Bay Day

Tuesday was a gorgeous day on Biscayne Bay. I led a group of Miami-Dade public school teachers in a workshop focused on the bay, its ecosystems, and the myriad of functions the watershed provides. As we kayaked along Key Biscayne's western shore, we encountered a family of manatees feeding in the seagrass beds, a juvenile Great Blue heron catching breakfast, and a baby nurse shark cruising through the red mangrove roots.

As natural capital is concerned, the Biscayne Bay watershed forms the foundation of the lives of millions of South Floridians. The Bay provides a number of ecosystem functions that produce goods and services that we depend on everyday - including clean water and air, thriving fisheries for food and recreation, protection from storms, and some beautiful views. Placing economic value on the flow of these ecosystem benefits is one way to highlight the importance of natural capital to our community. Recently, Miami Waterkeeper commissioned an economic study with the Earth Economics Institute that did just that, value our bay, and the results were significant. As a whole, a healthy Biscayne Bay is worth more than $60 billion in ecosystem goods and services over the next 50 years.

But the bay is under threat of collapse, as underlined by a recent grand jury report from the Miami-Dade State Attorney's Office. The report, created by a group of citizens that were empowered by prosecutors to investigate this issue of great public concern, warns that a host of factors threaten the health of the bay and the tourism economy it helps support. Threats range from aging public infrastructure, leaking septic tanks, discarded single-use plastic debris, fertilizer pollution, and heated water runoff from Miami-Dade's Turkey Point power plant.

“Biscayne Bay is at a tipping point,” reads the report. “Without corrective action, the declining quality of this body of water may become irreversible.”

What does 'corrective action' look like? In order to avoid the worst case scenario, the grand jury emphasizes an all hands on deck approach from government agencies, officials, as well as the general public. Together, we must focus on minimizing the impact of development along the shoreline and in the Bay watershed, and eliminate past development and drainage practices that are not environmentally sustainable.

“As we express our love for Biscayne Bay’s beauty, marine life and its ecology, we too often shy away from our daily actions that may be slowly strangling this thing we say we cherish,” reads the report.