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On February 27th, 2019, we were joined by the Microsoft Cities Civic Engagement Team, The Miami Foundation, The Nature Conservancy, local community leaders, elected officials, and their staff on a boat tour to discuss issues Biscayne Bay faces and various efforts to being made throughout Miami-Dade County to mitigate those issues. The Day on the Bay tour is a learning experience that allows public officials and community leaders to interact and learn from local scientific experts.

On Sunday, March 3, 2019, Miami Waterkeeper and Ransom Everglades School conducted a monthly Boat Patrol. The patrol traveled up the Gables Waterway while our Miami Waterkeeper, Rachel Silverstein, discussed the importance of living shorelines with students. Living shorelines provide important wildlife habitat and also build our waterfront's resilience to storm surge and sea level rise. Students practiced identifying different types of shorelines, including seawalls, rip rap, rock, and mangroves. Our diligent students also kept a keen eye out for marine debris on the water, being sure to pick up balloons from mangrove roots, as well as balls and bottles drifting with the current.  

We were so honored join Facebook for the launch party of their gorgeous new office – overlooking Biscayne Bay!  Thank you for highlighting our mission to ensure access to swimmable, fishable, and drinkable water.

Join Miami Waterkeeper in welcoming our new office manager, Carla Lovinsky! Carla joined our team in November 2018, and we’re very excited to be working with her!

This morning, February 28^th, the Miami Waterkeeper team provided comments at City Hall in support of a City of Miami resolution that would ban the use of herbicides containing the ingredient glyphosate. In the last year, the City of Miami used almost 5,000 gallons of herbicide containing glyphosate on city property. To address this problem, Commissioner Ken Russell sponsored a resolution that would make it City policy to use more environmentally friendly alternatives. 

Dade Heritage Trust’s Historic Places, Green Spaces program was launched in 2017 and takes students K-12 on half-day field trips to historic sites located in Lummus Park. So far, over 3,000 students and about 200 teachers have participated in the program. The purpose of the program is to engage students with historic, cultural, and recreational places with hands-on learning techniques and get them interested in historic and environmental preservation.

Miami Waterkeeper is an exceptional organization that taught me how to become more involved in environmental advocacy in ways I never knew I could. During my time as a Miami Waterkeeper Junior Ambassador, Kelly Cox, the Program Director, introduced me to EarthEcho International, where I applied to be a Water Challenge Ambassador. Being part of Miami Waterkeeper and EarthEcho International gave me multiple opportunities where I was able to educate the youth and engage them in our fight for a better future and planet.

 In honor of World Water Monitoring Day last year, Domingo Cortez, an EarthEcho Water Challenge Ambassador, and I had an incredible time teaching more than one hundred 4^th and 5^th graders during their science class at St. Agnes Academy, a Catholic school in Key Biscayne.

For decades the Army Corps of Engineers – the primary civil and environmental engineering arm of the United States government – has been carrying out projects to protect Miami-Dade County and its shoreline from the impacts of floods, storms, and erosion. These projects have typically taken the form of things like beach nourishment, seawalls, and artificial breakwaters, or structures built offshore to absorb wave energy. Now, the Corps is again examining potential projects to reduce the risks of coastal storms through two feasibility studies: one looking at the oceanside shore of the barrier islands, and the other looking at the coast on the western border of Biscayne Bay, including the heavily developed urban core of Miami.

As 2018 winds town, we are feeling thankful for our amazing community who has supported our mission and been partners with us in an  incredible year. We launched four new programs, added to our amazing team, and had a year of #waterwins across our outreach, advocacy and research platforms.

Join us in a a countdown of our top 10 #waterwins in 2018:

Miami’s reefs are in dire need of protection from being dredged again – AGAIN! Yes, that’s right, we’re as shocked as you are.

We recently announced that our efforts secured the restoration of 10,000 threatened corals following the PortMiami Dredging – a huge victory for our reefs.

But, what we didn’t know was that the Corps didn’t dredge deeply enough the first time around and they’re coming back for more. That’s right, the Port of Miami will be dredged AGAIN. We can’t allow this to happen and let the same mistakes threaten our reefs.