Politicians’ contempt for environment to blame for record manatee death rate
The biblical phrase “You reap what you sow” tastes like ashes grinding between the teeth this year as beloved Florida manatees die of starvation at record sickening levels.
Some 724 manatees — one in every 10 — have perished since Jan. 1, mostly because man’s pollution has ruined their once bountiful smorgasbord of underwater grassland.
The average annual number of deaths during the last five years was 261, but our careless contempt for keeping Florida’s waters clean now has caught up with these gentle creatures.
This isn’t just a coincidence.
How do you feel about that, Florida? Are you still cheering former Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s decimation of the state’s environmental watchdog agency in favor of making the state “business-friendly”?
Do you enjoy seeing fellow mammals wasting to bone, their carcasses rotting along waterways, their babies dying as fast as they’re born?
And you folks who joke smugly about “tree-huggers” and their oh-so-silly proposals — have you smelled the stench of manatee carcasses in Brevard County, ground zero for the die-off with nearly 300 rotting along the waterways?
The average Floridian has always respected wild surroundings and wants to protect the fragile parts, including its crystalline freshwater springs, its moss-draped woodlands and its rare animals.
The average state legislator, on the other hand, has always respected campaign contributions from wealthy polluters like phosphate mines and from developers whose goal is to cover sensitive land with subdivisions and golf courses that spew killing fertilizer into waterways.
Voters have said over and over again — loudly and unambiguously — that they want state money spent on the environment. Consider the 75% voter support for Amendment 1 in 2014.
The constitutional amendment ordered the state to use 33% of the proceeds — that was $750 million in 2015 — of an already-existing real-estate tax called documentary stamps to improve and protect water resources and to buy preservation land.
Instead, then-state Sen. Alan Hays, R-Umatilla, now the Supervisor of Elections in Lake County, chaired a committee that hijacked all but $37 million to feed bloated state bureaucracy, pay off state debt and keep the corporate welfare flowing.
That’s disgusting on two levels — the damage to the environment and the disrespect to the voters.
Scott, now a U.S. senator, led the environmental horror show as governor from 2011 to 2019.
He stripped the Department of Environmental Protection of employees and crippled the water management districts, mercilessly slashing employees and the ability to enforce environmental laws. He signed a bill that stopped local governments from regulating harmful fertilizer sales during rainy summer months and went so far as to ask the federal Environmental Protection Agency to back off enforcing water quality rules. Yeah, we don’t need any stinkin’ rules, right?
Of course, environmental degradation doesn’t happen in a blink. Disaster waits. Over the years, everything goes downhill.
And then one day it comes to this: “I think it will be the highest [number of manatee deaths] we’ve ever documented,” Martine de Wit, who runs the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s marine mammal pathology lab in St. Petersburg, recently told USA Today.
In the past, manatees had to fear the cruel cut of the boat propeller. Now, they have to fear politicians who make fun of attempts to protect the environment. There is no getting out of this one. Humans are responsible for the die-off of the very animals we claim to love and revere.
The sewage from septic tanks and fertilizers dumped into unguarded fresh and coastal waters have created repeat blooms of toxic algae and harmful plant life. They team up to destroy seagrass so that manatees, who need 100 to 200 pounds of the stuff daily, have almost nothing to eat.
Warm water released from power plants along the coasts is the siren song that entices the rotund animals with hairy lips to stay further north than they otherwise would during winters. Little seagrass grows there, and the manatees increase their risk of death if they through fatally cold water trying to leave.
U.S. Reps. Stephanie Murphy (D-Orlando) and Brian Mast (R-Fort Pierce) have introduced bipartisan legislation to help protect marine mammals by increasing funding for a grant program and for the Unusual Mortality Event Fund, which helps to rescue and rehabilitate sick and injured marine mammals and to determine what is making them ill.
It’s a good first step, but the reason sensitive manatees are dying is no big mystery. Environmentalists heralded this foul die-off. Politicians were deaf to the warning. Florida has at least some rules for protecting land and animals, but has had almost no enforcement in the past decade.
Dead manatees are just the beginning.
Editorials are the opinion of the Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board and are written by one of its members or a designee. The editorial board consists of Opinion Editor Mike Lafferty, Jennifer A. Marcial Ocasio, Jay Reddick and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Send emails to insight@orlandosentinel.com.