As Florida’s population rises, multiple sources of pollution are threatening the manatees, pinfish, and seagrass that call North America’s most biodiverse estuary home. Researchers like Casey Craig and her team at the University of Central Florida are looking at nanoplastics in oysters and “water quality advocates” like Nyla Pipes are among those fighting to protect the precious Indian River Lagoon — before it’s too late.
Story by Xander Peters | Photographs by Josh Letchworth
It’s a cold, dank, and dreary February day on Florida’s eastern Atlantic Coast. It’s the time of year when the winter wind cuts through the skin and down to the bone’s marrow. The wake of our 16-foot skiff and the purr of its small engine break the placid surface of the Indian River Lagoon. Tiny specks of water splash across our faces like frigid, sharp darts. The sun is shining, antagonizing. Even less forgiving on the central nervous system is the slightest touch of water this time of year. Let a few stubborn drops of water slip between the laces of your boots, and the chill will nestle in for the day. The coldness starts in your toes before it monkey-climbs its way up to your legs and then your spine as if it’s trying to hunker down and stay warm itself.
The small crew of University of Central Florida undergraduate volunteers knows enough to wear water waders while they reach down and dig through oyster beds near one of the lagoon’s shorelines. They place them in a bag and hand each sack to their project leader, graduate student Casey Craig. Pearl earrings dangle from Craig’s ears as she sits cross-legged atop the skiff, a rubber hammer in her hand.
Craig chips the barnacles off the oysters and combs through them, collecting samples. “I need six more spat,” she calls out to the hunched-over volunteers. With each stop, their goal is to collect 15 spat, or baby oysters, and 15 mature oysters. They then pack up and move on to the next site.
The ornamental irony of Craig’s earrings is not lost on her. Neither is the mission to save the Indian River Lagoon, North America’s most biodiverse estuary. It’s home to roughly 2,000 plant species, 600 fish species, and 300 bird species, according to the National Estuary Council — 35 species of which are cited as threatened or endangered, more than any other estuary on the continent. Included in those species is the beloved manatee, of which one-third of the nation’s population lives in or migrates through the Indian River Lagoon. The lagoon, technically divided down as an ocean barrier island complex, covers one-third of the state’s eastern coastline, stretching 156 miles from north to south, from the Ponce de León Inlet in Volusia County to the Jupiter Inlet in Palm Beach County. For good measure, the Indian River Lagoon is broken down into three sections: the Indian River, the Banana River, and the Mosquito Lagoon.
Casey Craig examines a cluster of oysters in the Indian River Lagoon. She leads a University of Central Florida team researching the effects of microplastics on oysters in the lagoon system.
In 2018, University of Central Florida undergraduate student Heidi Waite published a study in the journal “Marine Pollution Bulletin” that found that oysters in the Mosquito Lagoon, the lagoon’s northernmost end, had the highest level of microplastics ever measured — at any time, anywhere on Earth. Microplastics are tiny pieces of plastic that measure less than 5 millimeters in length, the leftovers of larger pieces of plastic gradually breaking down. Researchers have found that these tiny pieces of plastic never truly disappear, instead further breaking down to pieces of nanoplastic, even smaller plastic pieces that range from 1-1,000 nanometers in length. Nanoplastics are small enough to enter a human’s bloodstream. Although the topic of microplastics went largely unnoticed until a decade ago, today, there’s a burgeoning amount of research being done on the topic. The long-term impacts of humans consuming microplastic, as well as on other species’ consumption of it, are unclear. Waite’s samples found that each crab averaged 24-25 microplastic pieces; adult oysters had 16-17 pieces.
The question at hand for Craig and others in their research is whether the microplastic pollution is as widespread throughout the Indian River Lagoon as it was for Waite’s measurement of the Mosquito Lagoon, or if it’s isolated to that section. Because the Mosquito Lagoon isn’t near an inlet, there’s a low flushing rate, Craig explains. That means pollution tends to stick around longer, unlike other areas of the Indian River Lagoon, which empty out into the Atlantic Ocean. And if microplastic pollution is a problem across the entire Indian River Lagoon, where is it coming from? How can it be stopped? Can it be prevented in the future?
“Just a girl living in a plastic world,” Craig says, laughing, as she explains the process of their work and hammers away at the barnacles. “It’s even scarier when you think about how plastic has only been around for such a small period of time, compared to how much pollution there is.”
Craig stops and looks up, the sun reflecting off the murky, emerald green water behind her. “If we lost these oysters, the entire biodiversity of this tiny, little nook that we’re in would change. The water chemistry will change because the oysters aren’t filtering things anymore. That’s kind of what ecology is all about — understanding the interactions that these animals have with each other and their environment, how they adapt to it, and how we see changes and things like that.”
A cluster of oysters from the Indian River Lagoon. In 2018, University of Central Florida undergraduate student Heidi Waite published a study in the journal “Marine Pollution Bulletin” that found that oysters in the Mosquito Lagoon, the lagoon’s northernmost end, had the highest level of microplastics ever measured — at any time, anywhere on Earth.
Without oysters, there’s less help within the ecosystem in combating harmful algal blooms, a byproduct of the massive amounts of nutrient-rich wastewater that regularly flows into the lagoon, and which seeps out of nearby septic systems. As has often been the case across Florida’s waterways in recent years, once algal blooms set in, fish kills follow shortly after. With all the death debris swept into the algal blooms, human and land species’ health is also impacted. “Everything is interrelated,” Craig says. “You can’t fix human health without fixing environmental health, too. When you can’t see something, you can’t understand the severity.”
Despite Craig and others’ efforts, the Indian River Lagoon is failing. It’s unclear if it’s too late to save the precious resource as it stands, at least in a way for this generation to enjoy it, much as previous generations have. It could also be said that the Indian River Lagoon’s poor health is representative of Florida’s ongoing water quality problems. Pesticides from Florida’s agricultural industry have seeped beyond the state’s surface, setting the stage for algal blooms. Nutrient-rich water used on front lawns has seeped its way into the system, too, largely thanks to a massive influx of folks who have moved to the Sunshine State in recent decades. Nearly 3 million people have moved to Florida since the 2010 Census measure, almost a 14.2% jump that pumped its overall population to more than 21 million. Recent estimates claim that Florida’s population could climb to as many as 26 million people by 2030, more than Australia’s current population, but with just roughly one forty-fifth of the same amount of available inhabitable landmass. Wastewater systems, both on private and public property, are having difficulty keeping up with the amount of sewage. It’s unclear how long the process can last. In that time, it seems, Florida’s water quality suffers.
The Indian River Lagoon’s decline can be traced back more than a century.
In 1916, Florida broke ground on the St. Lucie Canal (also known as the C-44 Canal), with the intention of diverting floodwaters from Lake Okeechobee through the St. Lucie River in Martin County and into the St. Lucie Estuary, which connects to the Indian River Lagoon. It was completed in 1928, but from central to south Florida, floods continued in the years thereafter, aggravating citrus growers and cattlemen in the process. In 1947, south Florida received more than 100 inches of rain, triple the amount than it had during recent drought years. Two hurricanes and a tropical storm followed shortly after, with floodwaters covering 5 million acres, from Lake Okeechobee to the Everglades. From Orlando to the Florida Keys, 90% of eastern Florida was underwater. Folks whose property was catastrophically flooded attempted to dynamite nearby dams to get their land back. Sheriffs deputized private citizens to help protect the dams. Floridians took up arms against each other in an effort to protect their livelihoods.
Florida kept digging and dredging, however. The floods mostly subsided. New dilemmas arose.
Those same problems at hand have only compounded. Between the 1940s and late 2000s, 85% of the mangroves that helped support marine life in the Indian River Lagoon were destroyed to make room for housing development. The expulsion of the mangroves — nature’s kidneys, in that the mangroves help recycle and clean pollution in marine systems — eventually laid the groundwork for March 2016, when the lagoon experienced its worst fish kill to date. Roughly 30 species were impacted by the die-off due to a brown tidal bloom caused by the algae species Aureoumbra lagunensis. Its health has improved little, if at all, in the years since.
“The lagoon is pretty much dead,” says Terry Gibson, a lifelong Floridian and outdoorsman. Gibson is also the legislative affairs director at the American Water Security Project, an advocacy group that promotes necessary water quality upgrades, like sewage and wastewater systems. “It’s hypereutrophic from one end to the other” after being overloaded with nutrients and pathogens “from sewage and other sources that it just can’t function as an estuary should anymore.”
A man paddling a canoe through one of the managed impoundments in Merritt Island Refuge, connected to the Indian River Lagoon. “The lagoon is pretty much dead,” says Terry Gibson. A lifelong Floridian and outdoorsman, Gibson is also the legislative affairs director at the American Water Security Project, an advocacy group that promotes necessary water quality upgrades, like sewage and wastewater systems. “It’s hypereutrophic from one end to the other” after being overloaded with nutrients and pathogens “from sewage and other sources that it just can’t function as an estuary should anymore.”
The decline in its health has been a decades-long process. Its recovery will take just as long, if not longer, if it’s even possible, advocates say. But it won’t necessarily be possible until Florida’s nagging water quality issues are fixed altogether. Advocates point to the most threatening of the Indian River Lagoon’s problems: septic tanks on nearby private property.
Septic tanks pump roughly 2 million pounds of nitrogen into the Indian River Lagoon each year, according to an analysis by Florida Today. That nitrogen supercharges the growth of algae, which in turn suffocates seagrass, of which thousands of marine species depend on for survival. According to estimates by Florida officials, 10% of the state’s 2.6 million septic tanks are failing. Many of the tanks were installed for homes built before 1983, when Florida mandated that there be a 2-foot separation between the bottom of the tank and the top of the water table. In theory, that was supposed to allow for dry soil to absorb and naturally dispose of contaminants. However, Florida’s water table is rising due to sea level rise, an effect of climate change, which has increased water levels around Florida by around 8 inches higher than was recorded in 1950. Because a porous limestone bedrock sits underneath Florida, the water, quite literally, rises through the crust of its soil. As a result, the septic tanks still aren’t functioning correctly. Florida’s 2016 Infrastructure Report Card found that the state is woefully behind in needed sewage infrastructure upgrades, at a price tag of about $18.4 billion.
Nyla Pipes prefers to call herself a water quality advocate rather than an activist. Something about the term activist, she believes, is too loud, too demanding. Although she doesn’t say as much, Pipes’ approach is more akin to catching flies (convincing legislators) with honey (to adopt better water management practices). But to her opponents, she’s known as “Ole Sewer Pipes,” a nickname that got pinned on her back in 2013 when she first got into water quality advocacy as a volunteer. “I’ve spent the last eight years of my life really sounding the alarm, saying, ‘Look, if we don’t take care of our waste, we’re going to constantly have algal blooms because it doesn’t matter if it’s a brown tide, the cyanobacteria, blue-green algae, or red tide. They’re an organism themselves. We are feeding them with our lack of sewage infrastructure in these coastal regions,’” Pipes says of how nutrient-rich wastewater supercharges these types of algae. “Fort Lauderdale is a perfect example. They’ve got some of the oldest sewers. Some of the pipes are 100 years old at this point.” Some are still made out of baked clay, which predated cast iron steel pipes. Steel pipes predated the use of modern PVC pipes, today.
Between 2009 and 2018, more than 12 million gallons of untreated sewage spilled into the Indian River Lagoon, according to data from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, obtained by GateHouse Media. In that same amount of time, per GateHouse Media’s analysis, across Florida, nearly 1 billion gallons of unpermitted wastewater trickled — at times, gushed — into Florida waterways. The only Florida waterways more impacted than the Indian River Lagoon were west Florida’s Hillsborough River (16.6 million gallons); Indian Harbor (16 million gallons), located just south of the lagoon; and Clam Bayou (15.4 million gallons), on the state’s western shore.
“Florida is nothing without good water — good, abundant water,” Pipes says. “We need it for our tourism industry. We need it for water supply purposes, for the more than 1,000 people a day who are moving here. We simply do not thrive if we don't take care of our water resources.”
Much of these problems fall on the shoulders of not just statewide elected officials, but locally elected officials as well, most advocates say. After all, there is precedent for tackling these types of massive water quality issues with smart fixes. As Gibson tells me, there are two shiny, albeit seldom referenced, examples: Tampa Bay and Sarasota Bay in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
But the Indian River Lagoon is 10 years behind efforts like Tampa Bay, says Linda Walters, the faculty advisor for the research at the University of Central Florida. That’s in part because Tampa Bay is one specific area that’s represented by one body politic, whereas the Indian River Lagoon stretches beyond different cities, different counties, and — by virtue of Florida’s oftentimes turbulent swing-state nature — sometimes widely varying, deeply-rivaled politics.
Most folks don’t realize the severity of the crisis, or else it would get more attention, says Jeff Maggio, a recreational fishing charter guide in Fort Lauderdale who helped co-found the Coastal Community Network. “The old saying is that if it doesn’t happen in your front yard, it doesn’t matter to you,” Maggio says of how those who work on the water experience the water quality fallout firsthand. “I can see it clearly, just because I’ve watched it. Most of the people who live in the state, they moved here in the 1980s and 1990s, or later. It’s harder for them to understand exactly what we used to have and what we have now. It’s tough to get people to care.”
To understand how, and why, the Indian River Lagoon’s water quality woes are relative to Florida’s larger water issues is to better grasp the steady escalation of an ecological cascade.
The Indian River Lagoon is an estuary. Estuaries support reef systems offshore, which in turn support coastal fisheries. Everything that’s valuable to fisheries spends some portion of its life’s history in an estuary. If not the fish itself, a type of plant it feeds off lies in an estuary.
Gag grouper is one of the Gulf of Mexico’s most populous recreational fishing species. Some of them derive from Sarasota Bay, and others from Tampa Bay, where the fish reproduce in the same locations, generation after generation, in what’s called spawning aggregation. The currents bring the species’ larvae ashore, and those baby fish then settle safely in the seagrass. In the seagrass, there are all types of little shrimp and other creatures that the baby fish will feast on until they’re able to feed on larger organisms. Once the fish reach sexual maturity, sparking the beginning of the life cycle once again, they venture offshore to spawn, just as their parents did. The entire life cycle restarts, again.
Enter a little fish called the pinfish. It’s a forage fish that matures within the seagrasses’ shelter. When it’s little, it also feeds on shrimp and other tiny creatures until its teeth transform in a way that resembles tiny sheep’s teeth. Pinfishes’ gut tracks change in that time as well, allowing them to feed on seagrass and digest cellulose, a vital structural component of the cell wall for plants and various forms of algae. The process basically turns sunlight into energy in the form of fish oil. Almost everything feeds on pinfish. Snook, tarpon, redfish, spots, sea trout, flounder. The pinfish are small, irregularly slow-moving, easily catchable prey, and they’re incredibly nutritious.
And there’s a catch — the seagrass. Pinfish absolutely have to have seagrass to survive.
When pinfish move offshore to spawn, as are a myriad of species of groupers and other fishes, they’re using a tremendous amount of energy in the process of making it there, essentially moving the marine life buffet from the estuary and out into the Gulf’s deep, murky waters.
Without seagrass, you lose pinfish. Without pinfish, the food web breaks down.
Two fly fisherman sight fish for reds on Mosquito Lagoon.
Think of Florida’s water quality issues statewide this way: I grew up working for my father’s plumbing company in east Texas, a faraway shot from Florida. My dad always told me there are two rules to plumbing: “Don’t chew your fingernails and shit always runs downhill.” In the case of Florida, the latter rings true.
These problems are interconnected, Pipes explains. During the rainy season in Florida, if it’s an especially wet year, Lake Okeechobee, by design, is allowed to fill up until it's under threat of flooding the surrounding area, near where Pipes lives. The ground is already saturated, so the groundwater will flow to the nearest canal or river, such as the St. Lucie River, a tributary for the Indian River Lagoon. Nutrients then collect in places like the Mosquito Lagoon, which doesn’t flush as easily due to not being near an inlet, building up more pollution as a result.
While these problems may end with the destruction of seagrass, they begin in the headwaters of Orlando, more than 100 miles north from where the pinfish are aggregating spawn and continuing their life cycle. That’s the part of the process folks are unaware of, Pipes says.
“The biggest thing is having an educated public and making sure that we're not just saying the reservoir in the Everglades agricultural area south of Lake Okeechobee is going to fix it all, because it's not. It's a very important component of Everglades restoration. But it is not the end all be all,” Pipes continues. “For instance, in the Everglades conversation, 95% of both the water and the nutrient load into Lake Okeechobee comes from the north — the headwaters are near Orlando. We have to tackle that. You can't clean the system up and get the water going where it needs to go by starting halfway through and sort of pretending it's all the lake.”
When Gibson was a kid, sometime in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he remembers tagging along with his father, an attorney who represented banks throughout the state, on work trips across Florida. Everywhere his father went, he took their fishing rods with him in case the opportunity arose. Gibson remembers those days of chartering guides to take them out in Sarasota Bay and Tampa Bay. Back then, as is the case today for the Indian River Lagoon, the regions’ water quality was suffering. “The fishing guides would be cussing,” Gibson says. “You couldn’t hardly get a lure through the grass; it’d been covered in slime” due to a nitrogen problem that was smothering the area’s seagrass, leaving behind an algal smudged mess.
By the time Gibson was in college in the early 1990s, when he’d come back to those same regions to fish on occasion with buddies, the conditions had altogether improved. The seagrass was coming back. The scallops were thriving. The water was clear, again.
More importantly for Gibson and his buddies, the fishing was damn good.
Indian River Lagoon is home to many migratory birds and much work is put into creating a safe refuge for their arrival.
That’s largely thanks to the efforts of Tampa Bay officials when Gibson was still a kid. In the early 1970s, most folks were ready to call it a day and say Tampa Bay was officially a polluted goner. In 1972, the bay’s bounce back started with the Sun Coast Girl Scouts, led by then-Hillsborough County Commissioner Jan Platt, when they beat back Pinellas County’s plan to construct a 19-inch outfall pipe intended to dump treated sewage directly into the bay’s water. The Girl Scouts’ campaign educated the public on the fact that their sewage was going directly into the bay. The public didn’t like that. “They recognized that they had a huge nitrogen problem and all the slimy algae was smothering seagrass, the same thing we have happening here,” Gibson says. “It was basically the Paris Climate Accord of nitrogen in those watersheds. Everybody gathered together and said we’re going to reduce it, and they got there.”
During that time, President Richard Nixon founded the federal Environmental Protection Agency and, after both houses of Congress voted to override Nixon’s initial veto on the legislation, signed the Clean Water Act, providing local governments enough money for wastewater infrastructure. That led to a $90 million project to construct the Howard F. Curren Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant in Tampa Bay, which was designed to turn wastewater into drinkable water for the locality. It opened in 1979. According to reports on the occasion, local officials celebrated its grand opening by sipping the water from its outflow in champagne flutes.
Today, there are a number of fixes already on the books, and many are already in progress.
Lorraine Koss has served as a councilwoman in Cocoa Beach since she was elected in 2018. Her background beforehand was working with nonprofit communications on water quality issues. Before her time on the city council, in August 2016, councilmembers unanimously passed the Save Our Indian River Lagoon Plan calling for a referendum election on a half-cent sales tax to fund it. More than 62% of Brevard County voters — 71% of the Indian River Lagoon is butted up against the county — approved the tax to fund the estimated $302 million plan. Now in its fourth year of the 10-year framework, Koss says it’s currently projected to raise closer to $400 million, 25% percent of which will go towards muck removal in the lagoon; 25% will be invested in allowing homeowners to connect to sewer lines; 25% for stormwater management, such as the installation of baffle boxes to filter water going into the lagoon; and another 25% in monitoring and follow up modification as science develops better ways of combating many of the ongoing issues the Indian River Lagoon faces.
“We haven’t seen much progress today because it took several years for so many of those projects just to be permanent,” Koss observes. “Muck removal is a major issue, and then there was the issue of what to do once you remove it. Though that doesn’t sound like much, it would prevent 25% of the nutrients that are currently going into the lagoon. That’s the estimated amount to get back to that tipping point.”
There’s also statewide legislation at play in Florida. Some of this is thanks to the environmental platform Governor Ron DeSantis ran on when he was elected back in 2018. DeSantis, a Republican who fashions himself as a self-described “Teddy Roosevelt conservationist,” notoriously called for the resignation of the nine-member South Florida Water Management Governing Board, all of whom were appointed by DeSantis’ Republican predecessor, former Governor Rick Scott. Founded after the Great Flood of 1947, the Board plays a vital role in Everglades protection.
The city of Fort Lauderdale recently approved a plan to borrow $200 million to fix the city’s sewer systems which have been steadily dumping untreated sewage into the New River.
The Florida Legislature approved the Environmental Accountability Act last year, which increases fines for any source of pollution by 50%, including excessive turbidity, dredging, industrial waste, or sewage. Instead of a $10,000-fine per day, it’s now up to $15,000 a day, with every day counting as a new day. The last legislature also approved the Clean Waterways Act, which moved the management of septic tanks from the Florida Department of Health to the Department of Environmental Protection, creating a better-balanced system for utility owners to apply for state grants and loans. It requires the utility owners to produce a biannual master wastewater improvement report so that the Department of Environmental Protection can better monitor maintenance and upgrades, as well as how they’re going to pay for it. And it also limits the density of development on new septic tank systems. Both bills received record funding, representing a sharp contrast from Scott’s tenure as governor, where not a single fine was levied.
Predictably, though, environmental interests are butting heads. In Orange County, where Orlando is the county seat, the Florida Rights of Nature Network led a local clean-water charter amendment providing rights of nature laws to local water bodies, which would allow for citizens to file lawsuits on behalf of polluted or obstructed waterways. It was approved by 89% of local voters, largely bipartisan in nature. However, tucked away in the sprawling 111-page Clean Waterways Act is a provision that would undercut the amendment by banning cities and counties from enforcing “rights of nature” laws. “The rights of nature movement is an acknowledgment that after 50 years of environmental regulation, by any standard of measure, our waters are worse off than they were when these regulations passed; acknowledgment that there can be no balance between corporate exploitation of nature in nature until they are on somewhat equal footing,” says Chuck O’Neal, the Florida Rights of Nature Network’s executive director. “Most entities have rights. Corporations have all the rights of the human individual, and yet nature has no rights. We're just trying to balance the scales and put some rights in the corner of nature.” The Florida Rights of Nature Network is now pushing other counties to pass their own amendments.
Decomposed algae has taken the place of many grass beds throughout the Indian River Lagoon.
Florida is building faster than its environment can endure, faster than estuaries like the Indian River Lagoon can endure. On the state’s western coast, during the summer of 2018, a 26-foot whale shark’s carcass was found on Sanibel Island. A dozen dolphins, 100 manatees, 300 sea turtles. Thousands more fish, species after species after species. All of it washed up on the state’s southern Gulf Coast shore side. The smell of death and decay would linger for weeks. Most marine scientists at the time pointed to the massive red tide cycle the state was enduring at the time, a single-celled organism called Karenia brevis. The tide lingered for 17 months overall, from October 2017 to the beginning of the 2019 calendar, the worst since 2006. In August 2018, then-Governor Scott declared a state of emergency as the tourism industry sunk. The red tide eventually spread all the way over to Florida’s Atlantic Coast, a rare event.
In December of last year, as sewage and fertilizers continued to pour into the Indian River Lagoon, thousands of dead fish gradually washed up on its shore, a “fish-apocalypse” spread out from Titusville to Cocoa Beach. It was the lagoon’s worst die-off since the 2016 episode.
These incidents will only continue throughout Florida, water-quality advocates are quick to remind.
Maggio remembers a time when Fort Lauderdale was once a beach town, a place where people came to get in the water and to be in the sun. “Now, Fort Lauderdale is a place where you come to go to the Ritz Carlton and to hang out at fancy restaurants. The reason for that is because the ecosystem is, in the way we've destroyed everything, not congenial for the beachgoer anymore,” Maggio tells me. “The whole state is going to be like that,” like Miami and Fort Lauderdale, where once miles of mangroves stood, only to be placed with concrete seawall. “Every little piece of trash that ends up on the street here in Fort Lauderdale, ends up in the Intercoastal Waterway. Every time there’s a big rain, it flushes right in there, and nobody thinks anything about it. It’s a liquid dump. The whole state’s going to be that way soon.”
A sign of healthy life as a dolphin breaches in the North Indian River Lagoon, near New Smyrna Beach. It’s a balancing act for advocates, but one in which public sentiment seems to be catching up. Last year, a survey sponsored by the Brevard Indian River Lagoon Coalition and the Clean Water Coalition of Indian River County found that more than 62% of registered voters statewide would be willing to pay an additional $2 a month for waterway cleanup projects.
Maggio’s unclear on how Florida officials can advertise their state as the Sunshine State — a place for tourists, an industry that contributed $86 billion to Florida’s GDP in 2018 — but not enforce stronger environmental laws and regulations. “They all act like they’re going to do something and then another year goes by, and nothing happens. Nothing, zero. They talk a big game. They pass legislation and things like that are supposed to do something, but it’s a shell game. It’s not working. It’s not a priority. If it was a priority, the same way the state fucking taught everyone to put their masks on and wash their hands, they haven’t said anything about the waterways.”
Even so, research done by folks like Craig and the undergraduate volunteers continues. They plan to release their findings in April. On that cold February day back in 2018, while they carefully measured out oyster samples, Craig acknowledged that their work is just a small piece in what it will take to put the Indian River Lagoon back together, to heal it and make it whole again. In a way, she recognizes their work may not be enough to make the difference. “Not all habitats are suitable for oysters,” Craig says as she chips away at barnacles. “Not only that, but sometimes the algal load is a lot more than what an oyster can handle. The biggest thing is that we don’t know all the driving factors of these harmful algal blooms. You can’t do the research unless you have the money. You can’t get the money unless you have a local government where policymakers find the environmental research valuable.”
It’s a balancing act for advocates, but one in which public sentiment seems to be catching up. Last year, a survey sponsored by the Brevard Indian River Lagoon Coalition and the Clean Water Coalition of Indian River County found that more than 62% of registered voters statewide would be willing to pay an additional $2 a month for waterway cleanup projects.
Florida’s body politic is catching up, too. In December, Governor DeSantis announced $20 million of funding toward better protecting Biscayne Bay in Miami-Dade County — half of which will come from the county, while the other half will be a part of the state’s $625 million in environmental project funding included in Florida’s Legislature’s 2019 budget plan. This year, DeSantis is also pushing for a $100 million cost-share program that would help offset costs for utility users to convert to using city sewage systems rather than home septic tanks.
Projects are in the works. But in the end, the difference makers will most likely be those whose feet — or in the case of Craig and her team of researchers, wader boots — are in the muck.
Want to help save the Indian River Lagoon?
Donate to the One Florida Foundation, where contributions go toward educational events. You can also volunteer at or donate to the Brevard Indian River Lagoon Coalition, which educates the community on the issues facing its most precious water source.
Xander Peters is a freelance writer living in New Orleans. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Reason, Southerly, and Scalawag, among others.
Josh Letchworth is an outdoor sports and lifestyle photographer from central Florida. He’s a Florida native and his passion is fly fishing all over the state.
