Telling the story of a beloved bay

Florida Bay Forever harnesses the power of the
narrative to protect this threatened lifeblood of the Keys.

By Jacki Levine

When Emma Haydocy talks about Florida Bay, the life-brimming estuary that links Everglades National Park with the Florida Keys, the Massachusetts native evokes an almost poetic vision of nature’s beauty.

“There are no words that can adequately describe the experience of being out on Florida Bay when the water is glass and you cannot tell where the water ends and the sky begins,” says Haydocy, “or the joy of chasing fish across the flats.” But the poetry turns to practical prose when the subject shifts to the environmental threats that have faced the fragile waterway — and the livelihoods it supports — since the late ’80s.

Haydocy is executive director of Florida Bay Forever Save Our Waters, a not-for-profit founded in 2016 after the Bay’s localized drought and catastrophic seagrass die-off in 2015. “Florida Bay means everything to the Florida Keys. It is quite literally the lifeblood of our communities,” says the former National Park Service ranger, who fell in love with the area during the three winters she was assigned to the Everglades National Park and settled there in 2018.

“Every single person who calls the island chain home relies on a healthy bay; every hotelier, restaurateur, fishing guide, waitress, or homeowner, all of us depend on Florida Bay. Our economy, and community, ceases to exist without pristine waters to support a robust tourism industry.”

Which may be why everyone from fishing captains to business owners to residents joined the group, mobilized “out of concern for the health of Florida Bay and the greater Everglades,” Haydocy says.

The threat is not new. Since the late 1980s, an unhealthy potion of agricultural fertilizer run-off, rerouting of fresh water, and periods of drought has upset the Bay’s delicate balance, killing off seagrass and allowing dangerous cyanobacterial (blue-green) algae blooms to flourish.

And while Florida Bay has been “subject to one of the most ambitious ecosystem restoration projects ever undertaken,” says Haydocy, the challenge continues.

How best to protect the Bay and preserve its legacy for future generations? Haydocy and her fellow members of Florida Bay Forever believe one way is through telling its story. They’ve launched the Voices of Florida Bay project to do just that. “The genesis of the idea…is rooted in the belief in the power of narrative, storytelling, and oral history as a tool for change,” says Haydocy.

And who better to tell that story than the fishing guides, whose own stories are inextricably linked with the waterway? “[They] are the experts of Florida Bay; they know the estuary better than anyone because they cover all corners of it every single day,” says Haydocy. “The guides who fished Florida Bay before the first documented seagrass die-offs and decline in the 1980s know a Florida Bay that many of us have never seen, and never will.”

In Volume 1 of the project, 10-15 guides from the Upper and Lower Keys and Everglades City, selected with help from the Florida Keys Fishing Guides Association, talk of their lives on the Bay, captured on video and transcribed for posterity.

A $5,000 Florida Humanities grant, which Haydocy says allowed them to “kickstart the project in earnest,” has gone toward facilitator costs and filming the interviews, and will cover a portion of the premiere of a short film produced from the interviews.

“America’s Everglades have been subject to restoration for two decades now, and the effort is far from over,” says Haydocy. “We hope this project will serve as a reminder that this fight has been going on for decades, and that we still have so much work to do to protect and preserve the lifeblood of our communities: Florida Bay.

“We also want to pay homage to the people who know the estuary better than anyone and honor their contributions to conservation of our precious Florida Keys fisheries and habitat.”