Just your local Trash Scientist blending in. (Photo by Grant Bemis)

Kismet (Photo by Grant Bemis)

Contrary to the speed this picture portrays, we were not moving
(Photo by Grant Bemis)

The Alligator River

I love locks (photo by Grant Bemis)

This is the motion I do when I talk about kelp...so Emily, Julie and I decided to all be kelp! (Photo by Grant Bemis)

Kismet in Maryland - we made it!

**Author's Note: It has been brought to my attention that the ICW does in fact extend past Florida and goes up through the Gulf of Mexico.  The Gulf ICW extends from Carrabelle, FL to Brownsville, TX.  It bears noting that I have neglected over 1000 miles of the ICW by only discussing the East Coast portion of the canal. 

Offshore views were pretty tight

The approximate path of S/V Kismet from Stuart, FL to Charleston, SC
(via Google Maps)

The compass and I were bffs on my night watches

No I didn't get a picture fo the Leatherback...but this is me right after I saw it!

Nothing beats a sunset offshore.

I love sailing... a lot... here's me at the helm!

Under sail on the Atlantic, somewhere off south Florida

The sunsets have been pretty killer this trip

Shark photos by Stephen Trbovich.

Elana and me at the Wetlab in our matching Great White Shark Socks.

Nurse shark photo by Matthew Bernanke.

Here's a picture of me with my favorite shark...in Animal Crossing New Horizons on my Switch.

Elana taking a blood sample on a nurse shark (photo courtesy of Elana Rusnak).

Elana’s research was separated into two parts. The first part of her research was studying a specific protein - C-reactive Protein or CRP - that has a naturally low baseline (meaning that there are relatively low concentrations of the protein in an mammal’s blood normally) which skyrockets during an infection and drops back off once the infection has run its course.  Cool, right?! Elana spent 2 years looking for the CRP gene in nurse shark liver tissue RNA and DNA.  For this part of her project all she could conclude was that CRP is present in the nurse shark genome but was not able to conclude that it acts in the same way during an inflammatory response in sharks as it does in mammals.  Elana said of her work on CRP: “It took me 2 years to get the CRP result and 99% failure - that’s a really important part of science.  Trying something and failing.”

The second part of Elana’s research was looking at transcriptomes, which detail the active cellular and protein processes occurring in that part of the body at the time of sampling.  For this project, she had the novel opportunity to look at a sick and healthy nurse shark’s liver transcriptome to compare the two.  In order to compare them, she built the transcriptome and looked at the differences in gene expression between the two sharks.  In order to understand what was happening in these different sharks, Elana used gene matches from genetic databases (which are apparently out there like little libraries for genomes!!!) and found that the genes and proteins from the complement pathways were really active, which shows that the complement pathway is a fundamental part of the shark immune system!  The complement system is a part of innate immunity that functions to clear infection in the host by boring a hole into the pathogen’s cell wall, causing it to burst open and die.  Conveniently, this is Elana’s favorite part of the immune system, and she’s really looking forward to learning more about this process in sharks!  
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Elana’s research has contributed to a greater understanding of the role different genes play in shark immunity, and she hopes to pursue a PhD learning more about shark or other fish eco-immunology.

You can see Elana giving a lecture about obscure sharks as part of an online series with Broadreach here.
Connect with Elana on Instagram: @elasmo_elana 
or Linked in: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elana-rusnak-marine-bio/
 
Elana Rusnak recently completed her MSc degree in Marine Biology and Ecology at the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science at the University of Miami.  She worked both as an undergraduate and a graduate researcher in the Shark Research and Conservation (SRC) program for 4.5 years.  Her work focused on the immunobiology of the nurse shark (her favorite!).  She was able to isolate some potentially important immune genes for the first time, and learned more about what an immune response looks like in a sick shark's liver!  She hopes to continue on and get a PhD in the field of Eco-immunology, where the immune function of an organism, like a shark or a bony fish, is related to how it interacts with its natural environment (ecology).   Elana loves to teach and would like to become a university professor after she completes her doctorate.

      During the Covid-19 Lockdown in California, I joined a Climate Change Book Club.  This experience has been both exciting and more than a bit surreal as I read about one impending global crisis, while living the shocking reality of an entirely different global crisis.  The club is made up of some of my peers and friends in marine science careers as well as two friends in other biology doctoral programs.  This group brings super interesting perspectives to the problem of climate change because we all have different backgrounds (even those of us in marine science focus on different topics, and it’s been super interesting to try and take the additional time offered by not having ANY commute (or a whole slew of other time consuming activities) to dedicate to a topic I care rather desperately about.

     We are reading Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Captialism vs. the Climate.  The book is about how Climate Change and Capitalism are fundamentally at odds with one another, and how despite the fact that we’ve known about anthropogenic (man-made) climate change for decades (Plantico and Karl, 1990), the interests of free trade and the economy have always come ahead of the needs of our fragile environment.

     I went on a (socially distant) walk with a close friend during the first week of being a part of my climate change book club and we were talking about the implications of climate change to our generation – catastrophic changes to our climate that cannot be predicted exactly but what we do know is that we can expect increased intensity of storm events like hurricanes, enormous rain storms and flooding, as well as hotter and drier droughts.  My friend looked at me and said she didn’t know how I did it – working with climate change as a biologist, how to not get depressed in the face of all of these uncertainties, in addition to the knowledge that there is an alarming number of people denying that these changes are occurring in the first place.

     To be honest, I don’t know how or why we are able to keep our heads up, but every other scientist I know working in the field of marine or atmospheric science has something they hold on to in the face of climate change – be it coming up with resilient solutions for communities using natural barriers, or researching the aspects of a creature’s biology which allow survival in changing environmental conditions.
So why start a book on climate change in the midst of a global pandemic?

     Well to be honest, I had been meaning to get around to books about the climate and more “serious” books than the escapism fiction books I normally read, but realistically it took my friend reaching out to me and asking if I was interested in joining the book club before I could actually commit to the task that is reading about how badly we’ve messed up our wonderful planet.  I’ve struggled throughout my academic career to look at extinctions caused by humanity as a whole because it’s such an emotional topic for me but at this point climate change is coming, and I’d rather be informed about all the steps we took to get here so at the very least I can be a little more prepared.     

     This topic is inherently uncomfortable.  It’s close to home because it quite literally is going to affect our home and the world at large in ways we can’t know until it happens.  And that’s scary.  Now what’s fascinating about reading this book has been the reaffirming of the beliefs that I’ve held for quite some time about the uncertainty we face due to climate change.  Now as a young overly progressive ridiculously loud environmentalist, I’ve been told for YEARS that I’m overreacting or that “it’ll work itself out”. 

     Klein’s book has highlighted a lot of the changes that we can expect to see in the face of climate change, especially given that we’ve been operating business as usual in terms of our emissions for the past 30 years in spite of scientific evidence clearly stating that increased emissions WILL impact our climate in ways that will become additive and unpredictable.  And although this knowledge isn’t comforting, it is refreshing to hear about climate change in direct terms rather than the wishy-washy watered-down nonsense that has been such a large part of the political discourse since I was old enough to listen to what politicians were saying.

Bummer, dude.

     Yeah.  I’ve been hesitant to talk about the current Covid lockdown/social distancing/whatever exactly is happening because it’s equally uncomfortable for me to talk about.  But one day on a walk down to the beach near me, I set up a towel on the grass about 100 feet from the closest person and laid down to read the introduction of This Changes Everything.  It was a Thursday afternoon, and you wouldn’t know that it wasn’t the middle of summer for how many people were at the beach.  In fact, you’d have no idea that there was a disease ravaging the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in our country because there were very few people wearing masks or practicing social distancing at the beach park.  I don’t claim to know the circumstances of every group of people hanging out in the park, but it felt out of sync with the events transpiring from Covid.

     While I was sitting at the beach, reading the beginning of this book I was met with this quote about climate change in the introductory chapter: “Faced with a crisis that threatens our survival as a species, our entire culture is continuing to do the very thing that caused the crisis, only with an extra dose of elbow grease behind it.”  As I read this chapter, a large family moved a whole picnic’s worth of stuff onto a table nearby and started blasting music.  Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t think twice about a family having a picnic in such a wonderful location but I live in a place where people are adamantly ignore the CDC recommendation of wearing masks in public places, and seeing everyone behaving like it’s just an extended break and there aren’t people on ventilators in our hospital just up Pacific Coast Highway feels icky.  And putting some learning about the impending climate crisis was just a little too much for this young scientist.
There is a silver lining somewhere here, I just know it.

     A recent paper in Nature found that the shut-downs caused by the pandemic have decreased daily global carbon dioxide emissions during the lockdowns by 17% by early April as compared with the average 2019 values (Quere et al., 2020).  While cool, without significant changes to how we as a planet, as a country, as a society decide to return to “normal”, the drop in emissions may be just a small blip in the increasing trend of climate emissions over the past few decades.

     Science is a funny hobby.  Sometimes you get to go out to sea for months on end for your work.  Sometimes you spend hours in front of your computer staring at a blank Word document wondering how exactly you should write the results of your study.  And sometimes we get to wake up at 2:30 in the morning and put on your blazer and pj pants to give a presentation at an international meeting on the research you’ve spent 6 months working on.  You know – that casual first scientific paper presentation vibe you know?

Socially distant science presentation

How did I get here? Great question!

     Back in October of 2019, I was wondering what I should do with my life – I had defended my master’s thesis, finished my seasonal job at the Miami-Dade County Sea Turtle Program, and was mostly done with writing my thesis manuscript.  And I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do: with my time, with my life, with my career.  Those pre-graduation jitters are REAL.  So I started casting around trying to make connections and put in my due diligence towards finding what I wanted to do. 

     Looking around South Florida for work in the field of fisheries science is a surprisingly small pool to draw from.  I was watching the NOAA Southeast Fisheries Science Center job board like a hawk, but in the meantime I was trying to find a way to get my footing in the field. I found The Billfish Foundation through a really cool Miami-based company called Waterlust that makes super cool water apparel AND donates 10% of their profits to different organizations working to help environmental conservation.
ANYWAY The Billfish Foundation is a non-profit with a mission of conserving billfish worldwide through research, education, and advocacy.  For those who don’t know, the grouping “billfish” includes sailfish, marlin, and swordfish – the pelagic fish with big noses, um I mean rostra.  These big pelagics are super cool fish with enormous migrations that can be thousands of miles long.  According to this article in Marlin Magazine a study found that one blue marlin had traveled over four thousand miles in 120 days! That’s SO MUCH SWIMMING!  I love pelagic (open ocean) species because they have cool life histories and are just the epitome of world travelers.  These wanderers span ocean basins in search of food and breeding grounds WHICH IS SO NEAT.

But I digress from the topic at hand…

     Having a love of big pelagics and a strong background in fisheries science, The Billfish Foundation seemed like the perfect place to start my science career after receiving my Masters.  I was pleased to begin the Wintrhop P. Rockefeller Fellowship at the Billfish Foundation in October of 2019.  For this fellowship, I was tasked with writing a paper, and in order to explain the topic of my paper/project we’re going to dive into a brief lesson on fisheries management.

     The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna (ICCAT) is an intergovernmental organization that manages tuna and tuna-like species (including billfish!!!) in the Atlantic Ocean.  There are other organizations that manage highly migratory species in other parts of the ocean, but since I went to school in Miami, which is on the Atlantic, we are gonna focus on ICCAT. Because big pelagic species like tuna and billfish wander the oceans, it is most effective to manage them jointly by the countries that fish for those species.  ICCAT was established in 1966 and has been managing highly migratory species ever since!

     SO ICCAT has lots of meetings where they assess the status of the various highly migratory species that they are responsible for managing.  My introduction to the ICCAT was at the 2018 Blue Marlin Stock Assessment as a member of the U.S. delegation where we learned about and discussed the management of – you guessed it – blue marlin!  I also had the privilege of participating in the 2019 White Marlin Stock Assessment.  The way we assess fisheries is through complex mathematical equations.  The standard way we measure “stocks,” or the amount of fish in that population, is something called Catch Per Unit Effort (CPUE).  Looking at trends of CPUE over time can indicate how well or poorly a stock of fish is doing in the ocean, since it’s incredibly difficult to physically count every single fish that is out there.

What does this have to do with my project? Everything!

      The models that we used in both the 2018 Blue Marlin and 2019 White Marlin Stock Assessments assumed that for recreational catch (tournament fishing and charter trips) it is as easy in 2020 to catch a billfish as it was in the 1970s.  Both anglers (fishermen) and scientists have expressed concerns that this is not the case, and we should be changing our models to reflect these concerns – which is where my project comes in!  For my paper, I conducted a literature review and 8 personal interviews with anglers and fisheries managers to determine what pieces of technology and fishing gear have made it easier to catch marlin over the last 46 years.

      After 6 months of working on the paper, I finally had the opportunity to present our results to the ICCAT meeting for the Working Group on Stock Assessment Methods on May 7.  This was an incredible opportunity because I presented to scientists from all around the world who work on all sorts of highly migratory species.  However, the meeting started at 12:00 in Madrid which is where ICCAT headquarters are located.  For those keeping track, 3:00am PST is noon in Madrid so I got to wake up and dress up for a presentation to almost 50 other scientists!

     I was talking about the presentation to a friend of mine and had made a joke about playing at being a real grown-up scientist and he laughed and fired back that it couldn’t exactly be considered “playing at being a scientist” when I was presenting my own research at an international meeting.  It didn’t really feel super “real” presenting my results over a Microsoft Teams meeting, but when we got through the end of my presentation and I got to answer questions about the project, it hit me that after almost 7 years since graduating high school with the goal of becoming a marine biologist – I’ve done it!
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I guess I’m a “real” scientist now.  And I’m so excited to see where this career takes me.

     This weekend I went paddleboarding – a sport and workout which is both immensely peaceful (for me at least) and able to be done while social distancing. Really a big win in my book because let’s be real, I have been LUSTING for some time outside of my backyard/neighborhood/solid land in general.

     While out on the water I had some time to actually breathe and think with clarity that I haven’t really experienced in these odd socially distant times, and while sitting on the Pacific I had some time to process what happened this week.  For my job up in Washington I am going to be the Lead Educator for Deep Green Wilderness where I will be teaching middle- and high-school students about ocean conservation and sailing on a ship called Orion.

     A really exciting part of my new job was attending a conference on the Salish Sea Ecosystem.  For those who are like me and didn’t grow up in northern Washington or BC Canada, the Salish Sea is the ecosystem which encompasses the Puget Sound, Straits of Juan de Fuca, Straits of Georgia, the San Juan Islands AND the watershed that feeds into these bodies of water.

Map of the Salish Sea & Surrounding Basin, Stefan Freelan, WWU, 2009

     The 2020 Salish Sea Ecosystem Conference was held online and took place over 2 days that were filled with Zoom sessions and SO MUCH LEARNING for me!  I went to sessions about contaminants in the ecosystem and learned about where large sources of toxins come from in the environment – I went to another session on microplastics in the Salish sea ecosystem which reinforced a lot of the themes I took away from my Master’s thesis, and I got to learn about kelp and the environmental stressors they have been facing over the past decade.

     What stuck the most for me about this conference was the microplastics talk.  Now I’ll be the first to admit that when it comes to plastics I am fascinated scientifically and disgusted as a citizen of Earth, but I really am interested in learning more about the fate of much of the debris that we are polluting our oceans with.

     So that I don’t immediately lose all my non-trash scientist readers, microplastics are generally defined as plastics which are smaller than 5 millimeters in diameter.  Typically, microplastics do not get to the ocean in such a small size (though some like nurdles do).  Instead microplastics come from the breakdown of larger plastics – things like bags, bottles, synthetic fibers – take your pick.

Microplastics on Long Island, Bahamas. Photo by Grant Bemis.

But Bree, what causes macroplastics to break down, and why are microplastics so bad?

     WELL dear reader, I’m glad you asked!  Macroplastics undergo what’s called photodegradation, which causes them to go from being recognizable – like the plastics I found while paddleboarding this weekend – to microscopically small.  Now not only do microplastic particles remain a marine pollutant, they also act as tiny toxin sponges, absorbing toxins from the water column like persistent organic pollutants (POPs) (Andrady, 2011; Bakir et al., 2014).  

     This whole microplastic/toxin sponge situation wouldn’t be all that bad if it didn’t do anything after it became a toxin sponge, but microplastics are pretty much everywhere.  Plankton, corals, and other invertebrates (like mussels and clams) are all ingesting microplastics (Desforges et al., 2015; Hall et al., 2015; Shim and Thomposon, 2015; Lusher et al., 2017).  These microplastics carry toxins which get carried up the food chain into higher trophic levels throughout marine ecosystems.  These higher trophic level organisms, including seabirds as well as fish and crustaceans, can also ingest mircoplastics directly (Cole et al., 2016; Lusher et al., 2017).  Basically they’re just the worst.  And it’s not just in the oceans: people like you and me are ingesting microplastics from a wide variety of sources including our DRINKING WATER (Barboza et al., 2018)!

So what you’re saying is microplastics are the worst and they’re everywhere?! Why are you writing this blog Bree? 

      That’s true! Microplastics are pretty ubiquitous, AND there has been some really interesting research done to show just how pervasive the problem is! Take for example experiments like the one the Seattle Aquarium is conducting looking at the amount of microplastics and microfibers in the waters of Puget Sound, or the research done by NOAA employee Kim Parsons and master’s student Jenna Harlacher at the University of Washington studying microplastics in orca poop!

     Although the issue of microplastics is one that scales from some of the smallest particles in the water column all the way up to the top predators in the Salish Sea, the microplastic problem is one that spans all seas – I couldn’t escape it in a short paddle in my local harbor, and I can’t escape it even when I’ve been out to sea for days on end.  As inescapable as plastics are in the marine environment, I believe that talking about them can bring about a positive change too.  I was talking to a colleague about marine debris and my master’s thesis and we got onto the topic of picking up trash when he goes to the beach and it made me smile.  Sometimes being an environmentalist and conservationist makes it seem like it’s me versus the whole world, but in talking to people and attending conferences like the Salish Sea Ecosystem Conference I get to remember that there are so many people out there trying to help the planet, and it gets a little less lonely.

     In light of COVID-19 and the quarantine and the huge move across the county and and and I’ve been struggling to get the creative juices flowing to write something for this blog.  Even though there’s a voice in the back of my head yelling about how now is the time to write because for the first time potentially ever since this blog was started, people have time.  And it may be egotistical to think people would spend their time reading my blog with their newfound time BUT WE’RE HERE AND WE’RE WRITING SO HERE WE GO!

     I did a very (un)scientific survey of blog reader (yes I did mean for that to be singular), and 100% of blog reader requested a manatee blog post (shoutout to Katherine thanks girl) – so here are some of the things I find coolest about the manatee.

1) Sailors mistook manatees for mermaids back in the day.  A wild and weird idea in our times but come on. These gentle giants more closely resemble floating rocks than Ariel and her sisters, but I mean to each their own I guess? Now I picked up this incredible tidbit from a book called Manatees for Kids – a book about an almost 11 year old girl who goes to Florida to see manatees.  Guess who was ALSO almost 11  when she visited Florida to see manatees for the first time! It was me!

Definite mermaids spotted in Virgina Key's best lagoon.

I guess this is as good a time as any to address this problem: if any of you readers ever had any questions about why I became a marine biologist the answer lies somewhere in hearing bedtime stories about dolphin’s first day and sea lions roar and an oceans A to Z book rather than I guess normal bedtime stories? I never had a chance.

2) Manatees are herbivores – they’re vegetarians! Like me! I love that we share a love of green things. Are manatees aware that we have similar dietary preferences? Absolutely not. Does it change the sense of camaraderie I feel for this species? OF COURSE NOT.

3) Manatees have 3 toenails on their front flippers. One of their close living relatives is the ELEPHANT! Elephants share these 3 toenails, and as my coworker pointed out in response to this photo…

Look at those toenails AND biologically accurate lettuce! 

​…though elephants are cousins of manatees, their closest living relative is the Hyrax – a mammal found in Africa (if you think this blog is really just an excuse to put my most embarrassing photos on my blog…you’d be absolutely correct).

4) Manatees are HUGE.  And by huge I mean 800 – 1200 pounds and up to 10 feet long, according to U.S. Fish and Wildlife.  And I guess that there are a lot of big animals in the ocean, but the scale of swimming with a manatee is hilarious.  Like definitely the biggest animal I’ve been in the water with so far and even though they move slowly there’s such a presence associated with them. 100% was very nervous the first time I swam with them even despite knowing that manatee attacks are VERY VERY rare ;p

5) ​Manatees have their nipples in their armpits! So when the calves nurse they swim up to mom’s flipper and nurse from there (as pictured here!!!)

Manatee calf nursing in Crystal River, FL

6) Mother and baby manatees communicate through chirps – and you can hear the babies communicating with their moms if you’re lucky enough to be in the water with a pair of them! It’s so cool!

7) Manatees migrate between fresh and salt water!  It’s super weird to me because I learned about them as a species that lived in the rivers of Florida, but you can see manatees right off the beach at my grad school – and that was the very place I saw my first manatee while living in Florida.  I screamed so loud everyone in the restaurant stopped to stare at me…I really like them, okay?

Manatees cruising through a saltwater lagoon

8) They have MANATEE LICENSE PLATES IN FLORIDA (this may be a cool point in Florida’s corner over the manatee BUT STILL!!!) And the money generated from the purchasing of these plates goes directly to manatee conservation!

9) Manatees have gone from “Endangered” to merely “Threatened” on the Endangered Species List because of conservation measures and population recovery!  This change in status happened in 2017, but the manatee is on the rise. This of course continues protection for the species but in case you were worried, manatees are also protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act as well as the Florida Manatee Sanctuary Act.  Lots of love for these grey nuggets <3

10) Manatees don’t like cold water. In fact, they cannot survive in water colder than 68°F (I mean honestly same) BUT they have a pretty wide range in U.S. coastal waters venturing into the Gulf of Mexico and up the Southeast Coast.  HOWEVER in 2006 one adventurous (or potentially lost?) manatee was spotted in New York City in the Hudson River! Talk about an epic manatee spotting!

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     So anyway.  Was this post just an excuse to post a bunch of pictures of my favorite animal? Yes.  Did I relish the fact that I could also post embarrassing pictures of me in my manatee onesie? Absolutely. But I also hope I have given you at least one reason to smile or shake your head about how excellent these ecologically irrelevant* floating potatoes are.  They are the best animal on earth, contrary to my high school marine ecology teacher’s loving moniker for them of “ocean speed bumps”, these peaceful lil dudes are straight up chilling.

Turning 25 with the best animals on Earth!

​*A note for curious readers.  Why did I call my favorite animal ecologically irrelevant? WELL BOY OH BOY DID YOU COME TO THE RIGHT BLOG. Basically manatees were really just out here minding their own business for a few million years munching on sea grass, making sure the sea grass was in check and BOOM humans come in practically out of nowhere and have the audacity to take over the manatee’s role in the ecosystem AND cause crazy high rates of mortality for manatees leading them to drop precipitously in population numbers.  For those paying attention, this crazy drop in manatee population numbers led to the West Indian Manatee to being listed on the Endangered Species List in the first place.

     In honor of the state I just moved out of, I thought I'd share some about one of the most ridiculous laws in effect in the State of Florida: the Plastic Preemption.

     The State of Florida has a preemption that prevents local governments from passing laws to regulate polystyrene products including plastic bags, Styrofoam containers, and plastic drinking straws to list a few.  Florida’s economy is largely driven by tourism, much of which is ecotourism for our coral reefs, beautiful beaches, and amazing fishing grounds.  As someone who has spent the last 2.5 years of her life learning about plastic and its awful impacts on the environment, I have a few opinions on why this bafflingly backwards piece of legislation is a really really dumb law.

      Plastic pollution is a problem that has been documented to affect not just beach aesthetics but has environmental impacts on resident marine life and can threaten human health.  The effects on marine life include engtanglement of marine mammals and sea turtles, as well as fish, birds, mammals, and over 800 species of marine animals that consume plastics in their environment.  Even if you can push empathy for marine organisms out of your mind, WE ARE DRINKING MICROPLASTICS IN OUR DRINKING WATER!

​      For coastal cities like Miami, the plastic pollution problem is not some abstract environmental problem, but rather is something that we see when visiting the beaches in front of our homes and parks.  Some concerned citizens might argue that cities should have the right to pass legislation that would protect their environment, but the Florida’s preemption has not only deterred, but actually fully prevented cities from doing exactly that.

     Florida Statute section 500 Section 90 has proved a looming threat to cities like Coral Gables trying to ban plastic containers for takeout in businesses.  In 2016, Coral Gables passed a law banning plastic containers and was promptly sued by The Retail Federation on the basis of Florida Statute sections 500.90, 403.708(9), and 403.7033.  The court ruled these statutes unconstitutional and decided that the city’s Ordinance was not preempted.  Following this ruling, the case was then taken to the Third District Court of Appeals which ruled in August that the preemption superseded the City’s ability to pass this Styrofoam ban.  The City of Coral Gables has taken this case to the Florida Supreme Court.

     Multiple cities around the state have passed plastic bags bans in the past year including Surfside, Gainesville, and Palm Beach.  In response to the Court of Appeals ruling however, all three of these cities overturned their bag bans.

   All hope on the plastic problem is not lost however; there are multiple ordinances around Miami-Dade County that were passed prior to Statute section 500.90.  The City of Miami Beach has an Ordinance passed in 2014 which banned the use of Styrofoam city-wide. In addition, the voice of the people can act as a powerful call to action for our government.  When faced with the environmental crisis of toxic algal blooms in 2018, the state created a Blue-Green Algae Task Force, whose job it was to figure out what to do about the environmental crisis.  With this precedent, I think there is definitely the hope to reverse this ridiculous assault on the environment.

     Will I ever stop putting colons in my titles for blog posts? Probably not. But we’re not here to talk about me.  We are here to talk about a personal hero of mine and #nastywoman, Marjory Stoneman Douglas.  Her name is common one in South Florida, but why do I consider this legendary woman a Nasty Woman? Read on and see what this COOL LADY accomplished in her 108-year life.

     Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1890, Marjory grew up in the Northeast U.S. and received her degree in English from Wellesley College in 1912! What a cool lady!  What were women doing in 1912? MOST OF THEM WERE MOST CERTAINLY NOT GRADUATING COLLEGE – ESPECIALLY with a degree in English.

     Marjory left the Northeast, and her garbage brief marriage to a con artist, to work as a reporter for her father’s newspaper in Miami, you know, the newspaper that casually became The Miami Herald.  After serving as a nurse in Europe in World War I, she returned to the Herald to serve as an editor – because why wouldn’t she??? Because she’s the absolute coolest!  Did I mention that she was the ONLY woman working at the Herald? No? WILD. 

     And then in the 1920s, because she had some important things to say, Marjory started her career as an author, writing books and short stories for the rest of her life.  Now naturally, she was known for being an environmentalist (which we will talk about later), and has been recorded fighting for Women’s Suffrage, fighting against slum-lords, and for free milk for babies whose parents needed aid.

     Douglas is best known for her work titled River of Grass about America’s Everglades.  Now as we are all aware, I am a HUGE fan of the Everglades, but Marjory took her passion for this incredible ecosystem to the page and the people.  The book begins: “There are no other Everglades in the world.  They are, they have always been, one of the unique regions of the earth; remote, never wholly known.  Nothing anywhere else is like them…” Not only does she capture the essence of a natural place so perfectly in this opening, she goes on to describe the natural history of the region in a way that transports the reader to the swamp where she invites everyone to see and love the Glades for the natural wonder they are.​

     In an NPR article about Douglas, one of her old English teachers, Kevin McCarthy stated Marjory “was fearless, it didn’t matter who she was talking to, with engineers, or governors or even presidents. She believed so strongly in preserving the environment that she was very effective.”  For her environmental activism and writing, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1993, when she was 103 for those keeping track of the years, and was posthumously inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in the year 2000.

Fun fact: Marjory and I love the same Miami parks! Here is one of them (Matheson Hammock) at sunset.

     Douglas lived in a cottage she designed in the Coconut Grove neighborhood of Miami from 1926 until she died there in 1998.  Do I take inspiration from living in the same place as this incredible woman?! Every freaking day!  But she also recreated in the same places I do – in the beautiful Everglades, in Matheson Hammock Park.  She loved southern Florida for what it is and was – a beautiful, wonderful swamp.  And in case I haven’t proved how motivating and incredible this lady was, I’m going to end this blog post on a quote from this lovely lady and real #nastywoman.

     ​“Speak up. Learn to talk  clearly and forcefully in public… Do your part to inform and stimulate the public to join your action … Be depressed, discouraged, and disappointed at failure and the disheartening efforts of ignorance, greed, corruption and bad politics – but never give up. You have to stand up for some things in this world.”