Venn Diagram of People into Environmentalism

It's tricky to be an environmentalist because a lot of times your allies, who agree with you that the environment needs to be protected, wildly disagree with you about other things. I don't have the solution for this but I've tried to map out the problem with this Venn diagram.

Red Tide is back in SW Florida

My title is a bit misleading. Florida red tide (blooms of the toxic dinoflagellate alga Karenia brevis) has actually been skulking around west and southwest Florida since last summer. But because of the wind and current patterns it has mostly stayed to our north and offshore... until now.

Karenia brevis blooms are tricky to understand and predict because they usually start far offshore, fueled by nutrients from deep water currents that brush along the "continental shelf" of west Florida. But when winds and currents bring the blooms closer to shore, they interact with nutrient sources from the land; the flow from polluted rivers and runoff. There is a growing scientific consensus that while Florida's red tides may not be *initiated* by pollution, they are definitely worsened by pollution.

As paddleboarding marine biologist I'm out in the water a lot, so I get a lot of reminders of what's at stake; what we have to lose if we don't get our pollution under control and tamp down these red tides. For example, last week when paddleboarding around Lover's Key the water was relatively clear and I saw a cute little bonnethead shark swimming along over the sand. Today, paddling the same route with a friend, there were dead fish floating everywhere and a stench was in the air; a mix of rotting fish and the aerosolized "brevitoxins" of the red tide bloom. When we paddled over the same patch of sand where I'd seen the baby shark last week, there it was again, or another one about the same size, freshly dead.

Why do we empower rich people and weaken democracy?

One thing that limits how much I try to convince people that Donald Trump is an awful person who should never have been given power (yes, I would actually be trying more) is this: It’s so PLAINLY OBVIOUS. Seeing Trump on TV in the 1980s, sneering down at the common people from his gold-plated penthouse, I could instantly tell he was a bad person. I thought everyone, even kids like me, knew this: Good people don’t brag about being rich. The more you brag about being rich the worse a person you probably are, and Donald Trump’s entire personality and career is based on bragging about being rich. He should have been laughed into obscurity, or maybe slightly-pitied-for-his-sad-vanity into obscurity. Instead, millions voted for him to be president.

To Nazi, oops I mean to NOT SEE and reject obvious-bad-guy Trump, the 77,284,118 people who voted for him last year must have an incredibly different way of viewing people and the world than I do. I’m going to speculate about those differences and hopefully maybe get to some kind of useful insight about where our thinking goes astray and how we could do better.

 

Difference #1: We differ in how we think people get rich, and what we think wealth indicates about character. Some people associate wealth with positive traits, some associate it with negative traits, or just luck.

Positive View: Wealth is a sign of____

Hard work

Intelligence/Creativity

Contribution to society; Productivity

Goodness; Being rewarded by God

 

Negative View: Wealth is a sign of____

Selfishness/Stinginess/Greed

Ruthlessness; Willingness to cheat and exploit others

Luck- especially the hereditary luck of being born to rich parents

The advantages of attending elite private schools and colleges and entering the high-society "Good ol' Boys" club

Corruption/Collusion; Benefitting from a political system you’ve twisted in your favor

The various “rich get richer” feedback loops in our economic system

 

I think it’s a combination of these positive and negative things that lead to individual wealth, and the relative amounts of different causes of richness varies from one rich person to the next. Not all rich people are purely evil, is what I’m saying. But generally, I think richness comes more from luck and negative traits than wealthy people would like to admit. I also think we Americans are WAY too gracious in how we think about rich people as noble heroes while denigrating poor people as trash. This kind of thinking, which is encouraged by media owned by rich people for whom its important muffle class grievances, makes it easy for rich people to stay rich and get richer while avoiding criticism for bad behavior.

 

Difference #2: We differ in beliefs about “the government” and “the elites.” A common thing about people who’ve embraced Trump seems to be a super strong belief that government, per se, is bad, and therefore anyone who cheats the government or fights the government is good. The story goes like this: There’s a democrat / deep state “elite” that does not work in the public interest and needs to be destroyed by a strongman like Trump who will then recreate a government that is truly by and for the people… or maybe just reign as a benign dictator. The details of what’s supposed to happen after the strongman destroys the government aren’t very clear, which I wish was a matter of greater concern for his supporters.

I agree that government CAN be bad, and sometimes it’s necessary to resist, reform, or even overthrow the government. However, the democratic governments we form are also our only means of protecting ourselves (everyday people) from being exploited by actual elites- the ultra-wealthy and powerful like Trump, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Rupert Murdoch, etc.

Also, much of the dysfunction of government that gets people upset today is because of how it has been beat up and weakened over the decades by the corruption of big-business influences. Handing the steering wheel of government directly to those big-business influences is not helpful. The GOP’s biggest lie is saying they’re taking power from the elites and giving it to the common people, when actually they’re doing EXACTLY the opposite in such an obvious way that I’m astounded more people don’t see it.

My Open Letter to FL Senator Rick Scott regarding illegal actions by Elon Musk's "DOGE"

 Title: Please protect NSF, EPA, NOAA, etc; oppose illegal actions by "DOGE"

Hi Senator Scott,

As a working citizen, the taxes I pay support a variety of federal programs carefully designed and managed to benefit the public. For example, the mission of the National Science Foundation (NSF) is "To promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity and welfare; and to secure the national defense."

As a marine biology professor whose work has received support from NSF, NOAA, and the EPA, I have been proud to help these important agencies achieve their missions. My students and colleagues at Florida Gulf Coast University also work hard to do good science and win competitive, merit-based funding support from these agencies, or to work for them as experts. For example, my former student Lisa Rickards (FGCU MS Environmental Science 2018) now works to protect the environment at the EPA. Brondum Krebs (FGCU MS Environmental Science 2022) is working on a NOAA-NCCOS funded project to understand and protect fisheries resources in the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary- an amazing coral reef ecosystem off the coast of Texas. Matthew Tillman (FGCU MS Environmental Science 2024) has been accepted into the extremely competitive NOAA Corps officer program and is going through their rigorous basic training, eager to use his science, boating, and diving skills to the benefit of our nation.

Because of their importance to the nation, to me, personally, and to the next generation of scientists who I have helped train, it is extremely upsetting to see these carefully built federal programs being “thrown into the wood chipper” as colorfully stated by unelected “DOGE” head Elon Musk. The reckless and illegal actions of DOGE are not reform and are not in our national interest; they are national self-destruction. The richest man in the world is treating our venerable institutions like a personal piñata; whacking them to pieces and grabbing the spilled loot for himself and his cronies. Unless Musk and DOGE are stopped, quickly, the programs essential to our national well-being will fail spectacularly and millions of Americans like Lisa, Brondum, Matthew, and me, will suffer.

I would also like to point out that while a majority of Floridians voted for you and President Trump, NOBODY voted for Elon Musk. With that in mind, please do whatever is in your power as a Senator to oppose Musk and DOGE.

Thank you,

James G. Douglass, PhD

Estero, Florida

Bluesky account, SUPdate, and new GPS watch

Well, gee. It has been a while since I've made a blog post. Blogs are so "old internet" now. Gears are churning in my mind, though, and I'm thinking that maybe old internet has some advantages over the extremely algorithm-driven, addictive, doom-scrolling-for-profit, orchestrated-and-manipulated-by-oligarchs-aligned-with-fascists disaster that is "new internet." 

Towards that end I've created an account on supposedly-less-worse-than-facebook-and-twitter/X social media platform "bluesky" - https://bsky.app/profile/jamesgdouglass.bsky.social

Bluesky doesn't allow posts more than 300 words, but that could kind of work out if I put long rants and picture-filled posts here on my blog, and just link to them on bluesky. Unlike facebook, I think bluesky doesn't deprioritize posts linking to outside websites. 

As for personal news, I've been working a lot trying to keep up with my teaching and research responsibilities at FGCU and I haven't been able to do as much watersports as I would like. I am still paddleboarding at least once a week, though, and I've changed paddleboards. Unlike the pre-hurricane-Ian days when I lived in a house with a shed and could store lots of toys, I am now limited to what I can store permanently in my 2009 Chrysler Town & Country mini-van, and one 14' SUP board that I store on top of the kitchen cabinets with a little rack system that probably voids the security deposit on the one-bedroom apartment I live in with Rhonda. 

The 14' SUP I originally had on top of the cabinets was a 23" wide Riviera RP raceboard from 2017. It was really beat up and many-times repaired from injuries sustained even prior to 2022's Hurricane Ian. Anyway, I finally decided to give it away after getting frustrated with how much trouble I had staying on it in the rough water 2024 Key West Classic race. After all, I still had a slower but more seaworthy 14'x27.25" Fanatic Falcon 2014 raceboard collecting dust in my buddy Serge's backyard shipping container storage unit. So the Riviera went away and I'm now exclusively using the big red Fanatic, which is also windsurfable, by the way, because of the mast track I installed in it a long time ago. 

My favorite paddle route is circumnavigating Lover's Key. It's an annoyingly long, trafficky drive from where I live now to Lover's Key, but I know I can always get a dirt parking spot there, and it's free. There's a closer place where I can get in the water (the Estero River), but flat water paddling is comparatively boring, and paddling the wide Fanatic in flat water is kind of sad because it's significantly slower than the narrow Riviera was. If I'm in bumpy water or waves I don't notice that.

Anyway, in December I gave myself a little present to help me motivate and track my watersports and other exercise. It's a "Garmin Instinct Solar" GPS watch. The GPS isn't on all the time- just when you turn it on to track an activity, but it has motion sensors and a heart rate sensor that ARE on all the time, so if I want to see what my heart rate was when I was asleep, or something, I can look at that data via a bluetooth wireless connection between the watch and my smartphone. (Kind of creepy, but whatever.) The heart rate monitor in the watch gets what I think is accurate data when I'm jogging, based on what I know my maximum heart rate is from prior monitoring with chest band HR monitors. However, the HR monitor in the watch gives total garbage data during standup paddling. I don't know if it's because of the different wrist motion, or water conductivity, or what. 

I have yet to try using the watch for "intervals" type workouts of the sort I used to use my "SUP Speedcoach" GPS for, but the watch beeps and buzzes every time I complete a mile, so I can glance at my wrist and see how my pace was for each mile paddled or jogged. If anyone else has some tips for getting the most out of this type of wrist GPS for SUP training, I would love to hear those. 

Florida sandwich: SUP race between two hurricanes

Fall 2024 schedule:

1. Research and teaching at Florida Gulf Coast University
2. Hurricane Helene
3. Key West Classic paddle race
4. Hurricane Milton
5. Back to research and teaching

Life in Florida is *a lot* sometimes, in both good and bad ways. Rhonda and I have adjusted to the "downsizing" that Hurricane Ian forced on us in fall 2022, moving from a flooded then sold from under us rental house in Bonita Springs to a tiny but cute bedroom apartment in Estero. Positives include:

1. Bicycling a short distance to work and never having to worry about gas or finding a parking place.
2. Power-couple working from home vibes with two desks set up in a single room that is home office, living room, kitchen, and dining room.
3. Easy to walk the dogs within the apartment complex, nice neighbors, and a swimming pool.
4. Being at 5 meters elevation (as opposed to 2 meters) and therefore not having to worry about storm surge or freshwater flooding.
5. Rhonda discovered that there is just enough room over the kitchen cabinets to store my 14' race paddleboard, and we developed an efficient system now for getting it down and out the door, so I can paddle almost as much as I used to again.

There are some negatives, like it's a longer drive to the beach, we have no room for guests and no storage space for hobby stuff, and we can't make our own decisions about the landscaping. We're living well overall, though, and able to progress on some of our life achievement / enjoyment goals. For example, Rhonda is kicking butt with her writing and editing career, going on Disney World trips with her sister and nephew, and I am pursuing some semblance of chaotic balance of research, teaching, environmental activism, and watersports / fitness pursuits. The last month has been a particularly dramatic one, and that is the subject of this post.

It started out fairly normal: teaching and research. Fieldwork for the research has been fun. My colleague Melissa May and I are part of a team working with the Gulf Shellfish Institute to restore hard clams, aka Southern Quahog (Mercenaria campechiensis) by combining seagrass and clam restoration projects. Hard clams used to be ubiquitous in SW Florida, but they were massively overharvested in the 1960s and have been slow to recover, possibly due to loss of spawning stock. We've been diving in shallow waters and scoping out sites that currently have low amounts of clams and seagrass but could potentially be restored. In the picture below some Gulf Shellfish Institute researchers are hamming it up with a few clams we found during a site survey using the Sanibel Captiva Conservation Foundation's research vessel.

The bad stuff started with Hurricane Helene, which we were worried could be a reprisal of Hurricane Ian's devastating effects on our area. Helene was devastating for the "Big Bend" region of Florida between Tampa and Tallahasee, and almost apocalyptic as a "1000 year" freshwater flood event where my parents live in Asheville, NC.

The scariest thing for me about Helene was not being able to get in touch with my parents for days while watching apocalyptic footage of Asheville flooding, and imaginging them swept away in a mudslide somewhere. It turns out they were OK, and were able to evacuate to their beach rental house in South Carolina; an interesting reversal of the usual "head for the hills" thing you're expected to do in a hurricane.

Helene wasn't that bad for us in SW Florida, but it still managed to flood FGCU's Vester Marine Field Station enough that they had to remove drywall from where they had JUST fixed it post-Ian. The surges of Helene (and later Milton) show up well in this log from a water quality sensor deployed at the marine station by FGCU scientists.

Also, Helene flooded my paddle friends Justin and Bill's houses on the Imperial River and derailed their plans to attend the last ever Key West Classic paddleboard race. And it majorly resculpted the beaches and "sanded over" beach parking lots. I feel bad for whoever's cars and trucks these were that didn't get moved out of the Bonita Beach parking lots before the storm.

Some of the old Bonita Springs paddle racing crew were unaffected enough by Helene that we were still able to attend the Key West Classic. I drove down with Cindy Gibson and we met Meg Bosi and John Weinberg there, along with a bunch of other paddle racers from around Florida who we've gotten to know over the years.

Hawaiian style blessing before the 2024 Key West Classic.

For the race I'd been thinking about bringing my WIDE 14x27.25" Fanatic Falcon, but I didn't have the wherewithall to get it out of post-Ian storage at my buddy's house before the mess of Helene. So I ended up going with the beat up 14x23" Riviera RP that lives on top of my cabinets. The narrow Riviera board was perfect for the north side of Key West, where the water was flat in the lee of the south wind, but it was almost impossible to balance on the board on the wickedly choppy south side of Key West, where a residual wind and swell from Helene was bouncing off the cement seawalls. I especially suffered in in the final segment of the race where I kept falling and falling and was eventually passed by my most closely matched competitor Travis Kindt. Almost everyone else was also having balance issues, though, and many stand up paddleboarders ended up sitting down or kneeling on their boards to finish the race. Once the "sitters" were disqualified I actually ended up in third place, after Jake Portwood and Travis Kindt. My time was 3 hours 11 minutes, which is about 45 minutes longer than my best time from years past. Cindy won first place in the 12'6 board class and first place overall for the women, rounding in front of a bunch of younger women on 14' boards.

Jake Portwood first SUP finisher.

Me limping over the finish line.

Cindy Gibson finishing strong.

Meg Bosi.

After the race we ate good food and did a bunch of touristy stuff in Key West. Ernest Hemmingway's house was worth the money and the Key West graveyard, with all kinds of history, flowers and feral chickens and iguanas running amok was neat.

We didn't get much rest after Helene and Key West before the next hurricane loomed: Milton. With a more southerly track than Helene, it looked like it could be extremely bad for us, and maybe a "worst ever" scenario for Tampa Bay. As it was, the track kind of "threaded the needle," coming ashore just south of Tampa Bay and not causing much storm surge there, while being far enough north of my area that our storm surge was only a little bit higher than Helene's was. There were scary tornadoes across the whole state as Milton was approaching, though, for which Rhonda and I had to hide in the bathroom with our dogs. It also flooded FGCU Vester station ABOVE the line where the soggy new drywall had just been removed after Helene. Ugh. Bill and Justin's river houses also flooded again, significantly more so than in Helene, so they are in hell still. Areas north of me but south of Tampa Bay, like Venice and Sarasota, got it worst, with major surge, wind damage, and basically total devastation of the barrier islands and low lying areas.

I know I shouldn't get in the water after hurricanes, since it's like, 90% sewage and toxic waste, but yesterday Cindy and I carefully paddled through the backwaters from Bonita Beach road to Wiggins Pass State Park to check out the scene there. Interestingly, all the ingredients of nature: trees, sand, shells birds, fish, etc. are still there, just in significantly different arrangements. The parking lots of the state park are totally obscured under new sand dunes, and what once were forests are now roots and tree stumps awash in the Gulf of Mexico.

People keep talking about "build back bigger and stronger" but I think we need to be a little careful about how we approach that. In my opinion, we really shouldn't be building stuff that's supposed to last a long time on beaches and barrier islands. These areas move and shift around a lot, even when sea level isn't rising, and sea level IS rising (about 3.57 mm/yr in Fort Myers according to the NOAA gauges there). Besides the upward creep of sea level rise, another thing making us more vulnerable is the increasing temperature and "oceanic heat content" of the Gulf of Mexico, which is like rocket fuel for hurricanes. The gulf has been record hot for the last few years, and was 2-3 degrees Celsius warmer than normal for these last two storms, contributing massively to their convective winds and precipitation. Big, destructive hurricanes won't be hitting us EVERY year, but they're definitely going to be hitting harder and causing more surge and flooding than they did in decades past.

Between Helen and Milton my geology / meteorology colleague Dr. Joanne Muller gave a killer talk about hurricanes and her efforts to account for their changing impacts over time. Proud to be part of a scientific community that is looking at the science and economic impacts of storms with clear eyes.

Dirt roads, parks with hiking / biking trails, simple beach access areas, maybe some campgrounds; those are the only kind of human use things that I think really make sense for beach front and barrier islands of the Gulf.

Does it make sense to harvest and repurpose cyanobacteria blooms in South Florida?

Florida has a lot of problems with harmful algal blooms, due to nutrient pollution from wastewater and runoff; a problem that has grown exponentially along with the state's population. In Florida's lakes and rivers, the worst types of algae blooms are those comprised of toxic cyanobacteria, like the Microcystis aeruginosa currently covering Lake Okeechobee. US Representatives Brian Mast and Byron Donalds, from the east and west sides of South Florida, respectively, are sponsoring a bill that would require the harvest and repurposing of these cyanobacteria blooms. Is this is a good idea? Is it even possible? I have mixed feelings about it. Below is a link to a newspaper article about the bill, and below that is an explanation of what I think about it, which I orginally posted as a long reply-comment on facebook.

https://www.news-press.com/story/news/local/environment/2024/07/12/bill-would-have-corps-skim-cyanobacteria-from-waterways-to-make-biofuel/74205200007/

I'm always glad to see elected officials taking an interest in science and environmental issues. It is encouraging that Rep. Donalds and Mast recognize Florida’s algae bloom problems, the link between excess nutrients and algae blooms, and the potential for removal and repurposing of bloom biomass to help address the underlying problem of excess nutrients. I am concerned, however, that skimming/straining cyanobacteria from the water may be impractical compared with other forms of nutrient removal. I am leery of requiring use of these new technologies before their practicality has been vetted against established methods of nutrient removal that may give more bang for the buck. Muck dredging and mechanical removal of invasive aquatic plants are more proven methods for extracting excess nutrients from natural waterways, and I suspect that in most circumstances they are more cost effective than cyanobacterial skimming.

With regard to the conversion of wild algal biomass to biofuel, it's a neat idea but it's not first in my list of promising green fuel sources. For one thing you need a consistent, highly concentrated supply of algal biomass to feed into the biofuel process, but blooms in nature are spotty, spread out, and expensive to harvest and transport. Growing biofuel algae as part of sewage treatment processes is probably a better bet. In the US our eagerness to support biofuel enterprises has sometimes resulted in questionable decisions about what biofuel enterprises to subsidize. For example, huge federal subsidies to corn agriculture for ethanol biofuel have been good for corn farmers but have probably done more harm than good for the environment, since it takes so much fertilizer, pesticides, and fuel to grow corn. I think the moral of that corn story is we need to be cautious about which green enterprises we support at the federal level. Use of federal funds to support the development and evaluation of environmental technologies is great, but it’s important not to pick one winner prematurely and lock it into federal laws that are hard to reverse.

Finally, our first line of defense against algae blooms should always be tightening measures to prevent nutrients from getting into the water in the first place. Therefore, I would be hesitant to endorse big investments of public funds in nutrient removal projects before similar investments have been made in reducing nutrient loading. There are a lot of septic-sewer conversion projects that need support, a lot of outdated municipal wastewater treatment systems that need upgrades (fixing leaky underground sewer lines, etc.), a lot of agricultural and landscaping practices that need review and revision, a lot of stormwater treatment ponds and wetlands that need to be managed better, etc.