I say it all the time — We live in a postcard!

This morning I watched a manatee surface off the dock, slow and unbothered, like it had nowhere to be and all the time in the world to get there. A great blue heron stood at the water’s edge not twenty feet away, fishing, festinating. Out past the mangroves, somebody’s skiff was already running the backcountry before sunrise. That’s just a Tuesday here.

Earth Day is April 22, and I think it’s worth pausing to really appreciate what we have.

We have the backcountry, the Ten Thousand Islands, the Gulf, the birds, the fishing, the manatees, the dolphins, the mangroves, the seagrass. We have roseate spoonbills flying pink against a sunset sky. We have stone crabs and snook and redfish and mullet running in October like clockwork. We have insects and plants and creatures that exist in this corner of Florida and almost nowhere else on earth.

There are places along the Florida coast that were once beautiful fishing villages and wild coastal communities. Some of them are barely recognizable now — overdeveloped, overfished, loud in the wrong ways, stripped of the very thing that made people want to come in the first place. The birds gone. The water murky. The fish reduced to whatever invasive species managed to survive the neglect. The charm replaced by souvenir shops and traffic.

I don’t want that for us. I don’t think you do either.

What this place needs from us is respect — real respect, not bumper sticker respect. Don’t litter on the islands. Mind the grass flats under your hull. Give the manatees their space. Let the birds nest in peace. Don’t leave your trash everywhere, and don’t burn down the beautiful we have.

We are lucky in a way that most coastal communities in Florida are not. The Ten Thousand Islands and the Everglades are still largely wild. The fishing is still real. The birds are still here in numbers that make birders drive hours to see. The manatees still come into the river.

So this Earth Day, I’m thinking about the postcard we get to live in every single day. And I’m thinking about how much I want my grandchildren to be able to say the same thing. There’s nothing quite like it.

You may also be interested in The Manatee – Florida’s Gentle Giant or Birdwatching in Paradise.