WaterNotes

One hundred and nintey feet of shoreline on the lagoon. Three hours of my Tuesday morning. Two cups of coffee. One pair of gloves. Four giant trash bags. And a certain sense of defeat and exhaustion by lunchtime.
Here’s the tally:

19 plastic water bottles
57 cigar wrappers
193 cigarette butts
24 Coke [...]

Over the weekend I hit the Lagoon once more for a serious cleanup. Instead of showing up in flipflops and a tanktop with a single bag to use I came with an absolute arsenal against trash. Pocket knives, a roll of bags, watershoes to go hunting in the shallows for marine debris, oatmeal [...]

“Would you flick that into your kids’ bathwater?” I’m trying to brainstorm and come up with short slogans about cigarette butts, which dominate the marine debris scene for the Indian River Lagoon. Over the last week I’ve been out to scour the same edge of water – as I’ve been reporting on for [...]

Strolling along the lagoon yesterday evening I spotted several dozen molts from American horseshoe crabs (Limulus polyphemus). Horseshoes are some of my absolute favorite animals on the planet. From their incredibly long survival timeline (pre-dinosaur, arising nearly 540 Mya) to their awesome quicksilvery-blue blood there’s just a lot of quirky facts to relate [...]

Another twenty pounds pulled from the edge of the Lagoon today. Its from the same stretch I’ve been cleaning for over a month now. I feel like the maid, sweeping up behind everyone and muttering: “Didn’t I just clean this?!”

The monofilament is everywhere. I’m not sure if thats because I’m suddenly more [...]