Planet Money - How manatees got into hot water

Episode Date: April 8, 2022

While on the brink of extinction in the 1970s, manatees found sanctuary in the warm waters of Florida power plants. Now, they're hooked on fossil fuels. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Planet Money, from NPR. Every once in a while, you see something that shakes you out of the consumer autopilot of everyday life. Something that reminds you that this high-tech global economy of ours is actually just an elaborate contortion of the natural world. You remember that everything we truck, barter, and exchange is woven into the fabric of something much more ancient. That after millions of years of evolution, we are literally burning the remnants of prehistoric forests to keep our iPhones charged. I had one of those moments one morning not long ago, at a kind of wildlife sanctuary on the east coast of Florida's Tampa Bay. I was standing at the bustling front entrance with marine biologist Lauren Gomez,

waiting for a truck carrying a very special delivery. A rehabilitated manatee. It's hard to tell what's a tour bus and what's a manatee. This one's just the UPS. Although sometimes they come in a UPS truck. Have they really? Yes. Oh, here it comes. There's the truck.

All right, Lauren is directing the truck in. They've just opened the back door, and there is a rubbery-looking manatee inside. For the uninitiated, the Florida manatee, or sea cow as they're also known, looks a bit like a sentient fingerling potato. But enormous. This guy is on the smaller side at 685 pounds. He's got gray leathery skin, fingernails on his flippers, and a sweet whiskery face, like an extra doughy seal. Watch your feet, watch your toes.

Everybody clear? Yes. They're lowering the ramp down to the ground at the manatee in a big canvas. Looks like an Ikea bag. This particular manatee is named Berkey, his handlers explain, because he was found as an orphaned calf floundering alone off the Gulf Coast around Thanksgiving. It was a very cold Thanksgiving, so instead of calling him Turkey, we named him Berkey because it was so cold. Like a cold turkey, I see. Yes, exactly. Now it's all starting to make sense.

Now, after two years, Berkey is ready to be released back into his natural habitat. The staff lower him onto a foam pad where they buckle a GPS tracking buoy around the skinniest part of his body, right above the tail. What's the skinny part of a manatee called? It's called a peduncle. A peduncle? Yes. Finally, it's time to head for the water. Around a dozen people gather around Berkey's stretcher

and awkwardly shuffle him down a concrete gangway. I think that was just manatee belly squeaking on the ground. And down in the water, surrounded by lush mangroves, are hundreds of wild manatees. It's like a giant, floating potato casserole. We're going straight in, we're going to walk out several feet, we'll open the stretcher as we go in, okay? One, two, three. After a few moments wriggling on the stretcher, Berkey glides, I won't quite say gracefully, into the water.

Yay, Berkey! So that's his little buoy, Bob? That's his little, exactly, that's the GPS tag right there. Bob, I'm up at the surface. It's a reunion. And this is kind of like a nature preserve behind us? It is, yep. This is all part of Manatee Viewing Center.

It's about 550 acres. You can just immerse yourself in nature. And it is beautiful out here. What's that building over there? Over here? That is Big Bend Power Station. So that's the power plant. I guess I should have mentioned, this bucolic manatee sanctuary,

it's actually nestled just below the smokestacks of a natural gas and coal-fired power plant, complete with plumes of steam and giant pyramids of coal in the distance. And on the other side of the water, hundreds of tourists are earnestly marveling at this incredible symbiosis of nature and industry. It all feels a bit dystopian, like an episode of Planet Earth mashed up with Black Mirror. But this power plant may just be the best home these manatees have. So that's why returning to nature entails being under some billowing smokestacks. Right. This is where nature meets technology, for sure. You are now over the clean, warm water discharge canal of Big Bend Power Station, where nature meets technology.

Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. In the 1970s, environmentalists in Florida struck a kind of bargain with power companies. They wanted to save the manatees from extinction. And the power companies wanted to save money. from extinction, and the power companies wanted to save money. Today on the show, the tale, or maybe the peduncle, of how these unlikely allies may have stopped manatees from going the way of the dodo, but got sea cows hooked on fossil fuels along the way. This is usually the part of the story where I would endear you, dear listeners, to the elusive majesty of our animal protagonist, the Florida manatee. But why would I do that when none other than Leonard Nimoy,

Mr. Spock himself, narrated a 1981 documentary all about them. Manatees may be wanting in beauty as we define it, but there is no animal that leads a more peaceful, non-aggressive existence. Their scientific order, Sirenia, is named for the sirens that supposedly enticed early sailors. In order to understand what these would-be mermaids have to do with Florida's power plants, you have to talk to the person who actually made that documentary, a guy named Pat Rose. You know, when you meet somebody in a bar or something, like, how do you describe what you do? Are you a manatee whisperer or a manatee lobbyist? I don't go to bars.

But if I'm with my wife 99 out of 100 times, she's going to already tell people I'm the manatee man. Pat's love affair with Florida's gentlest giant goes back to the 1960s when he was just a manatee boy. Growing up in landlocked rural Missouri, Pat became obsessed with water. He dreamed of becoming an underwater documentarian, like a Jacques Cousteau of the swamps. And it was during a diving trip to Florida when he was just about 18 that he heard his hero, Captain Cousteau's crew, had recently passed through the same area in search of manatees, but that they'd failed to find them. It was really rare to find a manatee in those circumstances, primarily because they had been hunted to such low numbers.

Manatees were on the edge of extinction. They were being decimated by speedboats. Plus, real estate development along Florida's waterways had been booming, destroying huge chunks of their habitat. From the seagrass beds they eat to the freshwater springs that manatees return to every winter, Manatees were quickly disappearing. But Pat was determined to find them. You know, I was young and I was brash. And so when people told me Jacques Cousteau couldn't find them there when I was there, well, I literally said, I'm going to find them. Pat set out alone in a little rented boat and spent a full day winding his way through a river. And after a few hours, Pat spotted one,

an oblong shadow lurking in the depths. He quietly slipped into the murky water, moving slowly forward until he saw an enormous gray wall of flesh emerge in front of him. Well, I sucked in hard on my snorkel because when you're underwater with a face mask, everything looks a third larger than it really is.

And this probably was a 2,000-pound manatee. And now it looks even a third bigger. So immediately you run through the repertoire of your mind. They're gentle. They won't hurt you. Just relax. It just let me stay there. And I'm not even sure how long it was.

But I'll never forget that. That moment, I knew I wanted to be there for these animals in the future. In order to help save the manatees and their habitat, Pat went to grad school for aquatic biology and moved to Florida in the mid-1970s. Manatees had been recently added to the endangered species list, but, Pat says says most people didn't know what they were or even that they existed. More people thought a manatee was an insect than it was a marine mammal. Really? And they didn't know the word manatee almost at all. If they did know about them, they were called sea cows.

So they needed someone to speak for them, someone to take up for them. Pat knew he needed to get to work. So he offered himself up to one of the state's most active wildlife groups, the Florida Audubon Society, as a sort of scientist documentarian. And they basically said, what do you want to do? And I said, most of all, I want to work to protect manatees. And I wanted to fly aerial surveys. I was going to do boat surveys. I was going to do aerial surveys. I was going to do boat surveys. I was

going to do underwater surveys. I was going to do public awareness, poster campaigns. And they essentially said, good, go find the money to do it. So he started applying for grants, not getting them. There wasn't much state funding. For the first year or so, Pat was striking out. And then he and his colleagues at the Florida Audubon Society were approached with a surprising offer for funding from an unexpected source, a company called Florida Power and Light. They were the major utility in Florida, so very, very well known, had probably one of the larger customer bases in Florida. This is not who Pat expected to be chipping in for environmental research.

But here they were, offering to fund a three-year scientific study mapping out where and how manatees lived. Pat was intrigued. What did you understand their interest was in getting this kind of research done? Well, I think we fully understood that they felt threatened because this was the sort of the heydays of environmental awareness. And one of the people tasked with dealing with that threat was a man named J. Ross Wilcox. He was working at the power company at the time. What happened was that EPA was looking at a variety of power plants, and they were rattling their sabers, and I got thrown into the lion's pit.

Ross was hired as Florida Power & Light's chief ecologist back in 1975. How novel was it for a power utility to have a chief ecologist when you first came there? I would say I was the first of the breed. Since the early 1960s, Ross explains, environmentalist concerns had become more and more mainstream. By the early 70s, Richard Nixon was signing landmark bills like the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act into law. We still think of air as free, but clean air is not free. And neither is clean water. The price tag on pollution control is high. Through our years of past carelessness, we incurred a debt to nature, and now that debt is being called. So lots of companies started hiring ecologists like Ross

to help them deal with all this new environmental fervor. And for power companies like Florida Power and Light, one of the most expensive new regulatory threats boiled down to a problem with hot water. Basically, many power plants emit hot water, and high quantities of artificially heated water can have all sorts of negative effects on aquatic ecosystems. It can lead to die-offs of fish and other species. This thermal pollution, as it's called, for a long time was just this negative externality, a harmful side effect that wasn't priced into the cost of doing business.

But now Ross's power company, Florida Power & Light, was faced with potentially having to pay for this negative externality to retrofit their operations and install these cooling towers Florida Power and Light was faced with potentially having to pay for this negative externality, to retrofit their operations and install these cooling towers so they wouldn't be spewing hot water back into the environment. And cooling towers are a multi-million dollar proposition. The cost of these retrofits can range widely, depending on the specific facility, but they can be up to $860 million for one power plant. And so it was around this time in the mid-70s when Ross and his colleagues started toying around with this idea. Like, sure, hot water can be an environmental nightmare for fish and plants and other organisms,

but there is one animal that seems to thrive in hot water. there is one animal that seems to thrive in hot water. The West Indian manatee, or sea cow, is a large... Okay, it's time for a little manatee science interlude. Basically, while manatees may look blubbery like a whale, they are, in scientific fact, actually kind of ripped. Breaking the water to breathe, its nostrils flare. And their comparative lack of fat leaves them extremely vulnerable to fluctuating water temperatures. Manatees will

literally die if they aren't consistently in water above 68 degrees Fahrenheit. The success of man has meant failure for the manatees. And so many of Florida's manatees would migrate every winter to inland natural springs to get their hot water fix. But as more and more of that habitat was destroyed or blocked off by development, people started to notice manatees congregating near power plants. And by the mid-70s, manatees had also been added to the newly beefed up endangered species list. Which got Ross and his Florida Power and Light colleagues thinking, what if manatees were the solution to our problem? What if our hot water is actually a positive externality, an industrial side effect that's not only beneficial, but actually essential for this species that the government is legally

obligated to protect. It was an intriguing idea, but there still wasn't enough definitive manatee science to make that argument. And this is where scientists like Pat the Manatee Man over at the Audubon Society came in. Scientists who needed funding for their own work. Even at my young age at the time, I was aware that there were biologists that might be hired to tell a company what they wanted to hear. And the last thing in the world I would ever want to be was one of those people. Pat says there were reputational risks to the idea of taking funding from a utility company. So he and his colleagues at Audubon added a stipulation. They would do the study if they could have full control over their findings.

And the power company agreed. Pat used that sweet, sweet power plant money to buy Florida Audubon a single-engine airplane. And he started flying regular missions to map out the relationship between Florida's manatees and its power plants. And what he found? Manatees were flocking to the hot waters of Florida's power plants. And thanks to Pat, there was now definitive data to prove it. What that would mean for the manatees and their strange stream bedfellows after the break. By the time Pat Rose was documenting how manatees were spending time at power plants,

there were only somewhere around a thousand manatees left. Times were desperate. So, Pat took his findings directly to the Florida Statehouse. His mission? To protect the manatees by protecting their warm watering holes. Literally, you have to sign up as a lobbyist. And I coordinated with the different staff of the committees and asked for opportunities to give slide presentations. He started showing his aerial pictures of manatees huddling for warmth and getting run over by boats.

And Pat says those images helped push lawmakers into action. We got the Manatee Sanctuary Act finally passed. So that was the big Florida law for manatees. That's where we protected springs like Blue Spring, Crystal River, Kings Bay. Lots of warm water zones were protected under the law. They implemented speed limits for boats. Lots of warm water zones were protected under the law. They implemented speed limits for boats. These were now manatee sanctuaries. And you know what else was protected?

Those warm water power plant sites. In order to save the manatees, you had to save the power plants. Ross Wilcox, chief ecologist at Florida Power and Light, says Pat's aerial manatee photos almost made his case for him. light, says Pat's aerial manatee photos almost made his case for him. When you looked up from 500 feet and all you saw was shoulder-to-shoulder manatees in the discharge canal, it didn't take much imagination to say that, you know, you turn that water off and those animals won't be there. Florida Power and Light, as well as other power plants around the state, was eventually able to bolster their case against regulation. That because manatees now depended on them,

they shouldn't have to make all those changes to their cooling systems. Changes that can cost hundreds of millions of dollars per plant. We not suddenly reminded EPA that they had a requirement under the Intention Species Act to not shut off warm water that might provide a benefit to the manatees. It's kind of like a little technical checkmate or something. It was. It was an interesting face-off, and EPA got backed up against the wall, and they had to blink. The EPA got backed up against the wall and they had to blink.

And starting in the mid-1980s, the manatees offered the power companies a different kind of value. The chance to help them rebrand themselves as stewards of the environment. A couple of them set up viewing centers where millions of tourists have since come to commune with the sea cows. I mean, obviously there was a public relations value to the story of the power plants becoming the defenders of wildlife. Did it feel like any of that factored into the decision-making? Oh, yeah.

Yeah. I'm sure it maybe didn't go over well with some of the conservation groups, but on the other hand, it's a very positive story. And in some ways, it is a positive story. Power plants became little life rafts for the manatees, helping them to recover their numbers. Now, hundreds of manatees have died over the last couple of years. Massive algae blooms fed by sewage and fertilizer runoff have caused a

collapse in the seagrass they eat. Still, manatees are way better off than they were in the 70s. By 2017, the population had grown to over 6,000, enough that the federal government decided to downlist them from endangered to threatened status. Though, there is another way of looking at this story. The power companies are still discharging large volumes of warm water into the environment. The manatee's natural habitat is still a fraction of what it used to be. They're still overrun by boats and human visitors. And now, manatees are dependent on one of the main industries driving climate change. As Pat Rose, the would-be Jacques Cousteau and manatee man,

reminded me. How many manatees in Florida are dependent on the power industry? So about 60% of Florida's manatees are dependent on artificial right now. That's huge. That's why we have this dilemma that we're going to have to deal with. The dilemma Pat is referring to is what will happen to the manatees if and when we actually manage to transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. And all that artificially heated water stops flowing. Some people have had ideas for how to build back manatee habitat without power plants, from artificial heaters

in the short term to removing dams and buying more property to turn into manatee preserves in the long term. But all these options are really expensive. And so Pat's goal now is to convince the power companies to help create a fund for manatee conservation. Pat says it's the least these companies can do. The utilities have saved billions of dollars over the years. And with some of that savings, I believe they are obligated to not let those manatees die or be harmed because of what they did. It is difficult to know exactly how much the power utilities in Florida have saved thanks to manatees. For decades, Seacows depended on at least 10 power plants for warmth. And the cost of retrofitting each plant can run between tens

of millions and up to $860 million. We reached out to Florida Power and Light. While they said they're committed to working alongside state and federal agencies and environmental organizations to secure the future of the manatees, they did not respond specifically when we asked about Pat's idea of a manatee conservation fund. I asked Pat Rose whether he ever second-guessed his decision to strike a scientific partnership with the power companies. And he told me, no. The research they did together laid the foundation for the manatees' recovery. But I can't help feeling more conflicted. On the one hand, Pat's bargain did help the manatees

through their most dire moment. At the same time, though, enabling an industry driving climate change to get around environmental regulations feels a bit like gambling the whole planet for the sake of one charismatic species, like losing the forest for one particularly cute little tree. The last time the Earth was nearly as hot as it might become by the next century was around 50 million years ago. Which, coincidentally, was around the time manatees took to the sea, waving their would-be flippers goodbye to their land-loving cousins,

who would eventually become the elephants. So in a weird way, if they do manage to survive all the obstacles humans have thrown their way, manatees might actually be better adapted for the warming world to come than we are. Do you ever think about a future in which manatees inherit the earth? It would probably be a pretty peaceful world. What's it look like? It looks like all of our shorelines were allowed to move in naturally as sea level rose, and the manatees were able to freely graze throughout it, and they will adapt and they'll be those great gardeners or stewards of the environment.

Maybe someday they'll be releasing us back into the wild. Maybe. That might be going a bit too far. Planet of the manatees. Right. far. Planet of the manatees. Right. To see pictures of Berkey the manatee and his friends hanging out beneath the smokestacks, find us on

Instagram, at Planet Money. And Planet Money TikTok has been nominated for a Webby Award. If you are a superfan, head on over to the ballot page and throw us a vote. We've put a link in the show notes. Today's episode was produced by Liza Yeager and Sam Yellowhorse-Kessler. It was edited by Jess Jang, and Planet Money's executive producer is Alex Goldmark.

Special thanks to Peter Alagona, Jason Sjogren, Eyal Frank, Jennifer Rayner, Daryl Domning, David Leist, and Melissa Aranchik. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. This is NPR. Thanks for listening. And a special thanks to our funder, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, for helping to support this podcast.