Since the Spanish arrived, Europeans have treated the bay as a sort of aquatic Giving Tree, taking what we wanted and rarely giving much back. We fished and netted, yes, but we also dredged and filled. We made land for homes. We allowed power plants to set up along the shores. We hollowed out the bay bottom to allow for shipping and cruises. In many ways — not the least of which literal — we’ve used Tampa Bay as a toilet for the detritus of civilization. In recent memory, upper Tampa Bay has had alarming levels of cadmium, and a closed fertilizer plant makes cleaning the water runoff tough. The bay grasses — and the bay life —withered until, like the stump of the tree in the Shel Silverstein book, the once-bountiful bay had almost nothing left to give.

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