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I was born here in South Florida and grew up playing on the river. I had a boat before I had a bicycle. My family was full of fishermen. It is no surprise as to who I am today. It was “in the cards” as they say.

Throughout my whole life I have found my entertainment in the out of doors, primarily as an angler, but not so finely focused on the fish that I did not notice the environment too. And anyone who has paid the slightest attention to the quality of the environmental conditions in South Florida has noticed that things just aint what they used to be. That is putting it mildly.

South Florida, the land of sunshine, was just a bunch of separated small towns when I was a child. Now the east coast of Florida from Lake …show more content…

Growing up on the river, even as a child, it was apparent. But no one seemed to care as long as it only affected those useless swamps out west.

But alas, in the last decade or so, the interconnectedness of all things began to show the truth.

Excess water during wet years, a threat to drowning the crops, has always been ejected through the closest coastal rivers, both to the east and west. My father and I learned not to fish or camp along the coasts during the rainy season back in the 1960s. Those coasts, lightly populated back then (and very fishy) are now heavily populated.
During dry years, water was (and still is) kept in the lake to irrigate the fields, to the detriment of the central wet plains that are the Everglades. Days of “raining” ash were common when I was a child as the scorched ‘glades burned deep into the muck. Again, too bad for the swamps, who cares? Well, when the water doesn’t seep through the swamps and drain into Florida Bay, that body of water becomes abnormally salty. The folks who live in the Keys, which border Florida Bay, rely on tourism and have been taking notice since diving and fishing are a main concern.

This year, during the recent Florida legislative session, a majority of those six million South Florida residents convinced their representatives that they were tired of algae blooms in their back yards

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