Carter Henne

In this episode, Brett gets a visit from his friend and President of Sea & Shoreline – Carter Henne. They talk about growing up outdoors and on the water in Polk County; how his desire to create sustainable marine ecosystems drew him first to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, and then Sea & Shoreline founder Jim Anderson; the things we’ve been getting wrong about seagrass restoration in the past and how that’s changed; and a look at some of the work he’s doing to now to protect coastlines and natural systems that extend far beyond just seagrasses.

On a lighter note, they also discuss the importance of securing boat’s motor before reaching the middle of a lake as well as the world of competitive underwater bicycle racing (yes, that’s a real thing).  If you want to hear Carter’s alligator stories, you’ll have to ask about those in person.

To check out the things Carter and the good folks at Sea & Shoreline to make Florida better, visit their website here: https://seaandshoreline.com

 

To check out some stories about the great work Sea & Shoreline are doing to restore manatee habitat in the Crystal River, go here: https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/full-circle/saving-our-springs-a-day-with-the-underwater-gardeners-at-sea-and-shoreline and here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HscircgSUFU and here: https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/gma3/video/rehabilitation-efforts-protect-dying-groups-manatees-98730763 and here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwANZ9GOI2Y and here: https://www.chronicleonline.com/opinion/editorials/editorial-l-state-officials-tour-waterways-under-restoration/article_bd29bf3b-bcca-5cf4-9900-c35af44b7d40.html

 

Want to see Carter’s team feed manatees? Go here: drive.google.com/file/d/1QmpruTsRWwX8TsejsopOgj0-Hhf6EH5C/view

 

You can also see what the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission are doing to restore vital habitat here: https://floridadep.gov/dear/water-quality-restoration/content/impaired-waters-tmdls-and-basin-management-action-plans

 

What is the Southwest Florida Water Management District doing to help this habitat?  Plenty – so check out their partnering efforts here: https://www.swfwmd.state.fl.us/projects/swim/crystal-river-kings-bay

 Please support this episode’s sponsor, RES.

 RES is a national leader in ecological and hydrological restoration, offering nature-based solutions with guaranteed performance through innovative delivery options. Discover more about their work and commitment to Florida and its environmental challenges by visiting www.res.us.

Our theme song is “Doing Work For Free”, by Bo Spring Band (Apple Music) (Spotify) (Pandora)

 

Transcript

[Music]

(…)

Welcome to Water for Fighting, where we discuss the past, present, and future of water in Florida, where the people make it happen. I’m your host, Brett Seifers.

(…)

This episode of Water for Fighting is brought to you by Resource Environmental Solutions. Res is a national leader in ecological and hydrological restoration, offering nature-based solutions with guaranteed performance through innovative delivery options. Discover more about their work and commitment to Florida and its environmental challenges by visiting www.res.us.

(…)

Alright, I think you’re all going to like this week’s guest a lot, Carter Henney. He’s a Polk County guy who I describe as a cross between Jacques Cousteau and Steve Irwin. He’s a marine biologist with an entrepreneurial spirit. He spent some time in his early professional life working at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission. Carter’s now the president of Sea and Shoreline, and I’m psyched he agreed to give me some time while he was in town.

(…)

Carter, it’s great to see you here in Tallahassee. Welcome, sir. Hey, happy to be here. Thank you. So, you were born in Winterhaven, and we have a lot of Polk coming through this, I’m using my quote fingers here, studio. But your story, like many people’s, like my family’s as well, did not begin in Polk County necessarily. Talk to me about your parents a little bit. They’re from Indiana, or at least they met in Indiana? That’s right, and it’s not surprising that you’d have people from Polk. It’s pretty much the center of the universe, according to us. Yeah, so family, my parents met at Indiana University. My dad was going there for optometry school at the time, and my mom was going through law school. And, you know, just like every good college romance, they met in the laundromat and struck it up, and that was it. I want to go back just a little bit further, just because it’s an interesting story, and I’ll tell people as well, it’s like, it’s a long winding tale for you. But I liken you kind of to a mix I was thinking about the other day, I was like, how to describe Carter Henning. I think it’s a cross between Jacques Cousteau and Steve Irwin. And we’ll get to some of that later. But I think some of that personality comes probably from your grandfather. He was a professional baseball player and a bunch of other things as well. Tell me about him a little bit. Yeah, that’s right. And that’s actually how my dad was born and grew up in Polk County. My grandpa was hired on as the first faculty member of Polk State College, Polk Community College at the time, now Polk State College. He went on. So my dad grew up in Polk County, went to Winter Haven High School, went to the same high schools as my dad. My dad actually went to Polk State College or Community College at the time, then to USF. And then I guess there was only two or three optometry schools in the country at the time. And one of those was at Indiana University. And that’s how he ended up there. And then my mom, she’s from, I think it’s Kindleville. My little sister’s Kindle. And then she grew up basketball fans, whole family, big Bobby Knight folks. And it just was a natural fit for her to go to Indiana. Yeah. And it’s funny. It’s like obviously, you know, basketball is life up there. But you and I talked not long ago about yourself. And you played some sports, but basketball wasn’t one of them. Is that sacrilege? Like was your mom heartbroken?

(…)

Yeah, no, she wasn’t heartbroken because my older brother, he was good at it. So he played basketball. I played some sports, obviously, baseball, basketball growing up. And we would go, my grandpa would take us up to the University of Kentucky where he played for basketball camp. I remember just long, long, long road trips going up to Kentucky with him in the fast lane, everyone going around us in Atlanta traffic.

(…)

But we got to play with the players and because of his relationships at the time, I think Calipari was the coach there. And just got to see the behind the scenes aspect of it, which was really nice. Nice. But let’s get to you a little bit. You mentioned a little bit of sports, but I want to talk about what you were like as a kid. Beyond the sports, you had to spend a lot of time outdoors. So I’m the middle child. My mom or my parents had three children and she affectionately refers to us as the three black sheep of the family. I’d say I’d probably take most of that honor. Yeah, she wanted us outside. So I was the youngest kid in the neighborhood. I was the middle child of our own family. And all the other neighborhood kids were, I don’t know, probably two to 10 years older than us and or older than me. And so it was just general goofing off. There was a cul-de-sac. And at the time in central Florida, not every lot was developed. Some had trees on it and there was some swamps behind it and some retention areas. And we go back in and tree forts and just general little kid stuff. It was on a big hill. Surprisingly, it was on the edge of Eagle Ridge. And so we’d get skateboards or bicycles or roller blades and figure out how fast we could go and what we could break and just general messing around. At some point, though, I think you’d mentioned I think you were about maybe 11 or 12. You said you moved to live on a lake itself. Which one was that? Yeah, that was Lake Daisy. So that was awesome. So growing up on a neighborhood off the lake was fun. My dad would take us down fishing to the local boat ramps. But then it was in your backyard and you could do it. And then that’s when it became something that I not only liked to do, but I could do it whenever I wanted to. And I could get good at it. And so I was just constantly in the water. Started out with a John boat. Had a John boat with a motor for about three days and or see me three hours and the tiller handles PSA. If you put a motor on a boat, make sure it’s all the screws are tightened down so it hangs on to the transom.(…) But yeah, so sank the motor and I was back down to Ores. So now it’s like I’ll skip I’ll skip board real quick for that. It’s like, do you the folks that you work with now, you all spend a lot of time on boats. Did they have to double check when when you’re in charge of a boat that you use draft motor on? Right. Absolutely. Absolutely. I’ve been known to mess one up. Right. So speaking of water, speaking of fishing, speaking of being on the boat, you actually started you say the first fishing club ever. And it was in Florida or is it beyond that? So going back to sports,(…) I always our entire family is incredibly competitive at weird things. And I’ve got that competitive gene. All my friends were going to play football in high school. And I said, well, I’ve never played football before. All the cool kids are doing it. There’s cheerleaders. Let’s let’s do it. So bad idea. I remember being on special teams of defensive end and special teams. I really just defended the water bottle mostly. But the special teams was just a kick in the pants. And I remember going south. This is ridiculous. You better pick a sport that you’re good at. And the only thing I was good at was fishing. And so I went to the I think it was Dean of Students at the time and a couple of buddies. And we started the first high school fishing team or club in the country at the time, which was just a ton of fun. We would go out anyone from canoes kayaks to full scale bass boats. We had cheerleaders the way the fish in the Dean of Students would boil peanuts and drink Bushlight on the edge of the bank. And it was just really, really good. And it went from just our high school to the following year. We got other schools in Polk County and then regional and then statewide. And then some of the folks actually that were original members went on to professional bass fish. And some started teams in colleges. And now it is where it is today, which is really cool to see. Yeah. I mean, we talked about that a little bit on the phone. I was most astounded by how much the purse was of this fishing competition. You said some guys wanted to be pros. Like being pro at fishing happens to be pretty lucrative if you’re any good at it, right? Yeah, it’s crazy.(…) You’re in high stakes. I mean, it’s just man versus beast out there. And it’s just it’s awesome. What was that? What was that first, like three and a half million dollars? Two point eight. Two point eight. Two point eight.(…) So you can read more about it on it’s been all over Barstool Sports. It’s been over all kinds of different magazines lately and a couple lawsuits filed out of it. But we’ll see.

(…)

So speaking of your time on the wire, this is in high school, even a little bit before, did that have an impact on your mindset? Was there something going on at the time where you’re like, hey, this may be something that I want to do for a living, not just the fishing itself, but in terms of how you saw the natural world around you? Yeah, that’s a great question. So I’ve always been a little bit quirky and always excited about the outdoors and really curious and trying to understand it. And when you’re fishing, fishing isn’t hard. It’s just recognizing patterns and then recognizing with enough conviction that you’re changing what you’re doing. So it’s just really repetitive. And growing up in Polk County, the mantra was we had 100 lakes within city limits and you would see lakes in some sort of development or natural or whatever the case may be. And you got to see these repetitious cycles of clean water and habitat being overly developed and poorly managed. And so you get to see all these different cycles. And that was always really curious to me. I knew I wanted to work outside. I didn’t know what that looked like. But just the beauty of what we do and working in the environment is there’s really no right answers. There’s less wrong answers and then just figuring out teasing away the gray. And that’s what I love to do. Is that what took you to USF then? You studied biology at USF, right? Right. Was that something that fed you into that or was it still, hey, biology gives me some options in terms of just being in a scientific field? Yeah, so my dad’s an optometrist.(…) There was a heavy campaign pressure to become an optometrist. There’s nothing wrong with the sport or the profession. I’m sorry, dad. It just wasn’t for me. And I knew that in my heart of hearts, but I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to be outside. And one of the smartest things I’ve ever done was a ridiculously stupid thing is just sit in my dorm room by myself, probably with a couple libations. And just like every other college student trying to figure out what they want to do with their life. And what I did was I started with a blank sheet of paper and started at the top. And I kind of wrote what my attributes and what I was good at and what I was passionate about. And then on the next line, I would try to write jobs that I thought had those qualities. And then I just kept going down into a triangle, upside down triangle, lower and lower.(…) And I got to the end and became a professional fisherman or a farmer. I really didn’t have a conviction on whether I wanted to be one or the other. So I just googled fish farming and just fell in love with aquaculture and farming fish. And I knew it would take me outside. I knew it would feed my creativity side. I knew it would from my intellectual side. And it was a growing industry and I thought I could make a mark at it. And so through school, I didn’t specialize in marine bio or botany or environmental. It was kind of, hey, if I can’t get this aquaculture thing going, then I can fall back and become an optometrist. And really that helped me out in my career because I took a lot of intensive chemistry, biochem and a lot of those courses. And also I was like, I’ll tell people, if you see Carter in person somewhere, I want to get into too much for now. But I asked a question because I’m talking about your time in college. And I talked to one of your colleagues before you and I sat down to talk. And they said, hey, ask Carter about the alligator story. And I said to you on the phone, hey Carter, tell me about the alligator story because I want to talk about that. And you said which one?(…) And so folks out there, if you get a chance to, I don’t know what the statute of limitations is for alligators situations. But if you see them, make sure you ask Carter about to tell you about at least one of them.

(…)

So back to the story of large, you’re finishing up at USF. You’ve decided the kind of person you want to be professionally.(…) And then it took you to, was that Fish and Wildlife right out of college? So it was actually during college. My second junior year, I was reading the high school news or the college newspaper. I saw that there was a scuba diving tournament that was coming up. So I participated in this scuba Olympics tournament. And there I met a lady that was, her name’s Maki. So shout out to Maki. That was the microbiologist at FWC down in St. Pete. She introduced me, just kind of telling her what I wanted to do, like big picture. And she says, oh, my roommate is the intern coordinator for FWC’s fish hatchery down in Port Manta T. I’ll introduce you. And I just kind of sleep at night. I was just beside myself, excited, doing all the research. Lo and behold,(…) I ended up being an intern there. And then they hired me shortly thereafter. Had a job coming out of college, making just all kinds of contacts from around the state and globe. And it was just incredible experience to learn aquaculture from just true masters at it. Yeah, I like how you tried to gloss over that competitive scuba diving as though I had no idea this was a thing. I thought competitive scuba diving was trying to find sunken treasure or something like that. Tell me, because you won an event, right?(…) Tell me about what competitive scuba diving is and the competition that you were involved in directly.

(…)

Yeah, that’s so I have no idea why the spirit moved me on this. It was a one and done. It was the gold medalist for underwater bicycle racing. So you got that on the mantle. So the underwater scuba diving was Olympics was swim across the pool and not deviate. You’d swim through hula hoops. And so you had to get your buoyancy right. There was a blow up balloons and lift something. And then there was a tow, where you had tow an unconscious diver. And then what I was in was the underwater bicycle racing.

(…)

True story throughout my life is if everybody’s playing one game, I’ll figure out some other game. And so I was watching these guys, guys and girls trying to ride their bikes underwater. And they can’t get any traction because there’s no, there’s no buoyancy. And so I stood up out of the water on top of the bicycle, got traction. And by the time anyone figured out what was going on, I was three quarters of the way through the race.(…) Yes. So you described several events, all the ones that you didn’t win that I can see the the real application of it. What’s the real world application of the bicycle race underwater? It gives you something to talk about on podcast.

(…)

Yeah, I say congratulations to you, sir.

(…)

I want to take just a moment to talk about my friends at res. Florida is a treasure trove of natural wonders. But the cost of that treasure is our collective responsibility to restore and protect its ecological and water resources.(…) That’s my friends at res. The nation’s leader in ecological and hydrological restoration are at their best. When an extensive Florida based team, res provides top notch nature based solutions that uplift Florida’s ecosystems and the communities that rely on them.(…) From water quality to hydrological restoration, wetland mitigation to coastal resilience, res addresses the complex challenges facing our state with our unique operating model of taking full responsibility for their projects performance over time. Working with both the public and private sectors, res is tackling the issues affecting Florida’s water and land resources the most. Their long term cost effective and sustainable projects rehabilitate impaired ecosystems, helping them do the work nature intended. Cleansing water, sheltering wildlife, buffering storms, and sequestering carbon from the atmosphere. Join res on their mission to restore and uplift Florida’s ecosystems. Visit www.res.us to learn more about res and their commitment to creating a resilient future for Florida. Alright, let’s get back to the conversation.

(…)

So, how long did you spend at Fish and Wildlife? A little over two and a half, three years. I think the entrepreneurial spirit, which you always had, I think it was you meeting someone in particular that you’re still involved with to this day, wasn’t it? That’s right. Working outside and had a little bucket full of fish, feeding redfish, and I just love it. I still love it. It was such a cool job. This older gentleman in a semi truck pulls up and waves me over and I thought he got stuck or something. I didn’t know what was going on. He rolled down his window and he said, “You’re the only one I ever see running around out here. Do you want a job?” I said, “How much you paying?”

(…)

And he told me it was a little more than I was making a state. I said, “Well, what do you do? What do you want me to do?” And he goes, “We grow seagrass.” And I said, “Holy cow, this could be really, really fun. Get to travel around.” I knew I wanted to work out in the outdoors and I knew I wanted to make a difference. I thought by farming fish, you take pressure off wild caught fish and jumped on it. I’m a kid. I love boats. I love barges. I love equipment. I love habitat and being outside. The job kind of entailed melding all of those skill sets together and just never looked back. How wide was that? Because you were still in the Port Manatee area with Fish and Wildlife at the time? Correct.

(…)

Was Jim working beyond that area? I know he’s in, would Apollo Beach or Ruskin? Right. Ruskin. So he was leasing out some sod farms from Tico at the time, growing sod, and doing some seagrass experiments at the time. So Port Manatee had great salt water and he was trying to figure out, or I don’t want to say perfected, but he was well on his way to becoming…no one else was growing seagrasses at the time. He just dug a hole out in the middle of his sod farm, pumped seawater into it, and started growing seagrasses. So he was a great mentor. There is no box even to stay within the lines. So he’s just a super creative guy and able to tie just so many different facets together. It’s just really cool to work with him. He was like a literal farmer though by trade before. Beyond just the sod and experimenting with the seagrass, it’s kind of interesting. You talked about your checklist and I don’t think that’s by accident that you mix farmer and fish together. So tell me about the evolution of…it’s no accident that you had farming and fish and then you end up with Jim Anderson. But tell me about the evolution of that technology. How involved were you with him? How long was he at it when you joined the scene? Yeah, that’s a great question. I think it would have been…I joined the scene probably in 2012 and he started in the mid-90s. And we’re not even close. I think we’re pioneers of it and some of the world leaders. We’ve been growing corn as a civilization thousands of years and yet it’s still so risky that the Fed subsidized crop insurance for it. And we’re not there with corn and we’re darn sure not there with native plants and seagrasses. I think it’s just incredible.

(…)

Our organization is spending so much time trying to hone in on our craft and just apply it from a multidimensional vector. Whether that’s water quality or wave attenuation or light. There’s so many different variables out there. It’d take many people, many lifetimes to really hone it down. And Jim, he’s got a bug for it. He can’t help himself. He’s got a tinker with it and it’s really cool. Were you kind of the educated salesman under that scenario when you were teaming up with him? Well first, let me start at the beginning.(…) You mentioned the technology that he was working with in terms of breeding seagrass to be better and better. Talk about those activities, what he was up to, the breed of seagrasses to make them feel better. Can you talk about the evolution of that and what he’s using? And then talk about how you work to move that forward into wider use.(…) All plants act a little different, just like anything. There’s short people, there’s tall people, there’s wide people, there’s skinny people. Some of that is learned over time, but some of that’s in the different genetics.

(…)

Jim kind of took a Mendel’s Peas approach to it, kind of basic and rudimentary. But then we started learning that, man, some of these plants grow in different conditions. We’re always trying to further the science, trying to de-risk this occupation and looking for plants that grow in poor water quality conditions, bringing them back to the nursery, and then breed them, cross-breed them, whatever. With other plants, based on whatever conditions they are, I’m really excited we’re dealing with native plants, right? We’re not doing anything crazy here. I’m really excited to see where that goes. It started mostly in the freshwater side. It’s moving more and more into the saltwater side. It makes a difference. One example is about four years ago. We did a job and we planted seagrass in, I think it was about 68 to 72 parts per thousand salinity.

(…)

We guaranteed our work and planting in saltwater that’s double the strength of the ocean.

(…)

We bombed. Man, we crashed. We did not do good at all, but we warranty our work. We went back to the drawing board. What the heck happened? We’re not going to do the same thing again. We started looking in that watershed and we found plants that were growing under those conditions. We brought those back to the nursery, grew those plants out, then planted them back out at scale and had great survival rate. So it’s just one example. I’ll give you dozens of others. Let’s stick with that for a minute because I read plenty of articles and columns. I’ve even heard people in person here in Tallahassee say the survival rate of seagrass planting, whether it’s for mitigation purposes or restoration purposes or otherwise, is exceedingly low. I think I was hearing something like in the 30s. I’m not sure if I remember anything. But the work that you and Jim have done to that point,(…) you’re getting much better numbers than that, right? 100 percent. Not 100 percent survival, but much better numbers. So our survival rates are really dependent on the project. So what we try not to do is we are a scientific organization. Yes, we love working with scientific partners. That’s not our goal. Our goal is not to produce white paper research, even though we’ve been involved with many papers. Our goal is to get plants where they’re currently not. And in doing so is you’ve got to figure out why the plant is not there to begin with. It makes no sense to plant seagrass where it’s not there already without knowing why it’s not there. It could be a recruitment issue. It could be a wave issue, light overgrazing, sediment issue, agronomy. It could be a million different things. But if you’re not addressing the root causes of why it’s not there, you’re not going to have any success. Just going beyond the narrative that it’s all one thing or, you know, it’s a game of net sums. One factor that kills seagrasses and it’s not one factor that’s going to get seagrasses back. There are no silver bullets when it comes to biology. If anyone tells you there is, hold on to your wallet. But that’s one of the struggles that folks in government have. I spent 20 years looking after taxpayer dollars, spending taxpayer dollars. And in the end, I think people are OK with money being spent, but they want to know that they got what they paid for. And the danger there is spending millions of dollars on something that doesn’t make it. But you’re saying a lot of folks are just looking at it the wrong way in terms of how they employ those things. You were dealing with underlying causes before doing it? Yeah. So, scene-shoarline, fast forward now, scene-shoarline started off in 2014.

(…)

We’re primarily doing, I call it 90 percent of our business with seagrass mitigation. Mitigation seagrass planting is much different results on hold than restoration. And the difference is it has to be there. So it causes practitioners to look at those underlying causes. Right. The problem with it, though, is it’s expensive in a lot of cases. And so now fast forward to today, we’re 90 percent restoration and 10 percent mitigation is because we’ve solely focused on bringing costs down by looking at what factors and what projects are good to where you can fix minimal, you know, small, small dollar factors to get seagrasses back. And so when we’re talking about restoration or planting seagrasses as a whole, it’s just looking at those underlying causes and figuring out how bad do you want seagrasses there? You know, what what links are you going to go? And if seagrasses, if you’re planting projects like that project that described with really high salinities, how do you have those reasonable assurances that you that you are going to be successful? And that’s the fun part of the job. What do you what do you attribute the more recent advancements or recent attention toward this type of restoration? It’s not something you know, and you and I have been around each other for about a year, even during that period of time, it seems like that people are thinking about this type of restoration as though it were second nature, whereas before it may not have been. And what do you attribute the kind of increasing success, whether it’s you or anyone else, like the increased success in terms of getting folks to pay attention to what you do? It’s just a business decision at the end of the day. In mitigation, you’re not in control of whether some entity is going to impact seagrasses in some way. So the projects being so spread out, it’s just a high dollar amount. And so what we did is we made a conscious decision, hey, we’re going to lower our costs and we’re going to make up for those net margins by doing a lot of restoration projects and doing them very, very well. And by lowering the cost, I remember doing seagrass mitigation projects for half a million dollars an acre. And you’re not going to fix anything from a rest restorative impact. You just can’t make that return on investment work. But sub 100,000, sub 50, some 30, you know, depending on what the project is, well, now you’re talking about single digit return on investments between three to five years and sooner than a lot of cases. And that is why that business, conscious business decision is why we started to just do more restoration.

(…)

Talk about the improvements in how you deployed the seagrass. I’ve seen your operation in person where you’re dealing with substrate that shouldn’t be there in advance. You’re using interesting new tools. Talk about that kind of technology, not just we’ve talked about what Jim Anderson did in terms of the right plant and bending it to the right place. Talk about like some of that technology as well in terms of like how you plant it, the secret sauce, at least for seagrass, if you can. First and foremost, every project is different. They all have different parameters around them. We’ve had a lot of success just focusing on the agronomy. Tell me what agronomy is first. Yeah.(…) So soil sciences. So getting your soil right, you know, if you get the ground right, it becomes a lot, lot easier. And at the end of the day, seagrass is still a plant. It’s a cool plant. It’s hard to grow. And it’s really important. Provides a lot of ecosystem services. But at the end of the day, we shouldn’t overcomplicate it. It needs nutrients. It needs substrate. And it needs light. That’s the three things. And so looking at the substrate as a parameter that we can control, whether that’s bringing the dredging or vacuum dredging sediments out, in a lot of cases, in soft sediment, manatees, turtles, ducks, deer, cows, people trampling, you name it, they’ll break the rhizome or the roots of the plant and cause it to wither away. And if in the case of manatees, if it’s really, really soft ground, well, the manatee just pulls the entire plant out instead of the leaves breaking off and then sprouting new leaves. And so just really paying attention to that mindset of get the ground right and make sure everything else is fine. And it all comes together. Is that a part of the days when there were worse success rates? Because people didn’t deal with those underlying conditions to make sure that they were right. So when you planted, manatee didn’t just come by and pull it straight back out of the… Yeah, exactly. And so we’ve been really working hard on figuring out what soil compaction levels are necessary for seagrass or submerged aquatic vegetation as a whole. So it doesn’t rip out and it doesn’t create anoxic conditions. In a lot of these areas, they’re not fun areas to work in. They’re upland cut canals. They’re canals that get just inundated after every red tide. They get a fish kill in there, creates anoxic conditions, low dissolved oxygen, creates fish kills, creates conditions where you get these cyanobacteria blooms and it builds up over time.

(…)

And without restoration, those problematic areas become regional problematic areas because, hey, nutrients, but mostly the cyanobacteria blooms, they drift out of there and they colonize new areas. And it just spreads like wildfire, like a cancer. Yeah. Tell me some more about that because you’re doing some work in and around the Indian River Lagoon area. What’s your take on the thing that’s the biggest problem? Is it things like that, that what you just described? How do you view the way forward there beyond the type of work that’s the direct work that you do? Is it those places, those tributaries that lead to lagoon? How do you see it? Yeah. The Indian River Lagoon does not have a 256 mile long problem. It has 256 one mile long problems. Thinking about it from a segmented standpoint is really important. For instance, Sebastian Inlet, just north of Sebastian Inlet. Beautiful water quality. Seagrass isn’t above a quarter inch tall. You can’t blame it on water quality. And there’s a couple other spots like that in the Indian River Lagoon. But in other areas of the Indian River Lagoon, you can’t see your toes at the beach. It’s just really poor water quality. What’s really interesting is talking about it from a, traditionally, it was a chicken or the egg. I think of it as a chicken and the egg issue. So I think without some sort of habitat or seagrass is out there, no matter how many water quality projects you do, the seagrass just doesn’t magically pop back. If it did, it would already be in Sebastian Inlet. However, if you don’t do those water quality projects, then seagrasses aren’t going to come back on their own regardless. And so we spent a considerable amount of effort and time and working with partners on the Indian River Lagoon. We had teammates out there planting today around Tucker Cove and Fort Pierce and setting up seagrass nurseries over there(…) to better identify where recruitment is the rate limiting step for seagrasses out there. And we can’t control the spigot coming out of Lake Okeechobee as seeing shoreline. But we darn sure can find and identify areas that are ready to be restored and start working on them. Like the old adage, when’s the best time to plant a tree? 50 years ago. Right. Right. So what are we waiting for? Let’s go. Talk a little bit about that in the meantime, because some people are like, great, the plant a tree method of great, we just need 50 years. But you’re not waiting for that. There are folks that are doing work now. There’s been legislation in the past, House Bill 1379 is the most clear example of efforts to restore Indian River Lagoon and other places as well in terms of water quality. But in the meantime, you all have actually done some work in terms of from your own nurseries and feeding manatees. Right. I know there was trouble with getting enough biomass to manatees in some of these areas. Were you all involved in some of that work? Yeah, it was actually a ton of fun. If you had told me in college, we’d be feeding manatees. I’d tell you crazy. But, you know, all these systems interact with each other. So when a lot of the manatees or a couple of the manatees that were cold stressed from the Indian River Lagoon got transported to Homosassa State Park. And we have a flagship project going on there between Crystal River and Homosassa. We now have so much grass growing that there’s just abundant and the manatees we would bring plant or leaves to Homosassa State Park, feed manatees and set up a schedule. And it was really cool to give back and participate in such a way that it was just a feather in the cap, I guess. It was fun. Sure. I think in terms of and I saw the place myself when you talk about the right conditions for the SAVs to flourish, you got that, though, in that Homosassa Springs area. Right. In terms of you, you get the substrate right. You get the plant right. You get the conditions right. And you plant and you get better off in the end than when you when you start. Like it’ll propagate itself after a while. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s that’s part of what we’re trying to achieve is a snowball effect. So no matter how low we can reduce our costs for planting seagrasses, if it doesn’t do its thing on its own, it’s never going to be cost. So Crystal River, for example, they set out to do 92 acres of upland cut canals just completing that now over a period of seven years.

(…)

And right before their 100 year anniversary as a city. Now the grass is spread to over about 350, 350, 400 acres of 800 acre bay. And that’s awesome. That’s what you want. You want to double, triple, quadruple the investment. And if you design the project, right. That’s what’s supposed to do. Yeah. No, that’s and that’s at least in my mind when I put on my government agency hat is like, hey, what am I getting for the expenditure? And you tell me I’m going to keep getting a positive impact. And at least it certainly keeps the conversation going the right way. Let me get away from seagrass and SAVs for a bit and manatee and fish and inverbit habitat into what you are doing to help protect. I’ll call it human habitat in terms of wads. Tell me what a wad is and tell me how the work you’re doing there is helping to protect communities and for. Yeah. So it’s funny in an effort to protect and grow more seagrasses, we’ve gotten ourselves into all kinds of predicaments. So in the beginning, we were just a seagrass planting company and then we realized we had to do more sediment amendments. And so now we do tons and tons of high area, low volume dredging. Well, in some areas, they don’t need dredging for seagrass recruitment. They’ll need wave attenuation protection. So one of the things that we’re really excited about is working with wave attenuation devices, creating longshore or offshore breakwaters, planting seagrasses or incorporating some natural habitat behind it and spacing it out at a distance to where boats and can still pull up to the sandbar and then providing that green, gray engineering with nature, whatever you want to call it, whatever the buzzword of the year is, providing that clean infrastructure to protect, to A, increase sediment behind them. So protect, get more sand back and then protect, wave it from hitting the shore all while having sea turtles or terrapins, everything fish, everything moves, passes through them, but you still get that offshore breakwater. I’m excited about it. I think it’s probably, it’s coming up as beach renourishment projects become trickier and trickier from a sediment acquisition standpoint. I don’t know that we’re going to be able to bulkhead the entire state of Florida off. Right. And then I don’t think it’s the solution everywhere, but I think it’s a big solution in a lot of areas that the state of Florida and the world’s changing and it’s moving faster and faster. And what we did in the past isn’t going to be necessarily the roadmap for the future. I’m not saying that we should throw out the entire playbook, but we need to start really thinking about new technologies, new platforms that are going to protect us and then still have some semblance of habitat and recreation. So we’re really excited about them. What is a good example of one of those kind of success stories where maybe you used the wads where you got some of that sand accretion because I look, I saw a lot of places. We have a lot of coast in Northwest Florida where I’ve dealt with where you’re losing significant amount of, I’ll call it real estate. It’s not for sale, but actual land that human and land animal habitat that’s disappearing. Is there a place where you’ve done work where you’re starting to really start to see some of those successes?

(…)

Yeah. A couple areas that I can think of is one Simmons Park in South Tampa Bay.(…) One is Sunken Island. Sunken Island was a bird rookery that every time the beach nesting birds would lay their eggs on the beach, another ship would come in and all the eggs would wash off. Where’s Sunken Island? Oh, sorry, Tampa Bay. Tampa Bay as well. And then right now there’s one being put in actually for a seagrass mitigation at the Skyway Pier or Skyway Bridge right there in the mouth of Tampa Bay. Got a couple proposed in all around the state and throughout the Southeast right now. It’s a new emerging technology that’s gone through all the peer review literature and wave modeling and all that. So if you want to see one, please just let us know and reach out to us. We’d be happy to show you around. Yeah, the cool thing about them is that they’ve got a relatively small footprint with the ground, so you don’t have to have all the sloping you need for a traditional riprap. So the seagrass mitigation or impact, potential impact is a lot less. So that’s what turned us on to them.

(…)

Yeah, and I’ll definitely put your contact stuff. We’ll put the website, all that in the episode notes. I’ve seen some of it firsthand, but I’m looking forward to seeing the living shoreline, the barriers, the wave attenuation. I want to see that in person. I haven’t had a chance yet, so I’m looking forward to that. What’s the professional accomplishment? It may be philosophical, maybe an actual project, but what professional accomplishment are you most proud of? By far and away, it is going from a staff of three to around 100 in a short amount of time, less than 10 years. I love hiring people, and I know as a business owner, you do more with less, and we certainly do that. But when we hire, it means that we’ve got the biology right, we’ve got a clear roadmap, and we’ve got a pipeline to continue that out. And we are lean and mean and bootstrap this thing since the beginning to 100 people now. And so every time we take a hire very serious, we want to hire super confident people,(…) really top notch people, and just feels good that you’re on the right track. I could talk all kinds of projects, but hiring is it for me. I like it. What, if anything, keeps you up at night in terms of Florida’s environment? Is there something out there that you’re like, gosh, I’m not sure how we’re going to tackle this one? You know, Florida’s environment is kind of the tail of two cities. I think that most people in Polk County don’t know what a gopher tortoise is, and they never will. And it’s not great. We’re developing at such a rapid pace. On the flip side of that, there’s plenty of conservation land, never enough. We would love to have more. I’m terrified that if folks at an early age don’t appreciate the natural resources, they won’t, when it comes time to purposefully tax themselves for restoration or conservation. They won’t, because they have no background or no history into it. But on the other hand, I think water quality is going to work itself out. I think there’s so much glaring need for it that there’s going to be more emphasis on public-private partnerships, on creative funding, on whatever that mechanism is.

(…)

It’s going to come along. And when private sector, the public sector, and the NGOs, and the community and public all get around trying to solve this mission, which it seems like this governor’s spent an incredible amount of time, energy, and effort and money on water quality environment, I think we’re marching in the right direction on that. But yeah, it’s probably not going to be a whole lot of gophers. Yeah, I mean, I guess you answered two questions. One, because the other question is, are you optimistic about the future of the environment floor? Sounds like you’re both. So I think that’s, you know, a lot of folks that are similar to being in your shoes, which is like, hey, there’s some real challenges. Obviously, Govertors is a huge one, especially where you and I grew up, but certainly beyond. It’s like, but are you really optimistic about that? The funding speaks for itself, right? But are you optimistic about how things look 10, 20 years from now? Yeah, it just moved, right? Like old Florida, you know, I grew up in Polk County when the citrus industry was still around. There’s no relative citrus industry now. And it’s just different. There are, are there a bunch of clean lakes in Central Florida? Yeah. Are there a couple of dirty lakes? Yeah. And that could be said throughout the state. What’s that book? Elaine Remembered. They talk about chasing the fog. Florida’s started out changing a long time ago, and it’s going to continue to change. If the residents aren’t enjoying Florida’s beauty, you’re not going to drag me out of the state kicking or screaming. I love Florida. I was born here. I’m a Florida guy. Yeah. It’s just, it’s just moved. What advice would you give to young people, young Carter Henny, that’s looking at or thinking about going into whether it be public service in the environmental sphere or the private sector? What do you tell them? Go. Do it. I can’t tell you how many times I tell people what I do. And they say, Oh, I wanted to be a marine biologist, but found out name your answer.(…) And that’s fine, right? I think more people don’t become it or follow their dreams is they, they just don’t get those internships. They don’t apply themselves. They don’t go and try to do it and figure out what they want to do. And so they settle into the path of least resistance. So if you want to do something, go do it. Good answer. Any good place to finish? I think Carter Henny. Thanks so much for being on the show, man. Thank you.

(…)

All right. Carter has left the building. One thing that I forgot to ask him that I usually ask my guests was how people can find out more about what he’s up to and how folks can reach them if they want to learn more about sea and trolling. Of course, you can always go to their website that’s sea and shoreline.com.(…) And as luck would have it in Carter’s case, he and his team will be down in Marco Island for the Florida Environmental Networks permitting summer school. That’s next week. So if you want to find out in person how sea and shoreline can help improve water quality while making shorelines more resilient or you just want to hear some really cool alligator stories, be sure to stop by their booth. That’s going to be right across from the registration desk down there.

(…)

Well, that’s it for this episode. Thanks for listening to Water for Fighting. This podcast has been brought to you by Res and Sea and Shoreline. Don’t forget to check the episode notes to visit their websites and learn more about how they can help you. If you’re enjoying the show, please be sure to subscribe on whatever platform you use. And don’t forget to leave a five star rating and review. You can follow the show on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, probably even Twitter at FL WaterPod. And you can reach me directly at FL WaterPod at gmail.com with your comments and suggestions for who and or what you’d like to know more about.(…) Production of this podcast is by Lonely Fox Studios. Thanks to Carl Sworn for making the best of what he had to work with and to Dave Barfield for the amazing graphics and technical assistance. A very special thank you goes out to Bow Spring from the Bow Spring Band for giving permission to use his music for the podcast. The song is called “Doing Work for Free” and you should check out the band live or wherever great music is sold.

(…)

Join me next time for another amazing conversation with someone who has helped shape water and environmental policy in the Sunshine State. Until then, keep your whiskey close and your water closer.