This program was made possible by Coastal Conservation Association Florida and the following sponsors: Up in the morning misery sticks in hand.

Many long years of living off this land.

Boat after boat for miles it seemed Tonging up oysters, hopes and dreams.

You couldn't wash the blue off the collar it was a hard day's work was a hard earned dollar.

The bay was full and the harvests were plenty.

And as for rules were there weren't many.

With every drop of the tongs they wished for more, not realizin' they were part of the water wars.

And as the oysters and the money kept coming something changin about the way that river was running.

Lord have mercy on the souls of man, The Corps of Engineers and all them dams that choke the Chattahoochee, Apalach' and Flint and may be the reason why this bay's spent.

How many oysters can one boat hold?

Let's get 'em to the dock, let's get 'em all sold.

How many oysters does one man need?

Do we blame it on Atlanta, nature or greed?

How much more can this bay take?

Not one more scrape from a tong or rake.

If you're wonderin' about the oysters and why there ain't more, just ask the last four.

I remember my dad at one time saying that this great bay is not going to be here forever.

And I really didn't believe it.

I thought he didn't know what he was talking about, but he could see it when he was alive.

He would say "This great bay is not going to be here any longer."

I'm a fourth generation seafood worker in this area.

I've been in the seafood industry since I was 12 years old, you know, on the boat with my dad, Had my first boat at 16 years old.

Oysterin', you know.

Me and my brother growed up with my dad oysterin'.

So my my granddaddy was an oysterman shrimper.

My great granddaddy was a boat builder, fisherman, you know, so it's generations of working this bay right here.

It would be like you could almost walk from boat to boat all the way to the island, you know, there would be hundreds of oystermen out there catching oysters.

It was a good way of life.

It was hard.

You know, I had in- I had in- I had invested my life in it.

It's been a rocky road.

It has.

after this bay's been shut down.

It's been hard on us around here, and i's not just me it's as a bunch of us.

There's a mighty few of us, you know, that we didn't really go to school to a certain to a certain grade, most of us And that hurt us in the long run, because we was depending on just getting to go to work and take care of our family.

And that's all we really wanted to do, you know?

Now, you know, an older person like me, I can't hardly get a decent job nowhere.

Well, here, if you ain't too old to work well you can work.

You know, when people most people don't have an education, they can't get a job.

But a man come up here, a person, he can't write his name.

He know a big oyster from a little one He can get out there in the bay and make a living.

A lot of people loves the water.

As I do.

And it just comes more natural for 'em to make a living that way.

instead of going off, you know, away from the place that they love so dearly.

The brutality of being out there in the sun and the cold and the wind heaving up tongful after tongful of oysters until you're exhausted, making enough to put food on the table and being happy about it.

There's definitely something to learn from these people.

It's about work ethic.

It's about love of the land and the sea.

It's about dignity for just doing something very simple.

When the bay collapsed to oyster harvesting, we saw a slow, simultaneous collapse of the oyster men.

And it saddens, if you talk to anybody in the community.

It really saddens us not to see oyster boats on our horizon when you're crossing the bridges in the area.

People that before were for many generations, being able to provide for their families by oystering have not been able to do that or have moved on to other industries to do that.

That changes the look and the feel and the makeup of a community.

My son is 29 years old.

He started following in my footsteps and I said, look, son, I said, find something You know, right now you can do air conditioning, welding, electrician, you know, plumbing.

I mean, you had, you know you could go to a Vo-Tech school and learn something.

I said, pick one of them up and do it.

Oh, we fought big time.

You know, he's like, "I don't want to go do that.

I don't want to go do that."

I said, "Well, son, you cannot make a living like me.

It's not there.

He would have been fifth generation, you know, in this bay.

I'm sad that, I'm not able I'm not able to watch him.

You know, he's become a really good young man.

And I've missed out on a lot of years of him growing up, you know, becoming that what he is.

But I'm glad he's able to make a living.

Because it's hard to make a living in this area now.

It has always been very difficult making a living on Apalachicola Bay.

Basically, there would be an industry that existed for a time and that would disappear.

We went from, shipping cotton to harvesting timber, basically clear cut all the timber around here then the lumberyards went broke.

Then they went to fisheries once ice came in so that the catch could be kept cold.

And now, of course, we've gone to tourism, so we basically hop from one industry to another, depending on available transportation and and that sort of thing.

As the oysters decline, that has taken a significant segment out of our local economy, because now there's no way for all these people who could, at the age of 15 go work with their fathers and become oyster harvesters and actually make a decent living, which was true for many years.

But after 2012, it's literally been impossible.

The oyster season is about to end.

Two months ago, the Oystermen were out on the bay before dawn icicles hanging from the bows of their boats.

Now the day arrives earlier, and while the ice is gone, there's still a chill in the air and a morning fog hangs over the water.

Larry Atkinson tongs for oysters in Apalachicola Bay and his wife Diane calls the catch.

This is extremely hard work.

It doesn't seem like it but it is.

There's oysters everywhere on the bar, but in certain places on the bar They have a- there's an unusual growth here and there of oysters and that's what you feel for.

You just kinda lift your tongs up and feel 'em.

See where there's the thickest.

And then you tong your boat- you push- you push your boat along and drag your anchor.

And when you feel the oysters real thick, then you just tong them up.

and then Diane culls 'em.

What I call a pretty oyster is the cup oysters.

Oh I love to cull them.

Because whenever they go in the boat, you look back there and you see a pretty oyster.

And it's just laying there by itself and it's all clean, you know?

It just it just fascinates me.

Like most everyone else in Apalachicola, they have reservations about dams, development and increased barge traffic.

Without the seafood industry here, I don't see anything else, really.

That's the backbone of this town.

We're afraid the dam will have an effect on the oysters or the bay.

Everything., you know, the seafood here.

We don't have any idea of whether we don't have any actual, like I say, educated reason to think that it will, but we're just afraid that it might A lot of things the government has done in the past have- seems to be turning out wrong right now.

The Florida, Georgia Water War started, I would guess Late 1990, early 1991, when the Corps of Engineers announced one day that the city of Atlanta could thereafter suck an additional 500 million gallons per day out of Lake Lanier and the Chattahoochee River.

The states of Florida, Georgia, and Alabama all share the Apalachicola, Chattahoochee, Flint watershed, river system, and for the past 30 years, there have been various, lawsuits, legal challenges to how the water is shared in that system.

The most recent became when Florida filed suit against the state of Georgia.

And when a state sues another state, of course, that goes straight to the Supreme Court.

I know that Georgia argued heavily to the Supreme Court of the United States that it was the overharvesting of the Bay.

Following the BP oil spill initially that killed the Bay and that Florida did that itself, and therefore Georgia is not responsible for the collapse of the Bay.

I believe that certainly that was the cause of the immediate collapse.

But I think the health of the Bay had been sinking for decades.

There are, I believe, 12 dams on the Chattahoochee River.

The first one was the Buford Dam up at Lake Lanier.

The last one is the one at Lake Seminole on the Florida Georgia.

And in between there are ten more dams.

And the Corps operates all of these.

And, they don't allow floods, basically.

So you didn't have these natural events that would sweep through the swamps and flush all the nutrients into Apalachicola Bay.

So this was already happening.

And now you're talking about an additional 500 million gallons a day being removed from the Chattahoochee River.

This is extreme surgery on the river.

For example, it would include some dikes at 86 different places.

channel realignments or bend widenings at 91 places, some seven cut offs and some fifty two sills.

This, you know, does something to the river.

It is surgery.

It does have a good benefit cost ratio.

We have a word for this: It's called channelization.

In a word What you're trying to do is you're taking this meandering river and you're going to stretch it straight.

Why do you want to do that?

So that boats can go up and down the river.

The Army Corps of Engineers operates the Apalachicola Chattahoochee River system, in the same fashion they do every other river system that they manage, the Mississippi River, for example.

And they are authorized by Congress to do this under the Rivers and Harbors Act of, you know, almost 100 years ago, they tell the Corps to go forth and manage this river, build dams, do it for the usually the following purposes.

It could be hydropower, navigation, flood control and a lesser purpose but it's in there would be drinking water.

But the first three I mentioned are the primary ones.

So the Corps of Engineers follows its directives, from Congress.

And they basically said to Florida, in so many words continuously, well, you know, we'd love to send you more water and, you know, help the environment and the natural resources in the bay.

But that's not one of our congressionally authorized purposes.

These battles have been fought out West for a long time, particularly over the Colorado River and the water in that river.

And, you know, today there's not one drop of water from the Colorado River that enters the California Bay, the Baja.

It's just totally used up and dried out.

Mexico gets none of it.

When you're at the end of the pipe, you are at a serious disadvantage.

I think the biggest takeaway is that this this battle over the water in the Chattahoochee, Apalachicola, Flint River system is not unique and it's not going to be the last one.

I think every river system in this country, at the rate we're going, will eventually be the subject of a similar battle.

Oysters have been decimated worldwide.

There's actually been more loss of oyster habitat than there has coral reefs.

And we all know that coral reefs have been decimated.

Up to 90% of oyster habitat has been lost globally.

And for an animal that grows so fast, grows on everything, you wouldn't think that that would be the case.

For the millions of dollars that have been spent on restoration, the oysters have not come back.

And that's even more troubling because there have been efforts to replace the habitat, which is absolutely part of the problem, and the material has gone out.

but the oysters haven't come back.

So the question is why?

What's going on now that is, is still preventing the oysters from coming back?

FWC is focusing on intensive restoration efforts over the next five years.

The Apalachicola Bay will be closed to wild oyster harvesting.

I don't think anybody takes that lightly.

I felt like they should have closed it five years earlier and they wouldn't have had to close it for five years.

What have they done with snapper, grouper, triggerfish, trout, redfish?

They close it down and let them reproduce, and then they allow you to catch 1 or 2 till the population comes back up instead of leaving it open.

And if you got a few there you go catch them up and there's no more, because the price of those few oysters are so high you can go catch them and make good money, but yet you killing off what's going to reproduce oceans for you next year.

And the year after that.

Natural reefs are formed by reef-building animals, such as oysters, that accumulate over a considerable amount of time.

People are familiar with coral reefs because of their dramatic size and color and variation.

An oyster reef is no less important, no less desirable in terms of the productivity of a marine environment, but they are open to the same negative influences as we've seen coral reefs are.

But it is the matrix that holds everything together, all the life.

Beginning about three decades ago, we began realizing as ecologists there were some species that really defined environments for all the other species.

And we call these ecosystem engineers.

Oysters are a great example of ecosystem engineers because they are creating a habitat.

They're creating structure where there used to not be any.

Oysters are creating elevation in the water column.

They're creating essentially new land that rises out of the water at low tide.

And it's something that, small organisms can live in.

They're also affecting the water around them by filtering that water.

One oyster mature oyster will filter depending on the waterway and the conditions, anywhere from 9 to 50 gallons of seawater every single day.

And whenever there's an oyster, there's not one.

They live in reefs.

They live in clutches and groups.

So you're talking, you know, millions of gallons of water being filtered by thousands of oysters.

It's just nature at work doing what it does.

They're broadcast spawners in the wild.

All right?

Which means basically any one of them will sense a change in the environment and begin to push their gametes, their sperm or their eggs - usually a male, just a little side note - into the water column.

Well, the females will send those pheromones and they will begin spawning as well.

The eggs and sperm will float down, kind of meet up and get together and fertilize.

The animals are swimming for 14 days, but after 14 days they're going to find their forever home.

They're going to put their foot down and literally be stuck there forever.

The Lone Cabbage Reef is going away, in part because we have reduced the freshwater flow to that estuary through the Suwannee River.

We're using that water for agriculture.

We're using it for cities.

We're we're just using more of it.

As a result, the frequency of high salinity events is increasing, and that's when a lot of these oysters die off.

We have at least nine major reefs - reef systems - in this part of the coast that have gone away or died because of that.

These are 3000 year old reefs and they've all gone belly up in the last 30 years.

This is powerful indication that we need to really do something about freshwater management.

We're going to lose all this if we don't do that.

And it has big effects down the road on fish and crustaceans and all the things that we end up liking to eat.

Over 90% of all the seafood in the United States, collected in the United States, spends a portion of its life in an estuary.

We tong for oysters.

There are newer ways to harvest them, but tongin' does strengthen the biceps and the back and and the character that's what they tell me helps you sleep well too.

There's only one thing better for you than farming oysters, and that's eating them.

Recording?

Yep.

Boom, baby, it's the host with the most issues, folks.

I'm the man with the plan.

I'm selling.

butter on every plate.

Think it's a game.

Get yourself some snow crab corn and potatoes.

I got blue crab as well, Man, check out the blue crab, folks.

They dancin' ladies and gentlemen, they dancin'.

I'm the man with the plan.

The host with the most issues.

Come on with me.

Talk to me.

Walk with me.

Crab fritters I got coconut shrimp, Swamp chicken, baby Get your alligator on a stick.

Swamp chicken folks.

Come on down.

Apalachicola I'm here for you.

French fries straight from France.

Bonjour baby.

Know what I'm saying?

Get your hush your mouth hush puppies.

And who got fried lobster like this?

We do!

Ain't nobody got that baby.

It's your boy, Miles.

Softshell crab.

It's here for the dance.

Get your grouper, crab fritters, And ladies: one size fits all.

If you need a calamari, you talk to me.

People who eat oysters understand what goes into presenting them on a menu.

Okay, when you get that perfectly shucked oyster and you put that in your mouth and that delicious brininess of that oyster, for some people, it's acquired taste of a raw oyster.

But those who have acquired the taste, it's just there's nothing like it.

And I think it's a way for us to connect as people.

And one of the best ways for us to connect as people is through food.

Oysters are alive when we eat them.

If they're not alive, you shouldn't eat them, actually.

And they have a beating heart.

They don't tell people this because people don't really want to know this while they're eating them.

So it's this live animal from the sea.

It tastes of the sea.

And I think there is no culinary experience that connects you to the sea the way oysters do.

As far as eating seafood and eating raw seafood, oysters are top of the line.

And when they when they right, from the right time of the year, you can't get no better than Apalachicola.

They're sweeter, they're more plump.

And when we have the right mixture of salt water.

They are salty and they are perfect.

Every bay has a different mineral soil content, and the water is a different salinity and has a different mineral content as well.

And that affects the flavor of the oyster.

Is completely determined by the water in which it lives.

The kind of current, the salinity, the natural organic things in the water.

Temperature is a big factor.

The farther north you go, the smaller the oysters are, and they tend to be brinier in flavor.

When you combine all those and infinite combinations the sweet, the nuttiness, the saltiness, you know, it's just like eating, I don't know, ice cream or any other food.

There's lots of different varieties, and everybody likes their own variety.

And oysters are something you can really love.

There's very few things in the world that are both aphrodisiac and navigational hazard.

And they're something that people have recognized for centuries as being special to humans.

Florida oysters are certainly renowned, particularly Apalachicola Bay oysters.

10 to 20% of the entire US's oyster economy came from that single bay historically.

But oyster resources all around the world, including the bay, have collapsed.

Some 90% of oyster reefs are now gone from the wild.

The economic impact of wild fisheries has been in decline, and that's where farming has really stepped in to try to fill that demand gap.

Things change, things evolve.

We're having to evolve, you know, to to make food.

That's what we're doing.

We're evolving to make food.

People want to keep oysters, on their plates.

This is probably the way it's going to be.

You know, the oysters that are in the wild probably need to be left alone and left in the wild.

They're the canary in the coal mine.

They're going to tell you when your ecosystem is having a problem, You've got nothing going into the sea to feed this animal It lives off of what is there naturally.

So you don't have the negative impacts that other kinds of aquaculture farming have been known to have.

And there are corrective measures that other aquaculture organizations are using to abate those negative impacts.

But the oyster itself and what we're doing out there is really a win win for the environment.

When you get a lease, you can't be somewhere where there's already seagrass, for instance.

Once you have a lease, you will have seagrass.

You will have animals living there that didn't live there before.

You know, we have crabs that live in the traps.

They're not ideal because they like oysters too.

But we have crabs that move in.

We have fish that move in.

We have seagrasses that move in.

You actually build a new ecosystem in an area where there wasn't one.

I don't think people always understand where their food comes from or what it's gone through to get there.

Some people are content not to know.

Some people are curious to know, but definitely not everybody knows.

The largest bay we have in the South just got shut down for the next five years.

Apalachicola Bay.

Okay, so there's no more tonging there.

They're finally starting to look at oyster ranching, oyster farming there.

That market's going to continue to grow.

When we started this six years ago, nobody wanted an aquaculture oyster.

Nobody was willing to pay a premium price for an aquaculture oyster because they could get cheap oysters off the bottom down there.

Those are gone.

It's in our best interest to invest in the sustainable keystone species that is the oyster for our tourism and for our food.

It'd be a very sad day, a very sad menu, a very sad day when you couldn't get an oyster.

And when you can't get oysters, you can't get a lot of other things because there's such an important part of the sea.

Experiencing red tide.

You walk on the beach and you feel like you got a cold.

And then it's the- the visually just walking down the beach and seeing dead fish, and it's running in a cycle.

So then all of a sudden it's horseshoe crabs and there's just hundreds of them.

Just dead animals everywhere.

The economic impact of red tide is way bigger than tourism.

It was estimated by a number of restaurateurs along the barrier islands when we had the last red tide, that they lost an average during the period of 50% of their customers, and in some cases, in some weeks, 80 to 90% You could smell that all over the beach.

You wouldn't go near one of those restaurants.

That is a major, major, major cost.

Oysters love Nitrogen.

And they they gobble that stuff up.

Red tide feeds on nitrogen.

They need that fertilization to, grow and expand and get out of control.

The more oysters we have out there, the more Nitrogen is absorbed and encapsulated and sent to the bottom of the bay.

It's all about balance.

Right now, one out of every three homes around Sarasota Bay has a septic system, septic systems don't work well right next to the waterway.

So because of our development, we still are putting more nutrients into the water than we're taking away.

We had a similar situation in the Chesapeake, maybe the late 90s, early 2000, when we had an outbreak from an excessive pollution load, washing from the Eastern shore fields.

And what happened to the watermen as they call them in the Chesapeake those that go up and and tong for oysters or haul crab pots out, work the water, if you will.

They started breaking out with rashes and headaches and then it became neurological.

They were having not only the headaches, but they were having memory issues.

And it was clear this was a crisis.

This was an untenable crisis.

People were offended by this.

Our Chesapeake Bay is sick and dying.

We were experiencing a dead zone.

There was no oxygen in the top 30 or 40 feet of the water column.

Nothing could live.

Fishermen would go out and they couldn't find fish at that level.

They'd have to fish in a certain depth.

And we formed this Chesapeake Bay Clean Water Blueprint, an agreement among the six states and the District of Columbia, to get themselves on a pollution diet with metrics, which is accountability.

That allowed us to create a huge reduction in Nitrogen from those sewage treatment plants.

Now, it didn't turn things around overnight because we still had to address agriculture, stormwater, two other big pieces.

And that work is still underway.

If you look at the history of Manatee County going back, you know, more than 100 years, the Manatee River was known as the Oyster River in some accounts because it was thick side to side, entirely oyster beds.

And they would come through to get the steamships up and down for for shipping and transport.

They would come through and dredge those oysters.

And once you removed the oysters, there's no further habitat for them to go back to and to grow again.

That's it.

We've just turned what was once hard bottom into sandy, silty bottom.

If we do these projects and return that cultch material back, we're very fortunate because we have enough of a larval source already out there in the water that we get recolonization, and we can then regain all of those incredible benefits that come from having those live oysters out in the water.

So we work with numerous partners.

We collect oysters from them, we dry and cure them, and then we use those oysters to build bags and beds and habitat for the new oysters.

And most of the actual labor of the creation of the projects has been volunteer-driven.

The material that we use when we're we're placing that cultch in the water, started on somebodys table.

We have a wonderful shell recycling program.

Many of the local restaurants are involved with that here.

One man's trash is another man's treasure.

That truly is what this endeavor to me is what it's about.

We're taking what years and years has been going into the trash and filling up landfills for whatever portion it does.

And we're saying, you know what?

This is a valuable resource.

We said, hey, we've got all these oyster shells.

We can do this at a grassroots level.

It started very small, and now it's steamrolled and we have people begging us for our shell.

This is not a model that just happens to work in our three little national estuaries.

It's going to work all up and down the East coast and in other countries throughout the world.

The natural solutions are very cost effective and they work and you are restoring nature while you do it.

So it just doesn't get better than that.

The tire reef will be located about three miles off Coco Plum Beach at Marathon, Florida.

For centuries, shipwrecks have created manmade reefs.

However, discarded tires have proved especially well-suited to reef building.

In addition, willing hands on pleasure boats of all sizes stow whatever tires their vessels can carry.

It's an opportunity for them to improve their sports fishing.

Equally important, the reef should be good for the tourist-based economy.

At the same time, they are ridding the Keys of some accumulated trash.

The excitement mounts as the fleet assembles and the long-awaited moment draws near.

Tire away.

This is the place, folks.

Now the reef building begins in earnest.

All around the country, people are experimenting with different ways to build the what you used to see as 3D structure of oyster reefs.

And we can do that with materials that are benign to the environment and will eventually go away.

but the 3D structure that the oysters have built on them will stay.

Trees, basically can grow oysters or brush or vegetation.

They create a hard material.

So when an oyster larvae is swimming through the water, it finds something to attach to.

Now it could attach to plastic or concrete or whatever.

But since they've evolved with trees and wood fall going out into the ocean, it's a normal substrate.

As the wood breaks down, the oysters fall to the bottom, and then they start building up the soft substrate over there.

And some, probably the initial ones, will be dying because they get smothered by the mud.

But over a period of time, as it builds up, one comes into the other, they start hardening the bottom, and then you start getting oyster bars growing around there.

The oyster dome is about a 400 pound piece of concrete with a tube or a netting in the in the center filled with mature oysters.

So it comes with its own seed source.

They don't move.

They weigh 400 pounds apiece.

They've been tested in Hurricane Michael, and we need results quick.

We have to replace oysters in order to have a balanced ecosystem.

One of the biggest things that oysters do, it's the same thing our mangrove shorelines do.

They help protect the shorelines and the coastal areas from storm damage.

So when you have storm surges, when you have wave impacts, a lot of those things are broken up by having that hard bottom, by having those living shorelines.

I mean, what you want is thousands of tiny robots to go out and solve your big ecological problems, right?

And in many cases we already have them.

We have these little oysters.

We have trees, we have seagrasses.

You know, these are things that we don't have to pay them to grow.

We just have to create the right conditions.

It's hard to build a filtration plant that would be as cost effective as an oyster reef.

Generally, reefs that are in decline are close to human habitation.

Therefore they're close to shore.

And by their very nature, oyster reefs are close to shore.

Therefore, over the last century, in particular, there's going to be all kinds of human influences and you can list them.

The main influence, of course, is the growth of the human population, placing increasing demands on limited marine resources of any kind, whether it's lobster, conch, oysters, fish, squid, whatever the resource is, we're seeing the same process take place where there's more and more demand for a scarcer product and therefore more intense actual exploitation or overexploitation without necessary safeguards.

These are influences that are hard to change.

A lot of the environmental destruction that has been done, we think of as huge mistakes, and we wonder why it's done over and over again.

And the answer is because it was considered a big success, you know, I mean, the British made England the most successful country in the Industrial revolution by completely destroying their environment.

It was a success story, they said as they coughed.

You see this, you know, over and over again.

New England was a great success story by destroying their environment.

You know, why did they destroy all of the greatest rivers in North America, in the Pacific Northwest?

To build dams for electricity, because the electricity built the economy, and the Pacific Northwest has the largest electrical output of any place in the world, Big success.

Destroyed all the rivers.

So we're just beginning to rethink what success is.

We have to redefine economic development.

There is nothing that says that jobs have to be environmentally destructive, or that economic development has to be environmental destructive.

The trick is to find nondestructive ways of providing jobs and developing an economy.

When I see a school bus come up here, they are so primed for adventure.

They want to see things and they're so excited, and they just can't wait to get off the bus and then come in here.

And then as soon as they start seeing things and they put their hands in, they are making these marvelous discoveries.

And a lot of them are overcoming fear because there's this creepy looking crab and everything else.

Well, I'm not going to touch it.

I'm scared of it.

Well, somebody else is picking it up and then eventually they get to pick it up.

The school groups that come back year after year, we start seeing these kids and saying, hey, you don't have any red footed sea cucumbers in here.

Why not?

You know?

And where's the fiddler crabs?

And they're, you know, they're not out today because, whatever.

And they and so they begin to learn and start learning the alphabet of nature, which is all this diversity.

The alphabet is plants, it's flowers.

It's all the other things like that.

This is how we begin the transformation.

One of the biggest problems that we have in Florida involving our environmental issues is changing baselines.

We're a retirement state.

And they come here and they think this is the most gorgeous thing they've ever seen, this is Paradise, which it is.

But the person that's lived here for 80 years, you know, will say, well, you should have seen it, you know, 80 years ago.

And that continues to happen.

If we don't educate people on the historical ecology of our area, then we are absolutely going to make the same mistakes of the past in terms of ecological disasters.

The reason we're having to restore something is because it was impacted by something that we as humans did.

So we have to remind people that you have to own the negative, because the negative is what caused the need for restoration, and that doesn't stop.

It costs us money to promote the recycling of the oyster shells.

It costs us money to compost.

It costs us money to change to a compostable to-go box because styrofoam is very cheap.

But we don't like taking the easy way out.

We want to make the world a better place and not just continue to be a consumer of resources.

Whatever we can do will steamroll and we'll get others to jump on board.

And that's the only way that things happen.

is you get more and more support.

They have to start small and then you get outsiders jumping in and getting interest.

And pretty soon you've got people up in the government listening, and that's what's important.

What has to be promoted and advocated for is the necessary funding to fix the problem, to convert those septics to sewer systems and have those sewer systems be state-of-the-art so that they don't, in turn, pollute any more than the septics did.

And you have to have stormwater controls.

In a couple of counties along the Indian River lagoon here between Brevard and Indian River County, there are thousands of unfiltered storm drains leading into the lagoon.

No filtration, no baffle boxes, no treatment, no nothing.

We can fix this.

I'd like to see it done in my lifetime, but I'm running out of time.

Congress never, ever enacted any authorizations to the Corps on a particular river system in those early years that had anything to do with natural resources, with critters, with the environment, with the health of Apalachicola Bay, for example.

And this then the Corps of Engineers, they followed the instructions that Congress gave them.

The only way you can you can fix this is really to get Congress to amend that enabling legislation.

They have to pass amendments to it to tell the Corps of Engineers "Hey, the health of Apalachicola Bay and the natural resources there are now on an equal par with managing this river for purposes of hydropower, navigation and flood control."

But until Congress does that, the Corps of Engineers is obviously not going to change its practices.

It's a local issue that other senators and congressmen don't want to touch.

But at a certain point, as it becomes more and more widespread around the country, and you have these same things happening here, there and everywhere, there has to be a national will to do this, and to fix these things.

One thing is clear the Apalachicola will always be used.

It will always be transportation.

It will perhaps always be a source of food.

But to what extremes it will be used and to what extent it will be manipulated by the users is difficult to predict.

Now, the people on the Apalachicola are faced with the proposition of improving it.

But can a river be improved?

Can they alter its face and its nature and create a better river than the river they grew up on?

It's a common thing.

It's just another river.

Unlike us.

It will last to see all the Aprils to come.

And yet we are the ones who will decide what form the river will take in that time beyond our time.

*singer* "This is the story of a river.

ages of a river etching a land ages of people naming the river flowing over and over again Apalachicola..." Count the oyster houses from two mile out here to Eastpoint.

Go back 20 years and count how many oyster facilities was along the waterfront.

You don't have too many.

So it's turning in to a tourist town.

They're buying us out.

Pushing us out away from here.

You know, I remember when I was a kid, all the way down the beach line was nothing but oyster houses.

We got one ocean house left.

One.

It's scary when you.

When you really want to talk it, I'm 52 years old, and I feel like I'll be still in good enough shape when it opens up.

I can go back out and make it, you know, make a decent living back on the bay.

But I don't know that for a fact, you know.

But it's a livelihood that everybody misses.

It's constantly talked about around here, you know, right now, this time of year, oceans are nice and fat and salty and and everybody's missing having them local oysters.

I can't give up.

You know, I just don't I don't.

I'm not going to give up.

Until I'm six foot under I'm not giving up.

Last year we couldn't get no oysters.

And so we had to make a decision if we was going to just sit here with an oyster house that we couldn't do anything with, you know, just like business.

So we decided to try something else And so this is what we went to right here.

We rent through VRBO and Airbnb and we have our own website.

So yeah, we rent them and you know, it's doing pretty good.

It's a little slow right now, but other than that it's been fairly good.

But the main thing is that it comes back and Apalachicola returns back to the oyster business hopefully like it used to be.

And that's what we're basically all hoping for.

I don't think oysters is going to be back right again.

I just don't think so.

I love working on small engines.

It's something I just love doing.

I don't get tired of doing it.

It's just something.

It's fun.

It's just so interesting to me I guess you could say.

That'd be my future.

Working on small engines.

I love doing it.

And I'd like to get my own business.

I'd like to get my own business doing it.

But take the one I like most.

I love oysterin' I love to go catch oysters.

I do.

It doesn't really matter what we come up with as scientists and what we suggest to management entities unless we get stakeholder buy in, We're not going to be able to come up with anything that everybody is happy about.

Our goal is to come up with plans that everybody can live with and comply with.

I don't think it's gloom, doom and despondency, but I think there's, we have to manage expectations.

We want Apalachicola Bay to be the poster child for a healthy, successful recovery, right?

What's very important is that when the restrictions are lifted, that we've got a healthy, sustainable wild oyster population.

And that's what everybody wants.

That's what the oystermen want.

That's what people who care about the Bay want.

Because we know that that healthy population leads to so many good things.

Every day people come into my gallery and they want to move here.

Who could blame them?

I mean, we're Norman Rockwell.

You pull in here and you have this little the quaint little town with historic buildings.

You have a waterfront with shrimp boats bobbing shoreside.

But, the future: Florida on the water.

All you have to do is drive West, South, wherever and, you'll see the future.

I just hate it that they come here to buy the land up and say how beautiful this is and start cutting trees down and trying to change things.

I don't think that's right.

But I don't know what to say.

I ain't got no answers to that right there, really.

But I hate it that it's all happening the way it is for my for my, for my kids.

It's something that they could've enjoyed.

It's Paradise, but it's fixin' to not be Paradise.

It's gonna be something else, whatever it is.

But the generations coming up is going to be different for them.

They ain't even gonna know what a set of tongs are.

They ain't gonna know nothin about oysterin' And it's sad.

Most of the men go out by theirselves and their wives stay in there and shuck My husband loves to have me on the boat with him.

and I like to be on there with him too.

Because that way we're together more and we have more time.

We could probably make more money if she was a shucker, you know like the rest of these people do.

But we just like to work together, you know, on the boat together.

I've got everything that makes me happy.

If the dollar was what I was after to make me happy well then I'd do it.

But my happiness is not in money I enjoy oystering.

I enjoy the water, and my family.

When the five years are up, is the former way of life going to come back?

Oh no.

That's gone.

That is gone.

In my opinion, now, I may be wrong, but you go back and look at any other fisheries anywheres in the United States that they have changed or closed.

And then when they opened it back up, it was nothing like it was when they closed it.

Now that's just, again, an opinion.

But I think you'll see that that opinion is going to be pretty accurate.

What's your opinion?

Everybody thinks that science will give you a complete answer to everything.

But science is never an end game.

It's a process.

It's a process of learning, and it's a process of figuring out answers.

I am optimistic about the future of oysters, and I also believe that anything can be done if, people want to do it.

You know, we're capable of amazing things, and it just takes the education and the effort of people to want to do that.

The solutions to these issues have to involve the commercial harvesting groups, the restoration practitioners the county leadership, the state leadership.

This is something where partnership is going to have to come together.

I may put in years worth of effort and do a massive restoration project here in Manatee County, but if our water quality degrades to the point where it can't support those, then it was all for nothing.

We're having population growth all over the planet, which means more pollution.

We have to find solutions for the environment that are going to work.

Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best.

We take them for granted, and you can only do that for so long before all of a sudden they're gone.

At some point, there's going to be a breaking point unless we appreciate what we have, unless we protect what we have, unless we treat our natural resources, sustainably so they'll be here for generation after generation.

Mother nature's actually really good at taking care of itself.

We need to lend a helping hand, but if we provide the habitat, the waterways will take care of themselves.

They'll regrow.

They'll re-seed.

That damage can be undone We just have to provide that push in the right direction.

I would like to see the injection of capital and care into regrowing the entire oyster fishery, because it can be done.

If we leave marine ecosystems alone, even for a bit, you're going to have a resurgence of the population and some kind of normalcy returns.

Well, that's exactly what's going to happen to the oysters if you give them a chance.

This program was made possible by Coastal Conservation Association Florida and the following sponsors: Then the oil spill came, BP money was the cure.

But this harvest Mother Nature couldn't endure.

New boats and trucks, all was good it seemed, but they were all unaware of what was coming down stream.

Now East Hole is bare and Cat Point is dry And man still stands around debatin' about why there's welfare meth, and the opiate crisis reminding us why this water here's priceless.