Stop the "rollout" of PLASTIC GRASS at FGCU

College campuses are usually quiet in summer, but Florida Gulf Coast University buzzed this week with an impassioned effort to stop the rollout of PLASTIC GRASS in the central quad. Plastic grass already sneaked its way onto campus in two other places this year, including a 4000 square foot area around the student center that used to be real grass and trees and is now an uninhabitable plastic heat-collector.

While mowed lawn is far from the best type of land cover for nature (you may have seen my other posts advocating for unnecessarily mowed areas to be "rewilded"), it's still WAY better than plastic grass, despite whatever BS hype you might hear from plastic grass salesmen. Some reasons real is better than artificial include:

1. Plastic grass is not alive. Nothing can eat it. Real grass, on the other hand, supports a food chain of bugs and worms and bunny rabbits and things that in turn support birds and other predators.
2. Plastic grass is made from oil in an energy intensive process that contributes to CO2 pollution and other types of pollution.
3. Plastic grass breaks down (quickly in the searing UV of the Florida sun) and introduces microplastic particles and toxic chemical pollutants like PFAS into the soil and water, hurting wildlife and endangering human health.
4. While real grass that's overmanaged with fertilizer, pesticides, watering, etc. can be a burden on the environment, grass actually grows fine in south Florida with no intervention other than mowing. It gets weedy, but that's a good thing because the biodiversity of the weeds leads to more efficient resource use and resilience, and the flowering weeds look pretty and support all sorts of beautiful and important pollinators like honeybees and butterflies.
5. Real grass with no chemicals added can also help sponge-up chemical pollution running off from other areas.
6. Real plants naturally cool the landscape via "evapotranspiration" (wicking water from the soil up through their roots and leaves into the sky), and also by conversion of light energy into chemical energy via photosynthesis. Sunlight hitting plastic grass, on the other hand, just turns into HEAT, making artificial turf areas much hotter than natural grass; even hotter than pavement sometimes. Trees cool better than grass, but grass is still way cooler than plastic. We've known this stuff about the heat problem of plastic turf since the early 1970s, at least, but just to demonstrate it again I deployed a thermometer on the real and fake grass at FGCU last week-

The plastic grass on campus is particularly galling because FGCU, my employer, is conspicuously branded as Florida's "environmental university." Environmental sustainability has been a central part of FGCU's stated goals since its founding in 1997. This may be partly to offset the original scandal of our campus' construction over sensitive wetlands and panther habitat that was supposed to be preserved. (This was part of a trojan horse deal to let land baron Ben Hill Griffin develop a bunch of surrounding property that was also supposed to have been protected. Very Florida.) Anyway, despite the dirty beginnings, FGCU has USUALLY done a good job of being green. We've kept most of the campus as natural preserve areas, we've let native plants grow around our stormwater ponds to the point that they've become diverse wetlands, we've integrated hands-on environmental education into almost all our academic programs, and we've hired a lot of biology, environmental science, environmental engineering, and marine science faculty who've been active in research intended to help protect the environment.

So how did we go so wrong with the plastic grass? I think it's because the business and operations parts of the university, in their enterprising zeal, have developed a very bad habit of making environmentally-consequential decisions about campus management and development without involving any of the environmental experts we have among our faculty. FGCU does have a Sustainability and Resiliency Council co-chaired by a wonderful environmental scientist who I sincerely love, but it doesn't seem like that group can do anything besides make recommendations that get ignored. I understand why the business and operations folks don't like involving faculty. We faculty are a bunch of opinionated know-it-alls who are never quite satisfied with anything, and decision-making processes we're involved in often become slow and painful. Also, we might say "NO" to some big building or project that the expand-the-enterprise folks are giddy about getting underway. Nevertheless, faculty from relevant disciplines MUST be included in decision making processes to avoid these kind of glaring, should-have-known-better, publicly-humiliating mistakes. What's the point of all our big brains and expertise if the people making decisions never ask us what we think?

In an official statement addressing the plastic grass controversy, given for a News-Press story about the plastic grass that I was also quoted in, our university's spokesperson pointed out that the planning folks did send around a survey last year to ask what people would like to see for the campus quad area. I remember the survey. It was pretty open-ended and of course I filled it out and said I'd like the quad area to be kept as natural as possible, and oh by the way please remember to ask us or at least tell us when you're making some big environmental decision. "Would you like us to replace the real grass with plastic grass?" was absolutely NOT one of the questions on the survey, and I highly doubt that any of the other staff or students who filled out the survey said anything remotely like, "I want to see more plastic grass." So I think the decision to use plastic grass was a poor interpretation of whatever feedback the planners got from that survey and one that, again, could have easily been avoided if there was anyone on the decision making committee with even the slightest knowledge and appreciation of science and environmental stuff.

The fight is still on. I have hope that we can stop the plastic-rollout from happening in the main quad, and maybe we can even tear it out of the areas it's already gone in. Some students from our ornithology club made an online petition that you can sign if you want to help. (790 signatures so far!) It's wonderful to see bravery and leadership from the students on these campus environmental issues. I was heartened to see their commentary in this Gulf Coast News TV segment, for example. I'm also excited to see one of our top research students, Anthony Dues Jr. has started a substack blog tackling the topic with a scientifically informed rant. This ain't over.

Sea Breeze / Land Breeze - The Gulf of Mexico Breathing

Florida doesn't have any mountains to look at but we do have some primo clouds. Clouds have interested me ever since I was a kid, but since getting into windsurfing and studying marine science, both of which require learning about the roles of ocean and atmospheric circulation in weather and climate, I've developed a cloud obsession bordering on the unhealthy. Clouds are neat in themselves, but their patterns and changes over time tell an awe-inspiring story of the planet's life; its giant, slow breathing and pulsing movements of water, energy, and heat. One cloud pattern I love to watch in summer in Florida is related to the seabreeze / land breeze cycle that unfolds each day and night.

Sea Breeze is wind that blows from the ocean towards the land. It's driven by solar heating of the land during the day, which causes hot air to rise over the land, drawing cooler air in from the sea. If conditions are right the seabreeze forms tall, billowing clouds as it rises over the land. These are the source of Florida's summer thunderstorms, which are particularly intense over the middle of the state where the Atlantic Coast sea breeze coming from the east collides with the Gulf Coast sea breeze coming from the west.

Land Breeze is the opposite of sea breeze. It's wind that blows from lands towards the ocean, when the ocean is warmer than the land so air is rising over the ocean and sinking over the land. It happens at night, because land cools off faster than water does. So when the sun sets in Florida the thunderstorms over land usually peter out, but majestic thunder clouds may form over the ocean. On summer mornings in Florida, especially on the Gulf of Mexico side, you can often look out and see gorgeous, side-lit walls of thunderclouds that formed over the ocean at night.

I can't see the beach from my apartment complex, but I know which direction to look to see those over-the-Gulf clouds, and they're often spectacular in the morning. Likewise, in the afternoon I look east to see the eruptions of storms forming inland, and I try to time my bike ride home from work to not get caught in them. Below is a comparison of the morning and afternoon skies today, demonstrating the pattern pretty well. (I should note that it's never exactly the same, and there definitely exceptions to the land clouds in the day, sea clouds at night rule, but the exceptions are interesting, too.)

Here's what the morning conditions look like on the iwindsurf.com radar. Land breeze pattern, with the activity over the ocean and nothing happening over land.

Here's what the afternoon conditions look like on the iwindsurf.com radar. Sea breeze pattern, with land heating generating rising air and thunderstorms over the peninsula, but not much going on over the waters.

This is the modeled wind strength and direction for the morning from iwindsurf.com. Air is still flowing off the land out into the ocean.

This is the modeled wind strength and direction for the afternoon from iwindsurf.com. You can see landward flow caused the seabreeze, plus locally increased winds around the thunderstorms.

The stark folly of poisoning a lakeshore (photos)

Next to my apartment complex is a large retention pond (henceforth, "the lake") which captures and processes runoff from the sprawling development around it. The major developments that border the lake are: Hertz Arena (where the ECHL champion Florida Everblades hockey team plays), Waterline Estero apartments (where I live), The Springs at Gulf Coast apartments, the Miromar Outlets mall, and the Interstate 75 highway.



According to satellite imagery on Google Earth, which I can rewind to 1985, there was some sort of waterbody there even the 1980s, though it was surrounded by woods then. My guess is that the lake began as a quarry, maybe related to construction of the interstate, before it was modified into a retention pond. Anyway, that's besides the point. The point is that nowadays it's an urban waterbody with the important jobs of:

1) Controlling flooding

2) Filtering pollution out of runoff water

3) Being something nice for people to look* at so they'll spend more money on rent, shopping, shows at the arena, etc.

*People used to do more than just look at the lake. In the early 2000s they did waterski shows in it, but that stopped before I arrived in SWFL in 2012. Probably for the best, but it's kind of sad they don't even allow fishing in the lake now.

4) Providing some vestige of habitat for plants and animals that are losing a lot of their other "real estate" as urban growth explodes in the area

Despite its burdens, the lake seems to be functioning well. I'm judging this by the fact that compared to other retention ponds in the area the water is surprisingly clear and full of submerged aquatic vegetation and fish. I know this from lots of looking at the lake, and a bit of snorkeling and deploying underwater cameras in it.

The lake's submerged aquatic vegetation, specifically Vallisneria americana, known as tapegrass or eelgrass, is its secret to clear water. The plants absorb excess nitrogen and phosphorus from the polluted runoff, so there's less in the water to fuel algae growth. This works really well, up to a point. If the loading of nutrient pollution becomes too extreme, or something knocks back the plant life, a lake can suddenly shift from plant-dominated with clear water to algae-dominated with murky water. This dynamic is called ASS - Alternative Stable States. For more info see Scheffer, M., Jeppesen, E. (1998). Alternative Stable States. In: Jeppesen, E., Søndergaard, M., Søndergaard, M., Christoffersen, K. (eds) The Structuring Role of Submerged Macrophytes in Lakes. Ecological Studies, vol 131. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-0695-8_31

I am nervous about this lake switching from its current, clear-water state into an algae-dominated ASS. The reason I'm nervous is that some parts of its shoreline are being managed very poorly. Specifically, the shoreline along Miromar Outlets and I-75 is being sprayed with herbicide to kill all the shoreline plants, leaving just bare mud and rocks. This video clip and the photos below it show the contrast between a well-managed part of the shoreline in front of The Springs apartments, and the terribly-managed part of the shoreline in front of Miromar Outlets.

Natural shoreline in front of The Springs apartments- Keep up the good work.

Semi-natural shoreline in front of Hertz Arena- They mow and do some "spot" spraying of plants, which I think is unnecessary, but it could be worse.

Herbicide-nuked shoreline in front of Miromar Outlet- Ugly, unsafe, and environmentally atrocious. Tsk tsk.

I assume Miromar is doing this as some misguided attempt to make it look "neat and tidy" because there's no legitimate ecological reason to do it. Here is why they should stop spraying herbicide on the shoreline:

1. It causes shoreline erosion.

2. It leads to more runoff pollution entering the lake. One reason ecologists recommend keeping a generous buffer of littoral and riparian vegetation around urban water bodies is because these plants are very effective at intercepting and removing pollution from runoff.

3. It reduces the abundance and diversity of native plant and animal life- bees, butterflies, birds, frogs, fish, etc.

4. While there might be a perception that nuking the shoreline down to a barren wasteland increases people's safety from alligators, it probably does the opposite, because it invites people to go closer to the water's edge where they're more likely to encounter an alligator. I think if the shoreline is reedy and brushy people are less likely to go down to the water's edge.

CONCLUSION: This lake is a local treasure, but it's in danger of losing its ecological integrity because of foolish management on the outlet mall side. I'll see if I can get in touch in with them and convince them of the error of their ways. If any of you readers know one of the higher-ups at the organization, please let me know.

Current thoughts on wealth inequality

 1. Billionaires* shouldn't exist. Their existence** is bad for society. Some people say, "Another's wealth doesn't hurt you- in fact you should be thankful to those great billionaires for stimulating the economy, creating jobs and investment opportunities, etc." I think that is bullshit, because there are several obvious ways that extreme wealth of a few individuals DOES hurt the general populace. Here are three:

a. Those with extreme wealth hoard and guard resources that could create more happiness for more people if they were shared and accessible. Waterfront is my favorite example of this. A huge portion of America's riverfront, lakefront, and oceanfront lands are the private property of a small number of rich, super rich, and ultra rich people, such that the 99% of normal, non-rich people like me are forced into fighting each other over a few tiny slivers of public access points. And in the most expensive waterfront areas the dang rich people who own the property aren't even HOME most of the time. Their gross mansions are empty, because they're off in some OTHER mansion somewhere because they're so stupidly rich they own like ten of them. 

b. Extreme wealth inequality fucks up democracy. Democracy is based on the idea that every person has an equal, intrinsic worth - a soul that matters, regardless of if they're rich or poor. (And regardless of their body pigmentation and whether their gonads make eggs or sperm.) But the existence of a few individuals with massive piles of excess wealth, combined with a political system with few campaign finance restrictions, combined with how well lobbying and corruption work, combined with monopolistic media network ownership by said few individuals, makes it so that a very wealthy person's influence on government is many orders of magnitude greater than a normal person's influence. And this gets worse over time as laws get passed that allow the ultra wealthy to influence things in ever more ways, and disenfranchise normal voters. We need to fix this not only with reforms to protect democracy from undue influence by ultra rich people, but also with reforms to prevent people from becoming ultra rich in the first place. (I think a lot of people would agree with me on the first part of that, but I'm not sure as many are ready for the second part because we are often sustained by the fantasy that someday, somehow we, too could become ultra rich.)

c. Extreme wealth inequality fucks up rule of law. Rule of law is supposed to go along with democracy to ensure that individual rights and safety are protected for everyone, regardless of their wealth. But extreme wealth buys armies of lawyers, fixers, cronies in government, etc., so that rich people become ever less accountable to the rule of law, and instead can deploy it as a weapon to intimidate and harass non-rich people. Just look at how little consequences there have been for Jeffrey Epstein's associates, for example, and how much flaunting of environmental, trade, copyright, and labor laws today's ultra rich people get away with. 

Sometimes apologists for the world's billionaires will admit that extreme wealth inequality is bad, but will make some kind of argument like, "It has to be this way, because the only alternative is COMMUNISM!" That is also bullshit. There are ALL KINDS of regulations, policies, and reforms to economic and social policies that can promote equality and protect democracy without being anything like communism. Getting the laws and regulations tuned properly to maintain balance is a challenging and never ending task, but it's better than just letting it go and having inequality get to the extreme emperor and slaves kind of level that its morphing into today.  

2. Trillionaires are 1000 times worse than billionaires. A trillion is a thousand times a billion, so all the things that are bad about a billionaire existing** apply times a thousand to the case of the trillionaire. 

*Since how much wealth a billion represents depends on the value of the currency, inflation, etc., there should be some independent definition of this level of extreme wealth, which won't go out of date. One way to do it is relative to the wealth of a median household in the country or the world. I saw one reference that in 2022 the median net worth of an American household was $193,000. If we take a billion and divide it by that median net worth ($1,000,000,000 / $193,000) we get 5,181.
Which means a billionaire is someone who has over 5000 times as much money as a typical person. Having even 100 times as much wealth as a typical person is hard to excuse, in my opinion, and I think its dumb for a society to let individuals accumulate more than that. 

**On the issue of existence, what I mean is that nobody should be allowed to have that much money - not that the people with that much money now don't have a right to live. They have a right to live, because we all do. They just don't have a right to hoard that much money, because nobody does. I'm advocating for societal measures to break up their monopolies and trim their wealth down to less dangerous levels. I'm not advocating for a spree of assassinations. Thank you for your attention to this matter. 

Reflecting on the reflecting pool

How about that algae bloom in the Washington DC reflecting pool that Trump just “fixed” in his typical manner- with foolish vanity, at great expense, amidst illegality and corruption, without heeding wiser counsel, and ultimately ineffectively? It’s a moment of schadenfreude worth savoring. For me as a scientist, it’s also a moment to lure people into learning about algae blooms. 

Here’s what you need to know: 

1. “Algae” is a broad biological category, encompassing all organisms that get their energy from the sun, except for true plants, which diverged from algal ancestors about 470 million years ago. The algae alive today include everything from giant seaweeds to single-celled phytoplankton and pond scum. 

2. Algae are the essential, first level of most aquatic food chains. Without algae there would be no fish, shrimp, clams, coral, sea turtles, dolphins, etc. 

3. Algae also make a large portion of the oxygen we breathe, and are important in the global cycling of other chemicals necessary for life, like carbon dioxide, nutrients, etc. 

4. SOMETIMES algae are a nuisance. Excessive algal productivity is called eutrophication, which rhymes with nutrification and stems from pollution by excessive nutrients- nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizer or wastewater. If the eutrophic overgrowth of algae causes harm to people or the environment it’s called a HAB (harmful algal bloom). 

5. Like nutrients, high amounts of light and heat also stimulate algal growth, and can favor more toxic forms of algae. An ancient and often toxic group of algae, the cyanobacteria (aka blue green algae), flourish in waters too warm for most other algae, like dark-bottomed reflecting pools. Cyanobacteria especially flourish when phosphorus levels in the water are high. I think the algae in the reflecting pool now are mostly a type of non-toxic green algae called Desmodesmus, but there’s more than one type of algae in the pool, and the dominant species are likely to shift over time, possibly to more harmful cyanobacteria like the Microcystis aeruginosa we often get in Florida. 

6. The best way to keep algae from getting out of hand is to make sure you’re not adding any extra nutrients to the waterbody you’re managing. The other best way is to make sure the aquatic ecosystem has living components that can remove nutrients and/or remove excess algae. 

 a. True plants like cattails, lily pads, and pond weeds compete with algae for nutrients and light and can help lower nutrient levels to the point where algae will no longer grow in excess. 

 b. Algal grazers like tiny crustaceans and snails can help suppress algae, and filter feeders like clams and mussels can sieve vast quantities of microscopic algae particles out of the water 

7. For small, artificial bodies of water, like swimming pools or fountains, algae can be suppressed with toxic chemicals like chlorine, copper sulfate, or hydrogen peroxide. However, these compounds kill desirable aquatic life, too, and are not appropriate for large scales or natural environments. The Department of the Interior says the hydrogen peroxide they are trying to kill the reflecting pond algae with now is non-toxic, but that's an exaggeration. A high dose of hydrogen peroxide will kill anything. If you decide to control algae chemically, you’re losing your chance to control the algae biologically (like with plants, grazers, or filter feeders) because the chemical controls will kill the biological controls. Also, chemical suppression of algae does nothing to remove nutrients from the water, so the fuel for the next algae bloom remains and the algae will come back with a vengeance as soon as the algae-killing chemicals wear off. This creates a kind of chemical-addiction cycle that is great for pool and pond management companies, but isn’t great for customers, or nature. 

8. In my opinion, anything bigger than a swimming pool should be managed as a true aquatic ecosystem, with plants, grazers, filter feeders, and all the other living things that keep algae in check naturally. Trying to maintain a huge reflecting pool in a lifeless state is a pretty dumb idea, in my opinion, dooming the managers to never-ending, expensive algal vacuuming and toxic chemical treatments. 

9. Some of the algal bloom problems in the reflecting pool are because of high nutrient levels in the water it’s filled with. The water comes from the Potomac River Estuary via a little reservoir called the tidal basin, which exchanges with the low-salinity estuary at high tide. Like the Chesapeake Bay, which it is a part of, the Potomac is quite high in nutrients from a variety of human sources. So it is unsurprising that a stagnant pool filled with its water is prone to algae blooms. 

10. Sometimes in the past the reflecting pool was filled with potable water from the city’s drinking water supply. That water was lower in nutrients and would initially be less prone to algae blooms than the Potomac water from the tidal basin. BUT that was an expensive use of precious drinking water, and it wasn’t just a one-time use, either, because water would be lost to evaporation and leaks. Plus, water changes would eventually be needed because the initially clean water would get contaminated from fertilizer rich runoff, bird poop, etc. and after a while the nutrient levels would be just as high as Potomac water, anyway. So, I think the Obama era re-plumbing of the reflecting pool with dirtier but cheaper to flush-through tidal basin water was an OK idea. 

11. I think the BEST way to do the reflecting pool would be more like a natural lake than a cement bottomed pool. The center would have to be dug quite deep to remain as open water, but to keep the water quality good the borders of the pond would have to be shallow wetlands vegetated with cattails, lily pads, etc. Instead of just existing to reflect the monuments around it, this “green” reflecting pool would perform multiple ecological functions, providing plant and animal habitat and naturally removing excess nutrients from the urban runoff passing through it.

What fundamentals of humanity are most absent from America’s public consciousness?

The current human population is about 8,300,000,000. (https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/)

We each have a consciousness and inner life. We each know something about the lives of our family, friends, and acquaintances. And we each have some sense of society at large; what people are like in other parts of the world and other branches of society, what power structures exist, how things get done, etc. It's a moral sense of how things are and how they ought to be, which can also be called the public conscience or collective consciousness.

There is a chicken-and-egg dynamic to our sense of society. What society is like influences our thoughts about it, but our thoughts about society also influence how we act and therefore shape society itself.

Our sense of society is based a bit on our upbringing, formal education, and direct experience. Increasingly, though, our sense of society is based on the news and culture content we’re fed by massive media networks owned and curated by a small number of extremely wealthy individuals. Those few, super-rich people have interests wildly different from our own. Specifically, their interests are vacuuming up all our wealth, monopolizing 100% of our attention, blinding us to their evil, neutering our capacity to resist their control, and forcing us into endless, indentured servitude. (Really!) Of course this affects what they show us, and what they don’t show us. They don’t show us how to organize and resist their control, for example. Sneakily removing important topics and important moral perspectives from news and public discussion is one of the most effective types of mass manipulation. It’s hard for us to notice what we’re NOT seeing when we’re flooded with so much of everything else. So, what are some of those important topics and perspectives that billionaire media want to erase from the public consciousness? Here’s what I think is missing:

1. The essential moral and practical values of cooperation and sharing- The “game” of our economy is increasingly rigged in favor of the rich, but it’s important to the rich that poor people still struggle to play their game. We oblige by beating the hell out of ourselves and each other just to generate wealth that’s instantly siphoned upward, from the worker class to the owner/investor class. (We are trained to be hyper critical of wealth-siphoning by the government through taxes while being totally oblivious to wealth-siphoning by the rich through all their price gouging and other dirty tricks.) We are also supposed to assume the only reason we’re poor is that we’re not as hard working or skilled as those wonderfully rich people; the mavericks, the disruptors, the stable geniuses. Cooperating and sharing are big no-no’s. Like, what are you, a socialist, a communist, a WIMP!? Everyone knows the true American Way is to bully, cheat, and steal your way to the top of the pile. Forget those antiquated ideas about “the common good,” the only true solutions are individual solutions. Greed is good. Ruthless, selfish, competition is the way – GET WHAT’S YOURS. And who better to lead us than the greediest of the greedy, the champions of the game? What could possibly go wrong with putting pathologically selfish billionaire crooks into the highest seats of government power? (Everything could go wrong, of course. Everything HAS gone wrong.)

Downplaying the value of cooperation and sharing funnels us into seeing life as a “zero sum game” where selfish antagonism is the only way to success. We see the selfishness of society’s “winners” glamourized and fetishized and start thinking that’s the route we should follow, too, not realizing the near-impossibility of that route for anyone not born into wealth and privilege, given the rigged game dynamic. Plus, even if selfishness COULD get you from the bottom to the top, it would only be solving the problem for you, while making it worse for everyone you’d shoved down in your scramble to the top. Really, both individuals and the bulk of society are much better served when we cooperate and support each other, but rich people HATE it when we do that.

It’s sad because cooperation has been and continues to be the KEY to human survival in the long term. It’s the thing that helped our ancestors survive droughts, winters, ice ages, cave bears and lions. Cooperation is not only key to overcoming survival challenges presented by the environment; it’s key to overcoming the oppressive power of the rich over the poor; the excessive stratification of society that we’ve been prone to since ancient times. Of course, cooperation and sharing aren’t easy to get right. There are plenty of examples of societies that, in pursuit of drastically more equal sharing, flipped from a cruel hegemony of the wealthy over the poor straight into a cruel hegemony of former revolutionaries over everybody. Nevertheless, I contend that we need large measures of cooperation and sharing baked into all levels of our society for it to function properly, and I think this every-man-for-himself kick that we’ve been on (since the 1980s maybe? longer?) is self-destructive folly.

Some people are nervous about cooperation and sharing because they’re afraid of being taken advantage of. We worry that our contributions to the public good will be hoarded and wasted by lazy or unscrupulous people; people who are poor like us but less honest and hard-working. Of course, our fear of other poor people is intentionally boosted by rich people. They mix it with potent additives like racism, sexism, xenophobia, etc., generally getting poor white guys to side (against their actual interests) with the rich. It’s not unreasonable to worry about your generosity being taken advantage of. But if our view was less distorted by rich people’s propaganda, we’d see that THEY are the ones most guilty of hoarding and wasting the fruits of our labor, while not being compelled to contribute their share of taxes, clean up the societal and environmental damage they cause, etc. The concept of accountability is important for cooperation and sharing to work, and it IS present in our public consciousness. The problem is that our sense of accountability is hyper-focused on poor scapegoats and quietly steered away from truly culpable rich people.

2. Citizen empowerment- There’s a lot that poor people can do to make society better and advance their collective interests. In a democracy, that includes voting, but there’s a lot more beyond that. Also, as things like partisan gerrymandering, other dirty tricks of disenfranchisement, and big-money-supported candidates on both tickets become more prevalent, its harder for voting (by itself) to fix things. It becomes more important to protest, strike, show up at public hearings, organize at multiple levels, share reliable information outside of propaganda networks, etc. Rich people definitely don’t want us doing this. Like, on the corporate mega-media news channel they’re definitely not going to tell you where to show up for the protest against the corporate mega-media news channel. And while the algorithms of your billionaire-owned social media network may feed you a stream of rage-bait news tuned to your partisan sentiments to keep your engagement high, they’re unlikely to give you any useful instructions of how to effectively channel your rage. Just keep scrolling and they’ll keep getting richer.

3. The downsides of capitalism – None of the economic ‘isms is perfect. They all need to be martialed by rigorous democracy to keep from becoming awful. But the lens of billionaire media always omits or downplays the problems of capitalism, since billionaires are the ones that capitalism benefits most, even when it’s off the rails and everyone else is suffering – especially then. We’re allowed unlimited criticism of socialism, but the inadequacy of capitalism as the sole principal of society is like a forbidden topic. You could write a whole book on the downsides of capitalism (in fact Marx and Engels famously did) but nobody has time to read that so we can summarize the downsides as: 1) Extreme wealth and income inequality. 2) Environmental degradation. 3) Economic instability and boom/bust cycles. 4) Commodification of essential needs. 5) Labor exploitation and alienation.

4. Hope- It’s obvious that things are really bad and it would be dumb to imagine that they’ll just fix themselves. That said, hope is both necessary and warranted. I mean, think about how truly horrific things USED to be. Day 1 of America was mass murder and displacement of indigenous people. Then we had 246 years of slavery. Women didn’t get the right to vote until 1920. But throughout our ugly history, good people have gotten together, fought the oppressive powers for the rights they deserved, and often WON, succeeding in making our society much better for a much larger portion of the populace. There is ALWAYS hope, wherever we can see and bravely use our collective power.

Manatees to oysters; school's out fieldwork blitz in SW Florida

I finished my spring semester grading on Sunday night then woke up at 6 am Monday to begin four consecutive days of benthic ecology fieldwork in the Caloosahatchee River Estuary (CRE) and Pine Island Sound (PIS). Here's a little about the projects:

CRE- Caloosahatchee means "river of the Calusa;" named after the people who lived in SW Florida prior to Spanish and English colonization. The original headwaters of the Caloosahatchee were west of Lake Okeechobee, but in the 1880s a canal was constructed to extend the river to the lake itself. This seemed like a good idea at the time, providing a highway for steamboat traffic and a mechanism for controlling lake level to allow more farming around its shores. Three locks and dams were also added to the Caloosahatchee to retain or release water as needed for human use, turning the river into a linear reservoir. Ecologically it was a disaster, of course, because it starved the Everglades of water and turned the relatively clean, steady flow of the Caloosahatchee into a wildly fluctuating, polluted flow.

From the Gulf of Mexico to the first dam on the river, life in the CRE now suffers from salinity levels that flip-flop between high and low extremes beyond the natural variability of an estuary. (I wrote a paper about that with some other scientists in 2020.) In recent decades we have tried to regulate the flow to better meet both nature's needs and human needs as part of the massive "Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan" (CERP). The latest Lake Okeechobee Systems Operating Manual (LOSOM), integral to CERP, is better at keeping water flows to the estuary within ecologically reasonable bounds. It's not perfect, though, and in high rainfall times or droughts like we're having now the estuary still gets too fresh or too salty.



The best "ecological indicator" of the estuary getting too salty is loss of the Tape Grass (Vallisneria neotropicalis) beds that used to cover large areas of the upper estuary. Vallisneria is a freshwater plant but can tolerate salinity levels up to about 10 ppt (pure freshwater is 0 ppt and the ocean is 35 ppt). So the upper parts of estuaries are OK for it. We want Vallisneria growing in the CRE because it provides food for wintering manatees and habitat for fish and crustaceans. It also helps absorb some of the excess nitrogen and phosphorus getting into the estuary from urban and agricultural pollution, and benefits seaward habitats like seagrass beds by preventing algae blooms. (My grad student Brondum Krebs and I wrote a paper about that in 2024.)

Picture of extensive Vallisneria beds in the CRE in 1984, taken by Calusa Waterkeeper emeritus John Cassani.

There have been various governmental and non-profit environmental group efforts in the 2000s to restore the mostly-lost Vallisneria beds, including an ambitious planting effort begun in 2024 using cages to protect the plants from grazing while they're getting established. Seagrasses (and their freshwater kin like Vallisneria) often experience "positive density dependence" in stressful environments, meaning they flourish when there's enough of them around that they can stabilize the local environment and resist grazing, but if they fall below that self-sustaining threshold it's really hard to get them back. Getting them back may require both a big reduction in the environmental stresses and active measures like planting. The 2025-2026 drought in Florida has greatly worsened the salinity stress on naturally recovering and recently replanted Vallisneria in the CRE. This week we were encouraged to see SOME Vallisneria still living in the CRE restoration areas that we monitored, but there was much less than there had been just 6 months ago.

A Vallisneria hanger-on.

There were also some upsetting signs of trouble in the upper estuary such as:

1. A huge, rotting manatee carcass in one of our monitoring sites. This may be a late casualty of the February power plant snafu that cut off the warm water flow that manatees were sheltering in on the Orange River, a tributary of the upper CRE. Or it migth have been a boat strike, since the seasonal speed limit for boats expired on March 31st but some manatees are still hanging out in the upper CRE. I'm not sure what the manatees are still doing up there because there's very little Vallisneria for them to feed on. They might be eating the filamentous red algae Polysiphonia subtilissima, which is abundant in the upper estuary due to the nutrient polluted conditions. Compared to true plants like seagrasses and Vallisneria, algae are thought to be an inferior food for manatees, so this is a little worrying.

2. Oysters, Crassostrea virginica, far further up the estuary than I've ever seen them before. Oysters prefer water of 14-28 ppt so they're usually in the middle to lower part of the estuary, rarely even making it as far up as downtown Fort Myers. This week we actually found a couple of oysters upriver of the railroad bridge and "Beautiful Island" water quality sensor maintained by the Sanibel Captiva Conservation Foundation (SCCF).

Oysters cement their shells to whatever hard substrate is available. In the upper CRE the hard substrate is shells of Rangia cuneata and Polymesoda caroliniana clams, which are normally the dominant bivalves in that low salinity zone.

Over the last 90 days the SCCF sensor has shown salinities near and sometimes exceeding 10 ppt, which is really bad for Vallisneria. A lot of the Vallisneria restoration areas and former strongholds are well seaward of Beautiful Island and have surely experienced even higher salinities this year.

What should we make of this? Should we give up on trying to restore Vallisneria in the Caloosahatchee, since climate change, sea level rise (about 30 cm [1 ft] since 1965), and increasing human demands for fresh water are going to make it even harder to maintain low salinities in the future? We need to be realistic, but I don't think we should give up yet. A huge reservoir (the C-43 reservoir) has recently been built upriver on the Caloosahatchee to store water in wet times and gradually release it in dry times. We didn't need that kind of artificial thing back in the day because natural wetlands in the watershed would store and slowly release water to the river. However, our drainage of the wetlands with canals, and other watershed modifications like pavement and rooftops that prevent groundwater recharge have made it necessary. Once it's full, the C-43 reservoir should at least buy us a couple decades of keeping the seawater at bay and maintaining a low salinity Vallisneria habitat.

There is the issue of the water in the C-43 reservoir possibly becoming a polluted soup of algae unsafe for release, since it's built on top of defunct orange groves with fertilizer-saturated soils and doesn't include any artificial wetland features for nutrient removal. But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it, I guess. I like the idea of having some kind of floating aquatic plant harvesting system in the reservoir to sponge up and repurpose the excess nutrients until the water is clean. Another thing we should be working on for the real long term is an inland retreat for the Vallisneria, because at some point sea level rise is just going to be too much to keep it growing where it's hanging on now. That inland retreat thing is something that both humans and plants will be going through in the next couple centuries.



PIS- Pine Island Sound, in contrast with the beleaguered pollution-highway that is the main stem of the Caloosahatchee Estuary, is the healthiest estuary in SW Florida. This is because its watershed is relatively sparsely populated barrier islands with decent pollution controls, it has good connections to the Gulf of Mexico through tidal inlets, and only gets a moderate amount of spillover pollution from the more inland estuaries like the Caloosahatchee and Matlacha Pass. PIS is not perfectly healthy, though. For example, it lost its Bay Scallop population after the construction of the Sanibel Island causeway bridge, which reduced flushing of the estuary and caused it to take on more gunky Caloosahatchee water. From north to south Pine Island sound you can see a definite transition in water color from Caribbean blue-green to more Caloosahatchee brown.



The reason I was in PIS on Thursday was to help with "ground truthing" for a seagrass mapping effort led by the South Florida Water Management District. A few months ago a contractor for the SFWMD flew over all the SW Florida estuaries aquiring detailed imagery for seagrass delineation. This is an important effort that's repeated every few years to track seagrass gains and losses. It gives us a report card on our environmental stewardship, because seagrass beds expand where water quality and salinity levels are good, and they perish where water quality or salinity levels are bad. I was nervous about the PIS ground truthing because I'm only a so-so boat operator and navigator, and the geography of PIS is a complicated maze of islands, vague channels, and dangerous shoals. To make up for my ineptitude I pre-scrutinized maps of the area and carefully planned a zig-zagging route to hit all the spots I'd been assigned to check. I had sharp crew of FGCU graduate student Alvio Barbaretta and undergrad Bailey Day, who made sure I didn't get lost on the drive to the boat ramp, measured water clarity, punched in coordinates and data, and kept eyes out for hazards of the sea.

This allowed me to focus on the fun stuff like snorkeling around the boat to see what species of seagrasses and algae were present. After three days in the coffee-brown water of the upper CRE with barely any submerged vegetation, the lush seagrass meadows and blue-green water of PIS were wonderful.

We even had a close encounter with LIVE manatee who seemed happy, and very curious about our boat.

Every site we stopped at in PIS had seagrass, though it was sparser at deeper sites (a result of reduced light availability) and it was more algae covered at southern sites (a product of more nutrient pollution) from the Caloosahatchee. As bad as the drought has been for Vallisneria in the upper CRE, it's actually pretty helpful for the saltwater-associated seagrasses in places like PIS, because less river flow and runoff means less delivery of coastal pollution. The beautiful seagrass scenes from Pine Island Sound are not something that we should take for granted, but rather, something that should inspire us to be better stewards of all waterways in Florida.