Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection and the five water management districts are failing in their missions to protect our waters.
Each year our springs, rivers and aquifers decline, flow less and become more polluted. Politicians loudly throw money at the problems but carefully miss any business nor industry which might be negatively affected. The only helpful action must come from lawsuits against these agencies, as we see in the article below.
Read the original article here at the Tampa Bay Times.
Comments by OSFR historian Jim Tatum.
jim.tatum@oursantaferiver.org
– A river is like a life: once taken,
it cannot be brought back © Jim Tatum
Epidemic of dying sea life shows Florida’s lax water quality regulation is fouling our public waters
Year after year, we hear the ridiculous arguments from polluter-friendly politicians that Floridians are somehow standing in the way of progress by asking for commonsense environmental protections.
This time of year, endangered smalltooth sawfish are usually giving birth to their young in the waters at Florida’s southern tip. But this spring, people are watching, horrified, as dozens of sawfish thrash helplessly in circles before they die.
Marine experts are baffled, and they’ve raced to South Florida to try to pinpoint the cause and rescue ailing fish. They have tested the water and samples from dead fish and ruled out water temperature, red tide and other variables. Experts interviewed by the Tampa Bay Times and other media outlets say current evidence points to a type of toxic algae.
We are witnessing another wakeup call about Florida’s poor water quality. On South Florida’s reefs, corals are bleaching and dying from disease. Hundreds of manatees starved to death in 2021 when algae outbreaks — fueled by fertilizer, sewage and agricultural waste — shaded out the seagrass they eat.
Year after year, we hear the ridiculous arguments from polluter-friendly politicians that Floridians are somehow standing in the way of progress by asking for commonsense environmental protections. We hear false assumptions about why we don’t need to properly conserve wetlands and mangroves; and most of all, that it would be too harsh to set more effective limits on the agricultural waste, sewage and fertilizer that are fouling our public waters, spewing dead fish on our beaches and chasing away swimmers.
When the unprecedented 2021 manatee die-off happened, Earthjustice filed suit against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on behalf of the Center for Biological Diversity, Save the Manatee Club and Defenders of Wildlife. Our lawsuit, which focuses on Florida’s water quality standards, is ongoing.
It is critical to remember that the United States has laws to protect clean water and the species that depend on those waters. The smalltooth sawfish, in fact, was the first marine animal to be added to the Endangered Species Act list in 2003. Southern Florida is their last stand; they used to roam as far north as North Carolina and Texas, and south to Brazil….
Alisa Coe is deputy managing attorney in the Florida Office of Earthjustice.
