March 30, 2025 by David Silverberg
On Feb. 12 of this year, Prof. Bill Mitsch passed away at the age of 77.
William Jerome Mitsch was one of the world’s foremost scientific experts on wetlands like the Everglades and did much of his work in Southwest Florida at Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU).
Although no one can stop the march of time and the toll it takes, Mitsch’s passing does leave a gap in the expertise and knowledge so critical to the environmental health of Southwest Florida. His knowledge of wetlands was awe-inspiring and encyclopedic.
Mitsch’s legacy of environmental activism is particularly relevant now as fights over control of wetlands and maintenance of their health flare anew under the regime of President Donald Trump.
The work Mitsch did and the causes he advocated should not be forgotten with his passing.
Mitsch first became interested in water and wetlands growing up in Wheeling, West Virginia, where he explored a nearby creek as a young boy.
“The creek, that must be where I started getting interested in aquatic science,” Mitsch, said at a 2022 presentation in Naples. “We knew everything about this creek, where the deep areas were, where the shallow areas were and how the creek meandered. We learned all this by chasing balls into the creek.”
A 1969 graduate of the University of Notre Dame, he was inspired by the first Earth Day celebrations in 1970 to pursue graduate environmental studies at the University of Florida. He pursued his doctorate under Howard Odum, a pioneering ecologist, at the university’s Center for Wetlands.
From there he pursued an active academic career studying, researching and analyzing wetlands. Among his many books, he was chief author of the standard textbook, Wetlands, now in its sixth edition. He held multiple faculty positions, sponsored over 85 master and doctoral students, published extensively and served on numerous boards.
Locally, Mitsch joined the faculty of FGCU in 2012 when he served as Eminent Scholar and Director of the Everglades Wetland Research Park, located in the Kapnick Center next to the Naples Botanical Garden. (The Park is now part of FGCU’s Water School.)
Mitsch was no ivory tower academic; he literally got his feet wet. And that didn’t just apply to swamps; it also meant the swamp of politics.
No sugarcoating
I first got to know Mitsch after moving full time to Naples in 2013. He was a source on several stories I worked on for Gulfshore Business magazine.
The word that springs to mind when I think of Bill Mitsch is “crusty.” He could be curmudgeonly, gruff and impatient. He was direct and brooked no bull. Even so, I always enjoyed talking to him. He was secure in his scientific expertise and fearless in speaking out about the truths it revealed.
Our first encounter came when I was researching an article for Gulfshore Business on water (“The Trouble with our Water”) in the January 2014 issue. (No longer available online.)
Mitsch provided background information for the article—but then he continued about the sugar industry’s interference in wetlands and water research to the point where I drafted a separate article to cover everything he provided.
In particular, he recalled an incident from 1992 when was distinguished professor and head of Ohio State University’s wetland research park. Along with Thomas Fontaine, then director of the Everglades Systems Research Division of the South Florida Water Management District, he was putting on the fourth international wetlands conference at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. It was sponsored by the International Association for Ecology. Only registered participants were supposed to be admitted.
Just before the conference began Mitsch was suddenly startled by Fontaine banging on the glass door to his office.
“They’re here!” Fontaine shouted when Mitsch got to the door. “They’re filming us and if you don’t get rid of them I’m taking my people and walking!”
“They” were people from the Florida sugar industry.
Mitsch rushed with Fontaine into the large, dark auditorium where the conference was going to be held and high up in the gloomiest murk of the highest seats he could see a tiny red light. He climbed the rows and sure enough, there were two men with a camera.
“I said, ‘I guess you guys are filming this event?’ and they didn’t argue,” Mitsch told me. They acknowledged that they worked for a company in Miami hired by sugar interests. “They were clearly there to hear every word that every state and federal official said.”
Mitsch had to get a legal opinion from the university before he could ask the cameramen to leave – and if they hadn’t departed he had the authority to have campus security throw them out. As it was, they did agree to depart but he also had to request that anyone in the audience turn in any recordings of the proceedings, which forced one poor graduate student to yield his tape recording.
That was hardly the only information he had to share. He plied me with allegations of Big Sugar interfering in research into the sources of pollution from Lake Okeechobee, to the point of industry agents breaking into laboratories to physically destroy notes and material. They blackballed scientists and targeted anti-pollution politicians. Regrettably, juicy as it all was, little of it was verifiable, so the article never appeared. But it was valuable in providing me with an understanding of the stakes and the extremism that water could inspire in this swampy realm.
Mitsch helped me formulate wetlands and Everglades policy positions when I worked as communications director for congressional candidate David Holden who ran in the 19th Congressional District in 2018.
That was also the year that Southwest Florida experienced the Big Bloom, a nasty, persistent red tide off the coast that was coupled with an intense blue-green algae outbreak in the Caloosahatchee River.
The Bloom continued for months, starting around October 2017 and persisted well past the 2018 election. Its cause seemed mysterious and unlike previous blooms, it showed no sign of dissipating.
On Jan. 10, 2019, Mitsch delivered a lecture at FGCU at which he pinpointed what he believed to be the causes, based on his research.
The cause, he said, was nitrate fertilizer—after years of debate and finger-pointing, it was the first time the source had been so authoritatively identified.
He also said that nitrate-laden rainfall, much of it caused by cars using I-75, leaking septic tanks, and pollution flowing from the Mississippi River drifting across the Gulf of Mexico, fed the naturally-occurring Karenia brevis organisms.
At least in part due to Mitsch’s findings, the state, some counties and towns enacted rules regulating fertilizer use in an effort to cut down the pollution and combat the red tide. To this day Lee and Charlotte counties in Southwest Florida ban fertilizing from June 1 to Sept. 30. In Collier County the cities of Naples and Marco Island do as well.
The birth of ‘wetlaculture’
Mitsch didn’t just chronicle and analyze problems, he also proposed fixes.
At the same lecture where he focused on nitrates as the cause of the Big Bloom, Mitsch argued for a solution to the pollution plaguing the Everglades and all the water that slowly flows south from Lake Okeechobee.
He called it “wetlaculture.”
The concept was that pollution could be defeated by creating new wetlands, which would filter out contaminants. These new wetlands could be created on previously cultivated land. Furthermore, they would create soil so fertile that nitrate fertilizers would not be necessary.
“Wetland restoration and creation are not easy,” Mitsch warned in his lecture. “They require attention to Mother Nature (self-design) and Father Time (projects take time to reach their potential).”
Further, he argued, wetlaculture had to be implemented on a massive scale. He estimated it would take 100,000 acres of wetlaculture to ensure clean water to the Everglades, 14 times more than that provided in Everglades restoration reservoir plans—of which he was very skeptical.
“They’re not digging a hole at all,” Mitsch said of the reservoir in a 2022 Naples Daily News interview. “They’re just putting up a gigantic wall around this rectangle and fill it with 34 feet of water. Nature doesn’t use squares and rectangles. They’re hoping the water will be clean enough but there are not enough [stormwater treatment areas] to put a dent in the nutrients.”
However, his preferred solution required time—10 years for new wetlands to establish themselves, in Mitsch’s estimation. For 10 years the soil would be used for agriculture. At the end of that time, the soil would be flipped and left fallow for 10 years to serve as a wild, cleansing wetland. Then, it could be flipped again, and so on, indefinitely.
It would also take a lot of money—much more than state government could provide, in Mitsch’s view. That meant it would take a federal commitment.
“We need the feds to keep an eye on our state government,” he said.
A wetlaculture experiment was actually implemented in May 2018 and it can be seen to this day. It’s in a fenced area at the back of Freedom Park in Naples that anyone can visit.
It actually doesn’t look like much. There are 28 kidney-shaped bins in the ground with sawgrass growing out of them. All of them will sit while the sawgrass grows. Researchers experiment with different levels of water and nutrients in the different bins. They measure nutrients in the soil and see if nitrates and phosphorous are being removed. When the soil is deemed to be clean and fertile enough they’ll plant crops and see how well they grow.
It wasn’t clear when the experiment started whether the cleansing process would take just a few years or 10 years, as Mitsch estimated.
But whatever it ultimately takes, in those quiet, stationary bins, Mitsch may just have launched a wetlands revolution.
A dark day
On the night of Jan. 24, 2020, I happened to be surfing the Internet and went into LinkedIn, which I rarely checked. By pure coincidence I discovered a blistering, infuriated screed from Mitsch, that had been posted minutes earlier.
The day before, Jan. 23, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under President Donald Trump had rolled back federal protections for wetlands and American waters and Mitsch was outraged.
Trump had boasted: “I terminated one of the most ridiculous regulations of all: the last administration’s disastrous Waters of the United States rule.”
“This is the darkest day for Federal protection of wetlands since it first started 45 years ago. This is a horrible setback for wetland protection in the USA, ” Mitsch wrote.
“I have followed this tug of war for all these years between those who appreciate the many ecosystem services that wetlands provide including cleaning our waters, sequestering and permanently storing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and providing the best habitat for hundreds of threatened and endangered species, and the industrial-scale agricultural, energy, and real estate giants.”
He followed with a call to action: “It has always been a David vs. Goliath. I am calling for those of us who appreciate some of the good things that nature has provided for us, whether you are Republican, Democrat, or Independent, to speak out about the rape of our landscape that will surely follow this action. I especially call upon those who are in the business world to help establish environmental bonds, local and state ordinances, and novel approaches to save our remaining wetlands. I also call upon the children and young adults, who are much more knowledgeable about wetlands than their parents and grandparents, to join the ‘silent majority’ who appreciate the role of wetlands to move forward, with or without our Federal government, to save our planet.”
Knowing that this was unlikely to be covered by any other media outlet in Southwest Florida, I wrote up the story for The Paradise Progressive: “FGCU wetlands professor blasts Trump water rules, calls for citizen action.”
The David versus Goliath struggle would continue for the next four years, with battles in courts and appropriations committees.
It reached its next inflection point on June 9, 2021 when the EPA under President Joe Biden reversed Trump’s wetlands decision.
Mitsch was ecstatic: “It’s a good move,” he told me when I called him. “I’m happy because it’s the right direction.”
The EPA’s announcement was made in coordination with the US Army Corps of Engineers.
“I’m delighted both agencies have stepped forward,” said Mitsch. “This, in my view, is a good turn for Southwest Florida and especially the Everglades.”
Still, Mitsch had reason to be cautious. “This is déjà vu all over again for me,” he said. “It’s the same issue that keeps coming back. It’s quite contentious.”
The core of the dispute was the definition of “waters” and “wetlands,” which had twice been defined in different ways.
“I hope they don’t get on a third definition that’s political and not scientific. I hope they have the stamina to go through with it,” he said of current efforts. “There is no such thing as a [legitimate] political definition of a ‘wetland’—otherwise we might as well throw out all our scientific books.”
Mitsch opposed the State of Florida’s efforts to take over wetland permitting and environmental protection. That authority was transferred to the state in December 2020 in one of the last official acts of the first Trump administration.
Mitsch’s hope was that the environmentally-aware Biden administration would keep control of permitting.
“I’m very much afraid of Florida taking wetland management away from the feds. What the feds are doing is great but I’ve seen it before,” he said. “There’s no question why [the state] wanted to take over water regulation; it was for development.” While he said he was discouraged that “the train is out of the station in Florida, I hope the momentum of this [new federal rule] spills into Florida somehow.”
As Mitsch predicted, the battle continues.
On the one hand the federal government won a round on Tuesday, March 25, when the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the US Army Corps of Engineers and against the sugar companies. While the sugar growers sought a larger water allocation than the Corps was providing and sued to get it, the court sided with the Corps, keeping the water flowing for Everglades restoration.
Mitsch would have approved.
However, with Trump back in office, Florida is again trying to seize control of the state’s wetlands.
In 2024 a US District judge vacated the 2020 Trump decision to hand permitting authority to the state, ruling that the transfer violated the Endangered Species Act. The ruling came in response to a 2021 lawsuit filed by Earthjustice, an environmental organization. That lawsuit argued that the state of Florida was still trying to evade the Endangered Species Act restrictions. The lawsuit aimed to force compliance.
The latest twist in the saga will come on May 5. That’s when arguments over permitting authority between Florida and the EPA will be heard in the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
Regrettably—or perhaps mercifully—Bill Mitsch will not be present for the latest developments.
Mitsch retired in 2022 after a 47-year career, but he remained alert and interested in his field to the end.
In Southwest Florida, a land so critically dependent on its wetlands, which are extremely endangered and likely to be even more assaulted, it’s worth remembering Mitsch’s work and the enormity of his scholarship and innovations.
But especially at this time it’s particularly important to never forget his activism and his fearlessness in conducting good science, speaking the truth and acting on it. He did that despite controversy and opposition and big forces arrayed against him.
It set a good example and one that has never been more important than now.
He was truly a wetlands warrior.
To read all of The Paradise Progressive’s coverage of Bill Mitsch, click here.
Liberty lives in light
© 2025 by David Silverberg
The Paradise Progressive 