In 2011, I was hired by the Artists Alliance of North Florida, doing business as Florida's Eden, to be their Blue Path coordinator--the person who organized and assisted with efforts to raise awareness about the plight of Florida's freshwater springs. Those springs--some of Florida's first tourist attractions that remain economic boons to their surrounding communities--were suffering decreased flows and increased pollution. The problems were caused not only by an increasing population but also by bad decisions and misleading messaging coming from elected officials and state agencies--water management districts, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, and local governments and planning and zoning departments throughout the Springs Heartland.
"The Blue Path" was a term coined by Gainesville journalist and author Cynthia Barnett, who laid the groundwork for a Florida water ethic in her book Blue Revolution and in Our Water, Our Florida, a white paper published by the Collins Center on Public Policy.
Looking back, I realize that those of us at Florida's Eden were naive. We thought that if we raised awareness about the plight of Florida's springs, positive changes would follow and the springs would be restored to health. So we tabled at events, we held book launches for Barnett's Blue Revolution, we mounted exhibitions, we circulated newsletters, we worked with an innovative environmental education program, we enlisted the voices of other writers and artists to spread the word that our springs were sick and needed help.
We helped to create and worked with various springs alliance groups that began a series of lawsuits aimed at forcing the State of Florida to follow existing laws to clean up the springs.
But all that "raising awareness" didn't lead to improving conditions in the springs, it just brought more people to the springs. We were hampered by our federal nonprofit status, or maybe by a lack of nerve, to tie the sickness in the springs to Florida's politics--its leaders and decisionmakers--and to our modern tendency to treat our natural "resources" as commodities instead of living systems with which we exist in a reciprocal or even sacred relationship.
And all those lawsuits (there have been many) have not brought improvements, much less restoration, to any of our springs.
Over the years, I've become convinced that solving our springs problems requires not only a sociocultural and political paradigm shift, but also a spiritual shift--a transformation of the relationship we humans have with Mother Earth. The American environmental lawyer James Gustave (Gus) Speth, a founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council, nailed the problem in this image that cropped up one day in my Facebook feed:
Going forward, could there be a Blue Path that does more than raise awareness? A Blue Path that leads to a truly transformative shift in how those of us in the 21st Century are treating the waters that sustain both our springs and ourselves?
