Green Florida Keys
Why not plant a tree? It doesn’t make you a bad person. Just remind yourself to make a Green Florida Keys. Daily.
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Make trees not paper. We absolutely love green, tree trunks, living, thriving forests, mangrove trees, buttonwood trees, palm trees, pine trees, grassy meadows and mangroves forests. I don’t have any research to spout, but the more trees and more healthy green the better. This applies to ocean as well as land. Yes! We get oxygen from the green stuff in the ocean too.
Mary Stella Maris 93s from Nada Khalaf-Jones Photography on Vimeo.
Our planet loves green growing things. Loves em. It helps the earth breath. And all of the living things on it. And we NEED the clean air trees produce and the other green cells to keep working very hard to create Oxygen. This is done by something developed by our plant over millions of years, called photosynthesis. More about that magic oxygen producing process here
So plant trees and make a Green Florida Keys! Also – don’t buy real sea sponges 🙂
Of course this sinister relationship is all about those selfish plants. How dare they take up space where someone could use the wood to build a home for a new, hopefully ‘plant more trees’ Green Florida Keys family? Or a new ‘plant more trees’ school or a ‘plant more trees’ business.
How can one person, you – or me) make a difference. Well. Here is my daily & weekly commitment.
- pick up trash and plastic in particular all around the neighbourhood. weekly.
- recycle everything and return styrofoam to places where they recycle that too. daily.
- re-usable shopping bags for groceries. all the time.
- turn off all the lights at night. daily.
- plant flowers, vegetables, 4 trees for you 4 trees for each kid, plant hedging bushes, grow boxes w veggies, herbs. Plant grasses and keep em growing.
And yeah. I’m a selfish human. I got my space. And it’s a very nice one. For 6 of us. 3 beds 2 baths a pool and 75 foot by 100 foot lot.
And we live on a nasty brown canal that was made overly deep and has insufficient flow. It was done poorly, with no planning or care or thought for consequence. AND NO Oxygen producing plants surviving in it’s murky depths. Only anaerobic organisms and a little vegetation growing on the top 3 feet that cycles in and out with the tidal flow.
Florida Keys Aerial Photography by the author @floridakeysdronepros
If I start my plan to make a more Green Florida Keys maybe the greenery around us struggling to ‘breath’ and produce oxygen will get some help from my efforts. I know our canal is a negative factor – the thousands of mangroves, oysters growing on mangrove roots, sponges around us are not enough to clean and filter the water in this deep dark murk.
We live beside an 18 ft deep canal, where the deepest natural waterways feeding it are only 4 ft. This causes a flow and stagnation problem.
Florida Keys Real Estate – we work with local agents who care about a Green Florida Keys
Environmentalists? Local authorities pick the canals they think need most help. We were not one of the lucky ones. But….we can build an aerator. A bubbler. And this will help to air things out. Move the silt and detritus. And bring what is down there deep in the sludge back up, and possibly out for good, maybe when the tide takes it away – to where? Makes me shiver to think. One thing we all know – don’ swim in this canal.
Green Florida Keys is just a Sunday morning idea. And those if us who like the idea of Green Florida Keys may also think beyond our own little patch. For a career scuba diver who has seen a world of oceans, it is very clear there is filtering going on. And when the filtering mechanisms are broken or removed things get worse.
SPONGES! OYSTERS! SEA CUCUMBERS! We see the sponges in the canals, they filter and clean, filter and clean. Oysters in the Chesapeake or sponges growing on the bottom below tourists paddling along the kayak canal trails around John Pennekamp Park Coral Reef State Park. And these oysters, sponges, cucumber sponges suck in water and clean it. They produce food for the ecosystem in which they reside as a by-product. It is called sponge poop. This ‘idea’ developed over millions of years by our planet, (watch the sea cucumber pooping video) is the same as the concept behind ‘filters’ we would use to clean our canals.
Make More Green
But we aren’t there yet. Here is what it looks like in a time-lapse of oysters filtering the water as they ‘feed’ This works here in the Green Florida Keys too. There are oysters growing on mangrove roots around our Key Largo canal. So, maybe Green Florida Keys includes growing more oysters…these aren’t the fleshy kind you would eat.
So. I say to you. Keep your trees, trim and make em bushy…more green. Plant a new one, two or three. Every week. This photographer and film maker will do the same. Encourage more green life. It’s the one thing that brings more oxygen to the planet. I’ve found trying to stop people from trashing the planet is almost impossible. One thing I can control is trash in my neighbourhood AND increasing vegetation on my 100 ft by 75 ft lot.
Going off to do some cleaning, recycling, digging and planting now! Green The Florida Keys. Make trees not paper. Make L02VE and buy #Tesla #electriccars #plantmoretrees #stopillegallogging #moretrees #forests #mangroveforests #oysterscleanthewater #cucumbersponge #spongepoop
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/sponge.html
