Environment
Exploring the Florida Wildlife Corridor
We can expose environmental crises and conservation challenges all day long. This initiative, however, offers solutions. I tag along with Florida Wildlife Corridor founder and National Geographic Explorer Carlton Ward Jr. to learn more about an ambitious effort to preserve 18,000 acres spanning the Florida peninsula, protecting plants, water, wildlife and people, too.
Picayune Strand: An Everglades Restoration milestone in the making
In the 1950s, an ambitious developer imagined a massive new suburb carved out of the Florida swampland. The company went bust, leaving a vast, parched land in its place. As the Picayune Strand State Forest Restoration nears completion, I join up with an ecologist who has been part of the project since the start and discover how engineers seek to rehydrate the land and heal a damaged ecosystem.
Modern day "Gladesmen"
My favorite part of being a journalist is meeting people I might never encounter otherwise. In this piece, I discover the "Gladesmen" -those who call the Everglades home- and how they live in tandem with the natural world. This was an eye-opening piece for me for other reasons: My subject, Jack Shealy, shared perspectives on Everglades restoration that I typically don't hear from the environmentalists and government agencies working on the project. The experience reminds me to examine all sides of every story.
What Can We Do About Our Water?
Like many places around the world, Southwest Florida suffers from nutrient pollution -we have too much nitrogen and phosphorus in our water. In small doses, these substances help our crops grow. In large ones, they prompt algae growth in our water. In 2018, my region suffered joint outbreaks of red tide in the Gulf of Mexico and blue-green algae from freshwater canals. I'm a proponent of solutions journalism. There are steps we can take-simple ones- to protect our water. We just need the political will to do so.
My Ode to the Florida Outdoors
I love to hike. But I'm from New England, and my idea of hiking is scrambling up mountainsides, eager to take in magnificent summits. Florida may have no summits, but I've learned to appreciate the subtle and strange beauty of my adopted state.
How a Beetle Fells Trees and Threatens Butterflies
The more I learn about invasive species, the more I am appalled at the havoc they wreak on our ecosystems. In this piece, written at the invitation of the North American Butterfly Association, I delve into the cascading effect of a beetle that made its way to North America on ashipping container, carrying a fungus that infected and killed red bay and swamp bay trees across the Southeast.