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After Cyclone Senyar, Indonesia probes whether development amplified scale of disaster
(news.mongabay.com)
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James Brooks*Alaska Beacon*
Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s administration is proposing to divert money from a program intended to compensate North Slope communities for the side effects of oil and gas drilling on federal land near them.
As Dunleavy prepares to unveil a long-term fiscal plan, the state is proposing to use at least some of that money across Alaska instead.
“Definitely a big deal,” said Alexei Painter, director of the Legislative Finance Division, which analyzes the budget on behalf of legislators.
The National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska Impact Mitigation Grant Program sends millions of dollars from the federal government to North Slope communities each year.
It’s funded through revenue generated by oil production on federal land in the North Slope, and it is expected to grow significantly in coming years as more oil is produced from projects like Willow, which is located in the vast petroleum reserve between Utqiagvik and the Prudhoe Bay oil field.
The Willow project alone, for example, is expected to generate $3.1 billion for the grant program between 2029 and 2053, a boon for the borough’s 10,583 residents.
But in documents published recently, the Department of Revenue has reclassified money for the program as “unrestricted,” meaning it could be spent in a variety of ways.
During a Wednesday, Dec. 17 meeting of the Alaska Permanent Fund Corp. board of trustees, CEO Deven Mitchell told the board that he had just heard “that there’s been a federal law change” that could see more money end up in the Permanent Fund.
Mitchell couldn’t recall where he had read about that change, but it appears in the state’s newly published revenue forecast, which covers the fiscal year that starts July 1.
In several footnotes, the Department of Revenue describes a shift in policy. Currently, revenue from the leasing of federal land in the petroleum reserve is deposited in “a special revenue fund” dedicated to a particular purpose.
That changes with the new fiscal year, when “these payments will be divided between unrestricted revenue (74.5 percent), the Permanent Fund (25 percent) and Public School Trust Fund (0.5 percent).”
That would mean money from NPR-A would end up in the state’s general-purpose accounts, usable for services statewide or the Permanent Fund dividend.
Last year, the department wrote, “The federal government dictates that shared NPR-A revenue must be used for specific purposes, and therefore it is considered restricted revenue in this forecast.”
This year, that sentence doesn’t appear.
Comparing the two forecasts shows the difference. Last year, the department labeled NPR-A revenue as “restricted,” or locked in to a particular purpose. In the new fall forecast, it’s “unrestricted,” or available for general use.
While only $9.6 million in NPR-A revenue is expected in the next fiscal year, the state forecasts that amount will rise significantly after the end of the decade — to more than $200 million per year by 2033.
Speaking to reporters last week, an official with the Office of Management and Budget said the Alaska Department of Law was evaluating how changes to federal law in the Big Beautiful Bill Act will change the distribution of revenue to the state and local communities.
That act, passed with the enthusiastic endorsement of Republicans in Congress and President Donald Trump, calls for the state to receive 70 percent of revenue from oil and gas leases on federal land in the National Petroleum Reserve, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and Cook Inlet, starting in fiscal year 2034.
The Department of Revenue concluded that clause will ultimately have little effect.
“Since all current and forecasted production in the NPR-A is located on leases issued before 2025, only a small portion of revenue within the current forecast period is expected to receive the 70 percent share,” the department wrote in its new forecast.
The Act also contains a clause stating that “for each of fiscal years 2025 through 2033, 50 percent (of federal-land oil revenue) shall be paid to the State of Alaska,” but that applies to revenue from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, not NPR-A. No oil and gas drilling or production has yet taken place in the refuge.
Thus, the legal basis for the state’s policy change isn’t clear.
Staff for Sens. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, said they’re not sure why the state believes it can spend NPR-A impact aid outside the federally designated program.
“The law is clear: the North Slope priority applies to all NPR-A revenues through FY 2034,” said Joe Plesha, a spokesman for Murkowski. “At that point, the North Slope priority continues to apply to all existing leases—including for Willow, West Willow, and the rest of the [2.3] million acres currently under lease in the reserve. Only lands leased pursuant to the reconciliation bill lack the North Slope priority, and only in FY 2034 and beyond. As of today, that acreage total is zero.”
The Alaska Department of Law is determining whether the state may choose to keep NPR-A money for direct uses instead of sending it to communities, the OMB official said.
As a precondition for that interview, reporters agreed to allow the official to speak on background and not be quoted directly.
The Alaska Department of Law did not respond to an emailed inquiry about the effort. The governor’s office, when asked for a quote about the topic, referred the issue to a spokesperson for the Department of Revenue, who did not provide a comment beyond the department’s written forecast.
The North Slope Borough was unable to comment before deadline Wednesday.
Officials from VOICE of the Arctic Inupiat, an organization that advocates Iñupiaq self-determination and has acted as a booster for oil production, said in a statement, “While VOICE’s board does not have a formal position on this matter, we would note that responsible resource development on the North Slope supports essential services, like schools, health clinics, modern water and sewer systems, and world-class wildlife management and research supporting Indigenous subsistence traditions. The proliferation of these services is directly connected to significant increases in average lifespan for the North Slope Iñupiat from just 34 years in 1969 to 77 years today – the largest increase of its kind in the United States over that period.”
Correction: This article has been updated to correct a reference to a 50-50 split in the Big Beautiful Bill Act. That split applies only to oil and gas revenue from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, not from the petroleum reserve as previously stated.
The post Dunleavy administration may divert federal oil revenue from North Slope appeared first on ICT.
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Last Updated on January 5, 2026 The last remaining uranium mill in the United States is located in White Mesa, Utah. The White Mesa Uranium Mill, owned and operated by Energy Fuels, processes uranium-bearing materials into yellowcake, a key component of nuclear reactor fuel. Mill tailings are the liquid radioactive byproduct of this process, and […]
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Nuria Martinez-Keel*Oklahoma Voice*
WARNER — The banners stretch along the top of Warner Public Schools’ Event Center wall, each with the letter A as the centerpiece.
Every banner celebrates the 16 overall A grades that schools in the rural eastern Oklahoma district have received since 2013 on state report cards. A fresh one printed in 2025 signifies Warner’s high school and K-8 school were again among the top 5 percent highest-performing public schools in the state.
The A grades, though a heavy focus in the 800-student district, aren’t the point, Warner Superintendent David Vinson said. They’re a byproduct of students’ and teachers’ hard work. And if Warner can do it, he said, any district can.
“You have to make sure your students understand the why,” Vinson said. “It’s about their education. It’s about bettering their lives. It’s not about getting an A on the report card or about getting high marks as a school district. That’s a result or a fallout of them being high achievers individually.”
Public schools across Oklahoma are now implementing strategies Warner has been employing for years — a cellphone ban throughout the school day, frequent benchmark testing and tracking of students’ individual scores. The district changed its culture and policies more than a decade ago after receiving disappointing results on state report cards.
The town of Warner, home to 1,500 residents and Connors State College, doesn’t have a wealth of industry to keep its school district flush with local tax revenue, Vinson said. State funding and community support for bond issues fill in the gap.
About 60 percent of Warner students come from households at or near the federal poverty line, state records show. Many district students — 42 percent of whom are Native American, 31 percent White and 20 percent two or more races — have parents who work in farming and ranching in the area or drive 20 minutes north to Muskogee for industry jobs, Vinson said.
Not that he particularly pays attention to demographics. Those details, Vinson said, “tend to be used as excuses.”
High academic expectations and strict discipline are core to the district’s success, he said. Principals are quick to handle behavioral issues, leaving teachers free to teach and students better able to learn without disruptions.
The principal’s office is not a “revolving door,” he said. Any student sent in must leave with a consequence.
“I think education in general across the board has lost sight of that mentality, has lost sight of that philosophy,” Vinson said. “And that’s why you have schools that are in chaos, and you have entire schools scoring 0 percent proficient on assessments because the school has become so chaotic that teachers can’t teach and kids can’t learn. And there are just as smart of kids in those schools as there are in my school. They’re just not being afforded that opportunity to learn like our kids are.”
Small behavioral problems are addressed consistently, and big incidents are punished “severely,” he said.
In Warner, that includes the rare use of corporal punishment, a method of discipline that more than 100 Oklahoma districts still permit. Simply having it on the table as an option, Vinson said, usually is enough to discourage most students from bad behavior.
While administrators handle discipline, teachers are expected to maximize every minute of their class time, a concept known in Warner as “bell-to-bell teaching.” That means no movies and no downtime, said Charla Jackson, the district’s curriculum director and elementary counselor.
Middle and high school students are discouraged from mingling in the hallways during passing periods. Instead they’re expected to hustle to their lockers and then to their next class, where a bellringer assignment is usually waiting. They’re expected to read a book if they finish their classwork early.
Literacy is a major emphasis in Warner, Jackson said. Several Warner Elementary teachers have completed in-depth training on the science of reading, and the school provides reading interventionists and tutoring for students who need extra help.
“They are the experts,” Jackson said of Warner’s teachers. “They are the ones making the difference. We just try to support them and allow them to do their job. So, that’s first and foremost.”
High morale keeps teacher turnover low, Jackson said. Class sizes, though increasing with Warner’s enrollment growth, max out at about 24 students per classroom.
But, Warner isn’t immune from the teacher shortage impacting public schools across Oklahoma.
About half of the teachers at Warner High School entered the classroom through non-traditional means, like adjunct teaching and alternative or emergency certification, Vinson said. The district tries to support those educators with training, pre-written curriculum plans and co-teaching hours with a veteran teacher.
Having fewer classroom disruptions, too, “just makes everybody a better teacher,” he said.
Several district teachers told Oklahoma Voice that behavioral issues are rarely a problem in their classrooms, but when they do occur, school administrators readily step in.
When asked what sets Warner apart, kindergarten teacher Lisa Lee pointed to elementary Principal Alan Gordon’s desk.
“This man right here, he’s great,” Lee said. “The administration here, it just makes you feel good. You know what I mean? Like they’re backing us. They believe in us. They push us, and that makes a huge difference.”
Fourth-grade math teacher Pam White said she was ready to quit teaching before she came to Warner Elementary five years ago. White, 65, is eligible to retire but has chosen not to “because I love this school so much.”
She said the supportive administration has been “huge.”
“They’re in our classrooms,” she said. “They’ll take care of problems immediately.”
During a visit to White’s classroom, students in her afternoon math class were equally enthusiastic about their school, complimenting the quality of their teachers, school staff and principal.
But, Warner didn’t always have this culture of success. The turning point was 2012. That year, the district scored straight C’s on state report cards.
Vinson, then in his first year as superintendent, sent an email to Warner families to inform them “we are not pleased with the overall grade on these report cards for our schools.” The district’s administrators and teachers were already implementing changes, he wrote in the email. He still keeps a copy.
That’s when Warner adopted a more structured and disciplined culture, banned cellphones, started adhering to bell-to-bell teaching and aimed to have 90% of students make a proficient score on state tests.
The following year, the district met or exceeded the statewide average on nearly every state exam.
That trajectory continued over the following decade, despite state test scoring becoming more rigorous in 2017 and COVID-19 interrupting schooling in 2020. In 2025, Warner students scored above the state average in every tested grade level, the district’s report card shows.
Families in the area have taken notice. While the town of Warner has experienced little population change, its school district has grown from 600 students at the start of the turnaround to more than 800 today. Student transfers are a major source of the spike.
“I think a big thing is we established a culture here where kids want to succeed,” middle and high school counselor Misty Durrett said. “It’s something they take pride in.
“They know our ranking. They know where we stand. They want to maintain that.”
It’s not all structure and discipline, Vinson said. School still needs to be fun.
That’s why Warner has expanded extracurricular activities, electives and class options available to students. It’s added a competition choir, an art program, boys and girls wrestling, and a high school construction class, where students are building a house that should be ready to sell this spring.
Students on the high school racing team design and build a dirt-track racing car that Vinson drives in competitions on the team’s behalf.
School spirit events, like Homecoming, consume entire school days. With the winter holidays approaching, the interior of every Warner school is decorated for Christmas with lights, trees and door decals.
“You have to create those opportunities for kids to enjoy school,” Vinson said. “It can’t be structure, discipline, learning, structure, discipline, learning 170 days a year.”
Oklahoma Voice is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oklahoma Voice maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janelle Stecklein for questions: info@oklahomavoice.com.
The post How this small Oklahoma school district became one the state’s top performers appeared first on ICT.
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Combating climate change can feel particularly difficult these days. Countries, states and municipalities across the globe are missing greenhouse emission reduction targets and, in the United States, President Donald J. Trump has rolled back key elements of his predecessor’s climate agenda.
Given the trajectory, it might be tempting for pro-climate policy makers to turn to more aggressive measures of getting people to take action, such as mandates, bans or restrictions. People would then have to save the planet.
But a study published last week in the journal Nature Sustainability suggests that approach can carry real risks. It found that climate policies aimed at forcing lifestyle changes — such as bans on driving in urban centers — can backfire by weakening people’s existing pro-environmental values and triggering political backlash, even among those who already care about climate change. The findings suggest that how climate policy is designed may matter as much as how aggressive it is.
“Mandates can sometimes get you over a hump and tipping point, but they come with costs,” said Sam Bowles, an author of the paper and an economist at the nonprofit Santa Fe Institute. “There could be negative impacts that people don’t anticipate.”
Researchers surveyed more than 3,000 Germans and found that even people who care about climate change had a notably negative response to mandates or bans that did things like limit thermostat temperatures or meat consumption, which they saw as restricting their freedoms. The paper also compared that to people’s reaction to COVID-related requirements, such as vaccine and mask mandates. While researchers found a backlash effect, or “cost of control,” in both instances, it was 52 percent greater for climate than COVID policies.
“I didn’t expect that people’s opposition to climate-mandated lifestyle would be so extreme,” said Katrin Schmelz, the other author of the study, who is also at Santa Fe Institute. She said that people’s trust in their leaders can mitigate the adverse impact and, compared to the United States, Germans have fairly high trust in the government. That, she said, means she would “expect mandates to be less accepted and provoke more opposition here.”
Ben Ho wasn’t involved in the study and wasn’t surprised by its findings. “This is fundamentally about how a society values individual values of liberty and expression against communal values like safety,” he said, pointing to a sizable body of similar research on the potential for backlash to climate policies. “What is novel about their work is to show that these backfire effects are still true today, and what is especially interesting is to connect their data to how people felt about COVID.”
The political consequences of climate-related mandates can be dramatic. In Germany, a 2023 law passed by the country’s then center-left government sought to accelerate the shift away from fossil fuels by effectively banning new gas heating systems and promoting heat pumps. Though the policy allowed for exemptions and subsidies, opponents quickly framed it as a ban, dubbing it the heizhammer, or “heating hammer.”
The measure became a potent symbol of government overreach, seized on by far-right parties and contributing to a broader public backlash against the governing coalition. “The last German government basically fell because they were seen to be instituting a ban on gas,” said Gernot Wagner, climate economist at Columbia Business School. The current government is attempting to rollback the legislation.
Germany’s experience underscores the risks the study identifies. Policies that are perceived as restricting personal choice can trigger resistance that extends beyond the measure itself, weakening public support for climate action more broadly. So far, policies in the U.S. have largely avoided such opposition. That’s largely because American climate policies have historically been much less aggressive, with even progressives rarely turning to outright bans. But there is both precedent for a potential backlash and inklings of potential fights to come.
The 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act, for example, laid out the path to gradually phase out incandescent light bulbs. That led to the Light Bulb Freedom of Choice and Better Use of Light Bulbs acts, two 2011 bills that the then-burgeoning tea party movement pushed, without success. Today, methane, also known as natural gas, is at the center of similar cultural fights as cities attempt to ban new hookups and take other steps to curtail its use.
Opponents of climate action seem to have become aware of the power of bans to spark backlash, too. President Trump regularly refers to fuel efficiency benchmarks as an electric vehicle “mandate.” The natural gas industry has also framed efficiency standards for gas appliances as bans and used the backlash effect to help successfully delay other explicit bans on gas in new construction, such as in New York state.
Read Next
One word sums up climate politics in 2025: Greenlash
On its face, research like this can put lawmakers in a difficult position: If a policy isn’t aggressive enough, it won’t do much to combat climate change. But if it’s too aggressive, people could turn against it, or even the entire political movement behind it, as in Germany, and progress can stall.
“This doesn’t mean we should give up on climate policies,” said Ho.“It just means we should be more mindful in how policies are designed, and that trust could be a key component.”
Schmelz and Bowles both point to a similar conclusion, and say that any policy should at least consider the plasticity of citizens’ beliefs and values. “Ethical commitments and social norms are very fragile and they’re easily destroyed,” said Bowles. Schmelz added that people in power “can upset and reduce willingness to cooperate by designing poor policies.”
One way that policies can avoid backlash is by focusing less on banning a particular action and instead on making the other options more abundant, and more attractive (by adding tax incentives or rebates, for example). “Offering alternatives is helping in enforcing green values,” said Schmelz. Another option could be aiming to make climate-unfriendly activities more expensive rather than restricting them. As Bowles put it, “people don’t feel like they are being controlled by a higher price.”
The closer a policy gets to people’s personal lives, they say, the more important it is to be mindful of potential missteps. The authors also emphasize that they aren’t claiming mandates or bans never work — seatbelt laws and smoking restrictions have become commonplace, for instance. But those were enacted in a different era and there was little public dissent about their benefits to personal health.
“The was always somebody in that person’s family saying ‘No, look, sweetheart, I really wish you would be wearing your seatbelt’,” said Bowles. “We don’t have that in the case of the environment, so it’s a much greater challenge to shift the rhetoric.”
But, ultimately, Bowles says the broader message that he wants to convey is that people are generally generous and want their actions to align with their values. This new research underscores the need for policies that help them embrace that inclination, rather than temper it, which mandates or bans can do.
“People have a lot of good values,” he said. “When we look at our citizens and are designing policies, don’t take them to be jerks.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why forcing people to go green can backfire on Jan 6, 2026.
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This story was co-published and supported by the journalism nonprofit Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
On a late afternoon in early November, Xochitl Bervera launches The Roxie Girl from St. George Island into the gentle waters of Florida’s Apalachicola Bay. Almost as soon as the boat gets up to speed, she kills the motor and drifts the final feet toward her destination: a 2.5-acre grid of buoys and bags floating in Rattlesnake Cove. This is her farm, Water Is Life Oysters.
Bervera and her partner, Kung Li, launched the business in 2022, not long after the state implemented a five-year ban on harvesting the bay’s beloved but imperiled wild oysters, leaving the surrounding community without its economic engine and sense of identity.
As the sun sinks toward the horizon, Kung Li hauls in a bag of oysters and samples a mollusk to be sure it meets muster. They pop it open with a twist of an oyster knife and find everything that has made Apalachicola oysters famous for generations: briny liquor surrounding firm, sweet meat. “That,” Kung Li exclaims, “is a good oyster.” They put five bags on ice.
Freshly shucked Apalachicola oysters from Water Is Life Oysters. (Photo credit: Xochitl Bervera)
Oysters have been eaten for millennia from this estuary, where freshwater from the Apalachicola River meets the salty Gulf of Mexico to form an ideal breeding ground. In its heyday, the bay supplied 90 percent of Florida’s oysters and 10 percent of the country’s. But after a 2013 fishery failure all but wiped out a $9 million annual harvest that once supported 2,500 jobs, the state officially closed the bay in 2020 for five years.
Since the closure, locally farmed oysters—Crassostrea virginica, the same species as their wild predecessors—are the closest thing anyone’s had to that old familiar flavor. Water Is Life is among a few dozen farms that have attempted to fill the void, hoping to preserve the bay’s oyster culture while the state embarks on a costly reef restoration. Bervera, a former criminal justice organizer, and Kung Li, a former civil rights lawyer, harbor a vision for a revived Apalachicola Bay. They believe a vibrant local food system can once again feed this community and restore dignified jobs that protect the bay’s health rather than diminish it.
“I look around the country and maybe that’s not possible in many places any more,” Bervera says, “but it’s very possible here.”
Apalachicola, Florida, calls itself the Oyster Capital of the World, but for many years, oysters have been trucked in from out of state. (Photo credit: Ben Seal)
In a controversial decision, the state reopened the commercial oyster fishery on Jan. 1, leaving this small community on the Forgotten Coast—named for its relative quiet and lack of development—anxious about its economic future. If the oysters come back, so will the industry. If they don’t, roughly 5,000 residents in Apalachicola and its neighbor Eastpoint fear their towns will be overtaken by resort-style development like so much of Florida’s coastline, pushing out both their culture and their communities.
It’s a heavy weight to rest on a 3-inch mollusk.
‘The Heartbeat of Apalachicola’
Apalachicola Fish and Oyster Company workers shucking oysters in 1946. (Photo credit: State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory)
Charles Wilson can trace his lineage in Apalachicola back to 1860, right around when oysters overtook timber as the area’s chief economic resource. At the turn of the 20th century, his grandfather ran one of the many oyster houses that lined these shores, where shucked shells piled into mountains.
Like so many tongers—as oystermen are called here, after the long wood-and-metal tongs used for plucking the mollusks off the reef—he started going out on his father’s boat when he was just 7, heading into the bay every evening after school to fill buckets. Even at 78, he still has forearms like Popeye and thickly muscled hands from decades spent gripping his tongs.
When Wilson was young, trucks left the bay in droves, packed full with thousands of gallons of oyster meat headed far and wide. The abundance seemed inevitable. “It was there and it was never gonna run out,” he says.
For most of Wilson’s lifetime, the bay’s oysters were the center of an economic constellation—not just tongers, shuckers, restaurants, and distributors, but also boat builders, welders, mechanics, and more. In the water, too, the oysters were foundational. Blue crab, shrimp, redfish, flounder, and black drum flourished in the clean water they filtered and the nooks and crannies of their reefs, providing both sustenance and steady work for fishermen around the bay.
Apalachicola Fish and Oyster Company workers tonging for oysters in 1947. (Photo credit: State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory)
“The oyster was the heartbeat of Apalachicola,” one local told Betsy Mansfield, a postdoctoral researcher at Florida State University who has studied the ripple effect of the fishery closure. Mansfield calls oysters a “multidimensional foundation species” for their economic, cultural, social, and nutritional importance.
Oysters served as the community’s hub for generations. When someone fell on hard times, their neighbors organized a fish fry to rally support or took them tonging and passed on the day’s pay. Oystering was more than a job.
“It meant independence,” Wilson says. “It was an income. And it was a lifestyle.”
Apalachicola’s oysters held on longer than most. By the time the fishery failed, 85 percent of the world’s beds had disappeared. Locals attribute the longevity to the pristine waters of the Apalachicola River, the shelter from predators offered by the barrier islands, and an ethic that insisted on taking only what the bay could give. Even after Hurricane Elena in 1985 reduced oyster populations in Apalachicola by as much as 95 percent, the bay rapidly recovered.
But the state responded to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill by encouraging harvesters to grab what they could before the slick reached the bay. (It never did.) Coupled with a drought that limited freshwater flow into the bay and welcomed in saltwater predators, the rush to harvest led to quick collapse. Almost immediately, landings of 3 million pounds dropped below 1 million; they kept falling until the state Fish and Wildlife Commission pulled the plug in 2020.
A father shows his son how to shuck oysters in 1972 on Apalachicola Bay. (Photo credit: Holland, Karl E., State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory)
With the oysters went the work, including much of the supplementary shrimping, crabbing, and fishing. Oyster houses closed or pivoted to become restaurants. Boats were left to rot and tongs to rust. Poverty and drug use increased, residents say. Today, many former oystermen get by mowing lawns or cleaning houses for eco-tourists who visit the bay without realizing the seafood they came for is mostly trucked in from elsewhere in the Gulf. Until aquaculture picked up, the only oyster available in a place that calls itself “The Oyster Capital of the World” came from Texas or Louisiana.
The collapse sparked dread around the bay that tourism will fully replace seafood as the local industry. About 100 miles northwest of the bay, Destin serves as a cautionary tale. It’s a miles-long amusement park of monolithic beachfront resorts and chain restaurants. In Apalachicola and Eastpoint, the prized seafood and a two-story building limit have kept unchecked development at bay. Nearby, though, St. George Island is already filling in with pastel-painted vacation homes skirting the zoning laws. Residents fear a sudden influx of development if the oysters don’t rebound.
“It’s like a wounded animal with a bunch of hyenas,” says Wayne Williams, a longtime tonger and president of the Seafood Work and Waterman’s Association, which has advocated for the bay’s reopening. “Or a plate full of French fries left out for the seagulls.”
Residents ‘Kill the Drill’
For a beleaguered bay community, the past year showed what is still possible. In April 2024, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) prepared to hand out a permit for exploratory oil and gas drilling in the Apalachicola River floodplain. The river snakes through more than 100 miles of Florida’s panhandle, passing through marshes and floodplain forests that serve as habitat for dozens of endangered species, on its way to the bay. The ecosystem has historically been protected on both sides of the river. Its clean waters are vital to the bay’s marine life. A drilling mishap could have threatened any hope for the future.
The response was swift. The Apalachicola Riverkeeper filed a legal challenge and organized a “Kill the Drill” coalition of seafood workers, boat captains, and residents, including Bervera and Kung Li. The legislature eventually passed a bill prohibiting the DEP from issuing permits within 10 miles of a National Estuarine Research Reserve, ensuring the run of the river would stay protected; Governor Ron DeSantis signed it in June. A judge also urged the state to reject the permit, leading the DEP to reverse course.
The whole affair “was a blockbuster movie in terms of twists and turns,” says Adrianne Johnson, executive director of the Florida Shellfish Aquaculture Association, which was part of the coalition. It was also a reminder that although opinions are divided about the bay’s health and the potential for wild-caught oysters to return, its disparate communities share something unmistakable.
“People here have a relationship to the bay that is deep and real,” Kung Li says. “That relationship is what will turn despair into hope when the bay starts to come back.”
In 2024, “Kill the Drill,” a coalition of Apalachicola seafood workers, boat captains, and residents, joined together to prevent the state from allowing exploratory oil and gas drilling in the Apalachicola River floodplain. (Photo credit: Ben Seal)
For it to come back, though, restoration will need to succeed, providing habitat that allows oysters to accumulate and cling to one another as they grow into massive reefs. Diminished by overharvesting, the bay’s depleted reefs couldn’t withstand erosion from tides, currents, and storms. The degradation was so vast that in most of the bay “there were literally no reefs left” to build upon, says Sandra Brooke, a Florida State University marine scientist.
Restorationists have made headway in other bereft waters that once teemed with oysters, including the Chesapeake Bay and New York Harbor, but human mimicry of a natural process can be slow. Multiple projects have attempted to rebuild Apalachicola’s reefs with different materials, including Kentucky limestone, oyster shells, and concrete. Over and over, the bay buried or washed away inadequate substrates.
Since 2019, the Apalachicola Bay System Initiative, led by Brooke, has convened scientists, public officials, seafood industry members, and environmentalists behind an effort to understand the root causes of the decline and restore the bay’s health. The massive undertaking is still underway.
Shannon Hartsfield, a tonger subcontracted by the initiative, says he expected better results by this point—enough to support a meaningful harvest with economic value for oystermen. “We’ve only made small steps,” he says.
Despite more than $38 million of research and restoration that’s been poured into the bay since 2019, Brooke doesn’t believe it’s ready.
“From a scientific perspective,” she says, “I would have liked to have seen it closed for another five years or so.” From a cultural perspective, though, she understands the meaning of reopening the bay, even at a modest scale. “It’s one of the last vestiges of the way old Florida used to be,” she says.
The Fish and Wildlife Commission (FWC) confirmed in November that it won’t extend the bay’s closure, despite a recent analysis that found its historic 10,000 acres of oyster habitat had dwindled to just 500. In 2026, the state will open four oyster reefs to harvest, allowing just under 5,000 total bags to be split evenly among all harvesters—about 0.1 percent of the historic harvest.
The first season will span January and February—provided the oyster limit isn’t immediately triggered—and future seasons will extend from October through February. Securing a license requires a history of commercial oystering in the bay. A small amount of recreational harvest will also be allowed, all of it to be monitored by FWC officials. The FWC’s goals are twofold: restore 2,000 acres of reefs by 2032 and re-establish an oyster fishery.
Oyster shells piled high outside Leavins Seafood, an Apalachicola distributor that hasn’t offered locally caught oysters since the bay’s collapse in 2020. (Photo credit: Ben Seal)
“We understand that people are frustrated by the current state of the resource, and that there is a desire to return to the days when oysters were abundant and provided an important source of income for Franklin County residents and businesses,” the commission said in a written statement in November. “However, the bay is still in recovery.”
That recovery is aided by how quickly oysters grow here, Brooke says. It might take three years for an oyster to reach market size in New England, but in Apalachicola it happens within a year or so, thanks to the bay’s warm, nutrient-rich waters. Still, skepticism abounds about the FWC’s ability to enforce bag limits and protect the reefs enough to avoid a prompt relapse.
“The bay is going to provide. It’s a delicious bay,” Bervera says. “But if we don’t take care of it then it can’t really take care of us.”
The Promise of a Path Forward
For generations, oystering in Apalachicola was handed down from father to son, a promise that led many to drop out of school with their career laid out before them. There was nothing to replace it when the fishery declined—not just for the current seafood workers, but also for those to come. The health of the bay will determine their future.
Retired Apalachicola oysterman Charles Wilson with his long wood-and-metal tongs, used to pluck oysters from their reefs. (Photo credit: Ben Seal)
As soon as the fishery fell apart, Joe Taylor recognized the need for alternatives. As executive director of the nonprofit Franklin’s Promise Coalition, he pivoted his organization from anti-poverty work to youth workforce development. Today, his Oyster Corps—a subset of Americorps—trains residents between 18 and 25 in coastal resilience measures and habitat restoration, focused on oyster reefs, marsh grasses, sea grasses, and dunes. Workers receive a stipend for protecting local ecosystems, and many stay employed in related work after the program, often with the FWC and state parks. Oyster Corps teaches them skills that can offer a path forward, whether or not the seafood industry returns.
“People see the oysters and think about eating,” Taylor says. “But we also see oysters as the foundation for the healthy world that we want to live in.”
Taylor helped 450 seafood workers navigate the fishery collapse as part of a broader retraining and job placement initiative, helping fishermen find work in transportation, welding, and other trades.
Among them was Tony Foley, whose son, Holden, an Oyster Corps graduate, is now the organization’s director of restoration. Holden Foley started going out on boats with his father and grandfather when he was small, filling 5-gallon buckets of oysters for $5 a pop. He’s applying for an oyster harvesting license to make some extra money on weekends, but he knows his community needs more opportunity. Only a few of his classmates remain. Still, Foley believes the harvest can return and the community can rebuild.
“The area’s beautiful. It’s peaceful. It’s quiet,” he says. “When I travel and come back, I know why I stay here.”
Food and Freedom
In Rattlesnake Cove, the sun continues its descent as Bervera navigates The Roxie Girl around the buoys to check on her oyster gear. As she and Kung Li hoist up sinking bags and repair broken parts, they check on a clutch of juvenile oysters placed in the bay a few months ago. Dozens have died, inexplicably. It’s a reminder that farming is hard work—physically, financially, and sometimes emotionally. They toss the shells overboard and lament the loss. “Sadness,” Bervera says.
Bervera is fond of quoting the food sovereignty activist Leah Penniman’s refrain that “we have to feed ourselves to free ourselves.” For generations, the bay has made that possible. People here still trade—eggs for fish, oysters for shrimp, gator for boar—and they still host fish fries as a way to care for their community.
Kung Li on an old oyster boat that Li and business partner Xochitl Bervera repurposed to sell oysters directly to the community. (Photo credit: Xochitl Bervera)
Farmed oysters have served as a bridge to their wild cousins for the past five years. A former oysterman even shed a tear when he tried one from Water Is Life. “This is the oyster,” he told Bervera.
If wild oysters can thrive once again, it could sustain a local food system and way of life so many here desire.
“We’ll know we’re doing it right because we won’t see the Sysco trucks bringing seafood to a seafood town,” Kung Li says.
A week later, Kung Li and Bervera head down the coast a few hours to Cedar Key and come back with baby oysters to replace those they’ve harvested. The new seedlings are smaller than a fingernail. Kung Li and Bervera tuck them into fine-mesh bags to begin the year-long journey to harvest size.
They lean over the side of the boat and slide the babies, thousands at a time, into the waters where so many oysters have thrived before.
The post A Florida Oyster Fishery and Its Community Fight for Their Future appeared first on Civil Eats.
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