November 2023

Here at Hoover we spend more time than most people thinking about how to conserve water and use it in the most efficient manner possible. Two of the stories we found this month emphasized just how important it is to work with an irrigation system which operates in the smartest manner possible, especially when having to cope with the sometimes extreme nature of the Florida climate.

The South Florida Water Management District issued a warning this month for the residents of Collier and Lee counties, asking them to limit lawn watering and conserve water usage in an effort to prevent the imposition of mandatory water use restrictions. The reason why the measures are needed had been set out by the federal drought monitoring system, which warned of drought conditions across Southwest Florida impacting vital underground water supplies.

Living in a place like Florida, with frequent heavy rainfall, an abundance of lakes and a coastline usually within easy reach, it can be easy to take something as vital as clean drinking water for granted. The fact of the matter, however, is that Floridians don’t actually have an absolute right to clean water, something which the Right to Clean Water Campaign is battling to correct by drafting an amendment that will force the state to take action. As well as drinking water, the campaign is focused on the importance of clean water for industries such as fishing and tourism, and on tackling the problems caused by the fact that the wastewater treatment infrastructure in place can’t cope with the sheer number of people in Florida today.

The water-based problems in an area like Southwest Florida generally tend to focus on a lack of this vital  natural resource, but one story this month looks at the issues caused by an excess of water, and a proposed solution for those issues. The excess of water is caused by the annual release of billions of gallons of water from Lake Okeechobee into the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie rivers to prevent flooding around the lake. The water frequently contains high levels of pollutants, however, and this can cause problems such as harmful algal blooms, fish being killed and beaches having to be closed.

Now the residents of the area are proposing that the water in question should instead be redirected through the Everglades, which would naturally filter the water before it reaches the coast.

The history of Worthington Springs offers a salutary warning of the risks of over-using a natural resource. It was a favorite of tourists in the 1800s; they would flock to the town to celebrate the Fourth of July holiday. The sheer number of visitors meant that, by the middle of the 20^th century, the spring had stopped flowing altogether and would soon be abandoned completely.

Residents of Alachua County are now concerned that the dozens of springs in the region could end up suffering the same fate, due to the excessive groundwater pumping needed to serve newer housing developments. Efforts to protect the springs form part of the Right to Clean Water Campaign mentioned previously.

Think of water conservation and you naturally tend to concentrate on topics such as rainfall, springs and irrigation systems. One story this month illustrates that another approach can be taken however – one which makes it possible to grow plants utilizing a system known as aquaponics. The story looks at a project run by the Earth Ethics Institute which uses a combination of fish rearing, artificial light, fish excrement and soilless plants to grow food without the use of large scale irrigation. The aquaponics club currently operates on a relatively small scale – it has 29 members – but is perfecting techniques which, if scaled up successfully, could help to transform the systems and amount of water needed to grow food in the Florida climate.

Although many of the stories featured in the H2O Zone focus on large scale initiative and state-wide interventions, we are equally proud of the attention we can draw to individual who make a contribution on issues such as conservation. These contributions are often based on a combination of commitment to the idea of conservation and an ability to think outside the box. One great example of this phenomenon is Isabel Warren, a senior environmental studies student at Eckerd College. While interning at the Tampa Bay Watch Discovery Center on the St. Pete Pier, she noticed that the dissections of invasive squid and lionfish carried out at the center generated left-over squid parts which were simply thrown away. This story explains how her refusal to accept this waste resulted in the squid parts now being recycled as fertilizer.

This is another story about the difference so-called ordinary people can make when it comes to tacking issues such as conservation, and like the last story it revolves around food. Rather than looking at growing food, however, this story looks at dealing with food waste. Siblings Tomas and Chloe Jimenez have seized on the power of composting after Tomas saw a school presentation at the age of 11. Two years later, the siblings have expanded the use of composting not only on their own Ransom campus but have also persuaded other bodies to compost their own food waste, including St. Stephens Episcopal Day School, Larkin Hospital and South Miami Hospital.

Their commitment to the cause of composting is driven by the fact that it creates eco-friendly, natural fertilizer, and combats the statistics stating that a third of the food produced in the United States is never eaten, and ends up in landfill, where it produces harmful greenhouse gases.

The unprecedented heat wave experienced by the water off the coast of Florida last summer resulted on heat-stressed coral which, if left untreated, would have died. Luckily, much of the coral was lifted from the sea and taken to land-based nurseries such as the Mote Aquaculture Research Park in the Keys. This November saw 7,000 heat-stressed corals, which had been nurtured back to health, returned to offshore nurseries at Sand Key, Looe Key, Islamorada, and Key Largo. Lifting the coral required a massive effort initially, and it then had to be hand fed with plankton before being passed as healthy enough to be returned to the ocean.

We can all agree we're seeing a lot more extreme weather – from droughts through hurricanes to floods – threats to wildlife and rising sea-levels. If you live in Florida you’re likely to have experienced at least one of these issues first hand.

Another less well-known side-effect of rising temperatures is covered in an article documenting the arrival in Florida of invasive species not native to this part of the world. The article gives the examples of the Lionfish, the Cuban Treefrog and Burmese Python, and explains the havoc which species such as these can wreak on the local ecosystems. The Burmese Python, for example, is an apex predator, which means that nothing is trying to eat it while it snacks its way through the kind of wildlife found in the Everglades. Creatures known to have been eaten by Burmese Pythons in the Everglades include birds, small mammals and even alligators.