Sunday, July 1, 2018

July 1

After heavy rain, Lake Okeechobee and Lake Hancock fill up to overflowing. Lake Hancock is highly polluted and pours out into the Peace River. All of those pollutants then flow downstream and spills out into Charlotte Harbor. Lake Okeechobee is also full of contaminants and runoff from farms that is full of nutrients that overwhelm our ecosystem; it flows into the Caloosahachee River which pours out just south of Charlotte Harbor. We’ve had heavy rains before and the harbor has been full of brown water, but this time the fish kill is quite overwhelming. Not only is there an alarming amount of fish dying, but larger animals like manatees and sea turtles are washing onto the shore. It is a devastation like we’ve never seen. God gave us this land to use and to manage for our food and shelter and when you look at what has happened, we’ve made a mess of both. Our food is dying and the air from the red tide is hard to breathe and the waterways and beaches are full of death. This is a cause and effect of rerouting the water so that it no longer filters through the Everglades. The huge river of grass is not able to do its job and clean our water. I don’t know the answer to this problem, but it would be nice if we found one. All the land I know and love lie on the banks of the Peace River and at its mouth. God help us to heal our land.


And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” Genesis 1:28

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