Florida is fighting to feed starving manatees this winter:
Few vignettes show how much human activity has affected wildlife more than the scene at Florida Power & Light's plant in Cape Canaveral. Hundreds of manatees bask in an intake canal on its southeast edge, drawn by the warm waters. These manatees are hungry. Pollution has decimated their usual menu of seagrasses in the Indian River Lagoon. Many have starved: 1,101 died in Florida in 2021, and as of December, 2022's official estimate was nearly 800 deaths. So along the canal, members of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission are tossing them lettuce.
"It's just emblematic of how dire the situation is," says Rachel Silverstein, the executive director of environmental nonprofit Miami Waterkeeper. "The point where we would need to artificially feed a wild animal because their ecosystem is so destroyed that they cannot find food for themselves is pretty extreme."
[...] A lasting fix will require a long process of environmental restoration, which is partly underway—but it's a big task, one that has put local environmental advocates at odds with state and federal policymakers. And it's a complex one, thanks to the peculiarities of the Florida coast and of the sea cows beloved by its human inhabitants.
[...] Scientists hope that restoring Florida's Everglades will help protect natural habitats. Comprehensive restoration, overseen by federal agencies like the Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of the Interior, plus Florida's state government, began in 2000. Its associated projects aim to restore the flow of water from the central Lake Okeechobee to South Florida after a century of diversion that parched the wetland. But that project will run through 2050, at least, and environmental advocates believe that more can be done in the meantime at the government level.
In 2013, the US Environmental Protection Agency approved the State of Florida's annual limits—which are still in place today—on nitrogen and phosphorus in the Indian River Lagoon. "They stated that it would not adversely modify the Indian River Lagoon and affect any listed species," says Ragan Whitlock, a staff attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. "That clearly has turned out not to be the case."
[...] Allen, who has been monitoring seagrass throughout the year, says the Indian River Lagoon is seeing a minor rebound. He thinks the work people have done to curb the release of fertilizers and sewage into the water system "could definitely be having an impact." And most important to the manatees' supporters, as of December, rescue efforts throughout Florida had saved 103 sick and injured manatees.
"I think we can bring the seagrass back. We can remove these pollution pressures," agrees Silverstein. But there's a long road ahead, she says. "It's very difficult and expensive to put nature back together once it's been broken."
(Score: 2) by TheGratefulNet on Tuesday January 10, @12:21AM (1 child)
this is floriduh, right?
use the bus system. its what its there for, right?
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 10, @04:29PM
The water's too cold at the VPs house... unless, of course, you're trying to kill more native American residents who were here before Columbus, then, yeah, sure, ship 'em to the desert.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday January 10, @12:30AM (10 children)
OK, so, the Spanish started small. They only built a few forts, dredged a few harbors, and built relatively small cities.
Then the 'Muricans took over, and went big time. All those environmental wetlands laws? If they were to be properly enforced, we would be hiring contractors to haul Miami and Tampa north. Orlando would follow close behind. Virtually every farmer in Florida would be hit hard, with many of them simply put out of business.
Restore the wetlands, complete with mosquitos, spiders, snakes, alligators, and all the rest of those nasty swamp critters, and the manatees will live just fine.
It burns me up to see the EPA screwing with small farmers and businesses nationwide, but they do nothing about the destruction of Florida.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 10, @03:36AM (1 child)
> Then the 'Muricans took over,
Then the 'Murican land speculators and developers took over,
ftfy
It's people like Trump (a developer) that started the problem, ruined the place so they could make massive profits.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Immerman on Tuesday January 10, @03:17PM
And it's people like us that don't care enough to put politicians in power that would fight against the "money is the measure of all good" philosophy that has come to control our society.
Instead we almost all just sit out the primary caucus, and let the Parties and their wealthy donors select which sock puppet to put on the ballot.
(Score: 2) by helel on Tuesday January 10, @04:11AM
The EPA's mandate is nation wide, not just in Florida. It would be nice if they had the resources and backing to go after the truly wealthy and if you're honest about wanting to see them go about fully restoring habitat I implore you to vote for politicians that at least pay lip service to empowering them instead of those that promise to gut them.
Republican Patriotism [youtube.com]
(Score: 3, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 10, @11:31AM (6 children)
Florida is too valuable to save...
They take out the small time farmers because that is an attainable goal, soft targets without the power to fight back. An organized bloc like the Citrus industry, they're going to have to kill themselves (and they are well on the way with blight...)
They have already put up "huge" barriers to development, well individual development at least. If you own 10 undeveloped acres somewhere typical in Florida, good luck getting permission to build anything without $100k+ in studies and permits and detailed site plans, before even starting on the normal construction plans. However, if you are a developer building 1000 units of housing on 250 acres, you know what all those studies and permits cost? Maybe 2 to 3x as much as the single dwelling permit on 10 acres, see: 1000 units represents significant growth in the tax base....
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday January 11, @03:27AM (5 children)
Oh, I see their building and permitting department is emulating California.
Where your permits and other foreplay may easily cost 3x the construction costs, and can take 20 years to get approved.
My neighbor down in the desert built a barn that cost $14,000. The permit cost him $18,000. For a 30x30 pole barn.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 11, @10:46AM (4 children)
In Central Florida if you call it an Agricultural use structure you can basically build it without a permit, but they start pushing back on that loophole if you shift too much earth in the process, particularly for septic drain fields, particularly in floodways.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday January 11, @04:05PM (3 children)
That's largely true everywhere. If my neighbor's pole barn had been a "house", the permit was $38,000 (this was 20 years ago, and L.A. County was cheap for metro California -- in the Bay area the basic dwelling permit was then $125k) and there'd be a shitload more regulations to satisfy, even for an identical structure. But as soon as your digging impacts any sort of water, more regulations come into play.
And of course there was that stupid federal ruling that even temporary damp spots are "wetlands" to be legally treated as such. Even if you built it in the first place. Out here in ag country, this did nothing but prevent a great deal of normal maintenance. If you had a wet year and your private road washed out, too bad, now it's a wetland and you can't fix it. (We looked at property impacted by that. It was forced to use the neighbor's ditch crossing and bump across a field instead, after its own driveway washed out.)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 11, @05:33PM (2 children)
Before we bought our riverfront land, we had a DEP guy drive out 60 miles from his office to come demarkate the wetlands on it - he said he was glad to do it, and what he marked was actually pretty reasonable. The whole property is in a floodway, but most of it only gets wet in a 10+ year flood. When we cut in our access road through the woods, we stayed out of the wetlands except for two culvert crossings we put in and didn't ask any stupid questions about flood study requirements, and everybody has been cool with that for 25+ years now. I think being out of the way back in the woods where you have to be on the property to even see it helps. The county also doesn't like to rile up the land owners unnecessarily. If they started up with driveway washout non-replacement kind of stuff there'd be an uprising, maybe an ineffectual uprising, but certainly a loud one.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday January 11, @08:34PM (1 child)
I swear some officials don't think they're doing their job unless the entire landscape is turned to swamp. Anyway, good on the practical approach. Hopefully trouble will never come your way, and floods neither.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 11, @08:53PM
Well... we bought it in 1998, hadn't flooded since 1980 at that point. Terrible awful drought like the place hadn't seen in 100 years - was an excellent time to dig the pond and cut in the road (dirt from the 1/8 acre pond used to elevate the road, especially over the culverts but also 6-9" all along the 2500' length of it.) If it weren't for that drought we never would have been able to dig so deep in the sand, got down the 21' length of the excavator arm and found a Permian forest tree trunk, sadly they're not very durable when exposed to air. That's where we hit the water table so any fancy multi-step excavation would have been pointless anyway. The scrub from the road clearing went in the bottom of the 21' hole and got covered over - got lucky that the pond bottom sinking from rotting vegetation more or less balanced with the silting in from subsequent rains and floods.
Decades went by and we ended up living on a pretty nice acre+ of land in a major city, instead of the 50' wide 0.13 acre plot we had in Miami when we bought the land, also our new house is a 4-5 hour drive to the land, eventually sold it, about 4 years ago now. Still hold a sellers note for another 11 years so we haven't stopped spying on it via Google maps... new owners haven't cleared too much, they live much closer than we did: less than an hour away.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 10, @03:03AM
Can't they learn to eat all the alligators? or learn to code?
(Score: 3, Touché) by hendrikboom on Tuesday January 10, @07:02PM
How useful will the remediation activities be when Antarctica melts and puts Florida under an extra 60 metres of slat water?