story.

Lionfish Invasion: A Threat to North American Ecosystems

In the quiet depths of our North American waters, a silent invasion is taking place—one that poses a severe threat to the delicate balance of our aquatic ecosystems. The culprit? The lionfish is a striking yet destructive invasive species that has found its way into the waters of North America, leaving a trail of ecological havoc in its wake. In this blog post, we delve into the alarming impact of lionfish invasion on our local marine environments and the urgent need for concerted action.

Lionfish, native to the Indo-Pacific region, were introduced to North American waters primarily through the aquarium trade. Prized for their vibrant colors and exotic appearance, these predatory fish were unknowingly released into the Atlantic Ocean. The consequences of this introduction have been far-reaching and devastating.

One of the main concerns surrounding lionfish is their voracious appetite and rapid reproduction rates. With no natural predators in North American waters, lionfish have become prolific hunters, decimating local fish populations. This disrupts the delicate balance of the food chain, putting additional pressure on already vulnerable species and leading to the decline of native marine life.

Lionfish are opportunistic feeders, preying on a wide variety of marine organisms, including small fish and crustaceans crucial for the health of coral reefs. The cascading effects of their predatory behavior extend beyond the immediate depletion of prey species, causing ripple effects throughout the ecosystem. The result is a domino effect that threatens the biodiversity and resilience of our coastal environments.

The lionfish invasion isn’t just an ecological concern; it also poses a threat to local economies dependent on fisheries and tourism.

Click here to read the full story.

New Report: True Cost of Sprawl Includes Harm to People, Wildlife, Climate

OAKLAND, Calif.— Sprawl development built far from city centers carries direct and indirect costs that pull resources away from existing neighborhoods, harming communities and natural habitats, according to a new report published today by the Center for Biological Diversity.

The True Cost of Sprawl analyzed the environmental harms — including pollution, wildfire risks and public health threats — that come with poor land-use decisions. It found that suburban and exurban housing developments increase per capita infrastructure costs by 50%, pulling public funds from schools, parks, public transportation and other needs in existing communities for things like new roads and sewer systems.

"Fueling more sprawl is lucrative for developers, but it levies a hefty price tag for the rest of us," said Elizabeth Reid-Wainscoat, a campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity. "The disturbing trend of policymakers approving more exurban projects that exacerbate the climate emergency can be reversed with a few bold policy changes. Failing to address the true costs of sprawl will mean more land-use mistakes that lock us into a future of more smog, congestion and wildfire risk."

Click here to read the full press release.

Insurers face wave of inquiries over climate risks

The nation’s property insurance industry is coming under unprecedented scrutiny with the launch of three inquiries into how climate change is causing premiums to soar and pushing insurers to withdraw from at-risk regions.

The moves by the Treasury Department, two U.S. senators and a national group of state regulators point to growing concern that climate change is destabilizing the industry and forcing millions of property owners to pay much higher rates or forgo coverage.

"Climate change is making it increasingly difficult for homeowners and consumers to find available and affordable insurance," said Graham Steele, Treasury’s assistant secretary for financial institutions.

The inquiries come as some major insurers are retreating from disaster-prone areas and as some small insurers have been driven out of business by disaster claims that overwhelmed their finances. That has pushed millions of homeowners to buy insurance from state programs of last resort.

Treasury’s Federal Insurance Office announced Wednesday that it will collect data from the nation’s largest property insurers to pinpoint areas vulnerable to "major disruptions" in insurance coverage.

The federal effort, which has never before been undertaken, will assess "the increasing impacts of climate change on household budgets" and help officials develop ways to make property insurance more available, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a statement.

Three hours after Treasury’s announcement, Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Ron Wyden of Oregon, both Democrats, said they are investigating how climate change threatens the solvency of major insurers in four disaster-ravaged states. They sent letters to 40 insurers in California, Florida, Louisiana and Texas seeking information and documents that would show how the companies are dealing with climate change and where they have pulled back coverage.

Whitehouse, chair of the Budget Committee, and Wyden said they feared that climate change and insurance scarcity will create "a widescale decline in property values."

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With seagrass discovery, we may be one good solution closer to solving climate change

The wetsuit-clad team of University of Virginia explorers waded into the salty shallows of the largest restored seagrass meadow in the world, located off the Eastern Shore of Virginia, near Chesapeake Bay.

"We took a couple of long cores, and we were really surprised when we saw what looked like seagrass tissue down at the bottom," said research professor Peter Berg, an expert on how the carbon cycle operates in ocean environments. "Some of the cores took us back to about the year 1000, which is near the time when the Vikings came to the North American continent."

Berg and his team in the UVA Department of Environmental Sciences have solved the mystery of whether seagrass beds can permanently lock in carbon. They announced Friday that the beds can indeed capture and retain carbon for centuries—even in situations where the seagrass dies off.

The findings offer new optimism for using nature-based solutions in the fight against climate change.

This much was already known: Zostera marina seagrass—often referred to simply as "eelgrass"—effectively traps carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that fuels planetary warming.

Natural storage of this kind also occurs in tidal marshes and mangrove forests. As long as the plants flourish, they will pull carbon dioxide from the air. Scientists refer to the exchange as "blue carbon"—the "blue" being for water.

While it's true the individual shoots of seagrass survive for just a year or two, eelgrass spread is prolific. The plant reproduces both sexually, by the dispersal of seeds in currents, and asexually, by their creeping rootstalks. The result can be sea meadows that cover many square miles and persist for centuries.

That makes eelgrass something of a miracle in a sea that's constantly in flux.

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EPA announces new waters rule after Supreme Court decision weakening protections

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Tuesday announced a new rule that could curtail protections from more than 60 percent of protected lands, in response to a May Supreme Court ruling that curtailed which waters are subject to federal Clean Water Act protections.

The revised Waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule breaks from longstanding federal waters protections to require that protected wetlands have a clearer link to waterways like oceans and rivers.

EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in a statement that the agency had no choice but to narrow the rule’s scope following the Sackett v. EPA decision, in which the Supreme Court’s conservative majority wrote that protections could only apply where there is a “continuous surface connection” to a protected body of water.

"We’ve moved quickly to finalize amendments to the definition of ‘waters of the United States’ to provide a clear path forward that adheres to the Supreme Court’s ruling. EPA will never waver from our responsibility to ensure clean water for all," Regan said in a statement. "Moving forward, we will do everything we can with our existing authorities and resources to help communities, states, and Tribes protect the clean water upon which we all depend."

The National Wildlife Federation called the new rule inadequate in a statement, characterizing it as a consequence of the court’s positions on environmental protections.

"This rule spells out how the Sackett decision has undermined our ability to prevent the destruction of our nation’s wetlands, which protect drinking water, absorb floods and provide habitat for wildlife," Jim Murphy, the National Wildlife Federation’s director of legal advocacy, said in a statement.

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Medicine residue is everywhere in our rivers and lakes—and fish are behaving strangely

"If people understand that what they’re using and washing down their drains are ending up at their local rivers, streams, lakes, they might think twice. It doesn’t just go away."

For all the well-documented sources of environmental pollution—think chemical manufacturers, energy plants, mining operations, and agricultural processes—there’s another major source of contamination that continues to get short shrift by those charged with protecting the nation’s waterways and the public’s health: Pharmaceuticals and personal care products.

"Across the board, we don’t have our heads around this problem," said Emma Rosi, senior scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies. And considering America’s voracious appetite for pharmaceuticals—there were 3.7 billion drugs ordered or provided through physician visits alone in 2015—the scope of the problem is unsurprisingly staggering.

Chemical compounds found in pharmaceutical and personal care products are showing up ubiquitously in the nation’s rivers, lakes, groundwater, and drinking water—even remote regions of national parks. Up to 80 percent of streams in the U.S. alone are contaminated with chemicals, including pharmaceuticals, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). What’s more, the sheer volume of different persistent compounds found in the environment vastly complicates the regulation and remediation of them.

The primary culprit is human waste—urine and feces—that makes its way to wastewater treatment plants (and septic systems -ed.) unequipped to filter out all the various contaminants in the water. But it’s not just human waste that’s a problem.

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Dominion over the Earth? Who were we kidding? What the wildfires teach us

We might not survive our own climate foolishness. But the planet will go on spinning without us

WASHINGTON — On a clear day, the view from the top-floor terrace of the Kennedy Center is one of the best in the nation’s capital.

Turn one way, and the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials, along with the iconic pointed top of the Washington Monument, frame the sky above the National Mall. Glance uptown, and there’s the U.S. Capitol dome. Turn behind you, casting your gaze across the Potomac River, and northern Virginia’s sprawl runs away from its banks, stretching interminably into the suburbs.

On Wednesday, with much of the Eastern Seaboard cloaked in dense smog from wildfires raging hundreds of miles away across the Canadian border, all those historic sites you learned about in sixth grade social studies class were still visible – but the dense haze, and the glare from the sunlight bouncing off of it, also was impossible to miss.

At late afternoon on Wednesday, it wasn’t as bad as the sepia-toned sky that had settled over midtown Manhattan, making the city’s streets look like one enormous Ken Burns documentary brought to life, but it was still bad.

It also was a reminder that, for as much as we talk about "saving the Earth," we’re really talking about saving ourselves. And every time we inflict some injury on our shared home, we move that much closer to hastening our own demise.

At 4.5 billion years old, it’s survived meteor strikes, the dinosaurs, ice ages, tectonic shifts that have erased and redrawn the planet’s surface like a cosmic Etch-a-Sketch, volcanic eruptions, destructive storms, and reality television.

For the planet, this too, shall pass.

But for the rest of us, whose time here is barely a rounding error, the stakes could not be higher.

A fast reading of the first chapter of Genesis would have us believe that the "dominion" that God granted us over "the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth," means that we’re somehow in charge.

We’re not. And you don’t have to go any further than the next verse to be reminded that it’s a gift not to be taken for granted.

Click here to read the full commentary.

Restoring coastal ecosystems can mitigate climate change

Excess greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, are a major driver of climate change. Mitigating climate change in the future will require both decarbonization – such as transitioning to renewable energy sources – and carbon dioxide removal, which involves extracting already existing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. A recent study led by Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) and Yale University has proposed a unique approach to permanently capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through coastal ecosystem restoration.

Specifically, the researchers have focused on blue carbon ecosystems, such as seagrass and mangroves, which naturally capture carbon dioxide through photosynthesis and convert it into living tissue.

"Mangroves and seagrasses extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere all day long and turn it into biomass," said senior author Christopher Reinhard, an associate professor of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech. "Some of this biomass can get buried in sediments, and if it stays there, then you’ve basically just removed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere."

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U.S. House fails to override Biden veto of WOTUS legislation

The U.S. House on Tuesday failed to override a President Joe Biden veto, which means the administration’s regulation stays in place expanding which waters and wetlands can be regulated under the federal Clean Water Act.

The House did not clear the two-thirds mark needed to overturn Biden’s veto of a resolution that would have blocked the administration’s recent Waters of the U.S., or WOTUS, regulation.

Democrats generally view the rule as expanding the government’s power to ensure natural waters remain clean.

House Transportation and Infrastructure ranking Democrat Rick Larsen of Washington said voting to strip the rule would only further confuse the regulatory landscape and offers no benefits for the environment, public health or the economy.

The definition of what constitutes Waters of the United States has shifted several times in recent years as the past three presidential administrations have all sought to impose different interpretations and court challenges have at least partially invalidated each version.

The issue comes from amendments Congress added to the Clean Water Act in 1972 that said the statute covered "waters of the United States," while states were responsible for environmental protection of other waterways.

Click here to read the full story.

Do We Have a Right to Clean Water?

In today’s politically charged climate, the daily news seems filled with reports of someone calling attention to our rights. So it seems more than appropriate to ask: Do we have a right to clean water?

It’s no small issue. California publishes a map that shows more than 40 algae-laden waterways. Ohio is famous for Lake Erie summer algae blooms. Indeed, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has declared that all 50 states have a major environmental problem with harmful algal blooms, and the problems have been going on without satisfactory action for many years.

We should have a fundamental right to clean water, says the Florida Right to Clean Water organization, but expecting state politicians to act is like believing Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is a true story. Putting it in the state’s constitution is the only way to go, and in Florida, they’re set on getting it done. Moreover, the effort may serve as a model for other states.

Harmful blooms of blue-green algae not only slime up the waterways but also can impact human health, aquatic ecosystems and economies.

This initiative, of course, follows years of failed attempts to get Florida lawmakers to pass essential legislation over the concerted lobbying of the state’s sugar and phosphate mining industries, which have reportedly spent as much as $11 million in a single political campaign cycle.

Click here to read the full story.

Climate Change Enables the Spread of a Dangerous Flesh-Eating Bacteria in US Coastal Waters, Study Says

Though the occurrence of infections is small, the mortality rate is as high as 18 percent.

Cases of a potentially fatal infection from a seawater-borne pathogen have increased off the U.S. Atlantic coast as ocean waters warmed over the last 30 years, and are expected to rise further in future because of climate change, according to a study published on Thursday by Scientific Reports, an open-access journal for research on the natural sciences and other topics.

The incidence of infections from Vibrio vulnificus, a pathogen that thrives in shallow, brackish water, was eight times greater in the eastern U.S. in 2018 than it was in 1988, and its range shifted northward to areas where waters were previously too cold to support it, according to the paper, "Climate Warming and Increasing Vibrio Vulnificus Infections in North America," by academic researchers in the U.S., England and Spain.

By the middle of the 21st century, the pathogen is expected to become more common in major population centers, including New York City, and by the end of the century, infections may be present in every U.S. Atlantic coast state if carbon emissions follow a medium- to high-level trajectory, the report said.

Infections can enter the body through skin wounds or by eating raw or undercooked shellfish, and can turn necrotic in as little as one or two days. That requires, in about 10 percent of cases, the surgical removal of infected flesh or the amputation of limbs. The mortality rate is as high as 18 percent, and fatalities have occurred as soon as 48 hours after exposure, the report said.

"Our projections indicate that climate change will have a major effect on V. vulnificus infection distribution and number in Eastern USA, likely due to warming coastal waters favoring presence of bacteria and elevated temperatures leading to more coastal recreation," the study said.

Click here to read the full story.

Endangered species across America: Coastal California and Florida are home to the most threatened species - over 300 each - while land-locked states like Montana and Wyoming have less than 25

California and Florida are home to hundreds of endangered species, the most in the United States, according to conservation researchers.

The numbers come from a state-by-state look at which endangered species call which parts of America their home, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List of Threatened Species.

An original breakdown was created by a Reddit user meant to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the signing of the US Endangered Species Act into law.

The law was signed by President Richard Nixon after near-unanimous passage in the House and Senate in late 1973. It's designed to protect endangered species from extinction caused by 'economic growth and development un-tempered by adequate concern and conservation.' In a ruling affirming the law, the Supreme Court called it 'the most comprehensive legislation for the preservation of endangered species enacted by any nation.'

Florida comes in second (after California) with 341, and, unsurprisingly, the state's endangered species include many sea creatures. In addition to aquatic life like turtles and hammerhead sharks, it also has many endangered migratory birds.

In June, the White House announced plans to strengthen the ESA after rollbacks were instituted during the Trump administration.

'This is a decisive move toward undoing the damage done by the previous administration to the bedrock law that protects endangered and threatened animal species and their habitat,' Sara Amundson, president of the Humane Society Legislative Fund, said in a statement at the time.

'Among other steps, federal agencies under the previous administration made it more difficult to grant and maintain protections for species facing extinction and created carve-outs catering to both state and special interests that privileged profits and economic development over the survival of imperiled wildlife,' Amundson added. 'Things are not supposed to work that way when it comes to ESA protections.'

Click here to read the full story.

EPA broadens protections for U.S. waterways, reversing Trump

The decision — a setback for various industries — broadens which wetlands, streams and rivers can be regulated under the Clean Water Act but stops short of a controversial Obama-era rule

The Biden administration on Friday imposed a rule expanding the definition of waterways that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has authority to regulate, a move that reverses a Trump-era change and seeks to overcome nearly a decade of challenges to EPA powers, including a pending Supreme Court case.

The EPA said its rule strikes a balance it hoped would protect waterways as well as commerce, returning its Waters of the United States regulatory framework to something resembling its state before it became a focus of political debate in 2015. That year, the Obama administration significantly and controversially widened the scope of the Clean Water Act to cover even ephemeral streams and ponds; Trump dramatically weakened EPA’s water pollution authority with a 2019 rule of his own.

In broadening EPA’s powers once again, Administrator Michael Regan said the agency aimed "to deliver a durable definition of WOTUS that safeguards our nation’s waters, strengthens economic opportunity, and protects people’s health while providing greater certainty for farmers, ranchers, and landowners."

Environmentalists say the rule is central to efforts to restore the health of impaired waterways and fragile wildlife habitats because it gives federal and state governments powers to limit the flow of pollutants, including livestock waste, construction runoff and industrial effluent. The regulation determines how broadly the government can enforce the Clean Water Act, the landmark 1972 law credited with gradual, though sometimes inconsistent, improvement to the health of polluted and degraded rivers and lakes.

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A blueprint for clean water everywhere, for everyone

Celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act

While the national discourse is focused on issues that divide us as a country, clean water is one of the values that should unite us. No matter who you are or where you are from, we all need clean, safe water for drinking, for growing the food we eat, and for nurturing a healthy environment. Just like the veins and arteries in our bodies, rivers and streams are the circulatory system of our country. Rivers truly are essential for all life.

...my home river and rivers across our country looked a lot different 50 years ago. Before the safeguards of the Clean Water Act were in place, the Potomac River smelled so bad, you’d often have to hold your breath when walking by. Every time I played in or around the river, I would get skin infections. Other rivers from Maine’s Androscoggin to Ohio’s Cuyahoga were so polluted they caught fire. Across the country, rivers were treated as sewers – they were health hazards, unfit to support life.

The Clean Water Act, passed with bipartisan support, was a historic milestone establishing a fundamental right to clean water. It remains one of our nation’s most vital safeguards for the health and safety of our communities and our environment.

Any weakening of national clean water safeguards would be a disaster. The Sackett v. EPA case could throw out 50 years of clean water protections — 50 years of reasonable, rational safeguards — that our rivers, communities and our families rely on.

Click here to read the full story.

What Is a Wetland Worth?

As the Supreme Court considers the fate of American wetlands, Annie Proulx’s Fen, Bog, and Swamp offers an elegiac love letter to overlooked ecosystems.

Annie Proulx was not able to travel for her book on wetlands. But amidst a global pandemic, Proulx, who is 87 years old, was stuck at home. So instead, as she explains in the forward to Fen, Bog, and Swamp, which was released today, she drew from an extensive personal treasury of books, conversations, and memories of lessons in swamp appreciation. The earliest came from her mother. Growing up in eastern Connecticut in the 1930s, Proulx learned how to navigate the grassy tussocks around channels of sodden or submerged ground. An inaccessible, even frightening territory of bugs, muck, and stench opened up to her as a place of wonder, even delight.

It is unlikely that many of the places Proulx recalls are still there, at least not in the form she remembers them. That is because, as she writes, "the history of wetlands is the history of their destruction." The swamps of southern New England, like so much of America's wetlands, have since been encroached on by nearly a century of suburban development, and by centuries of draining and dredging before that. People have always been hanging nature’s sponges out to dry, until the land is firm enough to support a farm or a strip mall. It has been going on so long that attaining any perspective on the losses requires stepping back thousands of years. Or as Proulx puts it:

Most of the world's wetlands came into being as the last ice age melted, gurgled and gushed. In ancient days fens, bogs, swamps and marine estuaries were the Earth's most desirable and dependable resource places, attracting and supporting myriad species. The diversity and numbers of living creatures in springtime wetlands and overhead must have made a stupefying roar audible from afar. We wouldn't know.

Proulx, who has previously traced humanity's instinct to ravage nature in fictional works..., is the latest in a long line of wetland enthusiasts, many of whose accounts populate the book. Before her, there were painters and writers who became hip to swamps, finding inspiration in what she calls the "rare novelties and eerie beauty" of landscapes others considered ugly. People fought the wetlands, seeking to tame them for uses they considered productive. Little did they know how productive those places already were, through services like filtering water, flood protection, and storing carbon.

It is a tricky task to get people to value a place that gives us so much "discomfort, irritation, bewilderment and frustration," as Proulx writes. It can be a chore to appreciate all the things these ecosystems do for us, and harder still to see that value in a way that extends beyond the wants and needs of our species.

Click here to read the full story.

How the EPA’s lax regulation of dangerous pesticides is hurting public health and the US economy

Since the 1970s, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been tasked with using the best available science to regulate pesticides in order to ensure they are safe.

But a mounting body of evidence indicates that the agency long-heralded for its early decision to ban DDT has evolved into a more timid regulator that has not kept pace with the rest of the world to protect the health of people and wildlife.

That problematic trend was highlighted recently in two separate investigations by the EPA’s own watchdog. It found numerous scientific integrity and transparency failures prior to the decision to expand the use of a pesticide called dicamba that has subsequently caused damage to millions of acres of rural landscapes across the U.S. and its decision to downgrade the cancer classification of a pesticide called 1,3-D that is associated with serious harms to farmworkers.

My research has found that there has been a significant decline in the health-protective actions taken by the EPA’s pesticide office over the years. In this article, I outline how our regulators’ failings are negatively impacting not only public health but also the nation’s agricultural economy. This is particularly evident when comparing U.S. pesticide regulations to other agricultural economies around the world....

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What You Need to Know About Sackett v. EPA

The upcoming U.S. Supreme Court case is nothing less than a judgment on the Clean Water Act itself.

It wouldn’t be hyperbole to call it the most important water-related U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) case to come along in a generation. Indeed, the outcome of Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the first case to be heard in the court’s 2022–2023 term, will determine the future efficacy of the Clean Water Act by deciding whether wetlands are—or aren’t—deserving of federal protection.

Given the close relationship between wetlands and the larger system of streams, rivers, and tributaries to which they belong, the court’s ruling is certain to have a profound impact on the health and quality of all of America’s waterways.

Since 1972, the Clean Water Act has played an essential role in protecting the country’s diverse array of aquatic environments from pollution and keeping them safe for fishing, swimming, and wildlife (not to mention as sources of drinking water for millions of people). And for roughly that same amount of time, the act has also been the target of polluters and developers who would like to limit its regulatory scope. One way they’ve attempted to do so? By focusing on a particular—and pivotal—bit of language found in the law, five simple words that carry enormous legal weight: "waters of the United States" (or WOTUS, for short).

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EPA Unveils Plan to Protect Wildlife From Pesticides, Environmentalists Call for More Concrete Steps

Environmental campaigners on Tuesday cautiously embraced the Biden administration’s historic new blueprint to guard endangered species from pesticides as a much-needed step forward while also calling for more concrete moves to protect wildlife, people and the planet.

Welcoming the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) "first-ever comprehensive workplan" on the topic, Center for Biological Diversity environmental health director Lori Ann Burd said in a statement that "I’m encouraged that the EPA has finally acknowledged the massive problem it created by refusing, for decades, to consider the impacts of chemical poisons on our most vulnerable plants and animals."

"The agency’s refusal to consider how pesticides affect endangered species has pushed countless species closer to extinction," Burd continued.

"I’m hopeful the EPA will back up its words with concrete actions to fix these historic wrongs and move quickly to implement real, on-the-ground protections to stop species from going extinct and finally protect our incredible wildlife and plants from pesticides.

The EPA statement acknowledged the agency "has an opportunity and an obligation to improve how it meets its duties under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) when it registers pesticides under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA)," noting that "for most of EPA’s history, the agency has met these duties for less than 5% of its FIFRA decisions.

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50% of U.S. Lakes and Rivers Are Too Polluted for Swimming, Fishing, Drinking

Fifty years ago, the U.S. passed the Clean Water Act with the goal of ensuring “fishable, swimmable” water across the U.S. by 1983.

Now, a new report from the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP) finds the country has fallen far short of that goal. In fact, about half of the nation’s lakes and rivers are too polluted for swimming, fishing or drinking.

"The Clean Water Act should be celebrated on its 50th birthday for making America's waterways significantly cleaner," EIP Executive Director Eric Schaeffer said in a press release announcing the report. "However, we need more funding, stronger enforcement, and better control of farm runoff to clean up waters that are still polluted after half a century."

Florida... had the most lake acres impaired for swimming and aquatic life.

"Florida's toxic-algae crisis is the direct result of lax enforcement of phosphorus and nitrogen pollution limits in cleanup plans required by the Clean Water Act," Friends of the Everglades Executive Director Eve Samples said in the press release. "Because these limits rely on voluntary ‘best management practices’ and a presumption of compliance, agricultural polluters regularly exceed phosphorus runoff limits while dodging responsibility — leading to harmful algal blooms in Florida’s lakes, rivers, estuaries, and even on saltwater beaches."

Click here to read the full story.

The Day the World Stps Shopping

Journalist and author J.B. MacKinnon imagines what would happen—to our economies, our products, our planet, our selves—if we committed to consuming far fewer of the Earth’s resources. MacKinnon argues in his new book that reducing our consumption by just five percent would make a big difference for the planet — and we would barely feel the change. He'll explain in this Cambridge Forum on Wednesday with Patagonia's in-house philosopher, Vincent Stanley.

Click here to watch the full interview.

Murkowski bill focuses on blue carbon ecosystems

Sen. Lisa Murkowski is co-sponsoring a blue-carbon initiative that will invest $15 million a year to create a national map of mangroves, seagrasses and other coastal ecosystems that naturally store greenhouse gases and reduce climate change.

The Blue Carbon for Our Planet Act also instructs the National Academy of Sciences to assess carbon dioxide storage in deep seafloor environments and "coastal carbon markets."

According to Murkowski’s office, the Blue Carbon for Our Planet Act focuses on the need to better understand so-called blue carbon ecosystems, which serve as nature’s buffer for coastal communities.

The ecosystems span mangroves, tidal marshes, seagrasses and kelp forests. They stop erosion, filter pollution from the water and serve as a fish habitat. The coastal plants absorb carbon dioxide from the water and air. CO2 is stored in the trunks, stems, leaves, roots and soil.

"Blue carbon ecosystems have great potential to help mitigate the impacts of climate change in Alaska and elsewhere," Murkowski said in a prepared statement. "By protecting our shorelines from coastal erosion, storing incredible amounts of carbon, and helping to address ocean acidification, these ecosystems are a significant asset in our efforts to protect the planet."

Click here to read the full story.

EPA: Two Most Widely Used Pesticides Likely Harm Majority of Endangered Species

WASHINGTON— The Environmental Protection Agency has determined that the endocrine-disrupting pesticide atrazine and cancer-linked pesticide glyphosate are each likely to harm more than 1,000 of the nation’s most endangered plants and animals.

The finalized evaluations found that use of the herbicide glyphosate is likely causing harm to 1,676 of the plants and animals protected under the Endangered Species Act. Atrazine is likely harming 1,013 protected species.

"It’s no surprise that these chemical poisons are causing severe harm to imperiled wildlife since U.S. use exceeds 70 million pounds of atrazine and 300 million pounds of glyphosate every year," said Nathan Donley, environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity. "It’s long past time for atrazine to be banned, and the EPA needs to crack down on the reckless overuse of glyphosate. Without real conservation action, these pesticides will continue to push our most endangered wildlife closer to extinction."

The EPA has for decades refused to comply with its obligation under the Endangered Species Act to assess the harms of pesticides to protected plants and animals. But it was finally forced to do this evaluation under the terms of a 2016 legal agreement with the Center and Pesticide Action Network.

Click here to read the full press release.

EPA Plans to Clean Up Troubled Chemical and Pesticide Programs

The EPA announced the creation of two internal scientific advisory panels after whistleblower accounts of internal corruption.

Whistleblowers speak out about the Environmental Protection Agency’s practice of routinely approving dangerous chemicals.

Tthe Environmental Protection Agency laid out plans to improve scientific integrity today, including the creation of two internal science policy advisory councils. One will focus on the Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics and the Office of Pesticide Programs and will be chaired by a science policy adviser, a new senior-level role within the agency. The EPA will also be overhauling its New Chemicals Division.

The announcement comes after The Intercept reported extensively on allegations of corruption from five whistleblowers within the New Chemicals Division, which is part of the Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics, and detailed extensive problems within the Office of Pesticide Programs.

The whistleblowers have provided detailed evidence of interference with the assessment of dozens of new chemicals submitted to the agency by companies planning to introduce them to market. The scientists documented intense pressure within the agency to downplay or remove evidence of the potential harms caused by chemicals, including neurological effects, birth defects, and cancer. They also reported that their findings were altered or deleted from assessments without their knowledge.

Click here to read the full story.

The Department of Yes

How Pesticide Companies Corrupted the EPA and Poisoned America

Lianne Sheppard was sitting in her office on a Friday afternoon when a colleague approached her with an old study on the safety of chlorpyrifos. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the Environmental Protection Agency had used the study to set a safety level for the exposure to the pesticide, which is widely used on fruits and vegetables. But when Sheppard, a professor and biostatistician at the University of Washington, looked at the original research that was the basis for the paper and the safety thresholds that were calculated from it, she realized that the underlying data didn’t support its conclusion.

"I tried to reproduce their analysis, and I couldn’t," Sheppard said of the study, which was commissioned by Dow Chemical, the maker of chlorpyrifos, in the late 1960s. The research was conducted by an Albany Medical College professor named Frederick Coulston, who exposed 16 incarcerated men to the pesticide, dividing them into four groups — a low-, medium-, and high-dose group as well as a control — and recording their nervous system responses. The resulting paper, which was written by Dow statisticians based on Coulston’s data, concluded that at the highest dose the pesticide depressed the activity of cholinesterase, an enzyme necessary for neuromuscular function. Sheppard was able to confirm that finding. But while Dow concluded that the middle- and low-range doses had no effect, Sheppard found effects in both groups. She also saw how Dow had used the paper to help the EPA set an incorrect “no-effects level,” or NOEL, which is critical for calculating a safety threshold.

"I realized that in the middle-dose group, which is the one that mattered for the no-effects level, they had conveniently left out one of the two baseline measurement days," said Sheppard. "The outrageous thing was that the group they declared as NOEL was only that because they left out data from their analysis." In a peer-reviewed paper published in October 2020, Sheppard and her colleagues concluded that "the omission of valid data without justification was a form of data falsification."

On one level, the story of the Coultson paper is simple: Decades ago, a seemingly small omission happened to slip past regulators. And yet the consequences of that one statistical sleight of hand, and the government’s failure to notice it, are immense. Between 1992 and 2017, chlorpyrifos was one of the most heavily used pesticides in the U.S., with some 450 million pounds of it sprayed on crops. Countless children and pregnant people were exposed to what we now know were unsafe levels. And those exposures have since been found to increase the risk of a wide range of neurodevelopmental problems in children, including ADHD and other attention disorders, autism, tremors, and intelligence deficits, as well as memory and motor problems.

Click here tp read the full story.

NASA Finds Direct Evidence of Human-Caused Climate Change

While scientists have long agreed that human activity was the biggest driver of climate change, there hasn’t yet been evidence from direct observation (the gold standard of scientific research) until now.

NASA has completed the first study of its kind, which has calculated the recent causes of climate change by directly observing satellite data. These observations are in line with what models have been suggesting for years: that the increase in greenhouse gases and other pollution in the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels has been the biggest driver of climate change.

While there has been other types of evidence to demonstrate anthropogenic climate change, this is the first time scientists have been able to track how humans are directly changing Earth’s energy balance on the global scale.

Though these results are not surprising, Brian Soden, co-author of the study and professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, summed up the importance of the study in an interview with CBS:

"In reality, the observational results came in just as predicted by the theory. There is no surprise in the results, but rather it’s really more of 'dotting the i's and crossing the t's' on anthropogenic [human-caused] climate change. It closes that last link between rising CO2 levels and planetary warming."

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5 Rivers Congress Should Safeguard Now

Wild and scenic designation would help wildlife, habitat, and local economies

Free-flowing rivers are the lifeblood of wild landscapes, providing habitat and food to myriad species both in the water and on the surrounding land. Rivers also help drive local economies: Boating, fishing, and other river activities account for nearly $56 billion in U.S. annual gross output, according to the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis—a figure that does not include significant additional consumer spending on lodging, food services, and so on. Further, these waterways are the source of drinking water for more than two-thirds of people in the United States.

And yet fewer than 2% of American rivers are federally designated as wild and scenic, a status that would help protect their ecologic, economic, and recreational value. Congress can increase that percentage, and the International Day of Action on Rivers, observed on March 14, is a good time to remind lawmakers why they should do so.

Click here to read the full story.

Invasive Insects and Diseases Are Killing Our Forests

America wasn’t ready for the pandemic. And it isn’t ready for the next contagion to strike our woodlands.

It’s not just humans. Trees also suffer plagues.

In the past 120 years, voracious insects and fungi have swept across North America with frightening regularity, laying low the chestnut, the elm, the hemlock and, most recently, the ash. Each of those trees anchored natural ecosystems, and human economies and cultures. And while climate change and wildfires grab the headlines, invasive species have so far proved to be a far greater threat to forest biodiversity in the temperate world.

In many ways... tree plagues are surprisingly similar to human ones — and these similarities can help us manage both types of threats.

Human and tree plagues move around the globe via travel and trade. Columbus and other European explorers brought smallpox, measles and other viruses to the New World starting in the 15th century, and viruses have been leaping oceans ever since.

In the millions of years since the continents separated from what had been larger land masses, trees like chestnut and ash had diverged into distinct species that provided sustenance to specialized communities of insects and microorganisms. Trees evolved defensive chemicals — a sort of tree immune system — to keep all this feeding at manageable levels. That’s why, for example, white oak trees can sustain more than 500 caterpillar species while retaining enough leaves to feed themselves.

The trans-ocean movement of tree species upended things. Occasionally, a pest landed on a tree similar enough to its host tree to be digestible, yet dissimilar enough to lack defenses against the pest. In the early 1950s, for example, woolly adelgids from Japan were discovered in the United States. The tiny insects found the sap of Eastern hemlocks delicious and began to multiply, decimating hemlock trees.

This story of the hemlock infestation highlights a second parallel to human pandemics: There’s usually a lag between when tree plagues begin to take hold and when they become noticeable. Once established, they become extremely difficult to eradicate and can cause billions of dollars in damage.

Click here to read the full story.

The Final Frontier: When Nature is a Nuisance to Development

"In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches."

Star Trek always opened with the mission of the Enterprise: “Space, the Final Frontier...to boldly go where no man has gone before!” In the Trump administration, the mission seems to be: "Habitat, the final frontier...take boldly what little remains!"

This is because the predatory voyages of a corrupted free enterprise have led President Trump and his cabinet to declare nature a nuisance to development and industry. The latest example of this mission is a new rule jointly posted on August 5 in the Federal Register by the Interior Department’s Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Commerce Department’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The two agencies proposed new definitions of "habitat" under the Endangered Species Act that is essentially limited solely to where creatures are right now, not where they could be. Conservation groups have long argued that areas that could host endangered species should be preserved as much as possible, in a nation that loses 6,000 acres of open space every day to development. That argument today includes anticipating where species might migrate in adjusting to climate change.

Click here to read the full story.

As The West Burns, The Trump Administration Races to Demolish Environmental Protections

AS WILDFIRES DESTROY millions of acres in California, Oregon, and Washington, and an unprecedented series of hurricanes cause historic flooding in the South, leaving parts of the region uninhabitable, the Trump administration has been racing to reverse rules designed to prevent exactly these kinds of climate disasters.

Throughout his presidency, Donald Trump has presided over the rollback of more environmental rules and regulations than any other president. The result has been that, even as climate change is on track to soon force millions of Americans from their homes and eventually heat the Earth to temperatures not seen for 34 million years, the leader of the country that bears more responsibility for the climate change than any other has doubled down on the decimation of efforts meant to combat both pollution and the climate crisis.

“The Trump administration is the first in the history of the agency to devote itself so relentlessly to a rollback agenda without even a pretense of meaningfully reducing environmental pollution,” said John Walke, an attorney and senior adviser to the NRDC Action Fund.

As soon as he entered office, Trump began the environmental reversals that will likely be the most enduring legacy of his administration. In March 2017, the Environmental Protection Agency signaled that it would not complete the planned ban of a neurotoxic pesticide called chlorpyrifos. The decision came after consulting closely with industry groups and after the Dow Chemical Company, which makes the pesticide, donated $1 million to the Trump inaugural committee. The Trump EPA has since completed dozens of other environmental rollbacks, including gutting the Clean Water Act; weakening restrictions on facilities that emit toxic air pollution; scrapping a rule that required mining companies to set aside money to cover the costs of cleaning up pollution; rewriting the National Environmental Policy Act so that it no longer requires government to consider the cumulative environmental impacts of major federal projects on communities; and ensuring that the coal industry is now able to dump mining waste in streams.

Click here to read the full story.

Climate change is bad news for your beach vacation

Will sea walls replace accessible beaches in our lifetimes?

For almost as long as people have been building near beaches, they have been protecting those buildings with sea walls. These barriers, which deflect strong waves and prevent coastal erosion, were constructed around ancient Roman harbors and medieval British cities. Archaeologists in Israel have even uncovered evidence of a 7,000-year-old rock wall constructed in the aftermath of the Ice Age to hold back rising oceans as the world defrosted.

But modern, human-caused climate change is escalating the threats that make sea walls necessary. Sea levels are rising, putting communities at greater risk from floods. Storms are intensifying, causing more and more sand to erode from beaches. Cities such as New York, Boston and Miami — as well as smaller, beachfront communities from California to Cape Cod — could lose thousands of homes and suffer billions of dollars in damage if they don’t find a way to hold back the water.

Yet these barriers can also transform the very places they aim to protect. A hard structure might keep the land behind it safe from the intense energy of ocean waves. But all that energy will instead erode the sandy beaches in front of the sea wall, erasing the places where people like to lounge and play. Shoreline habitats that have evolved with the give and take of the tides — salt marshes, sea grass meadows, rolling expanses of sand dunes — will also be disrupted. And, by deflecting the force of oncoming waves, “hard defenses” in front of one community may contribute to a greater deluge in another.

Nature has its own mechanisms for protecting against storms. The dense, anchored root systems of mangrove forests help dissipate storm energy, prevent erosion and filter water as it drains from the land into the sea. As an added bonus, the world’s mangroves are a potent tool for removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere; one study found that 75 billion pounds of carbon are sequestered in these rich habitats each year.

Click here to read the full story.

Supreme Court rejects Trump administration’s view on key aspect of Clean Water Act

The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected the Trump administration’s reading of a key part of the Clean Water Act as creating an “obvious loophole” in its enforcement, and gave a partial win to environmentalists in a case from Hawaii.

The court ruled 6 to 3 that a wastewater treatment plant in Hawaii could not avoid provisions of the act, which regulates the release of pollutants into rivers, lakes and seas, by pumping the pollutants first into groundwater, from which they eventually reach the ocean.

“This decision is a huge victory for clean water,” said David Henkin, an attorney for Earthjustice who argued the case. “The Supreme Court has rejected the Trump administration’s effort to blow a big hole in the Clean Water Act’s protections for rivers, lakes and oceans.”

The test endorsed by the court’s majority is “one under which environmentalists can prevail in most every kind of case that environmentalists have brought under the Clean Water Act,” said Richard Lazarus, an environmental law expert at Harvard Law School.

Click here to read the full story.

Clean Water Act - Trump's rewrite is finalized. What happens now?

The Trump administration today finalized its controversial definition of what marshes, wetlands and streams quality for protections under the Clean Water Act.

But don't expect regulatory certainty anytime soon.

EPA published its Navigable Waters Protection Rule in the Federal Register this morning, nearly four months after the administration unveiled the rule.

Publication starts a 60-day clock before the rule goes into effect and waves a green flag for an onslaught of lawsuits likely to be filed around the country. The litigation will undoubtedly run beyond Election Day, so the future of the rule likely depends on whether Trump wins a second term.

Environmentalists and several left-leaning states have signaled they are ready to sue, saying the rule — which cuts protections for most of the country's wetlands — is far too narrow.

On the other side, at least one conservative group stands ready to file, arguing the rule doesn't go far enough in paring back the Clean Water Act's reach.

Click here to read the full story.

There’s a Solution to the Fight Over Clean Water—and Trump’s Rule Isn’t It

I’ve been watching as the media covers the new “Navigable Waters Protection Rule,” which was recently finalized by the Trump administration.

The rule has been the subject of much debate. The divide most notably falls between two groups: farmers and environmentalists.

As a farmer for over four decades, my question is: why must these groups be at odds with each other? The answer is, they don’t have to be.

The New Navigable Waters Protection Rule, Explained

Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency announced a consequential change to federal regulations that define “navigable waters” under the Clean Water Act. The new rules maintain protection of many categories of waters but significantly reduce the range of protected wetlands.

Under federal law, the Clean Water Act prohibits discharges of pollutants from point sources to “navigable waters,” also referred to as “waters of the United States” (or WOTUS), unless permitted by either the EPA or the Army Corps of Engineers. The definition of these waters, therefore, sets the boundaries of these federal agencies’ authority.

Click here to read the full story.

The Clean Water Case of the Century

The U.S. Supreme Court is reviewing Hawaii Wildlife Fund v. County of Maui. The fate of the nation’s clean water hangs in the balance.

The nation's highest court is set to settle a decades-long legal dispute involving a wastewater treatment plant, its pollution discharges, and a partially dead coral reef in Hawai?i.

What started as a local water pollution case could have disastrous repercussions for clean water across the United States.

On Nov. 6, 2019, Earthjustice attorney David Henkin presented oral arguments before the nine Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court in Hawai?i Wildlife Fund v. County of Maui. A decision is expected in 2020.

At its most basic level, this case is about whether a wastewater treatment facility in Maui is violating the Clean Water Act by polluting the ocean indirectly through groundwater.

In 2012, after years of complaints from the community and unsuccessful negotiations with county officials over the destruction the pollution has caused to the reef and marine life, Earthjustice sued Maui County on behalf of four Maui community groups....

Click here to read the full story.

Lake Champlain Steward Intercepts Hydrilla

“Clean, Drain and Dry” is the motto for boaters across the Lake Champlain basin. This was not the case for a boat and trailer that was about to be launched into Lake Champlain at the South Hero John Guilmette access site in early September. The Lake Champlain Basin Program’s boat launch steward Matthew Gorton was conducting routine courtesy boat inspections to prevent the introduction and spread of aquatic invasive species when he noticed an unusual looking plant hanging off the trailer backing up into the Lake.

While Lake Champlain is host to 51 known nonnative and invasive aquatic species, Hydrilla verticillata has not yet been found in Lake Champlain. The watercraft carrying the plant in South Hero was last in the Connecticut River, a system in which the highly invasive plant hydrilla is established.

Hydrilla is an aquatic plant, common and often misnamed in aquarium trade, that grows aggressively while outcompeting most native plants. Hydrilla causes significant economic and ecological impacts in Florida where it grows in dense beds.

Click here to read the full story.

What the Trump Administration Is Doing to Your Water

The administration is attempting to undo the landmark 1972 Clean Water Act. Read on to learn why you should be concerned.

Everyone and everything needs clean water. Without clean drinking water, humans get sick. Plants, animals, aquatic life, and the entire food web need clean water to survive. That’s why the Trump administration’s efforts to gut federal clean water protections are so disturbing.

The administration repealed the Clean Water Rule and is now attempting to undo the landmark 1972 Clean Water Act.

Congress passed the Clean Water Act in 1972. Even though the 1972 Clean Water Act established that all “waters of the United States” would be federally protected, things haven’t exactly panned out that way.

Instead, there have been a lot of attacks by industry and developers over which waters should really get the protections of the Act, because polluters would prefer to not be subjected to the Acts requirements and the permits that ensure those requirements are applied.

The Clean Water Rule — enacted by the Corps and EPA in 2015 under the Obama administration — sought to clear up this confusion and provide science-based guidance on how the Corps and EPA would decide which waters are protected under the Act. Obama’s EPA first completed a comprehensive study on watershed health and connectivity and checked its work with panels of the most significant experts in all fields related to water from biology to geology to hydrology. They then rolled out a new rule based on that science. Environmentalists generally received the Clean Water Rule as a step in the right direction.

The repeal of the Clean Water Rule effectively threw away those science-based definitions, so now decision-making about Clean Water Act permits will revert back to the old, convoluted system.

Click here to read the full story.

Last Chance for a More Sustainable Future

A More Sustainable Path to 2050

There is a clear path to 2050 in which both nature and 10 billion people can thrive together, says Heather Tallis, a lead scientist for TNC.

A few years ago The Nature Conservancy began a process of reassessing its vision and goals for prioritizing its work around the globe. The resulting statement called for a world where “nature and people thrive, and people act to conserve nature for its own sake and its ability to fulfill and enrich our lives.”

That sounds like a sweet future, but if you’re a scientist, like I am, you immediately start to wonder what that statement means in a practical sense. Could we actually get there? Is it even possible for people and nature to thrive together?

Our leaders had the same question. In fact, when the vision statement was first presented at a board meeting, our president leaned over and asked me if we had the science to support it.

“No,” I said. “But we can try to figure it out.”

Ultimately, I assembled a collaborative team of researchers to take a hard look at whether it really is possible to do better for both people and nature: Can we have a future where people get the food, energy and economic growth they need without sacrificing more nature?

We need to do much more to remove the policy and economic barriers that still make a transition to clean energy hard. Technology is no longer the major limiting factor. We are.

How will we get there? By far the most critical action each of us can take is to support global leaders who have a plan for stopping climate change in our lifetimes. Climate may not feel like the most pressing issue at times—what with the economy, health care, education and other issues taking up headlines. But the science is clear: We’ve got 10 years to get our emissions under control. That’s it.

Click here to read the full article.

Clean Water Rule Rollback May Benefit Golfer-in-Chief While Wiping Out Protections for Millions of Americans

Note: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is expected to announce a rollback of the Clean Water Rule tomorrow, that would dramatically curtail the number of protected waterways and wetlands.

“I want clean water. Very important.” So spoke the nation’s Golfer-in-Chief just a few weeks ago.

But he apparently doesn’t want obtaining clean water to interfere with the prerogatives and profits of his businesses.

A rollback of the rule would benefit Trump, who owns or has Trump-branded golf courses in Florida (two), New York (three), New Jersey (two), Virginia (outside Washington, D.C.), California, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. As the nation’s Golfer-in-Chief, Trump is aiding his industry – and his own businesses – by undercutting vital protections for Americans’ drinking water and waterways.

The Obama administration’s Clean Water Rule was designed to protect the cleanliness and health of our nation’s waters. It is hard to exaggerate the importance of this objective. Almost one in three Americans – roughly 117 million people – get their drinking water from streams that lacked clear protection before issuance of the rule. Golf course owners – including Trump – shouldn’t be able to pollute the nation’s water with pesticides and fertilizers, as a rollback would in many cases allow them to do. News reports indicate we should expect not just a recalibration but a major scaling back of Clean Water Act application, leaving the public in the rough.

Click here to read the full press release.

America's Coastal Waters, Bays, and Estuaries in Bad Shape

EPA Classifies the Vast Majority of Our Marine Waters “Impaired” by Pollution

Washington, DC — As Americans flock to the beach for the long Labor Day weekend, they are likely to find their coastal holiday destinations under severe eco-stress, according to federal figures posted today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). Shorelines, bays, and estuaries suffer from high levels of mercury, PCBs, sewage, and urban runoff, fouling both the waters and their marine life.

“South Florida’s ocean waters are in the grips of massive, toxic red tides that may be a harbinger for other states, as climate change warms their waters while they become more nutrient-laden,” stated PEER Science Policy Director Kyla Bennett, a scientist and attorney formerly with EPA. “The take-away message should be that America cannot keep using the sea as our main pollution disposal system.”

These indices of marine water quality have declined significantly since EPA first started displaying this data in 2012, with more than double-digit percentage increases in impairment for each category.

Click here to read the full press release.

America Losing the War for Clean Water

More Than Half of U.S. Rivers and Two-Thirds of Lakes and Reservoirs Impaired

Washington, DC — Most American rivers, streams, lakes, and ponds are seriously polluted, and getting worse, according to federal figures posted today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). These freshwaters increasingly are not potable or swimmable, and contain fish not fit to eat.

“Florida’s current water quality emergency should be a national wakeup call,” stated PEER Science Policy Director Kyla Bennett, a scientist and attorney formerly with EPA, noting that the figures also do not account for new, emerging chemicals, many of which are damaging to aquatic life but for which there are no pollution standards. “We are losing the battle to protect the quality of America’s freshwaters.”

In 2012, EPA released a new database (called “How's My Waterway?”) which then showed similar but better water conditions. The figures are drawn from state reports submitted to EPA. Yet, EPA exerts little quality control over these reports, and reporting states often skew assessment methodologies to mask problems. Thus, states have little incentive to monitor water quality and, in many cases, have no dedicated budget for the task.

Click here to read the full press release.

Arctic ice choked with record amount of plastic from cigarette butts to packing material

If you are wondering what happens to all those cigarette butts flicked on sidewalks and plastic packing peanuts blowing down the street, researchers have found an alarming amount of particles from them deep in the ice of the Arctic Ocean.

The record amount of microplastic appears to be courtesy of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and increased fishing and shipping in the Arctic, researchers at the Alfred Wegener Institute of the Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research report.

The study raises concerns about the impact on human and sea life.

Ice samples from five regions across the Arctic Ocean contained up to 12,000 of the tiny particles per liter of sea ice, researchers say. More than half the particles trapped in the ice were less than 1/500th of an inch wide — less than one-tenth the thickness of a credit card.

“They could easily be ingested by arctic microorganisms,” said biologist and report author Ilka Peeken. “No one can say for certain how harmful these tiny plastic particles are for marine life, or ultimately also for human beings.”

Click here to read the full story.

Men Resist Green Behavior as Unmanly

A surprising reason for resistance to environmental goods and habits

Women have long surpassed men in the arena of environmental action; across age groups and countries, females tend to live a more eco-friendly lifestyle. Compared to men, women litter less, recycle more, and leave a smaller carbon footprint. Some researchers have suggested that personality differences, such as women’s prioritization of altruism, may help to explain this gender gap in green behavior.

Our own research suggests an additional possibility: men may shun eco-friendly behavior because of what it conveys about their masculinity. It’s not that men don’t care about the environment. But they also tend to want to feel macho, and they worry that eco-friendly behaviors might brand them as feminine.

The research... showed that there is a psychological link between eco-friendliness and perceptions of femininity. Due to this “green-feminine stereotype,” both men and women judged eco-friendly products, behaviors, and consumers as more feminine than their non-green counterparts. In one experiment, participants of both sexes described an individual who brought a reusable canvas bag to the grocery store as more feminine than someone who used a plastic bag—regardless of whether the shopper was a male or female.

Click here to read the full story.

Tom Evans’ conservation legacy forged through consensus

Former Republican Congressman Tom Evans sipped brandies in Richard Nixon’s den during a private fireside chat. He bet on the ponies with Democrat Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill. He broke party ranks to bring one of Jimmy Carter’s energy bills to the floor.

National Wildlife Federation President Collin O’Mara called the Delaware Republican “one of the most nonpartisan politicians I’ve ever met.”

Conservationists say Evans’ friendships were pivotal in the passage of a law that protected almost 2,700 miles of shoreline and probably saved lives and homes this hurricane season. The New York Times called it a “magic formula” and “the most important environmental law nobody has even heard of.”

The Coastal Barrier Resources Act of 1982, midwifed by Evans and the late Sen. John H. Chaffee of Rhode Island, allows anyone to build anything on 3.5 million acres of fragile seaside property, but it forces them to pick up the check — no federal flood insurance, no federal funds for roads or utilities and no federal bailouts after landfalling hurricanes.

“Some people don’t understand wetlands are very important in flood control,” Evans said. “They are exactly like a sponge, and, if we had not destroyed so many of them, Katrina, for example, would have been much less harmful. The same thing is true in Houston. The same thing is true in Puerto Rico. They’re not going to stop the water, but they’re going to make it a lot less harmful.”

“It’s one of the most important acts since 1980 to conserve habitat, protect communities and keep people out of harm’s way,” O’Mara said.

Of Evans, O’Mara said, “I would put him in the top 15 to 20 members of Congress in history in terms of working on environmentalist issues.”

Click here to read the full story.

Hurricane Irma, Rising Seas and Our Endangered Cities

Why the back-to-back blows of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma have certainly woken people up to the risks of climate change

President Donald Trump and EPA administrator Scott Pruitt may not want to talk about climate change right now, but judging from these storms, Mother Nature sure does.

I began covering energy and climate change in 1990, shortly after George H. W. Bush was elected president and announced the fossil fuels were going to be a big part of American life again. I wrote about coal mines and electric cars (My test-drive of a prototype Tesla roadster through the hills above Palo Alto made me an early and enthusiastic convert to electric cars), and interviewed influential climate scientists like NASA's James Hansen. I understood a lot about climate change in an intellectual and theoretical way, but I had not yet had what Al Gore calls an "oh-shit" moment. For me, my oh-shit moment was Hurricane Sandy, which spun into New York City in 2012. In the days after, as I walked through the sodden, mold-smelling streets of the Lower East Side, I understood not just the power of Mother Nature, but, more specifically, the power of water to destroy – or at least, deeply wound – a great American city. And it wasn't just big storm surges. As one scientist said to me, "Imagine a world where the water comes in ... but then doesn’t go out."

In the aftermath of Sandy, I tried to imagine exactly that. A scientist I was interviewing suggested that if I wanted to see a city that was really at risk from sea level rise, I should visit Miami. So I did. I arrived during the annual king tides (the highest tides of the year), and was stunned to find myself wading through knee-deep water in the swanky streets of Miami Beach. It became clear to me within 24 hours that the city of Miami was doomed.

Click here to read the full story.

EPA asked the public which regulations to gut — and got an earful about leaving them alone

Last month, the Environmental Protection Agency put out a call for comments about what regulations are in need of repeal, replacement or modification. The effort stemmed from an executive order issued by President Trump earlier this year instructing agencies to reexamine regulations that “eliminate jobs, or inhibit job creation” and/or “impose costs that exceed benefits.”

More than 55,100 responses rolled in by the time the comment period closed on Monday — but they were full of Americans sharing their experiences of growing up with dirty air and water, and with pleas for the agency not to undo safeguards that could return the country to more a more polluted era.

“Know your history or you’ll be doomed to repeat it,” one person wrote. “Environmental regulations came about for a reason. There is scientific reasoning behind the need for it. It is not a conspiracy to harm corporations. It’s an attempt to make the people’s lives better.”

“Have we failed to learn from history, and forgotten the harm done to our air, water, and wetlands?” EPA is for the people.

Click here to read the full story.

Historic Climate Case Led By Kids Is Headed to Trial

Twenty-one children want to hold the federal government accountable for climate change, potentially changing how we handle environmental law.

Early one morning this past August, as torrential rains pounded Louisiana, a 13-year-old named Jayden Foytlin woke up, stepped onto her bedroom floor, and found herself ankle-deep in water. At first she was confused, Foytlin says. She knew the storm would cause flooding, but it wasn’t supposed to reach her home, in the small city of Rayne. By the time the storm passed, 7 trillion gallons of rain had fallen across the state, flooding more than 60,000 homes and leaving 13 people dead. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the odds that the central Gulf region would be hit by a rain event of that magnitude have increased by at least 40 percent compared to a century ago because of climate change.

Foytlin first learned about climate change when she was seven or eight. “I always thought, ‘Oh, there are people that will handle it,’ ” she recalls. But as the years passed, “I noticed that nothing is getting better,” she says. “They aren’t taking control.” So in 2015, when she and her mother heard that an Oregon-based nonprofit called Our Children’s Trust (OCT) was looking for youth plaintiffs to participate in a potentially groundbreaking climate lawsuit, she wanted in. In August of that year, Foytlin and 20 other children from around the country—joined by renowned environmental expert James Hansen—filed a civil suit that accuses the government of failing to protect future generations from the impacts of climate change.

Click here to read the full story.

Why Are Dolphins Dying on East Coast? Experts Alarmed

Nearly 120 corpses have washed up so far this summer, government says

Bottlenose dolphins are washing up dead in unusually high numbers along the U.S. East Coast this summer—a "very alarming" situation that has experts scrambling to decipher the cause.

Nearly 120 corpses have washed ashore in coastal states from New York to Virginia in July and the first week of August, which is much higher than the normal number of strandings attributed to natural deaths. Virginia has had the highest mortality, with 64 animals found during that period.

Gregory Bossart, the Georgia Aquarium's chief veterinarian and pathologist, has been studying the impact of infectious disease and pollutants on bottlenose dolphins in Florida's Indian River Lagoon (map) for several years.

He's found that many of the lagoon's dolphins carry toxic mercury at 20 times the level permitted in human food by the U.S. government.

Said NOAA's [Trevor] Spradlin, "Marine mammals are like the canary in the coal mine"—many bottlenose dolphins live on the same coasts and eat the same fish that we do.

Click here to read the full story.

A Republican Case for Climate Action

Each of us took turns over the past 43 years running the Environmental Protection Agency. We served Republican presidents, but we have a message that transcends political affiliation: the United States must move now on substantive steps to curb climate change, at home and internationally.

There is no longer any credible scientific debate about the basic facts: our world continues to warm, with the last decade the hottest in modern records, and the deep ocean warming faster than the earth’s atmosphere. Sea level is rising. Arctic Sea ice is melting years faster than projected.

The costs of inaction are undeniable. The lines of scientific evidence grow only stronger and more numerous. And the window of time remaining to act is growing smaller: delay could mean that warming becomes “locked in.”

Mr. Obama’s plan is just a start. More will be required. But we must continue efforts to reduce the climate-altering pollutants that threaten our planet. The only uncertainty about our warming world is how bad the changes will get, and how soon. What is most clear is that there is no time to waste.

Click here to read the full editorial letter.

Trash Inc - The Secfet Life of Garbage

Garbage. It's everywhere — even in the middle of the oceans — and it's pure gold for companies like Waste Management and Republic Services who dominate this $52 billion-a-year industry. From curbside collection by trucks costing $250,000 each, to per-ton tipping fees at landfills, there's money to be made at every point as more than half of the 250 million tons of trash created in the United States each year reaches its final resting place.

At a cost of $1 million per acre to construct, operate and ultimately close in an environmentally feasible method, modern landfills are technological marvels — a far cry from the town dump that still resonates in most people's perceptions. Not only do they make money for their owners, they add millions to the economic wellbeing of the towns that house them. Technologies, such as Landfill Natural Gas and Waste To Energy, are giving garbage a second life, turning trash into power sources and helping to solve mounting problems.

Across the world, we’re producing more trash than ever before…nearly a ton per year for every man, woman and child in the U.S. Nearly half of it winds up in landfills....

For more information about the program and to view video segments and slideshows from the program, please visit their website.

New Report Warns of Expanding Threat of Hypoxia in U. S. Coastal Waters

Declining oxygen levels in Nation's waters forming dead zones, destroying habitats

A report issued today by key environmental and scientific federal agencies assesses the increasing prevalence of low-oxygen “dead zones” in U.S. coastal waters and outlines a series of research and policy steps that could help reverse the decades-long trend.

The interagency report notes that incidents of hypoxia—a condition in which oxygen levels drop so low that fish and other animals are stressed or killed--–have increased nearly 30-fold since 1960. Incidents of hypoxia were documented in nearly 50 percent of the 647 waterways assessed for the new report, including the Gulf of Mexico, home to one of the largest such zones in the world.

To read more about, and download a copy of the full report, please visit the NOAA website.

Study Reveals Mercury Contamination in Fish Nationwide

Scientists detected mercury contamination in every fish sampled in 291 streams across the country. About a quarter of these fish were found to contain mercury at levels exceeding the criterion for the protection of people who consume average amounts of fish. More than two-thirds of the fish exceeded the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency level of concern for fish-eating mammals. Some of the highest levels of mercury in fish were found in the tea- colored or "blackwater" streams in Florida, North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana - areas associated with relatively undeveloped forested watersheds containing abundant wetlands compared to the rest of the country. High levels of mercury in fish also were found in relatively undeveloped watersheds in the Northeast and the Upper Midwest.

For more information, please visit the National Water-Quality Assessment Program website.

Also see U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's National Listing of Fish Advisories www.epa.gov/waterscience/fish/advisories/.

The Encyclopedia of Life, No Bookshelf Required

Imagine the Book of All Species: a single volume made up of one-page descriptions of every species known to science. On one page is the blue-footed booby. On another, the Douglas fir. Another, the oyster mushroom. If you owned the Book of All Species, you would need quite a bookshelf to hold it. Just to cover the 1.8 million known species, the book would have to be more than 300 feet long. And you’d have to be ready to expand the bookshelf strikingly, because scientists estimate there are 10 times more species waiting to be discovered.

It sounds surreal, and yet scientists are writing the Book of All Species. Or to be more precise, they are building a Web site called the Encyclopedia of Life (www.eol.org). On Thursday its authors, an international team of scientists, will introduce the first 30,000 pages, and within a decade, they predict, they will have the other 1.77 million.

While many of those pages may be sparse at first, the authors hope that the world’s scientific community will pool all of its knowledge on the pages. Unlike a page of paper, a page of the Encyclopedia of Life can hold as much information as scientists can upload. “It’s going to have everything known on it, and everything new is going to be added as we go along,” said Edward O. Wilson, the Harvard biologist who spearheaded the Encyclopedia of Life and now serves as its honorary chairman.

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The Power of Green

One day Iraq, our post-9/11 trauma and the divisiveness of the Bush years will all be behind us — and America will need, and want, to get its groove back. We will need to find a way to reknit America at home, reconnect America abroad and restore America to its natural place in the global order — as the beacon of progress, hope and inspiration. I have an idea how. It’s called “green.”

In the world of ideas, to name something is to own it. If you can name an issue, you can own the issue. One thing that always struck me about the term “green” was the degree to which, for so many years, it was defined by its opponents — by the people who wanted to disparage it. And they defined it as “liberal,” “tree-hugging,” “sissy,” “girlie-man,” “unpatriotic,” “vaguely French.”

Well, I want to rename “green.” I want to rename it geostrategic, geoeconomic, capitalistic and patriotic. I want to do that because I think that living, working, designing, manufacturing and projecting America in a green way can be the basis of a new unifying political movement for the 21st century. A redefined, broader and more muscular green ideology is not meant to trump the traditional Republican and Democratic agendas but rather to bridge them when it comes to addressing the three major issues facing every American today: jobs, temperature and terrorism.

How do our kids compete in a flatter world? How do they thrive in a warmer world? How do they survive in a more dangerous world? Those are, in a nutshell, the big questions facing America at the dawn of the 21st century. But these problems are so large in scale that they can only be effectively addressed by an America with 50 green states — not an America divided between red and blue states.

Because a new green ideology, properly defined, has the power to mobilize liberals and conservatives, evangelicals and atheists, big business and environmentalists around an agenda that can both pull us together and propel us forward. That’s why I say: We don’t just need the first black president. We need the first green president. We don’t just need the first woman president. We need the first environmental president. We don’t just need a president who has been toughened by years as a prisoner of war but a president who is tough enough to level with the American people about the profound economic, geopolitical and climate threats posed by our addiction to oil — and to offer a real plan to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.

... Bush won’t lead a Green New Deal, but his successor must if America is going to maintain its leadership and living standard. Unfortunately, today’s presidential hopefuls are largely full of hot air on the climate-energy issue. Not one of them is proposing anything hard, like a carbon or gasoline tax, and if you think we can deal with these huge problems without asking the American people to do anything hard, you’re a fool or a fraud.

Being serious starts with reframing the whole issue — helping Americans understand, as the Carnegie Fellow David Rothkopf puts it, “that we’re not ‘post-Cold War’ anymore — we’re pre-something totally new.” I’d say we’re in the “pre-climate war era.” Unless we create a more carbon-free world, we will not preserve the free world. Intensifying climate change, energy wars and petroauthoritarianism will curtail our life choices and our children’s opportunities every bit as much as Communism once did for half the planet.

Equally important, presidential candidates need to help Americans understand that green is not about cutting back. It’s about creating a new cornucopia of abundance for the next generation by inventing a whole new industry. It’s about getting our best brains out of hedge funds and into innovations that will not only give us the clean-power industrial assets to preserve our American dream but also give us the technologies that billions of others need to realize their own dreams without destroying the planet. It’s about making America safer by breaking our addiction to a fuel that is powering regimes deeply hostile to our values. And, finally, it’s about making America the global environmental leader, instead of laggard, which as Schwarzenegger argues would “create a very powerful side product.” Those who dislike America because of Iraq, he explained, would at least be able to say, “Well, I don’t like them for the war, but I do like them because they show such unbelievable leadership — not just with their blue jeans and hamburgers but with the environment. People will love us for that. That’s not existing right now.”

... Am I optimistic? I want to be. But I am also old-fashioned. I don’t believe the world will effectively address the climate-energy challenge without America, its president, its government, its industry, its markets and its people all leading the parade. Green has to become part of America’s DNA. We’re getting there. Green has hit Main Street — it’s now more than a hobby — but it’s still less than a new way of life.

Why? Because big transformations — women’s suffrage, for instance — usually happen when a lot of aggrieved people take to the streets, the politicians react and laws get changed. But the climate-energy debate is more muted and slow-moving. Why? Because the people who will be most harmed by the climate-energy crisis haven’t been born yet.

... An unusual situation like this calls for the ethic of stewardship. Stewardship is what parents do for their kids: think about the long term, so they can have a better future. It is much easier to get families to do that than whole societies, but that is our challenge. In many ways, our parents rose to such a challenge in World War II — when an entire generation mobilized to preserve our way of life. That is why they were called the Greatest Generation. Our kids will only call us the Greatest Generation if we rise to our challenge and become the Greenest Generation.

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Crossing the Divide - Evangelists and Environmentalists Join Forces

All Things Considered, January 21, 2007 · A group of leading scientists and evangelicals have chosen to put aside their differences on how the world came to be and join forces to protect its future. They've formed a coalition and are lobbying Capitol Hill on environmental issues.

Richard Cizik is the vice president of the National Association of Evangelicals. He believes God made the world in matter of days. Eric Chivian is a biochemist from Harvard University who maintains that man evolved from matter over billions of years.

Chivian says that, before meeting each other, Cizik may have thought of him and other scientists as "latte-sipping, Prius-driving, endive-munching, New York Times-reading snobs. And we might have seen them as Hummer-driving, bible-thumping, fire-breathing…"

"…snake-handling fundamentalists," Cizik finishes.

Unlikely allies? Perhaps. But that's exactly what they've become in their mutual quest to fight global warming. The two men have launched what they're calling a dialog between leading figures in science and religion, specifically evangelical Christianity. They're not pushing any specific legislation, but they're trying to raise the public profile of environmental issues.

Click here to read the full story and a link to listen to the entire broadcast online.

Introduction to the Clean Water Act

The Clean Water Act celebrated its fortieth anniversary in October 2012. The EPA has produced a "slide show" to help the public understand the Act and how it is used. A link to the slide show can be found on the EPA's "Watershed Academy Web" homepage.

New Reports Assess the Condition of U.S. Coral Reefs, Outline Strategy to Reduce Threats

NOAA announces the availability of two new reports on coral reef ecosystems produced in cooperation with the United States Coral Reef Task Force and other partners.

The new report—the first-ever national look at the condition of U.S. coral reefs—points to pressures posing increasing risks to reefs, particularly in certain "hot spots" located near population centers.

Non-Native Plants and Animals Expanding Ranges 100 Times Faster than Native Species, Finds New Research Led by UMass Amherst

An international team of scientists has recently found that non-native species are expanding their ranges many orders of magnitude faster than native ones, in large part due to inadvertent human help. Even seemingly sedentary non-native plants are moving at three times the speed of their native counterparts in a race where, because of the rapid pace of climate change and its effect on habitat, speed matters. To survive, plants and animals need to be shifting their ranges by 3.25 kilometers per year just to keep up with the increasing temperatures and associated climactic shifts—a speed that native species cannot manage without human help.

"We know that the numbers of invasive plant species are increasing exponentially worldwide," says Bethany Bradley, professor of environmental conservation at UMass Amherst and the paper’s lead author. "We also know that plant nurseries are exacerbating the climate-driven spread of invasives and that confronting invasives is one of the best ways to prepare for climate change."

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A River's Rights: Indigenous Kukama Women Lead the Way with Landmark Legal Victory

Defending the rights of nature represents a big step forward in the fight against climate change.

Here’s one of the most powerful pieces of good news you probably missed this year: a group of Indigenous women in Peru succeeded in asserting the legal right to integrity and protection of the Marañón River, a sacred waterway that flows from the Andes to the Amazon. This is a significant victory for the preservation of nature, water, forests, and biodiversity; in other words, life itself. It’s also a big step forward in the fight against climate change, and for the rights of nature, both topics that were debated last week at the 11th Pan Amazonian Social Forum in Rurrenabaque, Bolivia.

The women warriors behind this legal victory—the second of its kind in Latin America after the case of the Atrato River in Colombia—come from the Huaynakana Kamatahuara Kana, a Kukama women’s federation in the lower Marañón Watershed.

The Federation began its fight in 2021, when Kukama women from 29 communities, led by Mari Luz Canaquiri, filed an injunction action against Petroperú (a Peruvian state-owned petroleum enterprise), the Ministry of Environment, and other government bodies. The women were outraged at how the ecosystems of their rivers, forests, and sacred plants were being poisoned and systematically destroyed by more than 40 years of oil spills.

After years of struggle, the Kukama women leaders succeeded in getting Judge Corely Armas Chapiama, of the Mixed Court of Nauta-Loreto, to rule in favor of their demands in March 2024. It was so evident that more than four decades of oil spills have destroyed the livelihoods of the Amazonian communities living along the tributaries of the Marañon River.

As the words of leader Mariluz Canaquiri of the Shapajilla Native Community make clear: "in our culture, the Marañón River is a living being. The Kukama have a close relationship with the rivers, the Purahua lives there, the largest boa in the Amazon, which for us is the mother of the rivers. For the Kukama people, the river is the heart of life, which pumps blood to the whole body.

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'Momentous Day for Nature': EU Adopts First-of-Its-Kind Habitat Restoration Law

One campaigner called the law’s passage a "ray of hope for Europe’s nature, future generations, and the livelihoods of rural communities."

Environmental groups celebrated a "historic" victory on Monday as the European Union adopted a law that seeks to restore at least 20% of land and sea habitats by 2030 and 90% to 100% by 2050, following a narrow vote by the European Council that swung on the vote of an Austrian minister who defied conservatives in her own government.

The new law, aimed at reversing catastrophic biodiversity loss, includes a sweeping array of protections for European ecosystems, from forests to wetlands to coral reefs. It also aims to restore organic soils in agricultural ecosystems, with special provisions for grassland pollinators and farmland birds. It was described as the "first ever" E.U. law aimed at nature recovery.

"After years of intense campaigning and many ups and downs, we are jubilant that this law is now reality—this day will go down in history as a turning point for nature and society," World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF) EU, one of several organizations that campaigned for the law under a #RestoreNature banner, wrote on social media.

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How Climate Change is Impacting US River Systems

A changing climate impacts the quality and quantity of water in US rivers. Observed and projected changes in precipitation intensity, groundwater runoff, flooding, fires, sea level rise, droughts, and seasonal conditions invariably affect regional water resources and impact energy production, infrastructure, human health, agriculture, and ecosystems.

Rivers are an important component of our water system. Less than one percent of the water on Earth is available for human use. It starts out as rain or snow that melts and flows through rivers to lakes or into underground aquifers. In addition to the groundwater we rely on for day-to-day household uses like cooking, bathing, or brushing our teeth, water from rivers is used to grow our food, manufacture goods, and produce energy.

River flooding is one of the more than 50 climate change indicators that the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has identified to examine the impacts of climate change on people and the environment.

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People are altering decomposition rates in waterways

Faster decomposition could exacerbate greenhouse gas emissions, threaten biodiversity

Humans may be accelerating the rate at which organic matter decomposes in rivers and streams on a global scale, according to a new study from the University of Georgia, Oakland University and Kent State University.

That could pose a threat to biodiversity in waterways around the world and increase the amount of carbon in Earth's atmosphere, potentially exacerbating climate change.

Rivers and streams play a key role in the global carbon cycle by storing and decomposing large amounts of leaves, branches and other plant matter.

Typically, the process would go something like this: Leaf falls into river. Bacteria and fungi colonize the leaf. An insect eats the bacteria and fungi, using the carbon stored in the leaf to grow and make more insects. A fish eats the insect.

Rivers impacted by urbanization and agriculture are changing how quickly leaf litter decomposes.

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Mangroves protect communities from storms. Half are at risk of collapse, report finds

Half of the world's mangrove ecosystems, with trees whose roots stretch down into brackish water, are at risk of collapse. That's according to the first assessment from the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a leading scientific authority on the status of species and ecosystems. The new report finds that sea level rise fueled by climate change is the biggest risk.

"The results were quite shocking," says Marcos Valderrabano, program manager for the International Union for Conservation of Nature based in Switzerland. "Fifty percent of the mangroves worldwide are at risk of collapse, and that's much more than what we expected."

Mangroves can be found along coastlines and estuaries, including in Florida and Louisiana, and have evolved to thrive in stressful conditions, getting flooded by tides and hit by waves.

Mostly straddling the equator and subtropical regions, mangrove forests act as a buffer against storms and cyclones. Valderrabano says for millions of people, mangroves act as "protection against that strength of the sea."

Mangrove ecosystems provide homes for animals like birds, crabs, and fish. Many fish spend part of their life cycle in mangroves, says Dan Friess, professor at Tulane University in New Orleans and one of more than 250 experts who contributed to the assessment. Some young fish go into mangroves "when they're really small," Friess says, "and they can hide from predators within the roots of the mangroves."

Mangroves are also important for economic activity — particularly fishing— and sometimes have deep cultural significance.

While mangroves are used to surviving in harsh conditions, the new report finds climate change threatens these ecosystems.

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Overlooked coastal marine ecosystems can capture more carbon dioxide than previously thought, finds study

The ability of coastal ecosystems to capture and store carbon dioxide has been underestimated. The question is not just about seagrass meadows and mangrove forests, which have already attracted attention, but a wide range of different ecosystems whose carbon storing function has been overlooked. However, for these areas to be able to combat climate change, they must be protected.

Coastal ecosystems have been shown to be extremely important in combating rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. This is thanks to their ability to capture and store carbon dioxide, known as blue carbon.

Historically, blue carbon research has focused almost exclusively on seagrass meadows, mangrove forests and tidal marshes, while other ecosystems have been overlooked. The importance of these other ecosystems in mitigating climate change has been underrated, and the total amount of carbon sequestered in the oceans has thus been greatly underestimated.

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This saltwater lagoon is legally a person. Here’s why that could help it survive

Mar Menor, Europe’s biggest saltwater lagoon, sits on the coast of southeastern Spain. A strip of sand separates the 52-square-mile area from the Mediterranean, creating warm shallow waters and enticing beaches popular with tourists.

But in recent years these crystalline waters have turned murky with algal blooms, mounds of dead fish have washed up on its shores, and the once fresh and salty scent has been replaced by a foul stench of decay.

House prices in the area have fallen, tourist revenue dropped and local people were left furious. But one of them had a new idea to protect the lagoon: what if it was given the same legal rights as a person? What if it had a right to exist and protection against the damage being done to it?

Teresa Vicente, a professor of philosophy of law at the local University of Murcia, first asked these questions in 2019. Three years later, following an intense campaign, Mar Menor became the first ecosystem in Europe to be designated legal personhood rights.

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Mangroves in Crisis: The 50,000% Carbon Time Bomb Ticking Towards 2100

Alarming projections show a significant rise in carbon emissions from mangrove forests by 2100, highlighting the critical need for protection and understanding of human impacts on these vital ecosystems.

The annual rate of carbon emissions due to the degradation of carbon stocks in mangrove forests is predicted to rise by nearly 50,000% by the end of the century, according to a new study published in IOP Publishing’s journal Environmental Research Letters. Mangroves in regions such as southern India, southeastern China, Singapore, and eastern Australia are particularly affected.

Human Activities and Mangrove Decline

Mangrove forests store a large amount of carbon, particularly in their soils, however human development in these areas has led to the degradation of these carbon stocks. Over the past 20 years, a substantial number of mangrove forests have been replaced by agriculture, aquaculture, and urban land management, leading global mangrove carbon stocks to decline by 158.4 million tonnes – releasing the same level of carbon emissions as flying the entire US population from New York to London.

The Critical Role of Mangroves in Carbon Cycling

Mangrove forests cover approximately 0.1% of the Earth’s land surface but play a vital role in providing wildlife habitats and regulating global climate stability. These mangroves store a large amount of carbon, particularly in their soils, and are essential to regulating carbon cycling on a global scale. Mangrove soils contain three to four times the mass of carbon typically found in boreal, temperate, or tropical forests.

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Wetland conservation most effective ocean-based climate action

Imperial College Business School, London, BIP management consultancy, and strategic design studio Sketchin collaborated on research to ascertain which mitigation approaches have the greatest impact.

The work concluded that wetland conservation offered more potential to tackle the effects of climate change compared to other ocean-based solutions. Overall, preservation and protection of habitats such as mangroves offers a chance to sequester 144MTCo2e in Europe alone.

"Our collaborative effort with BIP and Sketchin has shed light on the need to conserve and restore ocean ecosystems," said a spokesperson for Imperial College Business School, London. These thriving environments are the heartbeat of our "Blue Planet," providing the very oxygen we breathe and sustaining life as we know it.

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Scientists warn invasive pests are taking a staggering toll on society

The authors of a major new U.N.-backed report say invasive species are costing the world more than $423 billion a year

Invasive pests are wreaking havoc across the planet, destroying crops, disseminating pathogens, depleting fish people rely on for food and driving native plants and animals toward extinction, according to a major report backed by the United Nations.

The landmark assessment found more than 3,500 harmful invasive species cost society more than $423 billion a year, a tally only expected to grow as the modern age of global trade and travel continues to supercharge the spread of plants and animals across continents like never before.

By hitching a ride on cargo ships and passenger jets, exotic species are bridging oceans, mountain ranges and other geographic divides otherwise insurmountable without human help. The result is a great scrambling of the planet’s flora and fauna, with dire implications for humans and the ecosystems they depend on.

"One of the things that we stress that really is the tremendous threat this does pose to — and I know this is going to sound grandiose — but to human civilization," said Peter Stoett, an Ontario Tech University professor who helped lead a group of about seven dozen experts in writing the report.

The spread of plants and animals between continents is one of the main causes of Earth’s ongoing biodiversity crisis, an extinction event on par with the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. Invasive species are playing a role in 60 percent of extinctions, according to the report.

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Scientists Sound The Alarm Over Dramatic Loss of 3 Billion Birds in North America: ‘We're Watching… Extinction Happen’

The staggering drop in bird populations serves as a sobering signal of an urgent need to take action.

Since the 1970s, bird enthusiasts have watched the skies empty and heard the birdsongs go silent as nearly 3 billion birds vanished in North America. Disturbed by the findings of an expansive body of research, scientists across the globe are sounding the alarm as half of the world’s bird populations are in decline.

Found in every corner of the world from the snowy tundra of the Arctic to the lush rainforests of the Amazon, birds play a critical role in maintaining the delicate balance of their ecosystems. Robust and diverse bird populations advance pollination, help transport seeds, and fertilize the soil with their droppings.

Observing and cataloging these fascinating creatures has long been a popular hobby and an important source of data for researchers and conservationists. Thanks in part to citizen science reporting sites such as eBird, researchers have collected a wealth of information documenting the troubling decline of bird populations on nearly every continent.

Peter Marra, a conservation biologist and dean of Georgetown University’s Earth Commons Institute, and his colleagues studied multiple bird-monitoring datasets and found a disturbing trend. Using different methods to estimate population changes, Marra told Knowable Magazine, "they all told us the same thing, which was that we’re watching the process of extinction happen."

A recent article in the journal One Health explains that bird biodiversity benefits human health. Robust and diverse populations of birds contribute to pest control, naturally dispose of animal remains, and even drive tourism in some areas, notes the National Audubon Society.

Critically, birds serve as an important indicator of environmental distress, from alerting miners of dangerous gases in underground tunnels to illuminating the lethal consequences of insecticides like DDT. As bird populations dwindle due to habitat loss, volatile weather events, inconsistent harvests, the spread of intensive agriculture, and other threats, the loss ripples through the entire ecosystem.

The staggering drop in bird populations serves as a sobering signal of an urgent need to take action to avoid ecological collapse.

Although the situation may seem dire, the news is not all bad. The tireless work of conservationists has restored numerous bird species from the edge of extinction, and populations of wetland species are increasing due in part to political action to protect their habitats. These stories of hope show that it is not impossible to reverse the decline.

In addition to supporting wide-scale change and devoting resources to protecting critical habitats, restoring the bird population can begin in your local community and even your own backyard. Take action at home by creating a bird sanctuary by growing native plants and providing safe spaces for birds to eat, rest, and reproduce. Join a birding organization and participate in bird data collection.

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Earth is ‘really quite sick now’ and in danger zone in nearly all ecological ways, study says

Earth has pushed past seven out of eight scientifically established safety limits and into "the danger zone," not just for an overheating planet that’s losing its natural areas, but for the well-being of people living on it, according to a new study.

The study looks not just at guardrails for the planetary ecosystem but for the first time it includes measures of "justice," which is mostly about preventing harm for countries, ethnicities and genders.

The study by the international scientist group Earth Commission published in Wednesday’s journal Nature looks at climate, air pollution, phosphorus and nitrogen contamination of water from fertilizer overuse, groundwater supplies, fresh surface water, the unbuilt natural environment and the overall natural and human-built environment. Only air pollution wasn’t quite at the danger point globally.

The study found "hotspots" of problem areas throughout Eastern Europe, South Asia, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, parts of Africa and much of Brazil, Mexico, China and some of the U.S. West — much of it from climate change. About two-thirds of Earth don’t meet the criteria for freshwater safety, scientists said as an example.

"We are in a danger zone for most of the Earth system boundaries," said study co-author Kristie Ebi, a professor of climate and public health at the University of Washington.

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Everyone to live 15 minutes from green space or water in England under plans

Everyone will live within 15 minutes' walk of a green space or water under new government plans to restore nature.

Habitat for wildlife will be expanded and there will be 25 new or enlarged national nature reserves.

More money will go to protecting rare wildlife, such as hedgehogs and red squirrels.

The "blueprint" sets out how ministers intend to clean up air and water, boost nature and reduce waste over the next five years in England.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said protecting the natural environment was fundamental to the health, economy and prosperity of the country.

"This plan provides the blueprint for how we deliver our commitment to leave our environment in a better state than we found it, making sure we drive forward progress with renewed ambition and achieve our target of not just halting, but reversing the decline of nature," he said.

Caroline Lucas, Green Party MP for Brighton, raised concerns about how the plans to get people back into nature could affect farmers in the UK.

The post-Brexit green watchdog warned the country was facing a "deeply concerning decline in biodiversity".

The government has now set out how it intends to meet legally-binding targets on water quality, biodiversity and waste as well as international targets agreed at the COP15 UN biodiversity summit in December.

Environment Secretary, Therese Coffey, said: "Nature is vital for our survival, crucial to our food security, clean air, and clean water as well as health and wellbeing benefits."

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The Collapse of Insects

The most diverse group of organisms on the planet are in trouble, with recent research suggesting insect populations are declining at an unprecedented rate.

As a boy in the 1960s, David Wagner would run around his family’s Missouri farm with a glass jar clutched in his hand, scooping flickering fireflies out of the sky.

"We could fill it up and put it by our bedside at night," says Wagner, now an entomologist.

That’s all gone, the family farm now paved over with new homes and manicured lawns. And Wagner’s beloved fireflies – like so many insects worldwide – have largely vanished in what scientists are calling the global Insect Apocalypse.

As human activities rapidly transform the planet, the global insect population is declining at an unprecedented rate of up to 2% per year. Amid deforestation, pesticide use, artificial light pollution and climate change, these critters are struggling — along with the crops, flowers and other animals that rely on them to survive.

"Insects are the food that make all the birds and make all the fish," said Wagner, who works at the University of Connecticut. "They’re the fabric tethering together every freshwater and terrestrial ecosystem across the planet."

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Blue carbon: the hidden CO2 sink that pioneers say could save the planet

Part 1: With the ocean key to meeting 1.5C, all eyes are now on the vital but overlooked "big three" marine ecosystems – seagrass, mangroves and salt marshes

Off the Caribbean coast of Colombia, rare manatee calves have been spotted in the canals and rivers of Cispatá Bay’s mangrove forests. The once-critically endangered American crocodile is now seen more frequently. Birds and lizards nest in the branches, fish and shrimps use the roots as nurseries. These 11,000 protected hectares (27,000 acres) of mangroves are a biodiversity hotspot.

Mangroves, like other coastal wetlands, are powerful carbon sinks. That is, they suck up carbon dioxide from the air to store in their roots and branches, as well as the sediment that collects around them. They do this so well that they can store up to 10 times more carbon than forests.

And unlike “green carbon” rainforests, which store carbon in biomass, and therefore release it when the trees die, mangroves store most of the carbon in their soil and sediment. If undisturbed, it stays there for millennia.

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Blue Space Is the New Green Space

Why being near water can be a boon for our health and wellness

Chad Guenter, a firefighter and rescue instructor in Canmore, Alberta, stands six-foot-three, weighs 250 pounds, and is covered in tattoos. He has seen a lot of troubling things while working. Over years of occupational stress, Guenter has talked to therapists about his flashbacks and heavy feelings. But, for immediate relief, he goes to the river. "When I'm on the water, there's nothing else that I have to worry about—nothing else," says Guenter, whose stand-up paddleboard has helped him cope with the trauma he experiences as a first responder. "Water demands all of my attention. It’s really healing."

The restorative qualities of being in nature, or “green space,” are well documented, but researchers have only recently begun to focus on what changes when water is part of the picture, when we spend time in or near aquatic environments. Taking in the sea air, strolling along a peninsula, or simply sitting beside a pond have long been considered good for our well-being, but evidence is emerging that “blue space” may have a more profound impact on our bodies and brains than other outdoor environments do.

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Twenty plastic-busting inventions to clean our rivers and seas

There’s an incomprehensible amount of plastic in the ocean – estimates put the known total at 5 trillion individual pieces, or around 150 million tonnes. An additional 8 million tonnes finds its way into the ocean every year. That’s only increased thanks to Covid-19 and the resulting surge in single-use items like masks and gloves.

Most plastic enters the ocean via rivers, which carry vast amounts of waste from inland sources. Once in the ocean, plastic is broken down by the sun’s rays and by wind and waves, eventually transforming into smaller fragments called microplastics. But the hardy nature of the material means that this process can take hundreds of years. In the meantime, plastic – both macro and micro – wreaks havoc on marine life. It brings the risk of entanglement, and starvation (as species mistake plastics for food). As it enters the food chain, it also potentially leaches toxins into animals’ bodies – with as-yet largely unknown effects on these creatures, and the humans who consume them.

Around the world, inventors, scientists and entrepreneurs are trying to innovate us out of this predicament.

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Biodiversity: how our health and happiness depend on a thriving planet

During the COVID-19 lockdowns, more of us are noticing the variety of animals, trees, and flowers in our back gardens or local park - and how being in contact with nature can influence our happiness.

This variety of life is known as biodiversity and it’s essential for our health and wellbeing. We depend on biodiversity in the natural world for the water we drink, the food we eat and the clean air we breathe.

But reports show that it is declining at an unprecedented rate – and that this is likely to lead to huge economic and health risks. For example, farming relies on bees and butterflies to pollinate plants, which create fruits and vegetables. Losing pollinators will cost the UK agricultural sector up to £700 million each year, and would seriously affect the country’s food supply.

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64% of World’s Farmland at Risk From Pesticide Pollution, Study Finds

About one third of the world's agricultural land is at high risk from pesticide pollution, a new study has found.

"Our study has revealed 64 percent of the world's arable land is at risk of pesticide pollution," University of Sydney Research Associate and the study's lead author, Dr Fiona Tang said in a University of Sydney press release. "This is important because the wider scientific literature has found that pesticide pollution can have adverse impacts on human health and the environment."

Pesticides, herbicides and fungicides are widely used to boost productivity in farming, the press release noted. However, they have unintended consequences for human and environmental health. They can enter bodies of water through runoff or by entering the groundwater, contaminating drinking water. Pesticides like chlorpyrifos have been shown to harm the cognitive development of children, while others have been linked to cancer. They also pose a threat to wildlife such as bees and birds.

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Cherry Blossoms Bloom Early Across The World

Both Kyoto, Japan, and Washington D.C. are known for their cherry blossom seasons in the first few weeks of warming spring weather. This year, cherry blossom season came early in both of these cities. In Kyoto, the blooms peaked last Friday, the earliest in more than 1,200 years of records. Meanwhile, in Washington D.C, the blossoms peaked on Sunday, four days ahead of the average date over the past 30 years and almost a week ahead of the 100-year average of April 3.

These early blooms conform to a trend of earlier springs resulting from a warming planet (known as season creep). Japan started tracking cherry blossom season in 812, producing thousands of years of data. Cherry blossoms are very sensitive to changes in temperature, so having such a long record of peak blooms provides meaningful data about how the climate has changed over the past couple thousand years.

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New Report Finds Online “Fake News” is a Major Threat to Climate Action

A new report published by the Royal Swedish Academy of Science found that the future success of climate change policy is threatened by targeted attacks from social media. “Social media reports have created a toxic environment where it’s now very difficult to distinguish facts from fiction,” said co-author Owen Gaffney of the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

The battle over “fake news” has been raging in the U.S. for years now and Americans have witnessed how climate misinformation played a large role in the Trump administration’s climate policy. But it’s not just the U.S. facing setbacks from climate denialism. “One of the biggest challenges now facing humanity is our inability to tell fact from fiction. This is undermining democracies, which in turn is limiting our ability to make long-term decisions needed to save the planet,” said Gaffney.

In the U.S., climate denial has been on the rise. Climate denialists aligned themselves with right-wing conspiracy groups like QAnon to grow their audiences and platforms. But now, far-right extremism is surging across the globe, and anti-science sentiment is growing with it. It’s not just extremists in obscure forums anymore. It’s average citizens on popular apps like Facebook and Twitter, as well as conservative-aimed apps like Parler and Rumble that are helping fake news spread whether it’s intentional or not.

In 2020, climate change disinformation was seen by millions of people on Facebook, and fake news surrounding West Coast wildfires created a dangerous distraction for a dire situation.

Ultimately the mainstream media also has a role to play in featuring clear climate change content and programming that spreads facts and dismantles misinformation. Sadly, this hasn’t been happening. In 2020, the top four broadcast news channels, ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox, only covered climate change for a combined total of 380 minutes, accounting for only 0.4% of news programming.

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7 Reasons to Protect Seagrass

Remarkable flora, found in waters around the world, benefits ocean health and people

When looking out over coastal waters across much of our planet, one can often see large areas that appear darker than their surroundings—a possible sign of seagrass meadows, which play a critical role in the health of our ocean. Seagrasses evolved millions of years ago when flowering plants on land took up residence in the sea. Now, the estimated 72 species of seagrass fringe every continent except Antarctica.

In honor of Seagrass Awareness Month, observed every March, here are seven reasons this important ecological resource deserves protection:

Click here to check out the seven reasons.

UN: Huge changes in society needed to keep nature, Earth OK

Humans are making Earth a broken and increasingly unlivable planet through climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution. So the world must make dramatic changes to society, economics and daily life, a new United Nations report says.

Unlike past U.N. reports that focused on one issue and avoided telling leaders actions to take, Thursday’s report combines three intertwined environment crises and tells the world what’s got to change. It calls for changing what governments tax, how nations value economic output, how power is generated, the way people get around, fish and farm, as well as what they eat.

“Without nature’s help, we will not thrive or even survive,” Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said. “For too long, we have been waging a senseless and suicidal war on nature. The result is three interlinked environmental crises.”

Thus the 168-page report title is blunt: “Making Peace With Nature.”

“The emergency is in fact more profound than we thought only a few years ago,” said report lead author Sir Robert Watson, who has been a top level scientist in the U.S. and British governments.

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Bayer Announces $2B Roundup Settlement

Bayer's $2 Billion Roundup Settlement Will Cover Future Claims

OMAHA (DTN) -- Bayer has agreed to pay $2 billion to resolve future Roundup cancer class-action lawsuits in a settlement filed in a federal court on Wednesday.

According to a Bayer news release, the settlement would establish a fund to pay between $5,000 to $200,000 to future plaintiffs who allege they developed cancer from glyphosate use.

The company said it will work with EPA to "provide greater transparency" and access to glyphosate studies. That would include adding a reference link on the glyphosate labels to provide consumers with access to scientific studies and information.

Bayer acquired Roundup brands as part of its $63 billion purchase of Monsanto. Bayer continues to maintain that glyphosate is safe, regularly pointing out that the EPA and many other countries' regulatory agencies support glyphosate's continued use.

EPA reapproved an interim registration of glyphosate in January 2020. The Rural Coalition, Organizacion en California de Lideres Campesinas, Farmworker Association of Florida, Beyond Pesticides and the Center for Food Safety filed a petition for review in March 2020.

Most recently, EPA released a biological evaluation of glyphosate's potential effect on endangered species and critical habitats, finding that it was "likely to adversely affect" 1,676 listed species and 759 critical habitats, the vast majority of the species and habitats the agency considered.

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U.S. Leads the World in Plastic Pollution, New Study Finds

The U.S. is the No. 1 generator of plastic pollution in the world and as high as the No. 3 generator of ocean plastic waste.

That's the finding of a new study published in Science Advances last Friday that sought to paint a more accurate picture of the U.S. contribution to the plastic crisis. While previous studies had suggested that Asian countries were responsible for the bulk of ocean plastics, the new study upends this assumption by taking into account the plastic that the U.S. ships abroad.

"For years, so much of the plastic we have put into the blue bin has been exported for recycling to countries that struggle to manage their own waste, let alone the vast amounts delivered from the United States," lead author and Sea Education Association professor of oceanography Dr. Kara Lavender Law said in a press release emailed to EcoWatch. "And when you consider how much of our plastic waste isn't actually recyclable because it is low-value, contaminated or difficult to process, it's not surprising that a lot of it ends up polluting the environment."

The new analysis concluded that the U.S. generated around 42 million metric tons of plastic in 2016. Of the U.S. plastic collected for recycling, more than half of it was shipped abroad, and 88 percent of that was to countries that struggle to adequately recycle. Further, 15 to 25 percent of it was contaminated or poor quality plastic that would be extremely difficult to recycle anyway.

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Dr. Edie Widder To Receive Inaugural Captain Don Walsh Award For Ocean Exploration

Recognizing Her Outstanding, Sustained, International Contribution To The Development, Application, And Propagation Of Marine Technology Toward The Advancement Of Ocean Exploration

WASHINGTON, DC, US AND LONDON, UK — The Marine Technology Society and The Society for Underwater Technology are proud to announce that Dr. Edie Widder is the inaugural recipient of the Captain Don Walsh Award for Ocean Exploration. Dr. Widder is an MTS member, MacArthur Fellow, a deep-sea explorer, and conservationist who combines expertise in oceanographic research and technological innovation with a commitment to reversing the worldwide trend of marine ecosystem degradation.

Awarded jointly by the Marine Technology Society and the Society for Underwater Technology, this esteemed award is named after American oceanographer, explorer, retired naval officer, and marine policy specialist Captain Don Walsh. Walsh and co-pilot Jacques Piccard were aboard the bathyscaph Trieste when it made its daunting record descent on January 23, 1960 into the deepest point of the world’s oceans – the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench. The award recognizes outstanding, sustained, international contribution to the development, application, and propagation of marine technology toward the advancement of ocean exploration.

A specialist in bioluminescence (the light chemically produced by many ocean organisms), Dr. Widder has been a leader in helping to design and invent new submersible instrumentation, and equipment to enable unobtrusive deep-sea observations.

She helped found the Ocean Research & Conservation Association in 2005 – an organization dedicated to the study and protection of marine ecosystems, and the species they sustain through development of innovative technologies, science-based conservation action, and public education. (in Ft. Pierce, FL, -ed.)

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World fails to meet a single target to stop destruction of nature – UN report

‘Humanity at a crossroads’ after a decade in which all of the 2010 Aichi goals to protect wildlife and ecosystems have been missed

The world has failed to meet a single target to stem the destruction of wildlife and life-sustaining ecosystems in the last decade, according to a devastating new report from the UN on the state of nature.

From tackling pollution to protecting coral reefs, the international community did not fully achieve any of the 20 Aichi biodiversity targets agreed in Japan in 2010 to slow the loss of the natural world. It is the second consecutive decade that governments have failed to meet targets.

The Global Biodiversity Outlook 5, published before a key UN summit on the issue later this month, found that despite progress in some areas, natural habitats have continued to disappear, vast numbers of species remain threatened by extinction from human activities, and $500bn (£388bn) of environmentally damaging government subsidies have not been eliminated.

The UN’s biodiversity head, Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, said humanity was at a crossroads that would decide how future generations experience the natural world.

“Earth’s living systems as a whole are being compromised. And the more humanity exploits nature in unsustainable ways and undermines its contributions to people, the more we undermine our own wellbeing, security and prosperity,” she said.

The report is the third in a week to highlight the devastating state of the planet. The WWF and Zoological Society of London (ZSL)’s Living Planet Report 2020 said global wildlife populations were in freefall, plunging by two-thirds, because of human overconsumption, population growth and intensive agriculture.

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Momentum Growing Globally for Using Marine Protections to Address Climate Change

'Oceans dialogue' planned for UN meeting as nature-based solutions rise in priority

This year, the 197 Parties to the Paris Agreement are updating their domestic climate commitments, known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), to reduce global emissions and climate change impacts. Science tells us that countries need to step up the ambition within these NDCs, and within each subsequent revision every 5 years going forward, in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and bring the world on track to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.

Recognition is growing across governments that nature-based solutions, which the International Union for Conservation of Nature defines as “actions to protect, sustainably manage, and restore natural or modified ecosystems,” can be a bigger part of the solution to climate change. The degree to which different nature-based solutions mitigate and build resilience to climate change varies but, nonetheless, policymakers are becoming increasingly aware that they are an underutilized tool.

For example, some countries could protect and restore coastal wetlands, such as mangrove, seagrass and saltmarsh habitats, a move that could safeguard the range of benefits these habitats provide to people and nature. Coastal wetlands are often referred to as “triple win” ecosystems for tackling climate change because they can help mitigate emissions and support frontline communities in adapting and becoming more resilient to the impacts of a warming world, such as rising sea levels and increasingly severe storms.

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What’s the world’s most widely used herbicide doing to tiny critters?

Glyphosate-based herbicides are not supposed to harm wildlife. But lab studies keep finding otherwise.

As the active ingredient in Bayer's Roundup herbicide is increasingly scrutinized for human health impacts, scientists say it also could be altering the wildlife and organisms at the base of the food chain.

Glyphosate is one of the most widely used herbicides in history. Farmers in 2014 sprayed enough of the chemical to cover every acre of cropland in the entire world with nearly a half-pound of the herbicide, according to a 2016 study published in Environmental Sciences Europe.

Long thought to be relatively benign to non-target plants and animals, evidence is growing that glyphosate, the active ingredient of Roundup, may impact the metabolism, growth and reproduction of aquatic creatures and could be altering the essential gut bacteria of animals such as bees.

Such impacts could have serious unexpected impacts on the tiny critters that form the base of the animal food chain, say environmental researchers, who warn the ecological impacts are likely to grow as glyphosate levels build up in the environment.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations first expressed concern about the food chain effects of glyphosate in 2005, after research showed that glyphosate residues can stick around in water and soil for several months, maybe even years. That means it has the potential to build up to higher levels in the environment with each use.

In aquatic and terrestrial environments, researchers have linked changes in metabolism, growth, behavior and reproduction of certain fishes, mollusks and insects with exposure to glyphosate-containing herbicides.

Messing with the base of the food chain, say environmental researchers, could have profound ecological effects.

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Footprint of Nations: World's Ecological Footprint Exceeds Biocapacity by Nearly 40%

The Ecological Footprint is a measure of the amount of nature it takes to sustain a given population over the course of a year. According to the new 2005 Footprint of Nations report, humanity’s footprint is 57 acres per person while the Earth’s biological capacity is just 41 acres per person. By comparing a population’s footprint with its biological capacity, Ecological Footprint analysis suggests whether or not that population is living within its ecological means. If a population’s footprint exceeds its biological capacity, that population is said to be engaging in unsustainable ecological overshoot.

Please visit the Redefining Progress website to learn more.

Horseshoe crab survey in Florida

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Institute has recently started a new horseshoe crab survey. The goal of this survey is to locate and document horseshoe crab nesting beaches around the state of Florida. To document these important nesting beaches around the state, they are relying on volunteers to report any observations that they have of horseshoe crab nesting activity. The FMRI is asking anyone to report information on the date of their observations, location of their observations, whether or not horseshoe crabs were mating, and estimates of the number of horseshoe crabs seen. They have set up a toll-free phone line (1-866-252-9326), an email address (horseshoe@myfwc.com), and an online survey (http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/horseshoe_crab) for volunteers to use to report their observations. This project provides an excellent opportunity for the public to get involved with a scientific/conservation-oriented study.

You can also read more about horseshoe crabs, the results of the survey to date, and view photos at: http://www.myfwc.com/research/saltwater/crustaceans/horseshoe-crabs.

Florida's "Impaired Waters Rule" and TMDL's

We have been participating with the Southeastern Regional Office of the Clean Water Network (CWN), in a challenge of Florida's "Impaired Waters Rule" (IWR). This rule was designed by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP) to comply with the requirements of the TMDL (Total Maximum Daily Load) provisions of the Clean Water Act.

The CWN felt there were numerous problems with the IWR and coordinated with more than 50 organizations around the state (including the FSSR) to challenge this rule. The FL Department of Administrative Hearing's Officer ruled in favor of the FDEP. The ruling is being appealed and the participating organziations have also filed suit against the EPA for what we believe is their non-discretionary duty to either approve of or deny what amounts to Florida changing its water quality standards unilaterally.

If you would like to read more about TMDLs and the process Florida is currently following to implement them, click here for lots more information.

The state of Florida is also in the process of developing a system of water pollution trading credits. This is similar to the free-market based system the EPA has used for years in air pollution regulation. Click here to read more about Florida DEP water resource management programs.

St. Sebastian River Preserve State Park - Volunteers

The St. Sebastian River Preserve State Park has a large group of volunteers that do various tasks. They are always looking for more people who are interested and they are currently especially looking for more volunteers to help with manatee spotting surveys. There is a designated spot on the C-54 canal where volunteers spot and count manatees twice a day. If you can spare a few minutes of time and are interested in helping out with this or any other project at the Preserve, give them a call at 321-953-5004.

Informational Graphics

Sport Fish of the Sebastian Inlet - Life Cycle

Everglades Restoration

The following graphics are from an article in the Washington Post, June 23, 2002 on the components, projects and technologies being proposed for the restoration of the Florida Everglades.

Drinking Water Supply

The following graphics are from the Orlando Sentinel.

Sebastian Area Land Use and Submerged Aquatic Vegetation